Debate y Conocimiento

Social media in the enterprise world. Yes, it is possible

As an answer to the question "How can I apply this current of change in the use of information technologies to my company?", this article offers information gathered from market analysts, articles, etc., together with a summary of the speech "Tapping the Groundswell within your company", that Josh Bernoff gave in June at Telefónica's premises.

The "Groundswell" phenomenon [1]

In a short period of time, the evolution of ITs has led us to today's Internet world, disperse and social, in which a highly significant phenomenon has developed, spreading like a giant wave in the immense ocean, to which Josh Bernoff, from Forrester, has applied the term "Groundswell".

The term Groundswell describes the social change brought about by the use of new technologies by huge numbers of people to communicate with each other and with companies, and to do so much more easily and cheaply than ever before. Metaphorically, "groundswell" represents the wave of social democratisation that the use of the Internet has universalised and which threatens the future of many companies, which are not aware of this change in the way they relate to their customers, workers and the market. This combination of technology and the way people use them is called "Social Media".

What companies need to do is bring greater dynamism to communities and other groups and expand the use of Social Media. Move from compartmentalisation and secrecy to a culture of knowledge sharing. Retain talent and thereby promote the transformation of the company at a time of change such as we are now experiencing. For this, collaborative participation is fundamental, as is what is known as the WEB 2.0. Telefónica has implemented a number of projects to promote this change. The idea is to introduce changes in the way we work, both externally in relation to customers and internally among workers, in order to make it more efficient.

There are examples of this change in all areas of society. Internet changed the world and social networks have changed the way politics is done (as an example, in the most recent US presidential elections, 67% of donations to Barack Obama's electoral campaign were made via the Internet). The majority of political leaders have their own blogs and pages on Facebook. On the 28th of May this year, Twitter made the German Bundestag look foolish, as three deputies, who had taken part in a secret vote, informed the social network of the re-election of the German president before this was officially announced.

That last example explains the great caution towards this new wave. How secure will the company be if we implement Social Media? How can we permit freer flows of information while at the same time avoiding leaks to our competitors?

This wave of transformation could lead to embarrassing situations in some organisations, such as that caused in the United States by president Barack Obama's decision to use his Blackberry address book to keep in contact with his collaborators and a small group of friends, despite the official obligation to keep a record of presidential communications.

The change is more social than technological, and so it would seem that any approach to this Groundswell world should be taken with caution. The social trend is for people to take what they need from others. The most brilliant ideas are generated in the middle of our conversations. It is a proven mental characteristic. When people exchange knowledge and experience, they come up with new ideas. With Social Media and its ability to put thousands of people in contact with each other, the potential is infinite. Bernoff suggests a 4-pronged approach to Social Media (POST):

• People: Assess their social activities by analysing the means they use for these.
• Objectives: Identify them. What you want to accomplish and how to measure it.
• Strategy: Plan how you want to establish relationships and what you are going to change.
• Technology: Identify the technology used by your universe of people.

Technically, Social Media is composed of web-enabled devices, which we will now explain, and the consumer software that accompanies them and makes it possible to interact with the cloud of service platforms.

Web-enabled Devices

Without going into detail about Web-enabled Devices, I would like to mention one small anecdote that will help us to understand the differences in the mentality of the new generations

When you press the doorbell, which finger do you use? Probably the index finger. Now, notice which finger is used by your children, younger siblings or anyone born after 1997. The youngest press the bell with their thumbs rather than the index finger. The thumb! The same digit they use to play on their videogame consoles and to write text messages on their mobiles. These young people have been called the "thumb generation". And that is not the only difference: the most profound differences are in the way they behave and their values.

The trend in the development of devices for personal use is towards improved ergonomics and usability, with two main characteristics on the consumer side: availability and disposability. It is a constantly-changing market. The technology never becomes mature and product renewal periods are very short, especially in telephony and digital leisure. Thanks to them, we multiply our capacities, using them as adjuncts to our bodies that boost our limited natural abilities. We are delegating more and more functions to them, bringing them closer and closer to our own anatomy and senses, making the digital reality more accessible to and shared by everyone. The new ways of interacting with the digital world, haptics (touch, move & play), are enabling the technology to be led by users, increasingly permitting the open customisation of devices and applications. According to Gartner, in 2015, 90% of information, educational tools and resources and technology will be customised by users themselves. The arrival of open software to mobile devices is already anticipating this trend. In input interfaces, the mouse and the keyboard are declining in favour of the voice or the recognition of gestures and signals. In output interfaces, the latest innovations are approaches to sight, hearing and even smell and touch. Beyond written text and static screens, new devices such as Microsoft Surface, a multi-point tactile table/screen, recently presented at Telefónica's Movil Forum, are changing interaction with technology in daily use. And this is just the beginning.

Cloud service platforms

The two clearest trends in IT platforms are collaborative platforms and webtops

Collaborative platforms make it possible to share documents and coordinate the execution of projects without the need for costly content management systems or complex process engineering initiatives. One obvious example is the National Information Exchange Model (Niem) based on XML. This is a framework for the exchange of information among communities of interest (COIs), at all levels of the US Government.

Recognising this need, providers offer tools to facilitate these interactions. Internationally, we are starting to see commonly-accepted sets of tools: email, videoconference and instant messaging (IM). And we should start to see the same for platforms that integrate complete business processes. Providers who hope to be successful must make their technologies accessible by means of the creation of software as a service (SaaS) through what has been called cloud-computing [2], developing convergent platforms.

In the workplace, the online use of applications such as text processors, spreadsheets, etc., (webtop or webdesk), will benefit IT departments, reducing costs and improving support, with the consequent streamlining of the work place.

WEBDesks are composed of different tools:

• Active search engines: Google, Yahoo.
• Passive search engines: RSS
• Organisers: Blogline, Diigo, Clipmarks.
• On-line encyclopaedias: Wikipedia.
• Document publishers and creators: GoogleDocs and blogs.
• On-line stores: Box.
• Collaborative: Netvibes, ranking and ratings.
• Languages: Praxis

In addition, we should also mention the social networks themselves. The total number of users of the social network site Facebook is now over 200 million. Let us consider that figure from another perspective: if Facebook were a country, it would be the fifth largest in the world, after China, India, the USA and Indonesia. The potential of this population is immense, due not only to the sheer numbers but also their cultural profile and purchasing power. Given the popularity of the site, many companies have recognised the value of Facebook and other sites as showcases for their products and services, and this advertising is the main source of revenue for these sites.

Segmentation of the universe of users

We can segment the users of Social Media according to how they use it and which tools they use:

• Creators: blog, own web page.
• Critics: post, comments.
• Collectors: RSS, adds tags, vote web sites.
• Joiners: they have a profile on social networks.
• Spectators: they read blogs, browse, listen.
• Inactive: none of the above.

Bernoff says that if we analyse the profiles of adults in Spain and Europe, the distribution of percentages across these profiles would be:

I know - they don't add up to 100. That is because, according to Bernoff, some people belong to several different groups. If we carried out an analysis in companies, the results would probably be different.

A breakdown of these figures by age reveals the high participation of young people in Social Media. We mustn't forget that this new generation of young people has been called "Digital Natives", born between 1997 and 2000 into an already-digitalised environment. In the corporate world, analyses indicate that in large companies the majority of IT-Decision-Makers are unaware of and, of course, don't use these technologies.

The Web 2.0 will make companies evolve online, altering the way they relate internally and externally. Creating an open corporate space where collective intelligence acquires an additional value over and above the sum of knowledge of the employees that feed into it. The time has undoubtedly come to back the defenders of the WEB 2.0 in companies, applying its advantages wherever they can contribute real new value.

Social Media in companies. New behaviours.

The main benefit companies can derive from this technology and change in behaviour is a direct increase in their productivity.

A culture of generosity in sharing generates an environment in which the employee is efficient and acts motivated by social recognition. The best lever is recognition. Recognition that will be translated into greater visibility in the company, which should bring further incentives in the form of a better salary or position. This new attitude corresponds to the change from the price economy, in which everything has a financial value, to the price-less economy, in which, without forgetting the financial value and the effort to achieve things, other, more democratising and fraternal values take precedence. A Utopia? The closer we can get to it the better.

Other direct benefits for companies are greater transparency, a decrease in the use of email with the consequent respite from the compulsive online syndrome, an increase and improvement in knowledge management and the formalisation and documentation of the company's processes. The idea is to gather collective intelligence and make it work for the efficiency of the company.

Communication and collaboration are the two keys to this new model.

Communication and transparency

Information is and will continue to be power, the utopia of total transparency has still not fully arrived in our society, but in certain working environments fluidity in the emission and availability of information is one of the keys to success. In these environments, information has no value if it is not shared and the value lies in the ability to have/contribute the information necessary. In these cases, it is not the information manager that contributes the contents but rather the community. That same community promotes the information that is of value. In these environments, leadership is based on the social reputation of those that contribute the information. Adopting these models of professional relationships, the social networks facilitate and improve the company's operations.

The image below shows the evolution of information management in companies.

The challenge is how to achieve these levels of transparency without risking leaks of confidential information that could damage the company.

This can be done by directly comparing the cost of not having the information (according to IDC Research, it costs € 4,125 per year per employee) and the cost of leaks of information.

Balancing audacity with prudence is the key to success.

Collaboration

To facilitate collaboration in the company and among all its departments, functions and work groups, nothing better than a change in mentality, accompanied by information and knowledge management (I&KM) tools. Exploiting the technological populism prevalent above all among future generations could help in this task.

During the recent FORRESTER'S IT FORUM 2009, held in Las Vegas from the 19th to the 22nd of May, one of the most talked-about subjects among attending CIOs was the rapid evolution of employees. When the "digital natives" generation comes of age, in 2018, the change will be sociological rather than technological. How to incorporate the new generations of workers into the company?

The new generations entering the labour market have a different philosophy. Instead of dedicating most of their time to work, they seek a balance between that, their family, their free time and their own projects.

Social Media in companies. Tools and Technology.

We can also talk about content creation and access to content tools. What we have already seen is that the adoption of WEB 2.0 must be founded on principles of efficiency. It is companies with over 2,000 employees that are most rapidly adopting these technologies to their benefit.

In a survey carried out by Week Research on 250 professionals in technology companies, about the most useful WEB 2.0 tools, instant messaging came first, followed by integrated search and collaborative contents tools, including wikis and discussion forums. These were followed, at below 50%, by unified communications, mashups, portals developed in Ajax and RSS feeds. And, much further behind, blogs and business social networks. There is also a perception that its value will increase as the range of tools available increases. And they also believe that its deployment will have a moderate impact, and that the ROI of these tools is not as important as their possible impact on the new company operating models.

The Web 2.0 will make companies evolve online, altering the way they relate internally and externally. Creating an open corporate space where collective intelligence acquires an additional value over and above the sum of knowledge of the employees that feed into it. The time has undoubtedly come to back the defenders of the WEB 2.0 in companies, applying its advantages wherever they can contribute real new value.

But who will carry out this task? The process could start with the "passionate users", that minority of employees that use the Web 2.0 without being required to by their bosses. The architects of Social Networks must act as facilitators to these, identifying business spaces or processes where the most import thing is the availability of information and the coordination of heterogeneous groups, where the availability of information is an advantage and a lever of operating efficiency.

Clichés are rarely useful when speaking about specific individuals, but, if we want to explain the social reality, we need to use this segmentation in order to identify trends. While digital immigrants have used the technology to look for information, digital natives contribute and share that information. The distribution of current WEB 2.0 users is 90-9-1: of every one hundred WEB 2.0 users, 90 only consult, 9 participate and 1 creates contents. With digital natives, it is expected that this will evolve towards a new, more balanced distribution, with a profile of 100-0-100. For some, it is exclusively a work tool, it facilitates personal affairs, is a source of information or a leisure tool. For others, it is a new medium that makes it possible to share emotions and personal interests. This is why it is revolutionary. Little by little, the digitalised virtual world is becoming a real reflection of the lives of people and companies

The Web 2.0 will make corporations more responsive. The impact on business communications, corporate image and other business lines that adopt it will permit new trends in customised advertising, thus turning different marketing concepts such as long tail or Social Media Marketing into realities. The repercussions on marketing models will be significant. By means of the use of artefacts such as RSS (family of web feed formats codified in XML) to provide subscribers with frequently updated information in a process of web broadcasting or web syndication.

The HR departments can also benefit from the social networks to search for candidates and use the virtual worlds to carry out surveys, with emerging new business opportunities and improvements in the interaction with customers.

The use of Social Media to listen to your customers is already a possibility. It enables companies in highly-competitive markets, such as telecommunications, to focus on their customers? problems instead of on the products. According to Josh Bernoff, there are two types of brand in the market, those that their customers talk about (talkable brand) and others they don't talk about (boring brand). The former are the least frequent. Apple´s iPhone is considered a talkable brand. Independently of the type of brand, all companies that want to survive in a world transformed by social technologies must work to launch their own social applications as a way of generating value, connecting with people interested in their brand and showing them how their products solve their problems or meet their needs. To achieve this objective, we have already seen the different tools that social technology offers us. It is interesting to graphically observe the result of a survey carried out by Forrester in which, segmented by age, they asked the following question: What is the ideal means of communication with your favourite company?

The differences between generations are also evident here. Whereas adults favour discussion forums, those under the age of 18 prefer videos and the social network as means of communication with companies. Once again the Verbal vs. Visual dichotomy marks the difference between generations.

Practical references in other companies.

Finally, Bernoff indicated some market references in the use of Social Media in companies, with cases such as:

• P&G , which, with the idea of creating an internal collaboration environment, organises virtual work groups that capture ideas flying around the company.
• North Western Mutual uses a blog through which it helps to "open windows" and tackles cultural characteristics of its thousands of collaborating employees. Facilitating the use of blogs and activating RSS to capture the information passively, with a considerable increase in productivity.
• Oracle uses a collective intelligence application to generate new ideas, which it submits to a system of online voting. Barack Obama himself is introducing this idea into the US administration.
• Other successful platforms, also used in Telefónica , are Share Point, which enables us to hold virtual meetings, sharing documents and desktops with no other need than web access.
• There are other examples of collaborative tools in Telefónica, such as UniverseMcCom, implemented in O2 Europe for the monitoring of international projects, such as the implementation of Application Management in the Business and Support Systems (OSS and BSS).
• Another company, Razorfish, has a wiki where it keeps the updated files of all its collaborators, together with all the projects on which each one of the employees is working.
• Accenture connects people around the world with internal and external networks.
• At Best Buy (with "connect Blue Short"), they share information among employees on tricks to resolve problems of usability or operation of the products they sell (consumer electronics).
• In the telecoms world, Bell Canada can serve as an example, with large communities of ideas implemented.
• Azules Inside is an internal space created by Telefónica that aims to create debates on how social tools, commonly called '2.0', can help us in our daily work.. As an unofficial initiative, Azules has an external presence through the portal somos-azules.com, a space created by the employees.

Conclusions

To sum up, I would reiterate that the change is more sociological than technical. Social Media in companies must be applied always seeking an increase in productivity and accompanied by a change of culture whose main lever will be recognition and visibility in the company. Perhaps for this reason, those best adapted to this will be the so-called Digital Natives. But, until 2018, when they come of age, the challenge is to gradually adapt companies to this change. It might be interesting to talk about these Digital Natives in another article.

References

[1] Term used by Forrester.

[2] For more information, read the article Cloud computing explained, by Salvador Pérez Crespo

«Paper included in the bulletin eKISS nº108, a weekly internal publication of Telefonica»