UnChat Event (#SWChat)

Thanks to everyone who took part in this weeks Social Workplace Twitter Chat event (#SWChat).

UnChat Event

No topic or questions were pre-defined. The participants who joined were asked at the start of the event what hot topic(s) they would like discussed. The most popular were chosen.

Event Statistics

• No. of Tweets = 805
• No. of Contributors = 94
• Reach = 388,000
• No. of impressions = 3,200,000

Summary

Full Transcript Report via @hashtracking

Questions Asked

Q1) How do businesses and bloggers adopt to the 'visual' trend of Pinterest and perhaps future SoMe? via @LoisMarketing @fjfonseca

Q2) What are you using to track online mentions? via @nanianeleia

Q3) What is your favorite tool for content curation? via @pmswish

Q4) Is Social about technology or behaviours? #SWchat

Shared Reference Material

• Instagram
• Is Your Website Pin-Ready? via @fjfonseca
• #ChatAddict: A Personal List [vote for your favourite] via @lttlewys
• tickr.com
• hashtracking.com
• Comprehensive List Of Twitter Tools via @DavidChris
• Scoop.It
• You Should Pick Up Your Interest In Pinterest via PEISocialMedia.com
• Social Media in Business: It's Just A Bunch Of Tools Right? [slideshare] via @DavidChris
• STS Tip 1: Social technologies enable the strategy, they don't define it via @DavidChris
• MarketMeSuite.com

Today's #SWChat was sponsored by:
 

Useful #SWChat Links

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The Death of Email by 2018

By 2018 email as we know it today will be a thing of the past. Will I be proved to be a: GENIUS or FOOL Time Remaining:

In September 2008 I predicted the death of email as we know it within 10 years, to be replaced by something more collaborative in the social world we now find ourselves living in.

When I first made this death of email prediction people laughed in my face, literally.

Don't get me wrong I don't dislike email, it's a great linear communication tool but it has limitations in today's world particularly when we talk about collaboration.

Does this sound all too familiar?

An email arrives in your inbox that has been sent to 30+ people asking for feedback on the attached PowerPoint presentation. Person A responds with a 'reply to all' message with their feedback. Person B comments on their feedback with a 'reply to all'. Person C responds with a 'reply to all' adding their feedback on the presentation. Person C also responds with a 'reply to all' commenting on the feedback of Person A and Person B and so it goes on.... Before you know it there is a discussion going on in your inbox and you now have 50 unread emails that were not there when your meeting first started an hour ago.

Factoid: According to the Radicati Group, the average corporate user sends and receives 110 emails a day. If we say it takes on average 90 seconds to either read or write an email, that equates to 2 hours 45 mins a day or nearly 14 hours a week on email.

I spend more time on email than I do with my family.

These days companies are always looking to increase productivity of their employees and for them to be more efficient, whilst needing to communicate and collaborate more easily. Spending 14 hours a week on email is no longer an acceptable working practice.

Was the Death of Email crazy prediction really that crazy?

Let's be clear, life did exist before email and businesses did function (I know the thought of the death of email brings some of you out in a cold sweat).

If you look how technology has evolved over the last forty years since email was introduced, and how it has influenced behavioural changes in the way we communicate and collaborate, it stands to reason that at some time in the near future email will become a thing of the past.

If we only look back five years to July 2006, the first tweet was sent which begun to evolutionise how we communicate. Today there are over 200 million users generating in excess of 200 million tweets a day and handling over 1.6 billion search queries a day on Twitter. This is being used by many as an alternative communication channel (not replacement) to company emails.

Facebook was opened to the public in September 2009. Three years later it has 200 million users and today it has reached over 600 million users. It has also recently introduced an alternative to email that they brand as "definitely not email".

Google Wave came and went in 2009/2010 but the concept of an alternative to email was born. A lot of media hype around the failure of this was down to product and the fact that people didn't get it. However there are other allegedly conspiracy theories around this, one being that it was pulled by Google because they felt it was competing against it's own Gmail product. Personally, I think they just under-estimated the cultural change of such an innovative concept.

Google+ (Google Plus) is the latest social platform currently in soft launch mode and soon to be released, which could see it also competing against the standard email.

Maybe the death of email is not as far away as we think....

Check out this incredible video by Red Sky Vision who have talked to a number of companies (Able and How, CorpComms Magazine, Melcrum, Headshift to name a few) about how social media in the workplace is changing their communications:

The speed at which new social technologies are being introduced is growing exponentially and it won't be long before the replacement for email will arrive (or maybe it already has).

For me personally, I cannot wait until that day and stand by my crazy prediction that this will happen before the end of 2018.

Is reducing costs the key driver for social media?

Having a social platform to allow employees to connect and collaborate better will improve the knowledge flows of an organisation. It will allow companies to utilise the collective intelligence of its own employees to crowdsource and solve key business issues.

But in the current economic climate, companies are starting to think more about how to reduce costs. Is social media the answer? Kathi Browne of Wingspouse Publishing raises a good point on the subject:

"Interestingly, it is usually cost that is holding companies back. They see a potential cost to the man hours needed to learn / participate in social media and don't have a clear way to measure the return."

And maybe this is the problem. Companies are too focused on how to measure the ROI of social media and forget that actually this is just a natural form of business evolution. With over 500 million users of Facebook and 100 million users on LinkedIn, it's a fair bet to say that many of your employees are already using social media as part of their everyday lives. So surely it stands to reason that this will become embedded as part of how we communicate and collaborate in business? Kees Vogelsang agrees:

"Given the fact that more and more people are using many tools already for personal usage it is becoming easier to implement social media. And ... there is no way back. Ultimately these tools will be embraced everywhere, just like mobile phones."

So for those companies that are making the transition and investing in social media, if costs are not the key driver then what is it that is encouraging this cultural change? Andy Jankowski of Enterprise Strategies puts it simply and succinctly:

I am seeing a few companies embrace enterprise social media to reduce costs, but not as many as I would have originally thought. It seems the main driver of companies making the Enterprise Social Media investment is simply changing the way their company works (e.g., more collaborative, less siloed, etc.). These types of improvements, while valued by the c-suite, are often hard to justify with numbers. I am seeing many more contextual examples being put forth than detailed ROI studies.

And this is where companies will have the greatest success with social media. The focus shouldn't be on reducing costs per se but more on the business benefits of better collaboration. We also mustn't forget that employees are working more and more remotely these days and social media can play a vital role in keeping employees connected.

Companies do need to start looking at evolving from a knowledge management organisation to a knowledge sharing one, using social technologies as the enabler to build that social business infrastructure. However, the cultural change in this transition should not be under-estimated or ignored and needs to be incorporated as part of the transitional strategy.

So is social media in the workplace a key driver for reducing costs? It will certainly influence the reduction of costs, but it should never be the main focus for creating The Social Workplace. The main focus should be the evolution of a company to provide more and better collaboration opportunities and increase knowledge sharing.

Stop with the excuses not to be social

I am asked this question a lot "How do you get executive management buy-in to bring social into the organisation"? The answer is simple - I don't...

This sounds like an arrogant response but it's not intended to be. Let's be honest here, in these particular tough times your executive management won't particularly care about being social in their organisation, they care about increased revenue, better margins and keeping costs to a minimum.

If you can prove that being social in the workplace can have a direct impact on your revenue, margins and costs then you have a good argument to go into that boardroom and sell them the concept.  The problem is that it is extremely difficult to find a direct linkage.

So how can you make being social in the organisation actually work?

The answer is simple - approach it from the bottom up!

Whilst your executive management could try to enforce it in their organisation, it's actually the people on the ground that really need to take advantage of the benefits and it is these people that you have to sell the concept to. Prove it works to them and your executive management will have to sit up and take notice.

But remember, being social in the workplace is an evolutionary thing combining both traditional and social working methods in how we interact and engage with one another. It's about working smarter, being more effective and increasing efficiency, but more importantly than that it is about the change in mindset.

Whilst I was presenting to an executive board recently one of the board members made a great point:

"Social technologies can really help but it comes down to fundamentals of our sales people wanting to share knowledge across the social network. As David said, it's about the change in mindset that we have to address, the technology can only facilitate the process"

So don't get too focused on acquiring executive management buy-in before starting the social movement in your organisation as the chances are they will not understand it or support it. Instead focus on your vision and the benefits that a better socially connected organisation can bring and start building it from the bottom up. You might just be surprised at the reaction and the results...

What's the cure for Infoglut?

I'll be honest, I had never even heard of infoglut until recently when it was voted the winning topic for discussion for our weekly Social Chat event last week. But I now realise I am a sufferer.

Infoglut (also known as "Information overload") is a term popularized by Alvin Toffler that refers to the difficulty a person can have understanding an issue and making decisions that can be caused by the presence of too much information

So what's the cure for infoglut?

Before I try to answer that, let me take you back a couple of years at a time when I first out started on my "social media is about people" crusade and how I overcame, what I now perceive as, infoglut.

In order for me to make the right business decisions to create The Social Workplace, I needed to keep an eye on the market and understand how social media was being used as well as listen to what my customers needed. This is a lot of information to wade through, a lot of infoglut.

It was never my objective to reduce my email traffic in the beginning, but with all this information being directed to my inbox it soon became apparent that email overload was a major contribution of my infoglut and it needed addressing.

These are the various stages, and thinking, I went through to overcome my infoglut (you might recognise some of these stages...):

Stage 1 - Toe dipping
My social network was small, I was reading a couple of blogs a week (receiving notifications via email) and expanding my knowledge and understanding of social media at a slow but manageable rate.

Stage 2 - The RSS Reader
As my social network grew and I was reading more blogs and listening to podcasts, my email inbox began to overflow like a blind barman pulling his first pint.

I needed a way to segregate the various bits of information to digest at a more convenient time so I started to use an RSS Reader (www.feeddemon.com allowed me to monitor information inside and outside my company's firewall) which helped me to structure my information flows and to separate it from my day-to-day email traffic.

Stage 3 - The power of Communities
By this time I was becoming better socially connected and whilst that was the goal it did mean that there was more demand for information on socialnomics and social technologies. The more email requests I received the slower I was to respond, and the slower I was to respond the more requests I received asking why I was slow in responding (oh the irony!).

The accessibility of an employees tacit knowledge is a highly under-valued commodity in most businesses and I wanted to tap into and utilise this expansive knowledge network to reduce my infoglut level. By introducing a couple of Social Business Communities (one focused on the business aspect of social media, the other focused more on social technologies) I was able to channel all requests into these online communities. This resulted in a significant reduction in my email traffic, allowing the communities to become self-sustaining (over time), and prevented me acting as a bottleneck of information.

Stage 4 - Working with Workspaces
This redirection of information to a social platform reduced my infoglut considerably and allowed me to refocus my energies on my "social media is about people" crusade once again, which is where I began defining and driving new projects and initiatives to create a more socially connected enterprise. Introducing online workspaces to work collaboratively with users on these new projects and initiatives was a really effective solution until.....

Stage 5 - Defining Favourites
I now had over 30 active workspaces. Workspaces to work with my team on identifying and managing their fiscal objectives, workspaces for managing projects, workspaces for team meetings, workspaces for task force meetings, even a workspace for sharing large files....so I started tagging my favourite workspaces and my favourite blogs, choosing to prioritise my time and energy.

Stage 6 - The Supermarket Scanner
Having worked so hard to have all this really useful information at my finger tips, I'm not willing to discard it but I don't have the time to read everything. So I now scan, choosing the key bits of information to respond to within the permitted time frame. And I have become an effective scanner, absorbing information at a fast rate (though I don't go beep once finished).

So what's the cure for infoglut? Is it to reduce the amount of information flows?

Sadly, I haven't found a cure to-date but...

"The objective is not for me to reduce the amount of information flows I'm connected to, but instead evolve how I manage them, whilst maintaining my productivity levels"

And I realised this is exactly what I have been doing over the last 2 years, constantly evolving how I choose to receive my information flows and how I engage myself and others with them and not becoming a slave to the data.

So next time you feel inundate with too many emails and overwhelmed by so much information from different sources, take a step back and assess how you are managing your own infoglut level and find a suitable solution to ease your suffering. Do this regularly and choose to be more productive.

How are you preventing you own infoglut suffering? What actions have you taken and what positive results have you seen?