E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Welcome to the World of Socialnomics

In the past, I have blogged a couple of times about the ever popular Did You Know? series of YouTube videos as some of the most provocative, inspiring and eye opening clips to help folks understand a little bit the kind of significant impact social computing and social software are having not only in our workplace (And the corporate environment in general, for that matter!), but also in our own personal and individual lives.

Well, it looks like we have got another video making the rounds on the Internet at the moment, which seems to pick the baton quite nicely and provide us with a follow up set of insights that would surely wow you without measure! I discovered the clip earlier on from a recent tweet from Daniel Hudson and I surely enjoyed watching through and get a more up to date of where we are in terms of the impact from social networking in almost everything we do hehe

And since it is Friday afternoon, end of another long, and very fruitful week at work, readying for the weekend (Just around the corner!) I thought I would go ahead and share it over here for you folks to have a look into it. Originally, it’s titled Social Media Revolution (Although I prefer much better one of the taglines from the video itself: "Welcome to the World of Socialnomics!", which gives the title to this blog post); it lasts for a little bit over 4 minutes and it was uploaded on July 30th (Yes, I know! Very recent!).

Like I said, it’s four minutes worth while watching and learning about some very interesting facts of what’s happening in the social media space and how we are, indeed, living in exponential times. I could talk plenty more about the video, but instead I will cut if short right here and just embed it below, so you can have a look into it. Enjoy it and have a good one everyone!

Tags: Life, Changing World, Work Life Balance, WLB, YouTube, 21st Century, Future, Reality, Now!, Globalisation, Jobs, Learning, Connected, Connections, Technology, Shift Happens, Conversations, Exponential Times, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Innovation, Networking, Social Networks, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Social Media Revolution, Daniel Hudson, Twitter, Socialnomics, Social Computing Impact, Social Software Impact

The Company as Wiki by Best Buy’s Brad Anderson

A couple of months back I put together a short blog post (The Company as Wiki by Best Buy) on how Best Buy was eventually embracing social software and how they were telling their story in an amazing YouTube video in a little bit less than five minutes. Well, earlier on this week, and thanks to a bunch of tweets from Paul Thornton, I bumped into an extended version of that same video clip, but this time around with an extended interview with Brad Anderson, former CEO and Vice Chairman of Best Buy and who retired in June 2009, and Peter Hirshberg.

The interview was recorded in September at Zeitgeist 2008 and you will be able to find the direct link to it over here. I would want to keep things short in this blog post, so you have got a chance to go through the entire session which lasts for a little less than 29 minutes. But it will be worth it, I can assure you that, specially if you would want to find out plenty more on how their social networking initiatives are getting along…

However, I wouldn’t want to let you go without a few annotations I think would be worth while going through so that you can have a quick glimpse of what you are about to watch and listen to. They are in no particular order, nor priority. Simply some of what I think were the most interesting, thought-provoking and inspiring ideas exchanged during the interview with Brad. So, without much further ado, here are some of the thoughts of what you will find over at "Brad Anderson, CEO of Best Buy at Zeitgeist ’08":

• The next generation of leaders would need to start learning, and rather quickly!, how to let things go, i.e. control, ideas, etc. and start thinking their job is more that one of a facilitator than one of command and control.
• Is Middle Management really threatened by the emergence of social software within the corporate firewall? Most folks would tell you so; I still believe it’s quite the opposite!
• How is Best Buy being affected by the younger generations entering the workplace? Is there such a significant impact?
• Looks like some of the social software initiatives I talked about previously, like Loop Market (Idea generation), Tag Trade, Blueshirtnation (BSN), etc. are as healthy as ever!
• Traditional hierarchical structures are changing tremendously right as we speak, as social software is helping executives and regular employees interact with one another at the same level. And so it happens with the rest of the management line!
• Storytelling used rather heavily with a business purpose: learning from one another by sharing their stories is probably as powerful as it gets!
• Building up your brand through enhancing customer loyalty … as well as through improving the overall employee loyalty. Keeping your employees happy will help you keep your customers happy, too!
• Align your social software initiatives with your own corporate values and live by them all the way through!
• Improve the overall customer experience by encouraging active participation in nurturing healthy business relationships with your prosumers.
• The world is mobile. Let’s progress further with that idea. There is no way back!

And, finally, at the end of the day, and as quick wrap-up of this blog posts, a final thought that permeates throughout the video clip itself: it’s all about having fun at work, while getting the job done, something that a few years back, if you ask me, was unimaginable. Today, however, it’s a reality. A reality that comes through to us thanks to social software. A reality that will stay with us for a while. For a long while!

Thus the sooner we all realise about that and embrace its full potential to transform the corporate world of the 21st century as we know it, the much better for all of us. Don’t you think?

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, Productivity, Best Buy, Blueshirtnation, BSN, Wikis, Loop Marketplace, Tag Trade, Geek Squad, Business Value, Values, Business Values, Customers, Clients, Paula Thornton, Brad Anderson, CEOs, Chairmen, Peter Hirshberg, Zeitgeist, Zeitgeist08, Leaders 2.0, Leadership 2.0, Command and Control, Facilitation, Middle Management, Management, Change Management, Generational Workforce, Hierarchical Structures, Storytelling, Narrative, Sharing Stories, Customer Loyalty, Attrition Rates, Happiness, Employee Loyalty, Customer Experience, Mobile, Mobility, Mobile 2.0, Fun at Work, Fun, Plat at Work, Serious Play, Productivity 2.0

Behavioural Transition Strategies for E2.0 by Lee Bryant

Earlier on, over at "Enterprise 2.0 Conference Highlights – Day One", I mentioned how one of my absolute favourite presentations from the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference was the one that my good friend Lee Bryant did on the first day of the event, under the title "Behavioural Transition Strategies for E2.0 Adoption". Back then I mentioned how just this presentation was worth the over 50 hours I did in transit (Coming back and forth!) just to make it to the event itself! Yes, indeed, that good. If not even better!

Over the last few weeks I have been anxiously waiting for him to have a chance to blog about his experiences delivering the presentation, as well as perhaps share with us a copy of the slides. And yesterday he did just that! Go and have a look into "Behavioural transition strategies for E2.0" and get ready to go through an article, as well as the overall slide deck!, that will change your perception on Enterprise 2.0 and Social Software "Adoption". And how to "do it right!"

Here is one of the quotes from his blog post that I thought incredibly powerful and right on target as to what our challenge is for those folks who are doing social software evangelism:

"[...] What we really should be talking about is redesigning organisations and their networks to harness people power to get things done quicker, better and cheaper, and enabling businesses to scale in a better way. This, not tool use, is probably the goal of social business design and E20"

That, folks, is exactly *our* challenge! Nothing to do with the tools, whether we pick up the right choice or not, but quite the contrary! Figure out what issues are those within your organisation that you would want to help address and fix and start injecting what I have been calling "social software flavours" all over the place, that is, start figuring out whether enterprise social software may help you overcoming those issues and empower your knowledge workers to be more productive, doing more work with less effort (And, no, that’s not an oxymoron!).

Quite an inspiration, don’t you think? Well, that’s what you will find, following further up, on Lee’s deck available over at Slideshare. And plenty more! Go and have a look into "E20 Transition Strategies" and start flipping through the charts, digest them, learn them, internalise them, because, like I said, if you are doing social software evangelism / adoption in your company, you are going to find them an indispensable resource! For sure!

Check out, for instance, slides #9 ("Social networks + weak ties = organisational immune system" is a brilliant quote!), #21, #27 as examples of what you will find throughout the deck. As you will be able to see, Lee focuses on what most businesses haven’t even started to think about just yet: i.e. the second wave of early adopters. And that’s just what he covers on the second part of his presentation, although each and every single item discussed could very well apply to that first wave of early adopters, too, to be honest!

He just focuses not only on the adoption of social software tools per se, but how to improve the day to day productivity from knowledge workers by addressing the tasks they do and try to enhance them with various different social software elements. Typical examples like your email, your address book(s), your Intranet, idea generation, brainstorming, communicating with your customers and business partners, code of conduct at work, etc. etc. are just some of those different tasks we are involved with on a daily basis, yet, for most of them, we are not thinking about social software and how it could help us improve such experience and yet the opportunity is right there! At our fingertips!

And that’s what we need to start grasping, folks. Forget about focusing on the social tools themselves and figure out how you are going to engage your knowledge workers in them. Instead start working more towards helping identify tasks, preferably tasks and activities that you may be struggling with (Your pain points would do, too!), then put them together and start analysing what options within the social computing space you have got available to help out! Then a bit more of slide #21 and you will be on your way to a successful deployment of a Social Enterprise: your enterprise!

Now you can understand why I am so excited about Lee’s presentation, right? Well, in my own personal case, it gets even better. From a validation point of view, specially. Most of you folks know by now about the efforts of my own team (BlueIQ) on helping accelerate the adoption of social software inside IBM, right? Well, those efforts are still on-going, and rather strong too!, but funny enough about 18 months ago we realised that we needed to do the same shift, i.e. from a social tools focus into a tasks / activities one. And from that change onwards things have continued to go smoother by the day to the point that we helped identify those different tasks folks keep working on and slowly, but steadily, show them  how they themselves, with a little bit of help, support and facilitation can improve their own productivity executing those tasks using social software components.

Yes! The change is happening! Slower that you may be thinking about, perhaps, or, at least, not fast enough for you, but that doesn’t matter at this point anymore; what matters is that it is happening and as the time goes by, and more and more folks embark on it, the speed of it will be faster and faster, till it goes out of control reaching the tipping point (I think most of us are almost there!) and then we won’t have the opportunity to be able to go back! It’d be too late… Welcome to Enterprise 2.0!

(A big and special thanks to Lee, once again, for quite an inspiring session at the Enterprise 2.0 conference and for sharing along the blog post with the link to his excellent presentation!; it surely was worth while the trip to the other side of the pond! And back! Thanks much, Lee!)

Tags: e2conf, Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Conference Events, Events, Conferences, Reality Check, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, Productivity, Lee Bryant, Second Wave Early Adopters, BlueIQ, Social Software Adoption, Business Relationships, Business Value, Strategies, Transition Strategies, Early Adopters, Social Software Adoption, Tasks, Activities, Slideshare, Change, Change Management, Work Smarter, Knowledge Workers