>I’m doing two presentations in Philadelphia next month. The first will be at Janus Boye’s conference on May, 6th. My spiel there will be called “Editorial or social media? Both!” Let’s pretend for a moment you’re riveted by this catchy title…lemme explain: most intranet content is driven by the need of the publisher (typically organizational announcements, executive stuff etc), but it doesn’t have to be stiff and, in fact, integrating social media into the editorial can help employees find others with similar interest, get excited about their work and learn how to be better at what they do. I’ve been working on methods for doing this in a way that doesn’t cause the organizational culture to self-destruct for a while and have a team of people I work with at IBM who re doing really nice work integrating social into editorial — something that many external publications do too. It’s clear to me that just because employees are “stuck” inside the firewall for most of the day doesn’t mean yesterday’s broadcast-oriented publishing models will work. Anyway.

The second spiel I’m doing is the following day at the Council for Communication Management’s 2010 conference. I’m going to give a bit of an overview of how IBM’s intranet editorial team is structured (yes, I’ll be borrowing from my own pitch from the day prior)and then focus on the way we communicate financial performance to employees. Sounds boring, but I’ll try to liven it up with some music and dance. Kidding. Maybe.

>Not that you have the time to read a the transcript of an hour-long speech, but last night I read through Eben Moglen’s remarks from his February address to the Internet Society’s NY branch.

He walks through some fundamental decisions about how the web would be built that were made early on in the name of consolidating power rather than sharing it and goes on to demonstrate how the business models (such as Google’s and Facebooks) that resulted and prospered are fundamentally bad for human freedom. Here’s a sample:

The human race has susceptibility to harm but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record: he has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age.

Because he harnessed Friday night. That is, everybody needs to get laid and he turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality and he has to a remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal. Namely, “I will give you free web hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time”. And it works.

That’s the sad part, it works.

How could that have happened?

There was no architectural reason, really. There was no architectural reason really. Facebook is the Web with “I keep all the logs, how do you feel about that?” It’s a terrarium for what it feels like to live in a panopticon built out of web parts.

And it shouldn’t be allowed. It comes to that. It shouldn’t be allowed. That’s a very poor way to deliver those services. They are grossly overpriced at “spying all the time”. They are not technically innovative. They depend upon an architecture subject to misuse and the business model that supports them is misuse. There isn’t any other business model for them. This is bad.

I’m not suggesting it should be illegal. It should be obsolete. We’re technologists, we should fix it.

He makes some points about how Microsoft’s vested interest in the client/server model as opposed to peer-network model laid the groundwork for all this — very interesting to me. It sort of makes me want to just unplug myself from the social web, but I think it’s far too late for that. Even if you don’t tell Google your social security number, he points out, they know it anyway because you are the only one who hasn’t. It’s the mosaic effect for everyone and everything in a panopticon world.

He suggests a technology-based fix at the end that I think is mostly wishful thinking. I don’t Pandora is going back into the box — even if the box runs open source software and has pretty good security. The potential for freedom in the cloud is not going to come down to a technical fix — it’s going to have to get a whole lot worse before people get wise about managing their identity and privacy on the web. The market desire is so strong for php baubles and free web hosting that there’s gotta be some real pain before anything changes…and it will change when there’s a product that meets the needs of the collective lizard brain recoiling from it.

>I was at a meeting with IBM’s digital agency along with Pauline Ores, who I work with at IBM and she came out with yet another one of her killer analogies. She described the way that many companies are approaching social media is as though they have just heard about the idea of public transportation and so decided to buy everyone a bus. Amazing — this is so true (and often true within organizations as well.) I am sure you are all getting competing invitations to join online “communities” that really aren’t communities at all — they’re more like magazines with passwords. Especially in that they are devoid of the essential ingredient: people interested in helping one another.

On that same point, I am wondering if people from an internal communications/field enablement function are the worst or the best people to lead a company’s charge into the social media space. On the one hand, they typically have a high familiarity with web-based tools. On the other hand, they often see the world as an audience to be reached through a set of channels. Who wants to invite a spammer into their community (or join a spammer’s community.) Afterall, this is why God invented tivo — so we can SKIP the commercials, right? But if these people can shift their perspective to one of service to the audience (as opposed to, say, the short term goals of their own management) then they are the perfect agents for this kind of work. Those publishing skills could come in handy — or as Pauline and I were discussing, what was once spam could turn into a gift, if it’s produced in service to the community as opposed to targeted at an audience.

I am banking on this being possible.

>No, I’m not talking about their personal compensation. Rather, your company’s financial results. Was it a good year? Was it a bad year? Is it enough to just point them to the press release? Does it even matter if your employees understand your company’s financial results?

I’d argue that it is critically important that people have a well-formed understanding of their employer’s business model and results against that model. For one thing, it helps contextualize the decisions that senior leaders make — from provisioning IT, to the size of expense accounts, to travel expenditures, to increasing/reducing the size of the workforce etc. And since so many people own shares of their employer’s stock, it just makes good sense to understand your investment (don’t you wish that sentence could be teleported back in time to Enron and Worldcom employees?)

I’m going to attend — and speak at — the Council of Communication Management’s annual meeting. This year one of the focus topics will be communicating financial results. The size of IBM and the demographic and geographic diversity of our employee population has made communicating financial results challenging, but we’ve come up with some approaches that I hope the CCM members in attendance will find worth hearing about.

>I’ve been looking at an experiment from Google called “living stories” today and thinking — man, that’s actually more like how so-called “news” works on an intranet. Er, well, IBM’s intranet anyway.

We are very, very selective about what we put on the homepage for the entire 400,000-person workforce at IBM. Naturally, this means the stories we put there tend to be less newsy and more like feature articles. But they still pretend to be linked to a moment in time, which presents some problems in navigational, content-freshness, search-results etc etc. Basically, we end up trying to cram topic-index pages into the news well on the homepage because the news well is what we’ve got. I think the idea of intranet news has long-ago broken down and the Living Stories project could be an interesting approach.

In seeing the way Living Stories works on the internet, I could see creating a similar model for an intranet news portal…that is to say, thematic think-pieces/aggregation points organized by subject. It doesn’t matter necessarily if Google’s Living Stories back end is fully automated or populated by content-management elves because on an intranet it would be curated by communications staff and augmented with socially-derived data such as the most-clicked intranet search results for related terms etc. Perhaps there could be a community angle too — as in, interested people self-proclaiming and contributing content, volunteering to contacted etc.

Yes, we do actually have breaking news stories, but typically they are relevant only to subsets of the entire employee audience. And so we publish those to our profiles-driven, personalized intranet homepage only for those selected employees (e.g. new benefits information for Brazilian employees only appears on the homepage for Brazilians etc.)

Anyway, nice move on Google’s part — I like the idea for Living Stories and could see taking a similar approach for non-news on an intranet.

>I’m trying out a new bookmarklet that makes reading on the web soooo much nicer. Check it out for yourself here: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Here’s a super quick tutorial.
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3445774&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Readability : An Arc90 Lab Experiment from Arc90 on Vimeo.

>I’ve been thinking a lot about intranets as a set of services rather than a destination website. This blog is an example of a service that could be set up as part of the ‘intranet’ experience. I should say that IBM has an amazing internal blogging system — literally tens of thousands of IBMers (including myself) participate there. And yet it’s all locked away behind the firewall. Sure, much of it is inside baseball and so it deserves to be just conversation among IBMers, but wouldn’t it be even more powerful if the stuff that doesn’t need that level of privacy could be externalized easily? I mean, here I am blogging outside the firewall anyway, and the benefit of it is only peripherally accruing to IBM. A company-managed external blogging system is one way to enable employees to demonstrate their expertise in ways that may actually attract more clients and build the brand image of your company. I am not even talking about an IT platform necessarily — the service could be simply orchestrating and employee-focused program to get them blogging. Show them how, provide the air-cover needed etc.

Same thing goes for tagging, social bookmarking, other kinds of content publishing etc etc.

>I just met with Alan Hodgson of the United Nations Volunteers group — he found me while looking for a good model for alumni networks. I’m flattered — IBM has a big group, but it always feels like we’re running behind. Oh, and for those of you who don’t know, in addition to being the Editor in Chief of IBM’s intranet, I m the manager of our global alumni program, which is called the Greater IBM Connection.

At any rate, he asked my advice as he starts setting up an alumni group for the UN Volunteers…we spent a half hour on the phone but it boiled down to this:

1. Make sure you have really nailed your program goals — awareness and engagement look good on paper, but don’t really mean much. What do you want this group of people to do? Donate money? Come back for more volunteer opportunities?
2. Same goes for the value to participants — don’t assume you know what all the alumni want, ask them. We were surprised when we asked former IBM alumni and they ranked connecting with peers and access to IBM intellectual capital above career advice and job opportunities.
3. Use your email list very judiciously — if people get a sense that joining your network will just fill their inbox with spam, forget it. There’s a reason God invented Tivo.
4. Don’t get hung up on establishing participants’ identity with 100% certainty. Doing so is expensive. In all likelihood most of the people who join are legit, and if they’re not, it will quickly become clear. (And you can toss them out of your platform.)
5. Have a presence on open networks (like LinkedIn and Xing) but also build a homegrown network. You can decide later where you want to apply most of your resources, but one can compliment the other — and their advantages tend to counteract eachothers’ respective disadvantages. A basic group on many open social networks costs nothing or very, very little to maintain.
6. Let negative criticism happen on your site — instead of banning it or addressing it directly, keeps lots of great content flowing into your network that emphasizes the great things your alumni are doing. That sets a positive tone on the site and will, hopefully, get the conversation flowing in a positive direction. Make sure you highlight your alumni — much more than your institution. However, when there is negative criticism about the program itself, address it directly (e.g. comments about the website etc)

So yeah, it was fun to share with Alan what I’ve been learning about running a corporate alumni program. Will be interesting to see how things shape up for him.