Will Facebook Kill the Car?

When we think about disruptive technologies over the years, whether it is electrical power, fast and safe air travel, or even more modern inventions like personal computers or smartphones, we often assess and value these inventions in the context of what prior tools or processes they have impacted. Widespread availability of electrical power replaced steam power in more modern factories, air travel transformed commerce and leisure activities while getting most of us off of transcontinental trains, and each successive iteration or improvement in computer and smartphone technology moves the functionality and capability needle just a little bit further than last year's device. Sure, every so often a new breakthrough device like the iPad comes along that while not really having a natural predecessor, is mostly used to do the same types of things, (read news, send email, watch movies), that were done on other, existing devices, (primarily laptops). I'll bet even the most ardent iPad users only spend ten or twenty percent of their time actually doing something that is only made possible by the new technology alone.Cutlass

Truly transformative and disruptive technologies do more than just offer a better version of an older tool or allow us to do the same things we were already doing before in a new, more efficient, or more powerful manner. Transformations allow us to create entirely new things, define new categories, and most importantly - change the way we lead our lives in ways that have nothing at all, (at least on the surface), to do with the technology itself. 

I was thinking about this while reading the following piece from the BBC - 'Why are US teenagers driving less?'. It turns out American teenagers are driving less than their predecessors, and the article offers some interesting speculation on why that may be the case.  From the BBC piece:

Recent research suggests many young Americans prefer to spend their money and time chatting to their friends online, as opposed to the more traditional pastime of cruising around in cars.

Ok, so maybe not that transformative or disruptive. Kids like to text and Facebook. Move along, nothing to see here, right?

Here's more from the BBC:

In a survey to be published later this year by Gartner, 46% of 18 to 24-year-olds said they would choose internet access over owning their own car. The figure is 15% among the baby boom generation, the people that grew up in the 1950s and 60s - seen as the golden age of American motoring.

Now that is indeed more interesting, and telling. The internet, and by implication the social connections and activities the internet empowers, (mostly via Facebook), is the gateway to freedom, mobility, coolness - all the things that the car used to represent to the teenager or young adult. A car can only take me, and maybe a couple of friends somewhere. The open web can take me anywhere. But isn't that a kind of sad, lonely tradeoff? Give up a car for Facebook? Isn't that anti-social?

Well let's look at one example of the motivations behind, well, leaving the car behind from Wally Neil, a 25-year-old quoted in the piece:

But it was a decision made easier by the fact that he could speak to his friends online and play games with them over the internet so did not feel he was missing out.

"We were all pretty closely connected, even before Facebook.

"So we were not driving to our friends' houses, there was the gaming network and all that. We were putting the car on the back burner.

"There is a lot to be said for the video game killing the need for a car for a lot of kids."

Really interesting, and I will bet a view on networking, connection, and even technology that most of us don't think about too often. This isn't 'gamification' as it is being tossed around in the HR Technology space fast and furious right now, but rather the social, collaborative, and disruptive power of social gaming to change a myriad of offline and seemingly unrelated behaviors. No Dad, I don't need to borrow the keys to the '94 Cutlass, we are going to play World of Warcraft this weekend.

So the statistics say that teen driving is down in the US, and certainly gas prices and limited job opportunities have something to do with that, but looking at the data, (and the stories), a little deeper suggests that there is more to the story than a simple economic argument. If indeed a generation, the next generation of the workforce, has a set of radically different attitudes towards socializing, mobility, and connecting, then it is something we should be aware of and ready for.

What do you think? Can Facebook really kill the car? Are your kids or colleagues exhibiting some of these same attitudes?

2011 Rewind - Slaves to the Machine

Note: This week I am taking a look back on some of the 2011 posts that were either popular, interesting, (at least to me), or that might warrant a re-visit for some reason before the year is officially in the books. And also after about 200 or so posts this year, I am more or less tapped out of original ideas and want to recharge a bit. So that said, I hope you enjoy this little look back at 2011 here on my tiny corner of the internets.

I am not sure if the post from June titled 'Let's Pass on That, (The Hamster Wheel), was my best post of the year, (lack of comments and shares surely indicate that it was not), or even my favorite post of the year, (something about robots or sports would probably claim that spot), but in many ways I think the point of the piece is likely the most resonant, (at least to me), of all the big themes in the world of work in 2011.

Ridiculous amounts of content being created, shared,  and consumed every day. Social networks and connections on these social networks keep growing exponentially. Going to bed with the iPhone, waking up with the iPad is now not that unusual. Then later in the year Facebook launches 'frictionless sharing', making push notifications of the songs you listen to and the articles you scan out to the network an afterthought. All of it adds up to a dense, deep, and limitless sea of data that many of us try, (in vain), to stay on top of.  

In 2012 I think one of the major themes is going to be how, as individuals and organizations, we improve our ability to adapt, control, and make the technology, the deluge of information, and the power of connections and social networks serve our needs, and the needs of our organizations and communities, rather than the other way around.

So I will leave you in 2011 with a re-rerun of 'The Hamster Wheel', and say many, many thanks for spending a little of your time this year here on the site. 

Happy New Year!

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Really late to the story on this, (about nine months late to be more precise), but I recently found and read an incredible piece by Dean Starkman for the Columbia Journalism Review site titled 'The Hamster Wheel'.

In the article, Starkman compares the changes in journalistic approaches, and the increasing demands on journalists to create tons of consumable content for a myriad of platforms, (TV, radio, Web, Social Networks, blogs, live blogs,and on and on), to the proverbial caged hamster running on an exercise wheel. Lots of activity, lots of energy being expended, but no real progress, and of course the hamster ends up in exactly the same place when exhaustion sets in as it was before the running started, and theoretically it still had some options.

In the context of the news business, Starkman describes the Hamster Wheel psyche like this:

The Hamster Wheel isn’t speed; it’s motion for motion’s sake. The Hamster Wheel is volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no. It is copy produced to meet arbitrary productivity metrics. But it’s more than just mindless volume. It’s a recalibration of the news calculus. Of the factors that affect the reporting of news, an underappreciated one is the risk/reward calculation that all professional reporters make when confronted with a story idea: How much time versus how much impact? This informal vetting system is surprisingly ruthless and ultimately efficient for one and all. The more time invested, the bigger the risk, but also the greater potential glory for the reporter, and the greater value to the public (can’t forget them!). Do you fly to Chicago to talk to that guy about that thing? Do you read that bankruptcy examiner’s report? Or do you do three things that are easier?

It is perhaps difficult to find another industry than news and information services that has been disrupted more massively in the last 15 years or so by the rapid development of the web, the birth of so-called 'citizen journalism', and the perfect storm of cheap data plans, incredibly powerful smartphones and other mobile devices, and hundred of millions of social network platform users ready and eager to report and comment on the news - all in real-time. In the CJR piece, Starkman paints a vivid picture of increasing activity with possibly dubious benefit, and that underscores more endemic tensions in workplaces today - we are all asked to do more, or at least the same, with far less people and resources.

The article contains an example of the Hamster Wheel in action using the illustrative chart on the right - over the last ten or so years, story production in the printed Wall Street Journal has increased substantially, with corresponding reductions in headcount leading Starkman to conclude the average WSJ reporter is now 69% more productive that in 2000. 

In the race for web traffic, more views of a networks' or news organizations' YouTube videos, 'likes' on Facebook, or Twitter followers; Starkman makes the argument that the traditional values and importance of deeply reported and in-depth investigative pieces (the ones that can't really be tweeted), are suffering. And not only are news organizations steering away from the investment of time and resources to produce these pieces, the long-term financial benefits of the current 'Hamster Wheel' strategy are dubious at best. Some estimated claim the popular and 'Web 3.0' model of journalism The Huffington Post only creates about one dollar of revenue per reader per year.

Is that a large, more applicable to the workplace take on all of this?  In other words, why did I just spend 45 minutes and 600 or so words writing about a nine-month old article on the news business?

Well here goes - I think many of us of running on our own personal or organizational Hamster Wheels. We too have to be everywhere. We have to connect and communicate with colleagues and staff on many more platforms than ever before. We have to engage potential job candidates all over the social web, and create compelling engagement strategies for the conversation, (that will work on all kinds of mobile devices including ones that have not been invented yet). We have to stay on top of news, information, coming and goings in our industry in a 24/7 global context.

In short, we kind of have convinced ourselves, just like the execs at many of the news organizations that Starkman discusses in the CJR piece, that we can't take a breath, miss a tweet, an update, follow the hashtag from a conference we could not get to, or let someone else beat us to the punch.  It is a hard way to live without any kinds of filters to know what is truly important and meaningful and what isn't.

I'll leave you with a final nugget of insight from the the piece:

The most underused words in the news business today: let’s pass on that.

They might be the most underused words in your business too.

Maybe engagement isn't the right social outcome after all

If you have spent much time at all the last few years researching, attending events and presentations, or consulting with experts, (term used very loosely), on how to incorporate social tools and social media into organizational communication, talent management, or recruiting strategy, if nothing else you would have come away with the firm belief that 'engagement' and 'conversation' have to be among your prime objectives and desired outcomes. No customer or potential candidate wants to engage online, the theory goes, be it on a Facebook page, a LinkedIn group, or with a Twitter feed with a faceless organization, a logo, and a stream of automatically generated updates, or worst of all, an RSS feed of job ads pushed to the social outposts from your corporate Applicant Tracking System. Jasper Johns - #6

Conventional social media and social networking advice would tell the organization to simply not bother with social as a channel if all they really plan to do is constantly broadcast, advertise, and push content. You're not ready for social, the experts would say. You have to engage, converse, be a part of a consistent give and take with the audience in order for your efforts to pay off in the long run.  And that seems like really solid, sound advice. Consumers and prospects don't want another stream of low-value add corporate messaging and propaganda.

Yep, great advice on how engagement and conversation is what matters.

But what if that advice, if not being completely wrong, is at least not as hard and fast as is generally accepted in the emerging social recruiting space?

A recent ethnographic study on the role of technology and social platforms in the real world from the digital media consultancy Razorfish raises some interesting questions about how average and casual technology users typically consume with and engage with digital content. Long story short, the Razorfish study showed that rather than seeking to actively participate and engage online and with digital media and content, most users were more than happy to passively consume said content. T o some of the study participants, the flow of information in the social space is seen as a more ambient activity and background noise.  From the summary of the findings on the Razorfish site:

Historically, digital pundits have promised a more interactive future, in which users move away from passive, couch potato viewing to more active engagement. While the amount of user-generated content and sharing supports this movement, we have found everyday users increasingly leaning back in their digital consumption habits. Social media is described as a more ambient activity. “[Facebook] is usually a drag. I just feel lazy like I’m seeing the same old stuff and looking at people’s profiles. I feel somewhat guilty about it sometimes, like I’m wasting time.” Twitter, originally categorized as a social tool, is described more as a curation tool. “I don’t really tweet anymore. I just see what I should think about reading.”

The folks at Razorfish advise organizations looking to engage with consumers, (in our terms as HR folks employees and candidates), to not be afraid to be a 'pusher', that is to offer content meant primarily to be consumed, and to focus less on stimulating ongoing and sustained conversation. The rapid rise of the the iPad and the other tablets seem to bear this out, they are primarily consumption devices. The little 'creation' that emerges from most tablets are simply shares, likes, and re-tweets, the simplest and most low commitment form of content engagement there is.

The net of all this?

Well the Razorfish study was very small, and certainly should not be the sole data point to base a social content and engagement strategy. But I think an important takeaway from the study is to take a longer and more critical look at both what passes for conventional wisdom in the social media and social networking space, and what can easily become a 'follow fast' strategy that may not necessarily be the right one for your organization. 

If nothing else, results from these kind of studies that make us examine carefully our assumptions on what is still a nascent space are worthwhile, and even if you disagree with them, as I imagine many will, occasional validation of your own assumptions is a good outcome in itself.

Aisle, Window, or Next to the Guy Playing Farmville?

In what might be one of the more interesting examples of how the social graph and our social identities are becoming more manifest in the real world, consider this story reported in USA Today:

In-flight dating? Using social media to find a seatmate.

The long of the short of the item is that coming soon, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines will launch a 'meet and seat' service that will allow passengers of the airline to connect their social media accounts to the check-in process and choose seats for their flights in part based on the social profiles of their fellow passengers. If you have flown recently you know the drill, online check-in for most airlines now allows the passenger to choose their seat from a visual depiction of the aircraft showing all available seats. Now, at least on KLM, it seems like passengers will be able to mouse over seat 17B and take a look at the Facebook profile of their fellow traveler. The window or aisle seat debate just got a little more interesting.

Of course this socially-powered seat selection process will be optional, and opt-in only. It's creepy enough to be stalked on Facebook itself, ('Poke'), never mind getting caught up in a middle seat on a Transatlantic fight next to a Facebook oversharer or worse.

But there are some interesting implications for this kind of combination of insight from the social graph with a real world and mundane process. The idea, beyond just the PR angle, seems to be the creation of a better experience for those passengers that decide to opt-in to the socially connected seating scheme.

Who doesn't have a story about an interesting opportunity from a seemingly random meeting on a plane? And on many of the well-traveled and popular business routes, making connections and ferreting out business deals is practically an art form. 

Beyond selecting seats for a flight, I wonder what other use cases there might be for these socially-aware applications? Maybe for a student considering what classes to take with what professors or perhaps what networking or social events to attend?

How about when considering a new job?

Wouldn't it be cool to see a visual depiction of the office, locate your potential cube or desk, and do a little 'hover-over' on your potential colleagues and neighbors and see what they are up to on Facebook?

What do you think - will the integration of the social graph ever influence employment choices in that overt a manner?

Have a Great Weekend!

Senior HR Executive Conference - Social Technology and Innovation

This afternoon at the Conference Board's Senior HR Executive Conference Trish McFarlane and I presented a talk titled 'How Social Tools Can Empower a Global Organization'. The slides from the session are can be found here, and are also embedded below, (email and RSS subscribers may need to click through).

How Social Tools Can Empower a Global Organization

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Mainly, what Trish and I tried to share are some examples, both well-known and a few lesser-known, of how organizations have and can use social media, social networking, new tools for innovation and collaboration, and probably most importantly how looking at business challenges with an eye towards how social and collaboration can help meet these challenges.

These types of short presentations are really meant to be a kind of starting point to thinking about social in different organizational contexts, and for leaders and organizations that have already begun projects and programs, perhaps offering some awareness or insight to new opportunities they have yet to explore.

The feedback to the session was great, (thanks attendees for your time and attention), and many thanks to Trish and to the Conference Board for allowing us to present today.

I'd love your comments and feedback on the presentation as well!