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

Blog Talk Radio – Business Value of Social Networking: Become a Hippie 2.0!

Yesterday, if you would remember, I put together a short blog post where I was mentioning how apart from having one of those days of meetings galore jumping from one to the next, I was also looking forward to the great opportunity of participating live on the Blog Talk Radio podcasting show, hosted by John Moore, and along with one of my favourite Enterprise 2.0 people, Mark Masterson, as co-guest. Well, I am happy to confirm that the recording of that podcast episode is now available for replay.

And, boy, did we have such a good fun with that interview or not? John asked us a few rather interesting, insightful and provocative questions on what we thought were some of the major key points behind figuring out the business value of social networking. That was just a blast! What an adrenaline rush of back and forth between Mark, John and yours truly! I had such a great time!

John himself has actually put together a rather nice short blog post on that podcast under the title Social Media ROI and Hippy 2.0… It all made sense... In it he mentions how the recording lasts for about 56 minutes and it starts off at around minute 5, after he spent a little while sharing some further thoughts on the news and trends of the day / week related to social media.

I bet you may be wondering, right now, what we actually talked about during the course of nearly one hour, right? Yes, I agree with you, that’s a long time to spend on a podcast, but it certainly was such a good fun that I don’t think none of us minded at all! Thus here you have got some of the headlines and an annotation of two on the topics that we covered during that live podcast show:

• Business Value of Social Networking: Where we talked about how sometimes it’s much more effective, and productive, to focus on figuring out how to get the most of all of these social networking tools as our next generation of business tools to help us collaborate and share our knowledge more efficiently than trying to figure out the Return On Investment (ROI) of those social interactions without having even gotten things started in the first place!

  How it may prove to be much more convenient to demonstrate how social software can change the way we interact with customers, as well as with the rest of our peers, by humanising those very same business interactions helping nurture, even better, our own personal business relationships. We eventually shared plenty of thoughts and ideas of how this could pave out for almost any business out there!

• Living "A World Without Email": Yes, of course, we couldn’t miss out on this one, could we? Most of you folks, regular readers of this blog, already know quite a bit what this topic would be about, but what you may be interested in is the part of the conversation where I shared some further insights on demonstrating the ROI of giving up on corporate email and what it’s meant not only for me as a knowledge worker, but also for the organisation I work for and for those other peers I get to interact on a regular basis.

  Reducing your corporate email conversations by over 95% and instead move those into open social software spaces is one heck of a success story, don’t you think? Specially when over 3.5 years ago, most people felt I was crazy for doing such thing in such an email driven corporation like IBM (And probably like most of them out there as well!) and today, more and more teams and groups are also seeing such substantial reduction with their incoming emails by utilising more various different social tools. I may not be that crazy after all …

• Or, maybe, I still am! Because the other topic we talked about, during that one hour conversation and which we covered quite extensively, was a new crazy? idea that I came up with a few days back and which is picking a rather nice momentum and plenty of traction. Of course, I am talking about Hippie 2.0.

  Who would have thought about that? An initial blog post that I put together and shared across a little bit weary about it (I wasn’t sure whether it was going to strike a chord or not!), eventually has been raising a huge amount of rather interesting and very refreshing conversations on the true nature of embracing social networking beyond the business context, that is, how it is affecting us all as a society.

  That blog entry so far is one of the most popular threads on this blog and has sparked a good number of developments that will certainly keep a bunch of us buzzing for a little while longer! Who knows, perhaps for a long while…

  The thing is that we already have got a Web site up and running under Hippie 2.0 (Using Posterous at the moment and with a unique opportunity to have an open space where everyone can contribute with whatever the relevant content); we talked extensively about it on yesterday’s live podcast; a few people have already contributed some top notch content (Including some fun stuff!); and a few folks have been leaving comments already throughout the various entries and we have got a bunch of other really cool things coming up!

  I say we because my good friend Jay Deragon has been doing an outstanding job in pushing forward some of the content you will see on the Web site when you head over there. And for that, I am incredibly grateful! Thanks ever so much, Jay!! Really appreciate all of your efforts and glad you, too, feel the same way about this crazy idea!

Right, there were plenty of things related to social networking and proving its business value altogether that we talked about during that live podcasting episode over at Blog Talk Radio, but I think I am going to stop commenting further on it for now. Instead, I would encourage you all to go and listen to it, by perhaps quoting one of the best live tweets that people shared across during the show and which clearly represents the true spirit behind such a movement as Hippie 2.0:

"If you focus on fear, you’ll get fear. If you focus on humor, you’ll get laughs" (Superb quote from Mark captured by Susan Scrupski)

I hope you have enjoyed listening to the episode, just as much as we did during the live recording of the podcast. Like I said above, I had a great time participating in it and from here I just would want to take this opportunity to thank John Moore for inviting both Mark and myself into the show, to Mark for being such great fun, smart, insightful, witty, and another Hippie 2.0, like yours truly, and, finally, to Eric Andersen for helping facilitate the connection over … Twitter!

Thanks ever so much, guys! It’s been a great pleasure and hope to see you all soon over at Hippies20.com!

Tags: Blog Talk Radio, Podcasts, Podcasting, Radio Shows, Mark Masterson, John Moore, Business Value, ROI, Return On Investment, Hippies 2.0, Hippie2.0, 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, Productivity 2.0, email, Re-purposing Email, No-Email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, Information Overload, A World Without Email, Eric Andersen, Susan Scrupski, ITSinsider, Jay Deragon, Posterous, Twitter

A World Without Email — Year 3, Weeks 19 to 23 (Breaking the Email Addiction)

It has been a few weeks already since the last progress report I have shared over here around the topic of living "A World Without Email" (#lawwe) and since quite a few people have asked me recently how things are going, to the point where I will be talking to an internal group doing smart work and then a customer event on this very same subject very soon, I thought I might as well get together another update to relate how things are going. Has my weekly inbound email increased or decreased? Have I given up altogether on it already? Have I gone back to email after listening again to the sirens singing along? No, not likely! Still going strong and steady! After all of these years I can finally proclaim I have now, at long last, broken my email addiction!

Indeed, 5 weeks have gone by since the last time I blogged on this subject and even though I haven’t commented much on the topic on this blog throughout that time, things have been going rather well, steady and straight to the final destination of living that dream of "A World Without Email". One step at a time, year after year, but eventually getting there! Check out the latest progress report from those five weeks:

As you may have noticed, except for a single week where I reached the mark of 30 emails received in that week, for the rest of them the numbers have been rather consistent to go under 20 emails received per week, which is not bad considering the average of those 23 weeks gone by so far is still around the 18 emails mark, which I consider a rather good result to end up the remaining of the year in pretty good shape closer to the 15 to 10 mark. Indeed, not bad at all!

But might social media ever win the war with email? Or are the claims about the death of email greatly exaggerated, as Beth Kanter seems to provocatively suggest? Or are we in recovery mode, for the time being, since it looks like email is bad for our health? (My good friend Frank Bradley eventually suggests a few tips on reducing the impact of email in our health on that post; worth while having a look into it!). I’m not too sure, despite the wonderful news coming along indicating otherwise; like Ben & Jerry’s dropping email marketing in favour of social media, which a few folks have asked me what I thought about it … Well, what can I say? Hummm, Yummy!!

No, seriously, what I think is happening at the moment, is that we have reached the tipping point where we are finally breaking loose from our email addiction, as Tony Schwartz has nicely put, just recently, under the title "Breaking the Email Addiction", over at Harvard Business Review, with some rather thought provoking, controversial, but very much descriptive quotes of where we have been for a while:

"It isn’t overload we’re battling anymore, it’s addiction — to action, and information, and connection, but above all to instant gratification"

To then finish up with this other quote that seems to tackle that very same problem of email addiction and what we can do to break it:

"[...] We, too, can strategically train our attention. When it comes to email and the Internet, it’s critical that we do so to give ourselves more time to think more reflectively, creatively, and deeply in an increasingly complex world"

This last quote clearly reminds me of a recent blog post I put together where I was questioning whether multitasking is bad for the brain or not. And while still pondering some more about it, there is something out there going on that tells me that we don’t seem to have learned much from our previous addiction(s) and here we are, finding ourselves up another alley, but with another addiction: social networking, as Steve Rubel, from Edelman, has nicely described over at "Study: 43% Of Online Americans Addicted To Social Networking". Ha! I bet you saw that one coming, didn’t you?

I can certainly recommend folks have a read at Tony’s HBR piece, as I am sure that plenty of the tips he shares on breaking our email addiction could also be applied to taming that very same addiction leaning towards social networking. To me, eventually, it is all down to how we manage our interruptions; basically, how we train ourselves to focus our attention on what we really need to do, using the proper collaborative,  knowledge sharing or social software tools. Or, as I shared on another blog post over four years ago: "We create our own distractions and just need to learn to manage them".

I guess after three and a half years of living "A World Without Email" I have learned how to manage those distractions, and if folks out there may be wondering about how I have done it all along, I think I could just summarise it with two key words: balance and flow. That is, focusing on striking the balance between my distractions and the tasks / activities at hand and flow with regards to the point that I have finally learned to come to terms with my limitation of not being capable to read and digest everything that gets thrown back at me. Instead, I rely on the flow of the Social Web, as Stowe Boyd would put it, having realised that whatever it may well be, if it was really meant for me, i.e. something I would need, something that would really require my attention, it would eventually come back to me. In whatever other form or shape.

Perhaps that’s what breaking our addiction from both email and social networking is all about. Relying more and more on the social networks we all belong to, so that they can do their work in helping collaboratively filter what we need, and get rid of what we don’t need; resulting, eventually, in carrying out (our) work inside of networks and communities versus our traditional organisational structures, which seem to have trained us very well, over the course of the years, in sustaining that email addiction. May be it is the time to break loose and let social networks do the job. May be it’s the time for us to finally cultivate and trust, essentially, those networks we have learned to nurture over the course of time, because whether we like it or not, they do know what they are doing, don’t you think?

Are you ready to break through and join the revolution? What do we have to lose? Or, better said, what do we have to win? Something tells that a lot! Just hope we would all wake up before it is too late… before we transition from one addiction, that one of email, to another one: that one of social networking.

Hope not!

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, email, Productivity, Re-purposing Email, No-Email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, Information Overload, A World Without Email, Beth Kanter, Kill Email, Frank Bradley, Health, Ben & Jerry’s, Icecreams, Tony Schwartz, HBR, Harvard Business Review, Email Addiction, Social Networking Addiction, Instant Gratification, Multitasking, Steve Rubel, Edelman, Distractions, Focus, Balance, Flow, Social Web, Social Filtering, Collaborative Filtering, Stowe Boyd, Striking the Balance

The Web in Twenty

A few days back my good friend, and fellow IBM colleague, Aneel Lakhani, tagged me on an on-going meme that’s been going around for a little while now called "The Web in Twenty" where participants have to eventually provide answers to three different questions:

• How has the Web changed your life?
• How has the Web changed business and society?
• What do you think the Web will look like in 20 years?

So, since it’s been quite a while that I have last embarked on chiming in on one of those blogging memes I thought it would be a good time to do that over the course of the weekend and the actual blog post is up and running already. Over at my Posterous site under the same title: "The Web in Twenty", which will give me, by the way, a nice opportunity to kick things off again over there after the holidays, the business travelling and catching up from last week. Regular blogging activities will resume there as well with the same spirit as before, starting off with that entry I have just shared.

I wonder though whether the folks I tagged (Rick Ladd, Paula Thornton, John Tropea, Jay Cross, Harold Jarche and Stephen Downes) will dive in as well and share their insights with us …

What do you think? Do you reckon they will chime in?

Tags: Internet, Web, Future, 2030, Memes, Internet Memes, Metablogging, Blogging, Predictions, Rick Ladd, Paula Thornton, John Tropea, Jay Cross, Harold Jarche, Stephen Downes, Aneel Lakhani, Tagging