KM In the Jerkplace: Postmortem – Social Management in the Knowledge Media

Postmortem: Social Management in the Knowledge Media

(c) cybermancy.com/

Installment Summary:  We take stock of the flying elbows around the management table and find that much of the turf wars between KM and jerks are seeded by a series of pre-existing conditions. They include a fixation on security, gamification, and social media. 

Powering Down on Knowledge

Since no serious student of politics (geopolitical, office or otherwise) disputes the proposition that knowledge is power we will start our jerkplace postmortem with a less traveled corollary:

Power in its purest, undiluted form is an awesome aphrodisiac.

Agree with that logic and no wonder we're on the path to knowledge as our habitual gateway drug. Being compensated on the managing of knowledge, it's hard to deny ...

1. The plummeting price of storage
2. The proliferation of isolated sources
3. The congealing spaghetti of passwords slamming the doors to those silo-prone disconnections

But maybe the biggest change in the knowledge calculation is the business value placed on the internal pack behavior that's swelling the newsfeeds across our intranets.

The Power Hungry Chow Down at the Newsfeed Trough

The dumb-downed thumbs-up is the only vestige of personal judgment passing for a browser-contained experience. Emoticons, hashtags, likes ... All of the preceding attributes are measurable in a world where information once cost something to obtain. However, that justification is no longer valid in the land of content too cheap to meter. And it's not just a matter of mounting repositories or the virtual barbed wire we place around them.

No serious advancing of knowledge management can occur without the sober realization that social media is not some temporary distraction from tackling the real KM work. It's a daunting impediment to the collaboration we were hired to promote and capture. That’s not because ...

• The power hungry are busy accruing virtual badges (confirming a ravenous appetite for collegial know-how)
• Social media lowers the barriers to collaboration and who needs KM anyhow?
• You blocked me from reading your newsfeed

It’s that social media has lowered the knowledge bar to the point where challenging ideas are regarded as provocations. On social media terms that reckoning could be described as:

1. An insatiable need for praise,
2. The nagging doubt that compliments are insincere attempts to curry favor, or
3.  That it’s the world of ideas that are the true distractions.

It’s our outsized personalities that must be privileged before we address any demands on our collective expertise for solving problems.

Yikes.  

No Country for Honest Disagreements

I'm talking about a world where we placate our taciturn cousins with friended status while narrow-casting our way clear of a potential firestorm. The irony is that our sincerity buttons are being pushed by the same publishing features that shield us from the need to listen to, much less negotiate points of contention among conflicting opinions. I'm not suggesting that the foundational aims of KM are at risk the moment we deploy Yammer, Jive, or some other virtual water cooler for keeping our colleagues in the organizational loop:

• Oversharing is not the same thing as over-collaborating.
• TMI ("Too Much Information") is not the same thing as running a surplus of collective know-how. 

The rub is that keeping up our social appearances runs the risk not only of diluting findable content but pushes the need to produce, host, and maintain high quality content off the home page and into a sea of dead links and decommissioned servers. And before we're left debating whether humans are even capable of rationalizing through the back stacks of organizational sense-making, consider this. There is a jerk willing and able to...

1) Affix their jerk signature to a working definition of obsolescence – whatever got built before it faced the turnaround artistry of their wrecking balls.

2) Sandbag the wheels of change with so much process that even the option of deleting a non-functional site is an open invitation to paralysis creep.

The Knowledge Management Code of Practice: Takeaways 1-5

It’s been five years since the termination of System Wisdom. In that time I’ve worked at four knowledge-starved organizations. In each case they all held to the theoretical justification for hosting a knowledge function and failed to realize the benefits for doing so. The lessons I draw from these otherwise divergent enterprises is the real and lasting damage done by individual jerks. At each management level jerks sabotaged the focus, structure, and cooperation needed to operationalize the capture and transfer of know-how between communities and individual practitioners.

While I’m humbled by my own track record of working with these challenging colleagues, these mixed successes only reinforce the fundamental takeaways from the seven years of KM plenty at System Wisdom that preceded the current diaspora.

Here then are ten ways to that KM professionals can work through, around, in-between, and ultimately past the drain on collective energies from dealing with jerks.

   1.       Be a credible ambassador 

Be the group lead from the department of understanding. Credibility needs the impartiality of detachment to be both truthful and non-threatening. Don’t be vested in the mercurial personality or the following of tomorrow’s temporary mantra. Credibility is enhanced by a single-minded focus on moving the community needle into positive territory. That territory needs to be clear of conventional performance indicators. It’s not about the counting of “stuff.” KM is not measured by the composite sum of its parts. It’s not drawn to or rewarded by the appeal for shinier screens. And KM credibility doesn’t play well with budgetary authority or blanket justifications for maintaining dormant assets and inventories.

   2.       Operationalize the good of the group

Keep a maniacal pulse on the transfer points – be it via email threads, project retrospectives, attendance at user forums, or colleagues queuing for assistance in a request list. There are a surprising lack of analytics associated with knowledge-on-demand. There are even fewer for connecting that demand to the pipeline that this transfer point signifies. Knowledge managers are not gatekeepers or coders or subject matter experts so much as brokers between knowledge demand and content supply. Formulating that equation not only heightens awareness about resources but helps unblock the back channels where informal networks prosper but where transparency can move the entire community forward.

   3.       Metricize the un-trackables

Like we said, you will undermine your credibility if your knowledge budget comes down to the non-value-bearing cost of carrying stuff: software licenses, market research, travel expenses. They’re all one-way tickets to the most leading of all the cost questions – you can’t afford the freight if you have to ask the price. The value worthy of capture lies in the quality of the cohesion in the teams we support. The better the chemistry, the more interchangeable the pieces. The more dynamic the knowledge transfer within the community, the more chances to capture those transfer points. That’s where KM’s fluid nature is no longer seen as a nice-to-have but a critical competence for channeling the organization’s resources to the right challenges and opportunities.

   4.       Give everyone a seat at the table (and rent a big table)

Nothing rings more soundly in theory and half-baked in practice than the notion of open access. While everyone gets and agrees that privileged information needs to be padlocked there’s not much consensus around what constitutes the information commons – that sweet spot where all organizational boats are lifted by a single point of access. An effective KM program sets up a governance process where you know where you stand from the get-default-go, i.e. everyone can see everything unless it’s a case of A, B, or C. Delaying the process is an invitation to a convoluted rules that are prone to change based on revolving sets of rule-makers. Do you have rule-makers with exclusive sights on rules only they can stamp their signatures on? All the more reason for open access.

   5.       Call the bluff of exclusionism

Many organizations are becoming less open – even to themselves. How else to explain the extenuating nature of security sprawl – that advancing premise that information is foremost to be protected, no matter how benign its nature.

Hence, open site access – once the default setting of an organization’s communities -- is now an open access question. These increasing boundaries to access have their bad actors. But these are not the likely boundary-inducing suspects. This is not about cavorting, or lording, or even hoarding information for personal betterment. Pure and simple it’s about trust in the system and delivering on a consistent user experience.

So what’s an inconsistent one?

How about being sent the link that leads nowhere. Being sent the link to sites you can’t access typically means the site owner’s moved on or that the administrator’s overmatched. Pretty benign barriers. The problem is that a KM-centric view of information-sharing requires a level of intentionality and upkeep that eclipses the awareness and resource levels of most intranet site teams, run by folks whose primary role has zilcho to do with managing knowledge.

One key takeaway for KMers is to couch the care and feeding of company intranets in terms of what’s worth recognizing by the wider organization – much of this HR-centric.

Next week: The lessons keep learning with takeaways 6-10.

***

The blog series KM in the Jerkplace is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

KM in the Jerkplace: Episode Two -- Knowledge Engineering for Solitary Scrum Masters

(c) http://3.bp.blogspot.com/

Installment Summary: The Big Four knowledge survivalist jumps into the awaiting arms of the engineering camp for a once mighty developer of media software – back when hardware mattered. At first the opportunity is virgin territory. This inviting place to plant the knowledge flag is signified by efforts to source and build a search capability for leveraging the company’s collective assets. The initial optimism is however tempered by factional infighting and an unwillingness to fly those engineering colors under the SAME flag.

The Factory Gates Open for Knowledge Engineering

A week before I was to ship out as a SharePoint business ninja within IT, I hitched onto a passing knowledge raft. This water-logged trial balloon was powered by the knowledge-seeking curiosities of the engineering arm of Keen Core Technology – arms dealer to Hollywood, TV, and recording industries, and now under siege by an unceasing array of disruptor insurgencies from all sides of the media production spectrum.

While I had worked along-side IT and engineers with MBAs (a.k.a. “management consultants”) I had never been subsumed into the belly of the engine room: that is IT itself. I learned software-making as a repeatable cycle in need of documentation as-in coding the coders. I learned about daily stand-ups as the perfect antidote for task-drenched programmers who would rather be writing code than getting sucked into meetings.

My mission at Keen Core was to classify the wikis, channel the documentation stream, and socialize the release cycle of the half-dozen or so product development teams. Ultimately this meant distilling all these outputs into a single automated helping of digestible knowledge called “search.” The fact that there was no enterprise-wide answer to the perennial how-do-we-know-what-we-know question meant two things to the engineering crew of Keen Core:

1. Conceptual – how do we boil this ocean of applications, file-shares, lapsed repositories, and group-based collaborations from Outlook to Google Docs?
2. Practical – once boiled, how do we care and feed this resource so we can retreat to our safety zones in the comfort of knowing we can test our forward-leaning hunches against our collective history?

The Knowledge Safety Net

From a theoretical perspective the wish list that brought me to Keen Core began and ended with the same staggering and sober realization: we can scale the production of code but we don’t have a clue how to trap, catalog, and ultimately leverage the by-products of that effort.

This overwhelming sense of an organization’s inability to get out of its own way is not well-served by a top-down inventory of all assets – whether they live in the U.S. Patent Office or under “the digital landfill” as AIIM's John Mancini would say.  Rather than over-analyze the backlog of dumpster-grade documents, we looked to establish the safety net – not the uber knowledge archive.

There was nothing random to this sampling. Domain experts come out of the wood work – reluctantly sometimes because they’re often “heads down” …

• On some failure-is-not-an-option mission, or
• Closing in on some new shortcut to faster, better, cheaper.

These are not the sycophants of social media in search of the likability badging trophy. 

These are the folks who build stuff. They might not communicate effectively and their managerial skills lapsed long ago – if they ever had them. They are socially speaking apolitical, meaning they are drawn to fixing problems, not towards handling them. They are by-and-large drawn from the ranks of engineering and they are my brilliant, argumentative, recalcitrant, misunderstood people.

These are the ones who emerge when the call goes out for who-knows-how-stuff-works. And like their own circles, the documentation they travel in lands off the documentation radar. It lives on the outskirts of any centralized repository that confers authority, explains connections, or unpacks the experience that inspired it. In the case of the Keen Core safety net it was little more than providing a link to an obscure server I might or might not find password accessible. But after a series of non-threatening prods I had my unofficial off-the-map collection of references that the engineering teams swear by.

Not the sanitized intranet they were used to swearing at.

The Bake-off

The legendary chef Julia Child once said, “Always start out with a larger pot than what you think you need.” She might as well have been describing the process for picking an enterprise search engine. This proof-of-concept or PoC is your due diligence for matching internal priorities and selection criteria to your bake-off results. PoCs demand an improbable mix of reference able work product – no matter where it comes from, the application particulars, or the sub par referencing used to catalog the electronic version of what lives inside organizational roles and responsibilities.

Once I had my vetted safety net, I was clear to map them to the safe harbor of the search interface where memories get tested, experiments are run, and explanations are concocted.  That mapping included a healthy respect for the mismatch between Googling for cat videos that stick to our social billboards and researching a backlog of databases that live behind a corporate firewall. A PoC was undertaken to reduce the vast, uncharted wilderness of Keen Core to a single search box and a choice of search vendors – hence the “bake-off” that played out against the following design choices:

#1 – Fact versus Conceptual Search: Most business problems are not reducible to the distance of the closest pizzeria with the highest reputation ranking. In other words the answer is neither immediate nor obvious. It’s not persuasive on its own but needs the back-story to connect its relevance to the problem at-hand. That connection can only be provided by the searcher – not the search engine. The conceptual search idea was welcome by my colleagues as they were well-acquainted with the status and responsibilities of domain-expert-as-content-curator.

#2 – Single Answers versus Iterative: Because of their research-focused nature, most business or enterprise search problems are not only conceptual but iterative. They are greatly influenced by changes in time frame, authorship, formatting, narrative style, and context – the reason the artifact exists in the first place. Enterprise search results defy definitive or conclusive answers. They’re conversational – not just among peers but with the search interface itself which guides the searcher with:

1. Related events, 
2. People, 
3. Locations, and 
4. Organizations that suggest …
5. Further probing, 
6. Competing explanations, or even …
7. Complete redirections of our original assumptions.

This relatedness was realized in the proof of concept. Human-mediated tagging was neither doable nor desirable but the prospective search technologies proved up to the task for grouping these relations as search facets.

#3 – Search versus Source Dependent: The key to building our knowledge safety net is not so much keyword searching as enterprise sourcing: The ability not just to crawl volumes of pages, folders, and files but to evidence why anyone bothered to do so. Search scoping is essential because it brings the sense-making role of any single artifact apparent to colleagues with otherwise no shared experience beyond a common holiday calendar and pay cycle. Sourcing logic reinforces the cohesive logic of coordination across business lines and supporting functions:

1. Want to know what the customer sees before it’s out on your website? Search on marketing. 
2. Want to understand our products better? Search on training. 
3. Visual learner? Precede to training videos, etc. 
4. The more technical explanation? Go to the core requirements hammered out by account managers and the engineers who design to them.

Everyone at Keen Core understood the different lenses for sifting through the same content. The challenge was that only engineering had a seat at the bake-off table.

Enterprise Assets or Liabilities?

The good news is that each of these ingredients was factored into an enterprise search proof of concept for the engineering crew at Keen Core. The correct sources were indexed and configured to a search-driven interface reflecting both the nature of the index and the information-seeking goals of the searcher. Better still I got to run a true side-by-side comparison between two enterprise search vendors (Coveo and Google). The thinking here: My colleagues could base their tool of choice on their actual problem-solving.

The bad news is that Keen Core’s enterprise resembled a potluck more than a catered sit-down. The number of place settings changed with who wanted a seat at the table. The unsettled seating arrangements made it hard to move forward without revisiting some tired assumptions like:

• The Google Slam Dunk: Hey, wipe that Google web smirk off your enterprise requirements for Google Search Appliance. We’re talking two different engines here!
• The How Big-is-Our-Data Routine? What constitutes a fair test sample when a vendor solution crawls across diverse operating systems, repositories, and legacy apps (with licenses no one bothered to renew)?  
  
• The How-Open-is-Open Question? What's bothering your colleagues about access to resources? What's the important stuff we can get access to if we need it?  What are the content bottlenecks that hinder a silo-bound organization?

Conclusion: At every milestone selecting the right vendor was resistant to simple risk-to-benefit reductions. Multiple trade-offs were the norm. So were the dug-in heels of competing vendor camps. All of these larger lessons were lost to the conflicting agendas of poker-faced stakeholders – regardless of the actual bake-off winner.

Next week: The bake-off verdict is clouded by a crash diet spending plan courtesy of a stock delisting and a CEO whose blunt leadership style distances him from all non-depreciable costs -- including the company’s ingrained know-how on the building of its products.

***

The blog series KM in the Jerkplace is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

15 Minutes of Vertigo-inducing Fame

I'm deeply in love with Western Massachusetts.

I can tell it's love. Because given the choice between burbs and cities I can't abide either. This no-choice-at-all is called Pioneer Valley (and that's the path I've chosen). The connection runs deeper than the infatuation of floods or famines. It's given me more than any lover, credential, or birth rite can bear. That's the simple embrace of community.

It's a zagging of offshoots. It's a smattering of vocal opinions beholden to even louder lives in motion. The Valley residents that inspire this love don't just think something would be a good idea when they get around to it but make the time. I hear the words, see the actions, sense the community, and feel a group participation number coming on. And it sounds like this:

1. We can't make the money here but we can make the time -- and the effort to engage the neighbors, encircle the orbits, and divide up the work.


2. That's the thinking behind helping Valley folks become more "Knowledge-ABLE."


3. That's the term defining the web-based research skills and actionable outcomes convened by the Society of Useful Information.


4. We meet each Thursday evening in the Sawmill River Arts Gallery at the Montague Book Mill.


5. Click here to sign up for an upcoming session.

Who are the de-facto members of this Commonweal? They're the local educators, students, small business owners, web designers, social workers, and policy advocates. They don't need more connect time but better connections to their own research, customers, funding sources, and the powers to size up the stature, positions, and end games of the folks they'll be seated across from in their next business trips, job interviews, and power negotiations.

One of the other benefits of my Valley allegiances is that it only takes unmasking those affections in public for the media to cover these community-based meet-ups. Last week I landed on the front page of the Greenfield Recorder and Daily Hampshire Gazette's reprint of the same piece. And I didn't have to hack into any phones or call in any favors. The reporter Chris Curtis did a stellar job of recounting the hit-and-miss trial-by-errors of "the founding and sole member" of the Society for Useful Information. What could be more ground-breaking and less pressing than teaching to an impartial observer and "publicity-shy Amherst area consultant?"

As lifelong friend and chief rhetoric connoisseur Terry Canade remarked later on email:

"Your writer/editor was good at distilling quotes which sound like you, move the story along, and intrigue the reader."

The proof in Canade's assessment lies in last week's attendance. I drew double digits -- practically standing room only (and none of them repeat members). None of them were entirely clear on what to expect but they all showed up assured that the full cost was absorbed by the gas eaten up to occupy "a place that's impossible to find." Two hours later they had a grasp of the virtues of...

• Social bookmarking (exhibit: Delicious tagging and commercial-free search)


• Getting from a search ocean to a proprietary pond (exhibit: child molesters and malpractice doctors)


• Visualization tools (exhibit: connecting the vectors between events and stakeholders through Silobreaker and Muckety)


• Word algebra (exhibit: query formation techniques that combine a handle on semantics, syntax, and search operators)


• Credibility factors (exhibit: Site Explorer to compare self-directed and externally triggered attention)


• Timeliness (exhibit: the /date slashtag in Blekko search)

I was exhausted by the end of the session. I was compelled to do most of the talking because I didn't have prior knowledge of attendees search projects or the class size. I learn lots more when we can move beyond lecture and offer the group therapy benefits that come with articulating our silent confessionals to Google. Bringing voice to the discovery process is far more rewarding that the best engineered web destination. To paraphrase Karl Weick (or perhaps E.M. Foster):

"How do I know what I click on until it clicks with those I'm searching  (or reaching out to?)"

We'll know when curiosity leans forward and attendees find themselves returning with theories to test. That's when the class will find its voice. That's when the classroom will evolve into a round table and participatory search will become the key to self-education online. For now, crowding around the communal browser is a throwback to the early days of TV. Soon perhaps, it will be a leap forward to a collective experience that is anything but placid or unquestioning.

Just like the community of my affection.

LinkedIn First, LinkedOut Later...

To a metadata freak, LinkedIn is a marvel of information science. It is the botanical garden of social media.

Every germinating seed is dutifully watered in flower beds tended by a volunteer army of self-selected gardeners. The blossom worth budding here is that the attentiveness is anchored to the premise that our professional fortunes depend on this.

The LinkedIn premise is a massive database of self-administered professional life narratives. Access is determined by a network of click-happy connections: show you mine if you show me yours (both the resumes and the contacts).

The database gets regular feedings and weedings because -- hey -- those are my bowling trophies and and inflationary job titles and biopic documentaries I put on my reality series reward card program. Psst ... got any seed money?

What I'm unpacking here through unlicensed metaphor is a database of resumes. The splendor of the architecture is that the profile templates are self-organizing. There are no semantic web quibbles over taxonomies versus folksonomies, what vocabulary is worth controlling and which tag clouds deserve to float above the fog. In doing so, LinkedIn has achieved organic adherence to the age-old riddle:

How do I describe my uniqueness in the least invasive and most universal way possible?

That vessel is the cross-fertilization of the knowledge garden we researchers, sales animals, and job-seekers can all cultivate, horse-trade, or hunt down online through the sprinkler system known as LinkedIn's "advanced search features."

I did a session on this for the career options folks at my Alma mater of Hampshire College last month. It was fascinating to map the academic disciplines signified by each of the colleges schools to the requisite job skills, career paths, and institutional dimensions reverberating in the professional odysseys of Hampshire grads.

Then just last week I get pinged at work by Jon Lee, a Hampshire cohort from a 1.5 separation degree of overlapping concentric social circles circa 1980-84. Who better than a former Hampster and current job-seeker to put that ivory-coated knowledge harvest to the test?

Jon writes:

So, anyway, I want to harvest some of these connections. At first I thought I'd contact the person I knew, tell them who I was looking for and ask them to search the name and find the 2nd degree connection. A little awkward and time consuming (for the person I'm asking the favor). Yeah, so then I see the "Get Introduced Through A Connection" link. I choose my connection, then:



He continues...

My question is this... What happens, how does this work?

I hit send, a message goes to you. Do you only see my note to you - or the message to X (Leslie B. in this example) as well? And what about the person you know, who knows Leslie? How is that connection made? Automatically - or do you have to find the connection for me? Do they see my message to you, my message to Leslie?

The hypothetical scenarios go on for a few more paragraphs before the logic is tortured right out of the motivation for getting to the actual conversation stages -- the linking out phase of the process. I appreciate these questions because they underscore the associative clunk factor of shuffling through an overloaded circuit of lateral connectors.

The community spirit of pay-it-forward reciprocity might work for random acts of kindness. But maybe not so much for calculating and indiscriminate emails -- especially from people we know more for their degree of separation than we do about them. Period.

The artifice of the social media back-scratch points to the exit ramp or the link-out. This is the realization that as gorgeous as that well-groomed garden is, all the growth happens within the narrow confines of Linkedin.com. It is a walled in garden. That's why a thousand Facebook weeds makes more advertising perfume than the most painstaking bouquet of freshly cut resumes at LinkedIn.

You need to step on a few weeds, maybe even some poisonous ones before any meaningful conversations can happen. That's where a nose for research meets an eye for opportunity and an ear for discussion. That kind of growth can only happen in soils and climates where the greatest variety of vegetation takes root.

If I didn't answer your question, Jon, that may be because six years and 750 connections later, I still haven't plunked down $24.99 a month to find the answers.

LinkedIn First, LinkedOut Later...

To a metadata freak, LinkedIn is a marvel of information science. It is the botanical garden of social media.

Every germinating seed is dutifully watered in flower beds tended by a volunteer army of self-selected gardeners. The blossom worth budding here is that the attentiveness is anchored to the premise that our professional fortunes depend on this.

The LinkedIn premise is a massive database of self-administered professional life narratives. Access is determined by a network of click-happy connections: show you mine if you show me yours (both the resumes and the contacts).

The database gets regular feedings and weedings because -- hey -- those are my bowling trophies and and inflationary job titles and biopic documentaries I put on my reality series reward card program. Psst ... got any seed money?

What I'm unpacking here through unlicensed metaphor is a database of resumes. The splendor of the architecture is that the profile templates are self-organizing. There are no semantic web quibbles over taxonomies versus folksonomies, what vocabulary is worth controlling and which tag clouds deserve to float above the fog. In doing so, LinkedIn has achieved organic adherence to the age-old riddle:

How do I describe my uniqueness in the least invasive and most universal way possible?

That vessel is the cross-fertilization of the knowledge garden we researchers, sales animals, and job-seekers can all cultivate, horse-trade, or hunt down online through the sprinkler system known as LinkedIn's "advanced search features."

I did a session on this for the career options folks at my Alma mater of Hampshire College last month. It was fascinating to map the academic disciplines signified by each of the colleges schools to the requisite job skills, career paths, and institutional dimensions reverberating in the professional odysseys of Hampshire grads.

Then just last week I get pinged at work by Jon Lee, a Hampshire cohort from a 1.5 separation degree of overlapping concentric social circles circa 1980-84. Who better than a former Hampster and current job-seeker to put that ivory-coated knowledge harvest to the test?

Jon writes:

So, anyway, I want to harvest some of these connections. At first I thought I'd contact the person I knew, tell them who I was looking for and ask them to search the name and find the 2nd degree connection. A little awkward and time consuming (for the person I'm asking the favor). Yeah, so then I see the "Get Introduced Through A Connection" link. I choose my connection, then:



He continues...

My question is this... What happens, how does this work?

I hit send, a message goes to you. Do you only see my note to you - or the message to X (Leslie B. in this example) as well? And what about the person you know, who knows Leslie? How is that connection made? Automatically - or do you have to find the connection for me? Do they see my message to you, my message to Leslie?

The hypothetical scenarios go on for a few more paragraphs before the logic is tortured right out of the motivation for getting to the actual conversation stages -- the linking out phase of the process. I appreciate these questions because they underscore the associative clunk factor of shuffling through an overloaded circuit of lateral connectors.

The community spirit of pay-it-forward reciprocity might work for random acts of kindness. But maybe not so much for calculating and indiscriminate emails -- especially from people we know more for their degree of separation than we do about them. Period.

The artifice of the social media back-scratch points to the exit ramp or the link-out. This is the realization that as gorgeous as that well-groomed garden is, all the growth happens within the narrow confines of Linkedin.com. It is a walled in garden. That's why a thousand Facebook weeds makes more advertising perfume than the most painstaking bouquet of freshly cut resumes at LinkedIn.

You need to step on a few weeds, maybe even some poisonous ones before any meaningful conversations can happen. That's where a nose for research meets an eye for opportunity and an ear for discussion. That kind of growth can only happen in soils and climates where the greatest variety of vegetation takes root.

If I didn't answer your question, Jon, that may be because six years and 750 connections later, I still haven't plunked down $24.99 a month to find the answers.

Measuring the Impact of Thought Pieces

A new acquaintance recently published a provocative piece addressing the subject of social enterprise in an influential business media outlet. He was curious what kind of post-publication life his article was commanding in terms of press pickup, social bookmarking, reader feedback, and the resulting footprint of organizations and peer-experts linking to it on their own sites.

Most of the territory covered is aimed at the vain anxiety our names and effects will go public but escape our notice. There's more than a few utilities designed to consolidate our social media profiles: "our interfaces don't miss a single interaction, blah, blah, blah."

What I liked about this exercise was that it wasn't email or password-based. The only detail was the article itself. This is actually plenty if we're pursuing the power of an idea (as opposed to the browser used by our site visitors).

As far as recipes go the easiest and most literal way to trace an article on the web is to perform a link analysis. To do this you save the URL and then see who's linked to it.

A second more effective way is to allow for your keywords to appear in the "anchor." Anchor means the words that the linking party uses to describe the page it's linking to. As you'll see this gives a more thorough result -- including some cheeky tweets.

Capturing the social media piece is a little more fleeting than garnering page links. As we saw in the Yahoo example we're limited to the exact URL. URLs are becoming less static over time -- especially as they age and publishers pull them offline. This largely limits the amount of conjecture you'll get. It's not that Dashboard to end all buzz factors.

Again it helps to be less specific but there is no definitive source. Here's another example of a selective media universe where first and last name are the only terms in play.

When the promise of comprehensive profiling turns into the scattershot footprints of puny indexes I do what any rationale researcher does. I retreat back to Google. This is a Google query that focuses only on a news aggregation tool called Digg.

... and on Facebook.

Finally, here are two novel visuals for depicting links. The first from Google captures all links into ft.com that mention the author's name.

The second is not a search interface but a multi-dimensional view of recent media generation on the topic called Silo Breaker -- not specific to the original article but a big picture view to rival the most panoramic thought piece.

Happy fishing.

Measuring the Impact of Thought Pieces

A new acquaintance recently published a provocative piece addressing the subject of social enterprise in an influential business media outlet. He was curious what kind of post-publication life his article was commanding in terms of press pickup, social bookmarking, reader feedback, and the resulting footprint of organizations and peer-experts linking to it on their own sites.

Most of the territory covered is aimed at the vain anxiety our names and effects will go public but escape our notice. There's more than a few utilities designed to consolidate our social media profiles: "our interfaces don't miss a single interaction, blah, blah, blah."

What I liked about this exercise was that it wasn't email or password-based. The only detail was the article itself. This is actually plenty if we're pursuing the power of an idea (as opposed to the browser used by our site visitors).

As far as recipes go the easiest and most literal way to trace an article on the web is to perform a link analysis. To do this you save the URL and then see who's linked to it.

A second more effective way is to allow for your keywords to appear in the "anchor." Anchor means the words that the linking party uses to describe the page it's linking to. As you'll see this gives a more thorough result -- including some cheeky tweets.

Capturing the social media piece is a little more fleeting than garnering page links. As we saw in the Yahoo example we're limited to the exact URL. URLs are becoming less static over time -- especially as they age and publishers pull them offline. This largely limits the amount of conjecture you'll get. It's not that Dashboard to end all buzz factors.

Again it helps to be less specific but there is no definitive source. Here's another example of a selective media universe where first and last name are the only terms in play.

When the promise of comprehensive profiling turns into the scattershot footprints of puny indexes I do what any rationale researcher does. I retreat back to Google. This is a Google query that focuses only on a news aggregation tool called Digg.

... and on Facebook.

Finally, here are two novel visuals for depicting links. The first from Google captures all links into ft.com that mention the author's name.

The second is not a search interface but a multi-dimensional view of recent media generation on the topic called Silo Breaker -- not specific to the original article but a big picture view to rival the most panoramic thought piece.

Happy fishing.

Calling the Lurkers from Out of the Woodwork

One of the accepted norms of social media behavior is that the ratio of producers to consumers is roughly in that same ratio as inspiration to sweat (something like 10:1). That means there are lots of folks who read our stuff but don't write back. Perhaps me and my logrolling doesn't earn a place on your own blogroll. But while you're not inspired to engage directly you may well respond in a more passive mode.

A new way to uncover the untold legions of closet taggers is a new gadget called Deliciousify. It activates in the results window by flagging own the number of instances where your blog is worthy of placeholder status. It doesn't give you the actual taggers and you need to drill down in native Delicious to meet your fan base.

Here are a few other means to find folks who connect with your opinions by tagging your posts:

I suppose that the shortest possible answer is Technorati. I've got to say that I'm consistently underwhelmed by its search capabilities and the slop that passes for its index. If you're not vigilant about your ranking your will be yesterday's news regardless of how timeless your views may be.

Actually the inanchor: syntax in Google is pretty exhaustive (unlike Google's reluctance to be a good social media citizen when it comes to supporting any meaningful form of link analysis research). If you enter your handle it looks like this:

inanchor:attspin

The problem is that if your blog is your twitter is your music site is your travel planner is your local business forum handle then you're no further along than a new point of maintenance for managing all your online identities vis-a-vis friendfeed. While its a capable platform for aggregating multiple streams it is also self-referential. You get your facial 'friendeds.' You get your network. But you miss the periphery. Those touch points that are united by the power of an idea, not a location, habit, or common affiliation.

On the aggregate level there many analytic tools that can decipher traffic patterns and run free diagnostics. One useful tool here is XINU Returns which performs a fairly thorough link analysis but nothin' doin' on the passive machine-to-human social media path.

One parting question here: do we engage directly the people our ideas connect to first? I think not. But depending on what else they're linking to you can always add them to your network on Delicious.

Calling the Lurkers from Out of the Woodwork

One of the accepted norms of social media behavior is that the ratio of producers to consumers is roughly in that same ratio as inspiration to sweat (something like 10:1). That means there are lots of folks who read our stuff but don't write back. Perhaps me and my logrolling doesn't earn a place on your own blogroll. But while you're not inspired to engage directly you may well respond in a more passive mode.

A new way to uncover the untold legions of closet taggers is a new gadget called Deliciousify. It activates in the results window by flagging own the number of instances where your blog is worthy of placeholder status. It doesn't give you the actual taggers and you need to drill down in native Delicious to meet your fan base.

Here are a few other means to find folks who connect with your opinions by tagging your posts:

I suppose that the shortest possible answer is Technorati. I've got to say that I'm consistently underwhelmed by its search capabilities and the slop that passes for its index. If you're not vigilant about your ranking your will be yesterday's news regardless of how timeless your views may be.

Actually the inanchor: syntax in Google is pretty exhaustive (unlike Google's reluctance to be a good social media citizen when it comes to supporting any meaningful form of link analysis research). If you enter your handle it looks like this:

inanchor:attspin

The problem is that if your blog is your twitter is your music site is your travel planner is your local business forum handle then you're no further along than a new point of maintenance for managing all your online identities vis-a-vis friendfeed. While its a capable platform for aggregating multiple streams it is also self-referential. You get your facial 'friendeds.' You get your network. But you miss the periphery. Those touch points that are united by the power of an idea, not a location, habit, or common affiliation.

On the aggregate level there many analytic tools that can decipher traffic patterns and run free diagnostics. One useful tool here is XINU Returns which performs a fairly thorough link analysis but nothin' doin' on the passive machine-to-human social media path.

One parting question here: do we engage directly the people our ideas connect to first? I think not. But depending on what else they're linking to you can always add them to your network on Delicious.

Boston KM Forum: Virtual Teams

At yesterday's Boston KM Forum on virtual teams NetAge CEO Jessica Lipnack had a snappy comeback for the built-in bias of the newest wrinkle in what has KM done for me lately: Can we measure ROI on virtual teams? Her response? "Do we ROI face-to-face?" Her point besides the implicit one that this is a fundamentally off-balance, curveball question is that face-to-face is romanticized and that many of us have purely virtual, deep and caring relationships.

She and her husband Jeff Stamps also related an ongoing consulting engagement with the U.S. Army through Fort Leavenworth with their Battle Command Knowledge System teams (BCKS). She mentioned the audacious leap forward in the learning curve to support today's tight deployment schedules. The biggest visible leap? Lieutenant General Bill Caldwell's notion (now carrying the day) that all commanders need to blog in order to graduate from the program.

WBUR's New Production Media manager Ken George told us about Wordpress is content management system for Onpoint -- a major bump up in quality and dial down on production costs. They've been using Twitter to trigger tweet-ups at the station: "Anonymity is not your friend" is the lesson drawn from adding authenticity to engaged listeners of the station. Ken's convinced that fostering community is the key to preventing BUR from becoming disintermediated or marginalized like other traditional media. What I'm not convinced is that BUR is all that forthcoming or genuine about sharing the aggregate responses they get from the community -- let alone responding to a popular will or common interest defined by these outreach efforts. Case in point: we learned here that last week's pledge drive was actually met.

We also learned that the social media team would love to "ditch" the legacy BU database for "something that works in 2009." It's a complex issue involving multiple departments and the twittering profiles just may force it to happen in a manageable time frame (my conclusion, not Ken's).

Kate Pugh asked an excellent question about forum facilitation and whether it might be possible to introduce the skill-sets of the NPR talk hosts, perhaps in a social media milieu or even a more formal channel. Ken didn't think those skills overlapped much due to vast differences in the message volume. I get this from the operational side. But from a community-building perspective I couldn't disagree more. Would I double my donation so I could hear Tom Ashbrook ruminate about facilitation. Absolutely!

IBM Product Manager Suzanne Minassian (tekmoda.com) shared that she's a graduate of the Bentley Usability MBA Program . Suzanne guided us through the evolution of bleeding edge social media inside the firewall -- that's a seven term oxymoron in most organizations but certainly not IBM. Increased skills was the biggest internal payback in the justification for investing in social software. To Jessica's earlier ROI point again the question here is more revelatory than the finding itself.

Reduced travel, voicemail traffic and time savings per week based on self-guided problem-solving were all factored into the internal business case for social media. One inside tele-rep claimed that her client prospects increased significantly by embedding activity templates modeled after her own process flows in her intranet profile. From a usability perspective Suzanne evangelized about the "happy hour" ambiance delivered through an effort called Beehive, a more photo-based and feedback-driven version of the original template profiles developed 4-5 years back.

KMA's SharePoint Usability Consultant Sadie Van Buren talked about personal use of social networking tools and the slippery in-betweens of consuming and producing social media. Sadie referenced the Forrester framework for levels of engagement between active and passive users. She uses screen shots as illustrations in her documenting SharePoint issues that she reproduces and solves. Gratitude compels Sadie to post her own use cases.

"Build your network of other people like yourself who can help you" was the conclusion drawn from a story Sadie told. She demonstrated the real and lasting value found in assisting a fellow usability expert named Sue Hanley whose reputation preceded her but whose postscript includes looking to Sadie for guidance in solving some business issue that soon ensued after their first virtual meeting. We did devolve into one SharePoint digression where Sadie revealed her secret recipe for convincing risk-averse enterprises to adopt internal wikis. The secret is to introduce wiki-shy clients to "a multiple set of easy-to-edit webpages."

Dave Wallace walked us through some of the misfiring and lessons drawn from 'n kaboom rise and dive-bomb ash 'n crash of ZoomInfo. Dave also posted a predictability market postulation for using social tools for handicapping next probable headlines behind virtual team-building.

Finally the most off-agenda development of the day was the emergence of Larry "it's-broken-until-I-fix-it" Chait. Besides his credentials as the former CKO of ADL and co-founder of the Boston KM forum I had no idea that lurking below his what-me-tweet and who-has-time-to-blog skepticism Larry is a one-man geek squad: witness, some workarounds with his latest ASUS laptop that would have never occurred to me. I'm the guy who sends the machine back when the lights don't come on.

Co-founded Lynda Moulton has published a reading list here.

Boston KM Forum: Virtual Teams

At yesterday's Boston KM Forum on virtual teams NetAge CEO Jessica Lipnack had a snappy comeback for the built-in bias of the newest wrinkle in what has KM done for me lately: Can we measure ROI on virtual teams? Her response? "Do we ROI face-to-face?" Her point besides the implicit one that this is a fundamentally off-balance, curveball question is that face-to-face is romanticized and that many of us have purely virtual, deep and caring relationships.

She and her husband Jeff Stamps also related an ongoing consulting engagement with the U.S. Army through Fort Leavenworth with their Battle Command Knowledge System teams (BCKS). She mentioned the audacious leap forward in the learning curve to support today's tight deployment schedules. The biggest visible leap? Lieutenant General Bill Caldwell's notion (now carrying the day) that all commanders need to blog in order to graduate from the program.

WBUR's New Production Media manager Ken George told us about Wordpress is content management system for Onpoint -- a major bump up in quality and dial down on production costs. They've been using Twitter to trigger tweet-ups at the station: "Anonymity is not your friend" is the lesson drawn from adding authenticity to engaged listeners of the station. Ken's convinced that fostering community is the key to preventing BUR from becoming disintermediated or marginalized like other traditional media. What I'm not convinced is that BUR is all that forthcoming or genuine about sharing the aggregate responses they get from the community -- let alone responding to a popular will or common interest defined by these outreach efforts. Case in point: we learned here that last week's pledge drive was actually met.

We also learned that the social media team would love to "ditch" the legacy BU database for "something that works in 2009." It's a complex issue involving multiple departments and the twittering profiles just may force it to happen in a manageable time frame (my conclusion, not Ken's).

Kate Pugh asked an excellent question about forum facilitation and whether it might be possible to introduce the skill-sets of the NPR talk hosts, perhaps in a social media milieu or even a more formal channel. Ken didn't think those skills overlapped much due to vast differences in the message volume. I get this from the operational side. But from a community-building perspective I couldn't disagree more. Would I double my donation so I could hear Tom Ashbrook ruminate about facilitation. Absolutely!

IBM Product Manager Suzanne Minassian (tekmoda.com) shared that she's a graduate of the Bentley Usability MBA Program . Suzanne guided us through the evolution of bleeding edge social media inside the firewall -- that's a seven term oxymoron in most organizations but certainly not IBM. Increased skills was the biggest internal payback in the justification for investing in social software. To Jessica's earlier ROI point again the question here is more revelatory than the finding itself.

Reduced travel, voicemail traffic and time savings per week based on self-guided problem-solving were all factored into the internal business case for social media. One inside tele-rep claimed that her client prospects increased significantly by embedding activity templates modeled after her own process flows in her intranet profile. From a usability perspective Suzanne evangelized about the "happy hour" ambiance delivered through an effort called Beehive, a more photo-based and feedback-driven version of the original template profiles developed 4-5 years back.

KMA's SharePoint Usability Consultant Sadie Van Buren talked about personal use of social networking tools and the slippery in-betweens of consuming and producing social media. Sadie referenced the Forrester framework for levels of engagement between active and passive users. She uses screen shots as illustrations in her documenting SharePoint issues that she reproduces and solves. Gratitude compels Sadie to post her own use cases.

"Build your network of other people like yourself who can help you" was the conclusion drawn from a story Sadie told. She demonstrated the real and lasting value found in assisting a fellow usability expert named Sue Hanley whose reputation preceded her but whose postscript includes looking to Sadie for guidance in solving some business issue that soon ensued after their first virtual meeting. We did devolve into one SharePoint digression where Sadie revealed her secret recipe for convincing risk-averse enterprises to adopt internal wikis. The secret is to introduce wiki-shy clients to "a multiple set of easy-to-edit webpages."

Dave Wallace walked us through some of the misfiring and lessons drawn from 'n kaboom rise and dive-bomb ash 'n crash of ZoomInfo. Dave also posted a predictability market postulation for using social tools for handicapping next probable headlines behind virtual team-building.

Finally the most off-agenda development of the day was the emergence of Larry "it's-broken-until-I-fix-it" Chait. Besides his credentials as the former CKO of ADL and co-founder of the Boston KM forum I had no idea that lurking below his what-me-tweet and who-has-time-to-blog skepticism Larry is a one-man geek squad: witness, some workarounds with his latest ASUS laptop that would have never occurred to me. I'm the guy who sends the machine back when the lights don't come on.

Co-founded Lynda Moulton has published a reading list here.

Wordle Play in Pictures

One option for visual knowledge representation is an oft-tagged utility we've been using in a cloud-enabled intranet that we're now piloting called Wordle.

Wordle is not a substitute for plot-pointing social neurons like the one referenced by Valdis Krebs on a recent SIKM discussion. But it does create visual maps that could be applied to a community of practice wiki, job postings, or any other transactional undertaking worthy of tracking. The tool will generate a tag cloud for any RSS feed you throw at it. You can then re-stage the representation as a widget in your social media of choice.

For example our business pipeline contains a list of prospects. Each company's recent maneuvers generates a newsfeed which is then captured as a word picture.

Here's a work-in-progress posted today called "Budget Trouble."

This sequence is not automated. The cloud does not update -- lest fees, terms, conditions and enterprise edition headaches would surely ensue.

Bravo to the developer, Jonathan Feinberg.

Wordle Play in Pictures

One option for visual knowledge representation is an oft-tagged utility we've been using in a cloud-enabled intranet that we're now piloting called Wordle.

Wordle is not a substitute for plot-pointing social neurons like the one referenced by Valdis Krebs on a recent SIKM discussion. But it does create visual maps that could be applied to a community of practice wiki, job postings, or any other transactional undertaking worthy of tracking. The tool will generate a tag cloud for any RSS feed you throw at it. You can then re-stage the representation as a widget in your social media of choice.

For example our business pipeline contains a list of prospects. Each company's recent maneuvers generates a newsfeed which is then captured as a word picture.

Here's a work-in-progress posted today called "Budget Trouble."

This sequence is not automated. The cloud does not update -- lest fees, terms, conditions and enterprise edition headaches would surely ensue.

Bravo to the developer, Jonathan Feinberg.