Monday, August 09, 2004

Unlocking Human Potential Through Social Networking. By David Gurteen I was just looking to learn a little more on Social Networking for my upcoming Exploiting Social Networking in Organizations conference in September and stumbled across a post by Robin Good on his weblog where he raves about a paper from Lee Bryant on the topic. Now it just so happens I have seen Lee speak, the last time at the Social Tools Symposium conference in London last week and was so impressed with his deep understanding of the subject and the people issues that I 'signed him up' to speak at my conference. In Robin Good's words: "the paper entitled Smarter, Simpler, Social - An introduction to online social software methodology is an absolutely brilliant and well referenced resource to understand and appreciate the forces at work in our communication efforts." Robin is spot on. The paper is brilliant. [Gurteen Knowledge Log] 6:45:19 PM     The Support Economy. By David Gurteen A week or so ago John Maloney e-mailed me a weblog entry of Bill Ives on the book The Support Economy by Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin. I loved the opening premise: "The Support Economy starts with a compelling premise: People have changed more than the corporations upon which their well-being depends. In the chasm that now separates the new individuals from the old organizations is the opportunity to forge a capitalism suited to our times and so unleash a vast new potential for wealth creation." And then at the week-end, although the book was published in 2002, it was the fist book I come across in my local bookshop. So of course I just had to buy it. Its not light reading and I have only got through the first 30 pages or so but the concepts are awesome. Here is another quote: "The last fifty years have seen the rise of a new society of individuals, but corporations continue to operate according to the logic of managerial capitalism, invented a century ago for different people, different markets, and different needs. Today's individuals seek psychological self-determination. They are the origins of their own meanings, not a passive mass audience." I like that phrase "psychological self-determination". To me its another way of saying that people are becoming more responsible for their own lives and learning to be themselves. [Gurteen Knowledge Log] 6:43:18 PM     Good example of business networking through social knowledge management.  This is a case from Interface Software's files from a Boston-based accounting firm. Concept:  Query Partners for personal relationships with CEOs -> Prepare direct mail piece -> Insert personal note from Partner with the relationship. "The marketing team queried the system and determined that partners had existing relationships with fifty percent of the 200 CEOs on the new prospect list. A high-end mailing piece was sent to each of those 200 CEOs, along with a personal note by the internal relationship holder. “The results were phenomenal,“ said Jill Hulsen, Vitale Caturano’s director of marketing. “Twenty-three of those two hundred companies we mailed to have since become clients, with resulting revenues in excess of 5 million,“ she added. “We could never have expected results like this from a mailer without the advantage of knowing about those personal relationships in advance.” [thanks to Scotsman.com]" Now, is it necessary to have internal corporate social networking software to do this?  I suppose the abilty to do the query is greatly enhanced by scanning the social networks (rolodexes) of the Partners without the effort of having to ask each of them to do it...  In fact this is probably the key advantage of the system. So why not ryze or LinkedIn?  I suppose it comes down the the issue of people not putting their whole rolodex into the system - or, maybe more accurately their TRUSTED social network.  I'm guessing that this example worked because the 200 or so CEO's known the the partners of the accounting firm were truly known, not just acquantances (at least a good portion of them).  And as a result, you could offer a reasonable, quality service from people who were known quantities. So, where am I going with this...  There are at least two types of searches in social networks - the first is a specific search for specific information where there is usually a small number or even a single target that is unknown to the search initiator.  The first type of search usually follows a path longer than 2 links - that is beyond the network horizon.  The second type of search is to "mine" the data within the network horizon for contacts that have some need, want, desire or capabilty in common.  Then you use the resulting subset of contacts for a targeted communications campaign. Bottom Line - Mining Data within the Horizon, or Searching Beyond the Horizon.  I suspect both are facilitated by an environment (corporate or otherwise) in which trust is high enough that people will disclose their high-trust social network information. 6:27:45 PM

© Copyright 2004 W R Carlson. Last update: 11/12/2004; 8:57:52 AM.