Modern Alchemy

Tonight night on the HR Happy Hour show we will be joined by MIT Professor Sherry Turkle, author of the recent book 'Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other'.

 'Alone Together' is almost two separate, but linked works. Yesterday I looked at the first section of the book, 'The Robotic Moment: In Solitude, New Intimacies', which explores the world of 'social robots'; today the focus turns to the second half of the work; Networked: In Intimacy, New Solitudes', which focuses on the always on, always connected world of social networks and virtual worlds.

Whether it is Facebook, text messaging, or instant messaging - these days it seems for many of us, the notion of being 'alone' has changed.  Particularly with the advent of the smartphone, devices with computing power and capability that rival the desktops and laptops of just a few years ago, as many of us move around the world we carry our networks with us.

Tens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of friends, fans, followers, always within reach, just a few taps away. It is sort of comforting I suppose to think that with the rise of social networks and smartphones that for many of us we no longer have to truly be alone, or as Professor Turkle suggests, we are now 'alone together'.

But this connectivity comes with a cost.  For adolescents and teens, the smartphone serves not only as a constant tie to parents and friends, but a kind of tether as well.  In 'Alone Together' we hear tales from numerous teenagers that have grown weary with the constant demands that the connected life imposes - text messages that have to be answered immediately, calls from parents that have to be taken, and Facebook profiles that have to be carefully developed, maintained, and nurtured.

Charlie Brown from Peanuts was able to assess his relative popularity and standing in the school based on the number of Valentines that he received in the mail box. Today teens are judged by the interaction on their Facebook walls. If a few days go by without anyone leaving a message on their walls, many teens begin a conscious strategy of posting on other's walls, relying on the norms of reciprocity to generate posts back to their profiles. If there was one main point in Professor Turkle's studies of teens that resounded with me, it was this almost obsessive concern with Facebook.  

But while the book spends significant time discussing the impact of the connected life on children, there are certainly lessons for adults as well.  Young and mid-career professionals are depicted as having to be 'always on', the BlackBerry constantly within reach, a never-ending series of beeps and blinking red lights to be attended to, to be in a way nurtured.  Parents are seen as dividing their time and attention between family events like ball games and dinners and their smartphones.  The book describes this being in two places, the real and the network, as a kind of 'Modern Alchemy', as if through technology we have discovered a way to create time.

Ironically some of the same teens that lament the power and stress that comes from the connected life tell Professor Turkle that their parents are too often not 'fully there' for them, with the BlackBerry and iPhone too enticing to fully leave behind, if only for a short while.

As always, there is more to the story than the simplistic - 'Just put away the darn BlackBerry for five minutes' argument.  These networks, the enabling technologies that make the networks constantly available, and the demands that we feel that they impose (either real or imagined), continue to change the way children grow up, the way we relate to each other, and the expectations of the modern workplace.

What does it mean? What can or should be done?

Tune in to the HR Happy Hour show tonight!

Hamburgers as Performance Art

I mentioned to Patrick that I needed some ideas for topics to write about on the blog and he said I should post about 'burgers'.The Rocket Double

What about burgers, I asked.  What's the angle? Now, Patrick does not completely get the point of view I try to write from, but he is savvy enough of a blogger himself to know the topic needs some kind of angle, or theme to make any sense. 

He said to write about burgers that you get in 50's style diners, like Johnny Rockets.  Parick has been fascinated with the chain since we watched an episode of Undercover Boss that featured the hamburger chain's President and CEO, John Fuller.  The episode was pretty much straight out the 'Boss' pattern - the executive is out of touch with the day-to-day front-line workers, doesn't really understand how tough their jobs are, and how important they are to the company's success, and after the requisite humiliation he receives attempting to perform some of the basic jobs, emerges a more humble, thoughful, and enlightened leader.  Toss a couple of free vacations and tuition reimbursements on a few of the staffers and everyone goes home happy.

But this post is supposed to be about burgers, not leadership, or reality shows that unfold more like formulaic sitcoms.  

One of the interesting scenes in the Johnny Rockets episode is when the CEO has to learn the little song and dance routine that the staff perfrorm from time to time in the restatuants, as a means of entertaining and (sort of) connecting with the customers. We learn from the show and from dining at a Johnny Rockets restaurant, that the staff try hard to create a memorable and lively experience for the customers, one that moves beyond the simple menu of diner burgers, sandwiches, shakes, and fries. 

But clearly, the customer is to be served good, if basic food, welcomed and treated well by the staff, and even entertained a bit by music, singing, and dancing by the white shirted, bow-tied workers.

Contrast the experience at a Johnny Rockets with that at the Manhattan restaurant 4food. 

4food is a burger place unlike any other, the expansive menu of burgers, toppings, cheeses, buns, and condiments are offered with the expectation and anticipation that the customers will not only develop their own custom creations, that using a vast array of social media avenues, they will share these creations and by sharing, promote themselves and 4food.

Large screens display tweets and Foursquare check-ins, customer's creations are voted up and down in a kind of crowdsourced burger tote board, and iPads litter the restaurant to make the creation, ordering, and tweeting accessible and easy.

There are over a million possible combinations of burger ingredients, making the process for creation complex, the online burger generator reminds one of similar web-based tools for automotive sites, that enable one to build and customize their new vehicle.

But it seems clear from the overly complex menu, from the emphasis on customer participation in the burger creation process, and from the seemingly relentless barrage and display of tweets and check-ins; that the experience is designed and intended to be malleable, and to rely on the creativity and enthusiasm of the audience to be meaningful. 

We want to believe this model -  this open, flexible, and participatory model is the future, and is somehow 'better' than the old traditions.  We point to events like the uprisings in Egypt as more proof that when given the opportunity citizens, customers, or students can often if not usually outperform the traditional autocrats or hierarchies.  And no doubt for many circumstances, especially ones more important than the trivialities of ordering lunch, this will continue to be so.

But for the simpler things, the ones that consume most of our day-to-day lives, I wonder if the Johnny Rockets model still is the better way.

Sometimes you just want a decent hamburger, cooked the way you like, served by a friendly waiter or waitress. You want the 'performance' to come to you, rather than feel compelled to create at least a part of it yourself.

You want the star to be the burger, not the slightly annoying dude next to you worried about who is about to oust him as the mayor of the salad bar.

Conversation and Being Liked at Work

Last week the popular enterprise microblogging service Yammer, released a new set of features under the name 'Leaderboards'.  With the new 'Leaderboards' capability, organizations that have deployed Yammer to support internal sharing and collaboration will now be able to gain additional insights into what conversations and topics are generating the most activity and interest, which employees are the most engaged on the Yammer platform, and how other employees value and respond to topics and each other.

Some of the metrics that the new feature will provide include:

• Most Liked Members: Top 10 users whose messages have received the most ‘Likes’
• Most Replied to Members: Top 10 users whose messages have received the most replies
• Members with the Most Posts: Top 10 users with the most public messages posted
• Most Replied to Threads: Top 10 threads with the most replies
• Threads with the Most Participants: Top ten threads with the most participants

A screenshot of the 'Leaderboards' feature is below:

The Leaderboard offers a small, but important step for organizations that have deployed Yammer as an internal messaging and conversation platform. Having a better view into which employees are most active and 'liked', which employees consistently and effectively engage the community with topics and updates that generate interest and dialogue, and what general subjects and conversations drive the most overall response rates across the entire organization, can provide organizational knowledge and insights into the pulse of the enterprise; and the kind of understanding the is often difficult to discern, particularly in large or dispersed organizations.

Looking at active and popular network participants and assessing what topics and conversation threads generate the most activity are valuable inputs that can lead to potential improvements in organizational design, workforce planning and deployment, and even with creation and execution of business strategies.

What users generate the most engagement? Perhaps their roles in the organization may need to be reviewed and enhanced?  Or more likely, the enterprise many need to make sure adequate succession plans exist for these drivers of network engagement?

What topics launch the most conversation?  It could be that senior management needs to do a better job articulating their messaging around these topics, or perhaps more attention needs to be paid to a particular popular or recurring theme.

It used to be that managers and leaders could try and sort out what was really going on at work by hanging out in the lunch room, or the watercooler, or the local bar at Happy Hour. Today though, many of the other informal and serendipitous meetings are taking place virtually, in places like Instant Messaging chats and increasingly, enterprise collaboration networks like Yammer.

Still for many managers and leaders, the value of a platform like Yammer may be hard to quantify, but with the development of tools like the Leaderboard, the 'sell' to these decision makers will continue to get easier. Knowing which employees are most engaged, who is capturing the interest of the most of their colleagues, and what conversations and topics are most resonant with the workforce is the kind of insight that can be incredibly difficult for management to gain.

Even if they spend a lot of time hanging around the lunch room and watercooler.

Of course cynics might say that once employees catch on the the metrics that drive the Leaderboard that they will try to find ways to artificially 'game' the system, to raise their profile and position, but in an online platform, with 100% visibility and attribution of comments and activity, it seems like any reasonably healthy community would sniff that out and put a stop to it rather quickly.

Do you use Yammer, or another similar internal microblogging too?  

Would this kind of insight into network activity help your organization?

Emmitt Smith or the Tequila?

At this stage, there is almost nothing or more vapid than another tired, played-out missive with the ‘you had better watch what you say on social media’ angle.

Everyone gets it by now. If you put anything out there, whether it be a blog, a social network, or even a seemingly private Favrian text message, you have to prepare for the potential exposure (no pun intended Brett), of whatever ostensibly private information you are sharing.Michael Irvin likes this.

And even that is kind of an oxymoron, isn’t it?  I mean the phrase ‘sharing’ private information.  Once information is ‘shared’ it can’t really be considered private anymore anyway. Whether or not you buy in to Mark Zuckerberg’s vision that the age of privacy is over, it seems likely that the gradual erosion of the traditional notions of privacy online will continue. Everyone you know (okay, almost everyone), is sharing content of some kind online; most of this content is not embarrassing, does not present a risk to one’s current and future employment prospects, and quite frankly, is only interesting to a select few people, (if anyone).

Worried about the ‘privacy’ of your latest Facebook picture of your cat in a Halloween costume? Well quit worrying, no one gives two shakes about it.

But if eventually Facebook’s and Zuckerberg’s argument that society is changing to adopt a more open, public, and transparent attitude towards personal data and privacy gains more widespread acceptance (or is accepted by default by the millions of people that can’t figure out Facebook’s byzantine privacy settings), the implications will continue to impact individuals and organizations.

For the individual, the implications are pretty clear, and quite honestly haven’t changed all that much. Assume all electronic versions of anything, (email, Tweets, Facebook pics, texts, etc.) will eventually find their interested audience. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the ultimate interested audience is indeed the original target -  Aunt Sally, your friends from 4th grade, or the 17 readers of your blog.  As I said the rest of the world doesn’t really care, we have our own boring pictures to upload and 'what I’m eating for lunch' Tweets to craft.

For the organization, the implications are a little less clear, but no less real. Whether it is your silly 44-page dress code becoming the butt of countless internet barbs or the occasional online banding together of employees to ravage your paying customers, more and more enterprises will have to come to terms with their own erosion of privacy as well. And I think more and more, the organizations that embrace this new privacy paradigm will be the ones that attract the candidates that best fit their culture, (some bankers may have actually supported that dress code, so why hide it), connect with customers more directly and significantly, and finally position themselves as more enlightened and responsive, as they adapt and evolve along with the Facebook’s of the world (and their 600 million users).

In fact, I wonder if in a couple of years companies will give up on developing and deploying private social networking capability, and will simply figure out how to leverage the existing public networks for their purposes. Why build a private network that will never have the reach, familiarity, and ubiquity of Facebook?

If you have made it this far, many thanks, and I guess it’s time to explain the title of the post. I made my daily Facebook drop-in this morning, and in the right sidebar there was an ad that consisted of a weirdly grinning head shot of former NFL player Emmitt Smith, along with some promotional content for a new Tequila.  Just below the image of Emmitt and the tequila ad copy, Facebook informed me that one of my Facebook friends, a highly respected and influential HR professional, ‘liked’ this.  What I was left to wonder was what did my friend actually like - Emmitt Smith or the tequila?

Be careful out there.

The most useful social media site for business is...

What is the most useful social media site for business purposes?

LinkedIn?

Twitter?

Facebook?

What about the less publicized but more widely utilized social network called 'None'?

I was reading through the Rochester (NY) Business Journal print edition the other day, and I spotted the poll results that are in the image on the upper right.  Apologies for the poor quality, I could not locate the poll results online. 

Essentially of the about 600 respondents to the poll, and for now lets assume most people reading and responding to a poll in a local business newspaper are professionally engaged, 62% felt that social media sites were either 'Not at all important' or 'Not very important' for them in their work or profession.  

Pressed for more insight as to which social media site these professionals felt was 'most useful in your work or professionally', the leading choice was 'None' with 43%. LinkedIn as could be expected was the second choice at 37%, with Facebook and Twitter barely registering on the 'usefulness' radar.

I really don't have any profound comments or conclusions to draw from a small poll of professionals, in a small city, from a business journal that I bet is only read by folks that live here. 

Maybe it just sends a message that Rochester is in many ways an insular, kind of behind the times city. Perhaps the business community here is so small and tight-knit that traditional face to face, over the phone and/or email networking still predominates and is sufficient to help professionals meet their objectives.

I am not really sure, but I just wonder if I need to set up a new profile on the 'None' network and make sure my latest posts, tweets, and bizarre articles I share in Google Reader make it over the the 43% of folks hanging out there.

What it is like in your city?  Does the 'None' social network dominate as well?