An interesting little report came out of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research recently - a “statistically significant, longitudinal (study) on the usage of social media in corporations.” However, it wasn’t just any corporations - the study focused on the Inc. 500, which is comprised of the 500 fastest growing private companies in the U.S. One particularly interesting headline result - 39% of the Inc. 500 is blogging, which is a 20% increase over the previous year. In contrast, other research indicates only 11.6% of the Fortune 500 currently has “active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products“, a bump of 3.6% over the same time period. As the following chart shows, the Inc. 500 is also showing rapid growth in the adoption of social networking, online video, wikis, and podcasting:
It will be intriguing to see if the leadership of the private companies over public continues to persist, and/or whether the Inc. 500 adoption is a leading indicator of what the public companies are going to do. Wikinomics readers might also be interested in following the “In contrast” link above, which is a wiki page that was created by Chris Anderson and Ross Mayfield to enable a cooperative, volunteer effort to review the blogging activity of Fortune 500 companies. My favorite link here is the “spectrum of corporate social media“, which hopes to flush out a taxonomy of ways to engage in social media (with specific examples). I think it still has a long way to go, but here’s how it currently stands: Read More »
Very observant readers may note that this post has some striking similarities to what I wrote about three months ago - the collaborative experience economy. What I tried to do then was connect the “four forms of theater” idea from Pine & Gilmore’s “The Experience Economy” with the principles of wikinomics - hence the name of the post. For whatever reason I didn’t get a lot of traction with it, but I’m still intrigued by the underlying ideas, so I wanted to re-frame the idea directly in relation to social media. More to the point, I’d like to hear from wikinomics readers as to whether it’s a useful framework for thinking about the use of social media in relation to creating experiences both for and with customers.
Airlines make money when planes are in the air. So getting people onboard efficiently is key. Your organization makes money when projects are running smoothly. So getting new people “on board” and up to speed quickly is key.
When you board an airplane, the airline needs to communicate a certain amount of information to you and all the other passengers to get everyone working together toward the same goal: taking off on time. The airline can do this with a PA system, since all the passengers are in an enclosed space, in close proximity both at the gate and on the plane.
Joe Westhead sent me an interesting email awhile ago in relation to the ongoing MyFootballClub experiment (and has an intriguing post on the subject that I’ll come back to later). For those that may have forgotten, MyFootballClub became relatively famous as it sought out 50,000 fans to not only co-own a professional football (soccer in North America) team, but manage it through the “wisdom of crowds” principles. To quote one of the many articles on their plans (wikipedia has a great overview of their history):
The probable new owners will manage the club, voting online to choose match lineups and buying new players. To help run the team, the fans will be able to view all the matches online and, after the game, receive statistics on how each player has performed. They will also get weekly updates from the team’s head coach on how each player is doing during practice.
It sounded really good - and most commentators particularly focused on the ability to vote on line ups as a key driver of participation. This functionality went live recently, but was hardly a resounding success - less than 2,000 of the over 30,000 members voted on the line ups for some recent games, and the vast majority that did bother to vote elected to let the coach decide. This lack of involvement has led to several articles like this one, which sees it not only a hugely negative development, but as potentially foreshadowing the collapse of the entire experiment. But is it really that bad?
As popular as wikis have become, they aren’t yet in use across all mediums. Case in point: music. However, a company called Sonoma Wire Works appears to have solved this problem. Sonoma Wire Works has announced the launch of RiffWorks T4, an online music-collaboration application. With RiffWorks T4, musicians can record ideas, use drums and guitars, and add effects to quickly create songs. Most importantly, users do this online, and can easily collaborate with peers around the world — all for free! When finished, their tunes can be broadcast on RiffWorld.com.
Technology empowers users. Apple’s GarageBand, for instance, enabled just about anyone to make professional sounding music (provided a certain level of musicianship). A while ago, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails released his music as GarageBand files so that fans can remix them as they please (think open-source music). GarageBand has been popular since the source of the music is standardized, people can send it around and collaborate with friends — basically “playing tennis” with works in progress. However, the distribution of these edited files has effectively been limited to e-mailing music attachments back and forth. Very 1.0.
RiffWorks T4 solves this problem by making the music itself wiki based. It lets four people work on the music at once, but there’s no upper limit to the number of potential collaborators. It also synchronizes the piece across the computers of all of the contributors, and keeps a copy on the web that is always up to date and universally accessible. RiffWorks T4 has wikified music. Because of its centralized, collaborative nature, for the first time ever we can have crowd created music, I wonder what it will sound like.
Editor’s note: this is the third post in a multi-part series from Stewart Mader, author of Wikipatterns. You can check out some of his other work at Grow Your WIki, and the first two parts of the series can be found here and here.
When an organization has a wiki at the center of its operations, people can gather and share the kind of information that others need - including everything from projects, products, initiatives, strategies, and other pieces of the big picture, to the everyday: how to process an expense report, access an office’s network, get business cards printed, or reserve a meeting room. On a wiki, this information can be gathered by the small efforts of many.
Let’s look at an example - the expense report. It’s a standard process, with a common form that people need to access, complete, include receipts, and submit for approval.
I’m going to come right out and say it: people can get a little obsessive sometimes. And premium cable movie network Showtime has wisely decided to harness the power of their shows’ loyal fans by allowing users to create the content of their shows’ sites.
Showtime launched the first “Fan Wikis” about a year ago, and has since added pages for each of its shows. Since that time, pages have grown from basic content such as user-created cast bios and episode guides to complete guides of, well, everything related to the show.
Tudors’ fans maintain wikis from everything from costume design to a complete list of Tudor executions. Weed’s fans meticulously study characters’ wardrobes and post where to buy the exact article of clothing online. And it’s not a rogue few participating, either. The L Word wiki boasts more than 7,000 members.
Participation is simple. All a fan must do is register with Wetpaint and then check out what tasks are listed on the wiki To-Do list.
I haven’t decided what I think is more genius: Showtime outsourcing website content development to volunteers, or enabling fans to create fan sites on the actual Showtime site, keeping precious traffic right where they want it.
Showtime’s Fan Wikis are powered by Wetpaint, which describes itself as a place where “you can create websites that mix all the best features of wikis, blogs, forums and social networks into a rich, user-generated community based around the whatever-it-is that rocks your socks off.” The company announced May 19 it had raised $25 million to “accelerate the company’s growth.” According to TechCrunch, Wetpaint has now raised more than $40 million in all. On Wednesday, Wetpaint announced that more than 1million free social Wetpaint pages had been created since July 2006.
I’d like to see how Ben Letalik would grade Showtime in his weekly Wikinomics report card. Fan wikis combined with The Tudor’s multi-platform campaign launch of Season 2 (Showtime aired the entire season premiere for free on more than 60 sites, including Netflix and MSN) are very good examples of openness and sharing.
I started watching The Tudors (and subscribed to Showtime) after watching the Season 2 premiere on Netflix for free. I fell for Showtime’s 2.0 marketing plan hook, line, and sinker. Will Showtime’s innovative strategies and social networking features help it get an edge on long-time enemy (and market leader) HBO?
Editor’s note: this is the second in a multi-part series from Stewart Mader, author of Wikipatterns. You can check out some of his other work a Grow Your Wiki, and his first post on the wikinomics site is here.
In Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast, New York Times writer Matt Richtel looks at the growing problem of fractured attention in the workplace - thanks to email, instant messaging, and other interruptions that are costing employees 28% of a typical workday - and the cost isn’t just measured in time:
In the United States, more than $650 billion a year in productivity is lost because of unnecessary interruptions, predominately mundane matters, according to Basex. The firm says that a big chunk of that cost comes from the time it takes people to recover from an interruption and get back to work.
I often talk about email as a “push” medium - that is, you push messages out to recipients, and each person gets their own copy. This seems simple enough, but two problems emerge in practice. Each new email message can be an interruption, and the fact that a separate copy goes to each person means that it isolates people from each other.
For a few months now, my friends and I have been using this software called Dropbox. It’s really cool, check out the video:
Dropbox is a service that synchronizes files between computers and the web. Once you add a computer to your Dropbox account, the Dropbox software creates a folder in your My Documents folder, the contents of which are synchronized across all computers linked to your account, as well as the Dropbox server. Whenever files are changed, only the difference in the file is updated across the network, minimizing bandwidth requirements. You can also have shared folders with other users, the files update as they normally do across all computers in the network. Finally, all old versions of the files are stored, and are accessible via a web interface at the Dropbox website. While my friends use this mostly for swapping photos and legally acquired mp3s, the possibilities for business are many.
Given the versioning, synchronizing and web accessibility, integrating Dropbox with a company wiki would fantastic. No more uploading and downloading the latest version of files, you’d just open the file in your Dropbox share and save it when you’re done. Then, if you had to grab it from another computer, you log in through the web interface and download the latest version. It basically makes every file a wiki.
This system is similar to the new Mobile Me platform that Apple has announced, and is a solid step towards the world of cloud computing and storage. The concept of Wikinomics brings about lots of potential, but software like Dropbox really empowers users to collaborate en-masse easily and quickly. I highly recommend it.
Also, I’ve got 10 invites to give away, post a comment with your e-mail if you’d like one.
Several weeks ago we invited people to contact us if they were interested in being a guest blogger on wikinomics (and importantly, if they had an interesting story to tell). Today we are pleased to present our first guest blogger, Stewart Mader, the author of Wikipatterns (which Amazon just so happens to report is most frequently bought with wikinomics). Below is the first of a four-part series by Stewart that we will be publishing over the next few weeks:
I believe you can love what you do at work.
When I look at the sore subjects of work - email overload, unfocused meetings, and the confusion & misunderstandings that drag down projects - I see opportunity. A grand opportunity to take a step back, get a clear perspective on what really matters, and fix these things so that work can become meaningful and fulfilling.
Hi, I’m Stewart Mader, and I’m pleased to have been invited to guest blog with the Wikinomics team. That paragraph above is from my blog Grow Your Wiki, and it’s my call to action to people inside organizations who feel disempowered by existing tools and business processes.
PC Pro (via Slashdot) is reporting that the Encyclopedia Britannica is experimenting with a wiki approach to content. Britannica is doing it on their own terms, however:
Indeed, under the new Britannica scheme those who wish to contribute will need to create a profile outlining their qualifications and expertise in the area they are commentating on. They will then be able to add comments to encyclopaedia entries, or write their own. This content will then be reviewed by the expert editors of the site, and if any of it is deemed worthy of inclusion, added to the main article with a credit.
I’ve certainly got an intuition as to which articles will be ‘commented on’ first. While this seems like a sensible move for Britannica, it will be very easy to paint them as hypocrites given how critical they have been of Wikipedia in the past. People want to be engaged, so I think that Britannica’s real challenge will be fine tuning the process: submitting a comment or revision, only to have it disappear into a bureaucratic black hole is not a good way to encourage participation and engagement. At the same time, editorial standards are important to keep uselesscontenttoaminimum. Read More »
Click on the Dilbert tag below to see past mash ups on this site… or go to Dilbert.com to see the original and all the other mash ups that have been done.
As part of my research on next generation customer experiences, I was re-reading a great book by Pine and Gilmore called The Experience Economy. It was chapter seven that particularly piqued my interest, notably the section on the four forms of theatre - platform, matching, street and improv as they laid out in figure 7.1 (I have quickly re-created it in the link below).
The basic idea I am building towards is that wikinomics and collaborative experiences is about moving more and more of the business away from platform theatre and into improv - with street and matching theatre being steps along the way. But before getting there, some background on each is required.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words and I think this one sums up the power of wiki collaboration better than any 1,000 word essay ever could. The model is courtesy of Chris Rasmussen at US National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. I presented this slide during a talk I gave at Nokia today and someone pointed out that the happy faces on the left probably ought to be frowning — he had a good point.
Here is a cool idea that is just getting started. The Time Space Map is kind of a combination of Wikipedia and Google Map mashups. It allows people to graph historical events in a temporal fashion. The picture below shows the growth of the Inca Empire. A good description can be found here.
We visited Google on Monday, and got a briefing on their latest Google Apps. Of course, the facility was beautiful, with a great cafeteria and environmentally-friendly cutlery. But it was empty. The Apps provided similar great promise, but at the moment are a bit lacking too.
On the location: nice part of Detroit; fun workstations; colour scheme strong on primary colours; and the expected great cafeteria. Kudos for the healthy food, and the plates and cutlery made from sugar cane and corn starch. Everything was compostable, and they tell me they do in fact compost it with the food.
Oddly, the building was empty. I gather they’re new in Detroit, and I’m not totally sure why they need such a big space anyhow for a sales office. Perhaps growth will make the place buzz, but it’s not obvious how.
The Apps themselves have made a bit of progress over the past year, when I last looked at them. Most notably: Read More »
In the past Don Tapscott and Nicholas Carr have debated on numerous occasions the topic “Does IT Matter”. At the FASTforward 08 conference Andrew McAfee made an interesting comment on how Web 2.0 tools and technologies mean IT will become a more powerful point of differentiation. Those of us at New Paradigm have always held the opinion that IT is a key component of competitive advantage.
The theme of FASTforward 08 was ‘the user revolution’ and it is the user/employee that is at the center of successful Web 2.0 solutions. The theory is that because employees are now informationalizing your IT systems being a fast follower is more difficult. The reason for this is two fold. First, implementation is no longer a matter of rolling out the tools, but rather convincing employees to adopt a collaborative mindset and way of working. Second, in the past the success of an ERP or CRM rollout revolved around a small team of experts and consultants which could to a certain extent be replicated by another organization. With collaborative tools success hinges on the entire organization contributing and developing the tools.
Look at some of the mainstays in the Web 2.0 suit of technologies - wikis, blogs, social networks, tags, RSS, predictive markets. The collaborative, social, user generated nature of these tools makes it almost impossible to duplicate the value from one organization to another. Sure, technically speaking it’s simple to install and configure Web 2.0 tools, but when you are talking about information technology, getting the information into those tools is an art form. This means that organizations that can leverage Web 2.0 technologies will gain competitive advantage based on the skill in which they use those technologies.
The New York Times wrote a good article about how Wikileaks, a web site that allows users to anonymously post leaked documents has been shut down.
From the article:
[The site]… invites people to post leaked materials with the goal of discouraging “unethical behavior” by corporations and governments. It has posted documents said to show the rules of engagement for American troops in Iraq, a military manual for the operation of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and other evidence of what it has called corporate waste and wrongdoing.
This brillliant legal mind didn’t consider that the magic of the Intrawebs, could somehow keep it going in Europe.
Great discussion on the legal blog at the Wall St. Journal (great site, btw, I referenced it in an earlier post) about the ethics involved. Free speech is a concept valued highly by free society. But should anonymous free speech be held as sacrosanct? Surely, if someone is giving the right to say whatever he or she wants, they should endure the responsibility of the consequences.
Residents of Italy’s capital will glimpse the future of urban mapmaking with the launch of “Wiki City Rome,” a project developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that uses data from cellphones and other wireless technology to illustrate the city’s pulse in real time.
And how will these residents get this glimpse of the future? Well, that would be on the big screen display in one of Rome’s main centers, as the project ties into “Real Time Rome,” which was presented during the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale, the prestigious biannual exhibition of contemporary art.Alternatively, anyone with an Internet connection will be able to see a unique, up to the minute map of the Italian capital which includes the movement of the crowds, event locations, the real time positions of buses and trains, and even the where abouts (for now) of well known Roman personalities. The data, of course, is coming from the exact same places and people (anonymously for the most part, in case you were concerned).
This could be a really intriguing experiment on such a grand scale, and the groups that are coming together to make it happen include the MIT SENSEable City Lab, SEAT Pagine Gialle, Telecom Italia, Telespazio, the Rome public transportation authority ATAC, La Repubblica, and Trenitalia. Among the insights they hope to gain, MIT researcher Kristain Kloeckl offers:
“How do people react towards this new perspective on their own city while they are determining the city’s very own dynamic? How does having access to real-time data in the context of possible action alter the process of decision-making in how to go about different activities? These are among the questions we may be able to answer.”
These and many others - with privacy issues and tracking concerns first and foremost in many people’s minds. But done properly, such an offering could not be a valuable tool for everyone in the city to leverage, it could also be a “living” piece of art that provides a new perspective on our world today. As SENSEable director Carlos Ratti notes (using a lot of lingo I am quite comfortable with):
By deploying developments of the ‘Web 2.0′ and the ‘Semantic Web,’ Wiki City can be a significant leap forward towards a pervasive ‘internet of things’ to support human action and interaction.
To check out the wikicity data site, click here. The Web Urbanist also has an interesting post on this topic.
Technology and the US election I've written several times about the impact of social networks on this year's US Presidential election - see here and here. And let's be honest, the use of such networks and new web 2.0 technologies has been dominated by Obama. He’s embraced social networks like no other candidate in an attempt to connect with [...]
