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

The Adventures of Molly Discovering Social Software – On the Importance of Status Updates

It’s been a while already since the last time that I shared over here a blog post on the wonderful Adventures of Molly Discovering Social Software, so I thought it would be a good opportunity today to come and touch base on the latest episode available and which I didn’t include in that previous article. Yes, indeed, it looks like Molly’s adventures discovering social software at IBM continue and this time around, for episode #3, on one of my favourite topics, although things around it haven’t been very smooth lately. And you will see what I mean shortly …

Yes, like I was saying, it looks like Molly is back at it again exploring the great opportunities offered by social software tools and in this particular episode around the subject of Status Updates. Now, I am sure that at this point in time there is very very little that I would need to add about the subject of micro-blogging (Or micro-sharing, whatever term you would prefer), since I am sure plenty of people out there have already been exposed to it through, perhaps, its most popular example out there: Twitter.

However, what you may not be familiar with is how micro-sharing works for one of my favourite social software tools: Lotus Connections, in a large corporate environment such as IBM’s. And this is exactly what episode #3 from Molly’s Adventures… is all about. My fellow BlueIQ team colleague, Anna Dreyzin, has done it again and has put together a rather funny, witty and insightful video clip describing not only what Status Updates are all about, but also detailing the kind of impact that something so relatively simple can have in every single business (No matter how small or how large that business may well be).

As far as I can see, and if I watch closer my own behaviour from all of the micro-sharing I have been doing over the last three years nearly, I would probably venture to say that, along with my blogs, Status Updates are probably my favourite social software activities. Over 18,000 updates on Twitter & over 5,500 updates combined between Connections Profiles & BlueTwit would probably corroborate that theory. I would even go further and confirm that it is probably one of the main social tools that has allowed me to reduce by 95% my incoming take of emails over the last 2 years, therefore truly living "A World Without Email".

However, this may all be coming to an end pretty soon, unfortunately; at least, as far as one of the tools I mentioned above is concerned. To the point where I’m on the brink of giving up on it altogether for good (After my several failed attempts to do so in the past). I know. It’s not pretty, but the frustration with it is at such an incredibly high level at the moment, that I just entered the point of no return.

Yes, of course, I’m talking about my good old friend Twitter with which I have been having a love / hate relationship for nearly three years now. Sometimes I can’t even answer why I have stuck with it for so long, when for most other social tools where the experience has been that frustrating I have cut off that relationship almost right away. Go figure! It’s probably the community. I am sure.

I am certain as well that at this point in time you may be wondering what’s that last straw that broke the camel’s back, right? Well, something so relatively simple, yet so important and critical that in most cases we all seem to take it for granted all along, not just with Internet tools, but also with those behind the firewall, because most of us probably don’t think it is that crucial… when it actually is …

I am talking about support, more specifically, customer support. Specially when things don’t work out all right and you expect to have some decent customer service that never arrives. Here is an example:

Early last week, while I was enjoying a long holiday break I started to notice how a couple of the desktop and mobile Twitter clients I use on a regular basis (Mixero, Tweetie for Mac, Tweetie and Tweetie 2 for my smartphone) failed to provide me with plenty of the tweets that would typically come through my timeline. I initially thought it may have been an issue with the silly Twitter API limit set on 150 calls. But, unfortunately, it wasn’t.

I was also experiencing the same issues on my timeline through the Web interface. Missing large chunks of tweets that when going through the remaining ones they would not make any sense. Almost impossible to follow up with the conversations. And if Twitter is about something, you would have to agree with me that it would be conversations. So imagine how frustrating it all started to become …

And here is where the real issues began. I decided to raise a ticket to Twitter Support, since I couldn’t find any related items on the usual places, hoping that someone may be able to help out eventually, since I seemed to be the only one experiencing the issues (At least, none of the folks I follow complained about a misbehaving Twitter). And I was hopeful. For a little while. But for just that little while. Because, as I am putting this blog post together, I am no longer hopeful. I just basically gave up!

It’s been six days (Yes, 6!!), since I contacted support to inquire about what may be the issues with my Twitter timeline and why am I only seeing half of the tweets coming through. And to date, not a single solution has been offered. In fact, after an initial timid response I haven’t received anything else in those 6 days. And that hurts! Very much!

If I didn’t rely on Twitter as much as I do today I probably wouldn’t be worried much about the whole thing, but the truth is that I have learned to depend on it. My entire team is there, including my boss and my boss’ boss, plenty of my fellow IBM colleagues are there, too, as well as a good bunch of the people who not only do I respect tremendously, but also value, very much, their friendship and connections. So you can see the dependency I have on it at the moment. And the fact that I cannot longer hold conversations with them is becoming an issue for me. And a big one.

I mean, can you imagine 6 days without email? Or can you imagine 6 days without access to any of the other essential tools you may be using to keep in touch with colleagues, customers, business partners and other fellow knowledge workers? Right, neither can I! And that’s why after 6 days without a decent customer support experience, I am almost ready to give up on it, leave Twitter for good, and don’t come back. Instead, I am thinking I will be benefiting much more, without that frustration, by continuing to nurture my connections behind the firewall with an application that I can trust would work as expected and that, if not, I know from where the customer support would be coming in.

That’s why over the last few days I have gone quiet in Twitter; in fact, I haven’t been there much lately and don’t plan to come back till Twitter Support decides to look into whatever it is the issues I am having and provides a solution to them. Why? Mainly, because life is just too short to have to worry about not having something so fundamental and paramount as customer support, specially nowadays when customers are behaving different. Yet, Twitter doesn’t seem to understand that.

Oh, well … we shall see … I just don’t want to finish up this blog post with such troublesome reflection, so here is the embedded version of the video clip that my colleague Anna put together and which clearly shows the way I will be heading from here onwards, if Twitter doesn’t pull its act together real soon. Status Updates within the firewall for the win! (At least, for now…)

Dear @Twitter, are you listening? Please do not let me abandon you, just like that, after all these years, ok? Don’t let something so silly and yet so powerful as customer support get in between our relationship. It would be too sad … Don’t let it happen. I don’t want to look for alternatives. I just want Twitter to work as it used to. That’s all. Don’t think I’m asking for too much, am I?

Tags: Molly, Molly at IBM, Molly’s Adventures, Lotus Connections, Connections, BlueTwit, Status Updates, Web Presence, Ambient Intimacy, Declarative Living, Narrate Your Work, Mixero, Tweetie, Twitter Support, Twitter, Lack of Customer Service, Lack of Customer Support, Customer Support, Customer Service, Customers, Support, Service, 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, email, Productivity, Re-purposing Email, No-Email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, Information Overload, A World Without Email

Barriers of Social Software Adoption within the Enterprise: It Will Cost You More than You Think!

In my last blog post I hinted I will be putting together another entry where I would reflect on something that has been in my mind for a good number of months, if not years altogether. Something that, to me, comes pretty close home as the main problem, issue, bottleneck, challenge (whatever other term you would want to use) on the full adoption of Social Computing within the enterprise by knowledge workers.

Funny enough, it hasn’t got to do anything with a good number of the various different challenges that plenty of people have been talking about all around for a long while now. Yes, this is a blog post where I would not talk about cultural barriers, nor the various technology challenges (Social software tools being too complex to use, as the main one, for instance, as well as the plethora of them available coming as a close second one), nor the difficulties in letting command-and-control let go by organisations as well as some of the management layers, nor the reluctance to change and so on and so forth.

No, this is not going to be a blog post about any of those. I’m actually going back to basics. Back to what I consider the root of the problem as to why we are probably not as effective and efficient as we could be with our own adoption of social software within the enterprise. And I will use myself as an sample providing you guys with a bit of context and background of where I am coming from with such statement.

So let’s get things going with that context. In the current corporate environment one of the growing trends that you would have to agree with me it’s becoming more and more prominent by the day is how global, distributed and virtual it’s become over the last decade for all of us knowledge workers.

Right now it is almost impossible to find a business that may have all of its employees working in the same building, the same city, or perhaps, in plenty of cases, the same country. Yes, we all becoming more global, more virtual, which means that we are no longer being "restricted" to working in a traditional office (That same office building where 10 years ago perhaps we would’ve spent plenty of time at the water cooler, or coffee corner, in our early mornings and afternoons catching up with our team and other fellow colleagues enjoying a cup of coffee, or some tea).

Instead, we have all been getting used to the idea of working remotely, whether it is at our own home offices, while we are on the road, while visiting customers or business partners, while at the airport, and the nearest Starbucks "office", etc. etc. You get my drift. We are all basically taking the office with us.

And that’s where the problem starts. Right at the root of the cause as to why perhaps we may not have adopted social software as much as we probably should have in the first place. I guess by now you know where I am heading at this point in time, but, just in case you may not have, here it goes: to me, the biggest challenge for a successful social software adoption for remote knowledge workers within the enterprise is no other than the appalling quality of broadband connections we have got in our virtual offices.

There! I said it! I let it all out! The main problem that no one wants to talk about. The complete rip-off that us, knowledge workers, have been suffering from for a good number of years. But let’s see that with a bit more context and provide an example. In this case, an easy one: myself.

I have been a remote employee, working from my home office, for over six years now and I absolutely love the experience. I probably wouldn’t even change it for anything else. And I suppose that would apply as well to the over 50% of IBM remote employees who work away from a traditional office. And I bet that would apply to most of you folks out there as well who have been working remotely for a while now.

So that basically means that if we want to become heavy users of social software, we need to rely, now more than ever, on faster remote network connections, not just the clunky ones that would allow us to just replicate our mail and go off-line again. I mean, we are having access to hundreds of information resources (News Web sites, blogs, podcasts, videocasts, screencasts, social networking sites, micro-sharing services, etc. etc. You name it!), where plenty of them are rich media based, which means they are rather heavy. So you would expect that we would have an opportunity to enjoy faster speeds, right?

Well, we are not. Quite the opposite! How many times have you been to a conference event where on the first keynote session the connection offered goes down? How many times have you been stuck in a hotel room with Internet access where you are paying up to €22 per day for very poor quality of service? How many times have you been at the airport, waiting for that flight, connected to the WiFi, paying €6-€10 "just to be connected"? How many times have you wished that your 3G smartphone would have decent network coverage to allow you to use the tethering service, so you could continue to work online? How many times have you thought you are paying too much, every month, for an Internet connection that is way less than desirable? How many times have you wished that things would be different, perhaps much more accommodating to our own needs as a paying recurring customer than the Internet Service Provider that keeps letting you down time and time again?

I’m sure that if you go through those questions you will feel identified with a good number of them. You may be even nodding, as I put down these few words, that it is just far too close to reality. Yet we don’t seem to be doing much about it. And that starting with myself having experienced that lack of service, but still paying through the nose for it. If you have been following my blog, or my tweets, for a while now, you could probably identify the kind of fun that I have been enjoying all along. Latest example, being stuck in a five-star hotel in Tenerife, paying the heavy charges per day for an Internet connection that was just as slow, if not worse!, than my 3G smartphone’s. Ouch!!

And like that one, I’m sure there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of different examples that you could go ahead and share away in the comments along the lines of "Yes, been there, done that, got the T-shirt and the souvenirs". Yet we don’t seem to do anything about it. It’s like we enjoy being abused by those who charge us huge amounts of money for very poor quality service.

And this bugs me. A lot! I mean, I have got tons of rich media and web resources that I would love to share out there with the rest of my social networks, yet it is all been religiously stored in my Mac, because I cannot be bothered any longer waiting for hours to upload a video of 30 to 50 MB (And that talking on the low file size of things…). I gave up a long while ago. And I feel very sorry about it, because it clearly reminds me of plenty of the issues that Knowledge Management has been having over the last few years: i.e. lack of knowledge sharing or, even, hoarding one’s own knowledge. Yikes!!

I know that you may be wondering that I may well be over exaggerating this, but quite the opposite, to be honest. If you would like to see some proof of what I’m talking about I would strongly encourage to take a look into Speedtest World’s Results and statistics. Unless you live in one of those lucky countries you’re off to witness a very nasty experience. Another example? Here it comes…

I live in Spain, in Gran Canaria, to be more precise. And, according to Speedtest World’s Results, my country currently ranks at the 46th position worldwide as far as download speed is concerned and an incredibly depressing 98th position worldwide as far as I upload speed is concerned. 46th and 98th!!! Just unbelievable! But, not to worry, because it gets better; well, actually, much worse!

For those rankings that I have just mentioned above, I am paying a whopping 90€ bill for my home home ADSL connection (50€ per month with Telefónica) and my 3G smartphone Internet connection (40€ per month with the wonderful service provided by Movistar… NOT!!!). Plus you would have to add the hundreds of euros that I have been spending to pay for WiFi at hotels, airports, Internet cafés, etc. You would agree with me that it makes for a really nice yearly bill altogether, don’t you think? Yes, I thought so, but what did we get back in return…?

Well, I’m getting tired. I’m getting tired of it all. I’m finding it more and more challenging by the day to come to terms with the fact that in order to continue making heavy use of social software tools where rich media sharing is a rule (Not a nice thing to have, as most Internet Service Providers seem to think… since, to them, the less you use social networking tools the better for them because they will be charging you the same amount of money for hardly any quality service or probably not the one you think you would be entitled to for that amount of money, in the first place, anyway), I would need to pay a nice monthly bill to allow me to stay connected.

Not sure what you would think, but certainly I can think of better things to do with that money, specially when thinking what I get in return. I know, you may be thinking that I am over-exaggerating  again, right? Hummm, I don’t think so. Check the following screen shot with the charts for the top countries and judge for yourself whether I am on a unique situation or not. I am sure I am not… Here’s the snapshot:

I’m not sure what we could do about it, since, like I said before, no one seems to be bringing up this as an issue. Actually, most people think that broadband penetration is good enough. Well, maybe it is not. Maybe it could actually be way better. But, to be honest, unless we all say it is an issue, or a challenge, towards the successful adoption of social software within the enterprise, nothing much will happen. And that would be a real pity. All our evangelising efforts and hard work being shattered with a snap of a finger, just because we keep tolerating such poor quality of service for something that, to us, Web workers, should be our right. Like it is in some places already… Maybe I should move countries once again…

Tags: Barriers, Obstacles, Challenges, Issues, Social Software Adoption Challenges, Broadband Penetration, Broadband, Internet Service Providers, ISPs, ADSL, Mobile, Mobility, Global Office, Virtual Office, Distributed Office, Knowledge Workers, Web Workers, Remote Employees, Rich Media, New Media, Costs, Telefónica, Movistar, Smartphones, SpeedTest, Spain, Gran Canaria, Internet Rights, Finland, 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

Tenerife

Goodness! Where does time go?!?! It looks like it was only yesterday when I created the last blog post over here and when checking things out it turns out that it is eventually nearly two weeks since the last one! Whoahhh! Talking about being busy, eh? Well, not really. Errr, I mean, I have been rather busy, indeed, as we are coming closer to finish off another amazing year, but I have also been busy in doing something else that happens usually at this time of the year for me and which I can’t skip just like that: my holidays!

Yay! Indeed, it looks like the yo-yo effect that you folks are seeing with my recent blog posts over here has got to do with the fact that holidays have taken their toll and have managed to keep me disconnected and away from everything online for a little while. Then when coming back to work things are rather hectic, as usual, trying to catch up and, before I know it, it is nearly two weeks that I have been away from this blog. Whoah! (Again!)

Anyway, I am now back again into the full swing of everything online and, as such, regular blogging activities will resume in this blog from here onwards. Just my usual self. In fact, next article is going to have an interesting observation I have been pondering about on what, to me, seems to be *the* real barrier towards full adoption of social software within the enterprise. And, in this cases, just before you jump into the wrong conclusions out there, it hasn’t got anything to with work, enterprise nor business. (Interesting, eh? Well, coming up shortly!).

To get things going though, and to resume my regular blogging activities, I thought I would share with you folks a few words of where I have been over the last few days (Although I have been back at work for a couple of days already!). As you may have noticed, for a good number of months, I have developed that habit of sharing a picture every time that I put together a blog post over here. Most folks have realised that those pictures are actually rather special to me.

Yes, they are all pictures I have taken myself from the island I have been enjoying tremendously for the last five and a half years: Gran Canaria. Each of them has got its own story; some of them are even related to the article I publish next to them; some of them just bring back so many good memories from when they were taken; most of them are dear to my heart making me realise how lucky I am of living where I live.

Either way, beginning of December, I decided to finally put an end to something that I almost felt embarrassed about: the fact I have been in Gran Canaria for nearly six years and I didn’t had the decency :-O to go and check out some of the other equally stunning Canary Islands. Yes, I know! Shameful! So I thought it was a good time to put an end to that and a couple of weekends ago I decided to spend a long one in the other one island that has been attracting me for a while now, right from the start almost: Tenerife.

That’s right! I decided to jump into the ferry and spend a whole weekend of disconnectedness and just pure unwinding! And wildly successful, in my opinion! Why? Well, you may want to pop over into my Flickr account to get a taste of it, but mainly because of breath-taking, mind-blowing and incredibly humbling experiences as this one:

Or this other one:

Or how about this other one?:

Not bad, eh? Well, I could tell you a whole bunch more of the stuff I went through, constantly being wowed with full unbelievable emotions and experiences, but I think I’ll just leave you with those pictures for now letting you know I will be adding a whole bunch more over the next few hours into a new set I created a couple of days back … As stunning and incredibly amazing as this one:

Like I said, regular blogging activities will resume from here onwards, as usual, but that weekend I spent in Tenerife surely made me wish I would have taken on photography when I was a lot younger, because these pictures don’t really make justice to some of the stunning sceneries and magnificent landscapes I got to witness over those four days of intense brilliance!

Thank you, Tenerife! I will be back again! One day. I know. For sure!

Tags: Holidays, Weekend Breaks, Breaks, Unwinding, Disconnectedness, Disconnected, Work, Life, Balance, Work Life Integration, WLB, Work Life Balance, Spain, Canary Islands, Gran Canaria, Tenerife, Mount Teide, Teide, La Rosa, The Rose, Flickr, Pictures, Photography, Humbling Experiences, Landscapes, Brilliance