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2 September 2010 Social networks let us have more relationships but we don’t know how
“Digital social networks are transforming… [everything], from society and romance to politics and business… because they change the economics of how people discover, develop and maintain relationships.” – Social Networks’ Relationship Life Cycle
 Social networks are remaking society because they enable us to have more relationships and more kinds of relationships. Relationships give us more diverse kinds of information, and information leads to more dynamic action. The problem is, most people don’t know how to be social appropriately in this emerging environment, which will delay value creation and pervasive adoption. However, if you recognize these limitations and take them into account, you will have the advantage over your rivals, many of whom will get frustrated and curtail their social media investments.
This post is the third installment of the Midyear Update. It gets personal, where the first tackled strategy, and the second social technologies. I’ll discuss the biggest hidden barrier to social business adoption and how you can guide your firm through it. I include this in the mid-year update because it has been such a prevalent part of client work this year. Understanding it is key to building and maintaining momentum.
29 August 2009 Contradictions Abound—What Seems New Is Ancient—Sorting through the Clutter to Create Value
 Digital social networks are transforming every field of human endeavor, from society and romance to politics and business. This is happening because they change the economics of how people discover, develop and maintain relationships. Although some will argue this point, we humans share with other animals the propensity to take more of something desirable when given the chance, and social networks enable us to have more relationships.
However, as I predicted in the Web 2.0 Adoption Curve, 2009-2015, there will be a significant backlash against social networks during 2009-2010 because the market’s perceived value of social networks is much higher than its skill with the tools. This will result in inflated expectations and ensuing disappointments. Most executives are distracted by social networks’ strangeness and features, and they miss the obvious, that social networks offer a quantum leap in productivity for developing and managing relationships. Much of the market will reject social networks as a fad and will sit on the sidelines during the Failure & Disappointment part of the adoption curve. However, people and companies that understand the real proposition will develop a rare competitive advantage while competitors are snoozing.
18 April 2009  Fusing Business Development and Social Networking to Create Breakaway Value
IOR Before ROI
 As disruptive innovations cross the chasm and prepare for widespread adoption, early adopters need to integrate them with the levers of market power to create unusual value. For over 20 years, I have helped companies seize unusual advantage by adopting disruption ahead of competitors, so here I’ll share how early adopters are creating value with social network investments. Specifically, I will show how to combine social networking with “business development” (practice development, sales). I will begin with a high-level description of the social network-led business development life cycle, and I’ll close with key thoughts on value and ROI. Although the immediate context here is B2B and business development, the principles also apply to the B2C environment.
4 April 2009 A Blueprint for Social Networking Investments
 Web 2.0 and Social Networks have gained perceptible mindshare during Q1 2009, and conversations with clients, fellow speakers at conferences and online conversation are clearly showing the reappearance of a familiar adoption curve. Here I will discuss the Adoption Curve for Web 2.0 and Social Networks and provide rough milestones, so you can use it to gauge your investments in Web 2.0. You can avoid some of the extremes that the majority of the market will experience.
In addition, I will also show how Web 2.0 provides a rare opportunity to develop competitive advantage ahead of the market.
27 January 2009
Twitter and Facebook Top of Mind | #snc2009 | Awaiting Discovery: The Nascent Power of Weak Ties and Small Touches
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 What a difference a year makes! The Social Networking Conference debuted several years ago as a forum for social networking sites and vendors, with enterprise clients few and far between. Miami 2009 took place January 22-23, 2009 at the Miami Beach Convention Center, and it was a veritable enterprise 2.0 conference. Many of the presenters hailed from enterprise-focused high technology vendors, but they spoke as social networking practitioners. The good practices they shared reflected the maturation of social networks. Don’t get me wrong, we are still in early days, but it was obvious to see that social networks would be completely mainstream this year. Enterprise-focused vendors provided additional evidence by explaining some of the new social network features in their offerings.
Social Networking Watch’s Mark Brooks gave an overview of key trends, while jetBlue’s Morgan Johnston and IBM’s Adam Christensen drove home the message that companies could be rewarded for trusting their customers in social networks. Ford’s Scott Monty, Sun’s Lou Ordorica and Microsoft’s Marty Collins shared how they were using social networking to evolve their companies by opening up to customers and adopting P2P, two-way communications.Yammer’s David Schwartz and Faceforce’s Clara Shih presented two tech innovators that promised significant disruptive potential. SAP’s Steve Mann, Opera’s Thomas Ford and Dow Jones’ Tom Aley all shared fascinating social networking elements of their portfolios, which were all enterprise-focused. Awareness Networks’ John Bruce was on hand to share good practices and pitfalls. I presented the only industry-focused preso, focused on how social networks were beginning to disrupt the U.S. healthcare industry. I also gave the pre-conference workshop, Successful Social Networking Projects in the Enterprise.
Between my workshop and conference track, I scribbled enough notes to share the high points of many of the tracks, which I’ll summarize before offering Analysis and Conclusions. The reportage follows this convention: the summaries are from my notes of speakers’ remarks, and [when a sentence is bracketed], it is a comment. Click on logos for abstracts of the tracks.
29 December 2008
Conventional Wisdom Scuttled—Disruption Preview—Business in the Batter’s Box
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 Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was more than a major social media milestone because it ushered in a new relationship model among leaders and their supporters. Due to social media, an unprecedented number of individuals had a new kind of active, direct role in Obama’s campaign; moreover, I predict that the Obama campaign and imminent administration will change citizens’ and consumers’ expectations of “leader” and “follower” roles in government and business. Amazon.com changed consumers’ expectations about retail in general—information on demand, reviews, unbelievable variety at low prices—and a significant portion of Obama supporters will want to continue their support to “make the change happen.” These supporters will bring their changed expectations of action and collaboration to their vendors. That means your company.
The Obama campaign is very instructive to business leaders because business customers are changing expectations of their leaders, as we’ll discuss in more detail below. As the Global Human Capital Journal is not primarily focused on politics, I am less interested in the fact that Obama was elected than how he was elected. Moreover, I’ll go on record now as predicting that you will experience Obama’s use of social media increasingly in 2009, and I believe that the election will prove to be only the beginning: the Obama Administration will leverage social media in governing. Although Global Human Capital endorsed Obama, I have no inside knowledge of the campaign or its strategies. Obviously, this is a huge subject, so I will use this post primarily as a way to frame an ongoing discussion so that it may prove valuable to business and government executives.
Continue reading Web 2.0 Case Study: Barack Obama’s Use of Social Media
30 November 2008
2009 Poised as Inflection Point in Enterprise Usage—LinkedIn Increases Relevance to B2B Executives
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 During the 1990s, I was intimately involved with helping global organizations to decentralize their information technology—as a management consultant and marketing executive. However, a far more disruptive force is imminent today: communications and marketing are rapidly evolving into a networked, distributed pattern, following IT’s lead. Individuals that congregate online will have an increasing role in affecting how other people make decisions, significantly weakening the influence of the mass media on which many marketing strategies depend. Organizations that depend on centralized, controlled communications will be astonished at how fast they become irrelevant over the next five years. Although the case studies are still being written, I’ll go on record as saying that the 2008 U.S. presidential election will prove to be an inflection point of digital social networks’ disruptive potential.
LinkedIn is a leading venue for B2B and B2C executives, so it merits significant attention. The inputs for this Executive Adoption Snapshot are varied: I have had the opportunity to work with hundreds of executives to apply LinkedIn to their business processes in 2008. I met two LinkedIn executives this month, and I covered CEO Dan Nye’s recent interview. I will synthesize clients’ experiences and LinkedIn executives’ remarks in three sections: 1) Executive Summary, 2) remarks from Dan Nye, Patrick Crane and Steve Patrizi, and 3) Analysis and Conclusions.
I would also be remiss if I did not share some of my experience around what kind of services enterprises will require to excel in this new environment, so after Analysis and Conclusions, I have provided initial thoughts gleaned from my experiences with clients thus far working with Web 2.0.
2 August 2008
Enterprise 2.0 and B2C Web 2.0 Show Serious Traction—But Social Sticky Wickets Remain—How to Trust?
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 The Social Networking Conference (SNC) was an excellent place to check the pulse of Web 2.0 adoption from customer and provider perspectives. Producer Marc Lesnick explained in his opening remarks that, in the months preceding this conference, corporations had knocked on his door asking to get involved. His Ticonderoga Ventures had held several SNCs over the past few years, and it had been largely the purview of social networking start-ups and their facilitators. This is a very apt indication of the enterprise adoption predicted by my State of Social Networking Forrester coverage and 2007 Review.
SNC SF 2008 took place July 10-11, 2008 at the UC San Francisco’s Mission Bay Conference Center. It was a focused conference that balanced start-ups’ and enterprises’ innovation—with a dash of perspective from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Social Networking Watch’s Mark Brooks. On the enterprise side, GE’s Grewal and GM’s Denison covered the enterprise 2.0 and B2C Web 2.0 perspectives respectively, while the U.S. Air Force’s Adkins presented nascent cross-boundary collaboration in the armed services. Start-ups Twitter, Mowave, Faceforce and many others gave fascinating examples of innovation along several vectors. I beta-released the Social Network Roadmap in my presentation and moderated a panel with Visible Path, Jigsaw and LinkedIn in which we discussed various aspects of how enterprises were using social networks. IBM’s Rawn Shah offered a useful network for “social context” for planning and solutions for social networks.
Notable, too, was Daniel Brusilovsky’s very lucid presentation, “Social Networks: a Teen Perspective. Daniel is the 15 year old founder of Teens in Tech.
I have coverage of all these tracks, which I’ll summarize before Analysis and Conclusions. The reportage follows this convention: the summaries are from my notes of speakers’ remarks, and when a sentence is parenthesized, it is a comment. Click on logos for abstracts of the tracks.
29 June 2008
Reexamining “Content” in Light of “Conversation”
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 Web 2.0 is redefining content on the Web, and Duo Consulting’s and Content Wrangler’s Web Content 2008 Chicago, convened at the UBS Tower on June 17-18, 2008, was a rich opportunity to check in with the Web 1.0-Web 2.0 mashup. Embedded within the legacy concept of “content” (text, pictures, audio, video, etc.) is that few people create it and many people consume it, which is obviously less true with every passing month.
Something else is happening on the way to the forum, too: opinions about content are gaining more attention than the content itself, according to Day One keynote Dick Costolo. If so, where does that leave people who “manage” content? There is a whole ecosystem of professionals and vendors that manage content according to Web 1.0 rules, and many of them were here, sharing their visions and tactics for embracing Web 2.0. Day Two keynote Jerome Nadel provided a clue: a shift in emphasis to design: since “users” are creating the opinion content through their “conversation,” I’ll hazard that a key part of the concept of “management” will be providing a better whiteboard that enables people to share what and how they want with whomever they want when they want.
 Moreover, everyone had control issues. Speakers as a group did not agree whether consumers were in control now or whether content creators still prevailed. Chris Anderson’s adage kept flitting across my mind, “We live in an ‘and world,’ not an ‘or world’.” The conversation will not replace content; it will play with it. The two will synergize. As usual, I have summarized the remarks of speakers whose sessions I attended, and I’ll wrap with my own Analysis and Conclusions.
26 June 2008
How a “Facebook for Health Conditions” Is Redefining Privacy and Collaboration
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 Healthcare systems worldwide are criticized for falling short of expectations, and countries like the U.S., which feature aging populations, are rapidly approaching a crisis. Demand and cost will grow, but the system as currently structured will certainly break down unless radical changes are made. Web 2.0′s disruptive potential can be part of the remedy: we need to introduce much more accountability and collaboration into all parts of the system. We need to change the paternalistic attitudes that pervade the system, treat patients as active participants and encourage everyone to be more accountable. This series introduces healthcare Web 2.0 innovators.
Business Drivers
PatientsLikeMe is a digital social network where patients of chronic, life-changing diseases share detailed quantifiable information about themselves, their diseases and their treatments’ effectiveness. The goal of the site is to improve quality of life by sharing information.
Continue reading PatientsLikeMe: Healthcare Web 2.0 Innovator Case Study
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