Global Neighbourhoods

SAP Global Survey: AccountAbility's Steve Rochlin

 [Steve Rochlin from his photo file]

Quite recently, I learned that "Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) was more than just a platitude. It is an emerging category. Large companies are employing staff to work on it full time. CSR professionals are forming networks where they share information, insights and resources. Increasingly, they are using social media to further their goals.

Is CSR just some form of new do-good tokenism used by large enterprises to hide their vices between a thin veil of good behavior?  There are certainly some cases of that. But, at  the recent SAPphire gathering in Orlando, I attended a roundtable of nearly 30 people from such diverse groups as Kimberly-Clark and the Carnegie Council. While there was a high level of passion expressed by participants, there was clearly a level-headed and pragmatic approach to it. These were people who wanted to move the needle on enterprise behavior toward people and the planet.

It was the most interesting event I attended at SAPphire, not counting the Eric Clapton concert.

This was due, in no small part, to the workshop's co-leadership of SAP's James Farrar, VP for corporate citizenship and Steve Rochlin, North American head of Accountability, an international nonprofit that partners with business to promote CSR. He has built a career on the issue of corporate citizenship.

I asked Steve to describe what CSR is and is not and to describe how social media is being used to generate a global CSR conversation. He also explains why CSR is good business.

1. Exactly what is Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and who cares about it

 

In plain terms, CSR asks companies to be accountable for good, bad, or indifferent impacts their actions have on the environment, to communities, employees or people. What constitutes “good” or “bad” is subject to negotiation between companies and stakeholders-- groups, individuals, and communities who could be significantly affected by the way a business behaves.

CSR asks business to report transparently on both the harms and benefits it creates for the environment, individuals, and communities. And finally, it asks business to contribute positively to improve environmental sustainability, the development opportunities of low income individuals, and the overall quality of life. CSR expects a company to make these efforts in ways that can actually benefit its own competitive position.

2. How do you respond to the cynic's viewpoint that CSR is just lipstick on a greedy, smoke-spewing dragon? In other words, some folks argue that CSR lets a company say all the right things while continuing to conduct irresponsible activities in the name of profit?

The problem is that there’s no consensus on CSR's definition. So this does, in fact, leave room for companies to make CSR an exercise in PR or worse. There are too many examples of companies giving a few thousand bucks to a charity, then paying in the low six figures to advertise how great they are for giving the money. My favorite story is of a funeral home that promised an elementary school a brand new computer center if it made sure to encourage the kids to send the grandparents their way when their time was up.

Too many try to make CSR about giving a few pennies here and there. But it’s not about that. As our name underscores, accountability is at the core of CSR. What exactly do we expect companies to be accountable for in the way they treat the environment, communities, customers, employees, and shareholders?

Do companies share enough with us about their performance? Do they transparently report on what they are up to? Do they listen to criticism and work to improve? Do they give their most important stakeholders—the individuals whose lives could really be affected by the corporate decisions—some kind of voice and influence?

3.  Tell me about AccountAbility. How did it get started and why? How has it emerged? What does the head of AccountAbility do on a typical day--assuming you have typical days?

In 1995, a group of really visionary folk saw that the relationship between business and society was changing. They predicted that companies would be pressured to issue annual “CSR” reports documenting their environmental, social, and economic impacts.

They envisioned the proliferation of independent, global efforts to establish “standards” or codes of conduct for companies to adopt on everything from climate change, to human rights, to labor practices, and dozens of other issues. They said, “we’re going to need an organization that is always looking around the corner, seeing what’s coming, helping us prepare to meet it, and not letting us get too complacent or self-satisfied about what the rest of us are up to.” They created AccountAbility. We work to be innovative, but clear-eyed and practical. We try to make CSR work by really getting at the heart of what we hold business accountable for, and what others in the world need to be accountable for too. It’s not all one-way and dumped on business. We need mutual accountability, shared responsibility and ways of working collaboratively.

So we designed frameworks and tools. With IBM and The Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship we founded the Global Leadership Network (GLN) , a network of about 40 companies collaborating to define the terms of performance excellence for CSR and then demonstrate leadership. The World Bank’s International Finance Corporation and the United Nations Global Compact is involved as well. We have networks in China, Brazil, and India. We use an online, interactive, web platform to help companies self assess, plan CSR strategy, and benchmark.

We do a lot of work with companies to help them build collaboratively designed strategies with stakeholders. We’ve worked with SAP, GE, Nestle and many others on this. We designed one of the leading systems to assure — or verify — these CSR reports I mentioned earlier. It’s called AA1000. We partner with Fortune International and others to rate the accountability of the largest 100 corporations in the world. And we rate countries on how well they create a business climate that allows companies to be competitive and responsible to the environment and communities. Finally, we help companies, “non-governmental organizations (NGOs),” and governments partners to solve tough problems. So there is no typical day for me.

4. How does social media come in? What Social Media projects has AccountAbility started or participated in? Are you considering blogs, Twitter, FaceBook or online video?

In addition to our GLN, we are just finishing a worldwide wiki process to update our AA1000 standard on assuring — or verifying — CSR reports. We struggled with this at first, but got the hang of it, and it is been just a great and powerful process to use the power of social media communities to make vital improvements in this standard.

Third, we’ve just created a relationship with OpenDemocracy. It is a leader in creating blogs and other content vehicles to promote discussion on globalization and strengthening democracy. We often guest-post on OpenDemocracy and we host them in our offices.

We also have a Facebook account.

Fifth, SAP has supported a fascinating effort we’re leading with Web 2.0 analyst RedmonkBusiness for Social Responsibility (BSR) on Web 2.0 on the sustainable enterprise and the International Business Leaders Forum (IBLF) are helping to lead this as well. Among the things we’re doing is having debate and dialogue via a wiki platform. Those interested should email me and I’ll be happy to send you an invite.

5. Why has AccountAbility opted to embrace social media at this time? Where are you going with it?

Social media tools could be a veritable godsend for those working to advance a progressive vision of the relationship of business to society. And since this vision bolts squarely onto big challenges like climate change, biodiversity, energy policy, poverty, access to education, human rights, food and hunger, disaster relief and recovery, access to medicines for poor people, health and quality of life, and numerous other concerns, these tools could be a godsend for work on these specific issues too. But too many of us are playing the role of late adopters (if not out-and-out skeptics). We think that too many working on these issues have overlooked the power of social media.

We need to catch up and we need to help others catch up too.

6. Can you give me a good example of a company that has changed an activity because of CSR?

Oh, there are too many to mention. I get excited when I see companies like IBM using CSR as a vehicle to enhance R&D. It’s led to some truly profound initiatives like the World Community Grid , which gives supercomputing power to AIDS researchers, voice recognition technology for the elderly and disabled, and an SME toolkit for entrepreneurs in low income communities.

I look at General Electric, which has created a whole business model called ecomagination designed to help customers reduce energy consumption and greenhouse emissions. I look at cement manufacturer CEMEX which has created a new business model to help poor people get affordable housing and sell ready-mix bags of cement to markets they never thought about before. I look at Shell Oil helping to provide innovative, sustainable alternative energy solutions to poor, rural communities.

I look at Dow Chemical, British Telecom, Nokia, and so many others who are making big commitments to reduce greenhouse gases. I look at the network of major companies joining Business Leaders Initiative on Human Rights to make sure the rights of workers in supply chains are protected.

There is just so much that’s going on.

7. Can you give me a great AccountAbility CSR success story?

Our Responsible Competitive Index inspired the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to enter into an agreement with us to improve its performance. They see this as part of their effort to become one of the top 10 most competitive countries in the world.

We’ve helped one of the largest companies in the world design the first, worldwide human rights policy in its industry. We have a partnership to help revive the garment industries of poor countries now that World Trade Organization-imposed purchasing quotas have been lifted.

We manage a partnership of over 70 organizations that include WalMart, Levi Strauss, Nike, CARE, Oxfam, the World Bank and others. This work has helped save some good jobs and created conditions to prevent sweatshops in countries like Bangladesh and Lesotho. 

We have helped another top 100 company to acknowledge that it must take seriously the potential health impacts of one of its signature products. We’ll be facilitating a series of dialogues on what it can do over the next few months. We also helped a very famous apparel brand avoid a mistake that would have been devastating to its reputation. Its marketing team got too aggressive and was about to launch a major campaign about become “carbon negative.” We showed them that this would be a very problematic idea. I’m proud to say we have many other examples.

8. From an enterprise perspective, where's the ROI in CSR?

I have a love-hate relationship with this question. It is absolutely clear that CSR can generate top-line revenues for a company. It can inspire innovation. It can support new product development. It can open new markets and reignite moribund ones. It can acquire customers. It can recruit and retain employees. It can enhance brand and reputation. It can reduce costs. It can mitigate risks by protecting the so-called “social license to operate.” It can help raise share price.

Or it can do none of these things. Or it can do the exact opposite.

People approach CSR like the movie Field of Dreams. “Build it and they will come.” That doesn’t work for CSR. In fact, it just about doesn’t work for anything a business does. Very few experience the dream where you launch a product that sells itself.

Any company whether B2B or B2C in any industry can generate ROI from CSR. But that company has to be smart and strategic. It has to identify what the most material social and environmental issues are. It needs to assess what kinds of investments will produce what kinds of returns.

Most companies don’t do this. They see CSR as a type of PR. It’s not. It is fundamental and core to the business. Or they see CSR as a “do-gooder” exercise of “giving back.” This drives me crazy. Don’t “give back.” Understand what you are accountable for. Think strategically about how responding to your accountabilities can actually drive business success.

9. You seem to be in a triangulated alliance with Redmonk and SAP? Why do they work so closely with you? Can you name some other AccountAbility allies?

Well we did work with SAP to help it build a CSR strategy, identify material social and environmental issues, and engage with key stakeholders. Out of this we brainstormed an opportunity to look into Social Media as a potential driver of responsible business performance. Redmonk has a great reputation as an industry analyst that uses social media creatively. And it has begun to look into sustainability issues in a big way. It’s been a great partnership all the way around.

10. Additional Comments?

We’re learning that social media puts some amazing tools at our disposal. Whether we use them to construct the kind of society we all want to live, work, play, and do business in is up to us. We’d love to connect with those interested in applying these tools to advance the responsible performance of business.

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SAP Global Survey: Lego Community Pioneer Jake McKee

[Jake McKee, a Lego community pioneer. Photo from his file.]

If any of you have ever been to a Maker's Faire--an activity I highly recommend--there is usually a room dedicated to Lego, the little bricks that are supposed to be for children at play. It is much more than that.  On a recent visit to the event in San Mateo, CA, I met a kid of 14, who must have been a dead-ringer for Bill Gates at that age in looks, brilliance and geekiness. The young man had built, not just a train, but an entire model rail system out of Lego. The trains moved on sensors and the complexity of the model was startling.

Nearby, was a model of a robotic crane that could be used for nighttime site surveillance, for example,to examine hazardous area without endangering a human resource. The number of sensor-powered robots, prototypes and bizarre and innovative creations was startling.

The Lego company is now more than a billion-dollar company and it is no longer just kid stuff. It is estimated that as much as 10 % of it's revenue is for adult projects, many of which are the works of hobbyists, while a good deal are now the bricks of more serios endeavors. These adults have formed there own community, called Adult Friends of Lego (AFOL). This is an active and exuberant community. Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff wrote in their recent book, Groundswell, " Some products develop such enthusiastic supporters that communities spring up naturally." 

Jake McKee, now "principal and Chief Ant Wrangler" at Ant's Eye View, a Dallas-based customer collaboration strategy practice spent five years at Lego as the Global Community Relations Specialist. His job was to make sure the company allowed the natural fundamentals of community to pervade and transfor the company over time.

Here, Jake describes his experience.

1. What years were you at Lego? What were your primary responsibilities? Why did you leave?

I joined Lego Direct, then newly minted Direct-to-Consumer business unit of the Lego Company, in 2000. Our group was created to help bring the voice of the consumer back to the company in a significant way. I was originally hired as a Senior Web Producer, and starting working on our community efforts nearly immediately. I was at the company for more than 5 years, and the Global Community Development Manager for most of my time there.

Primarily my duties focused on building the relationship between the company and the adult Lego hobbyists - people who had chosen the Lego brick as their creative medium of choice. When I joined the company, I had a nearly impossible time even getting meetings with colleagues to talk about the adult fans. After all, the thinking went, why bother with 5% of the market when there's work to do with the 95%. My task was to help them understand the benefits for the business overall of connecting with the adult fans.

A week before I left the company, one of the projects my team worked on was a Wired cover story. In the week after I left, the CEO announced a restructuring of the company that put adult and kid's communities as a major focuses of the company's structure. More than five hard-fought, difficult, fun, and painful years had started showing return. I'm a challenge challenge junkie, and this was a clear sign I needed to find new challenges.

2. Tell me about Adult Fans of Lego (AFOL). How many members are there and in how many companies do they reside? What percentage of them are hobbyists v. professionals?

AFOLs are adults who have chosen Lego bricks as their creative medium of choice. There are a few who make a living by making Lego creations for clients, but a vast majority are hobbyists who love the bricks.  Males in technical specialties, such as science, math and computers are the most significant demographic, but AFOL is comprised of people in a diversity of fields and from all walks of life. It's been interesting to watch over the years how things have moved from a fairly heavy percentage of "tech nerds" when the communities were first forming to a fairly mainstream representation.

It's nearly impossible to say for sure how many AFOLs there are worldwide today, but when I was there, we estimated there were tens of thousands of active participants who make themselves known as adult LEGO enthusiasts.  Of course, there are countless "sleepers," people who build here and there, but haven't thought, "I wonder if there are other adult Lego lover out there--like me." The internet has created an incredible rise to Lego fans looking to connect and discover. The internet allows then to connect across time and distance in a way previously inconceivable.

3. What are some of the most interesting creations by adult hobbyists?

Wow, it's hard to pick just one. AFOLs have created (and continue to create daily) some of the most amazing things. On Brickshelf , a very old school image sharing site focused on Lego images, there are 2.3 million images. There are countless blogs, discussion forums and personal sites that also share images. And of course Flickr and the other photo sharing sites have their fair share as well.

Some of my favorites include the massive aircraft carrier , Nathan's huge, creepy, and excellent "Gray", the hilarious NesQuik Bunny Space Ship, or the baby yawn mosaic. The list of brilliant, original creations is very long.

4. Tell me about Lego prototypes for professional purposes, such as robotics and prosthetics. How did this get started? Why use Lego for modeling? is there a community built around professional modeling?

While I'm not sure specifically about prosthetics, the LEGO product has been used in countless ways beyond a simple child's toy. From corporate strategy brainstorming to teaching special needs kids various concepts, and tons of things in between.  Lego is a creative medium, not a toy. Just like painting or sculpture can be used for a variety of purposes, so can Lego.

5. You were the Community Guy responsible for the LEGO Ambassador program. How many members are there? How are they selected? How many apply? What does Lego gain by the Ambassador Community?

The Lego Ambassador program was a program I kicked off about a year before I left the company, and was primarily meant to help further the connection between company and community. At that time, we'd finally begun seeing the internal support momentum for working with AFOLs pick up steam and we needed a more scalable way to connect with the broader community. In the early days of our AFOL interactions, you could nearly talk to every fan interested in talking to you. But by that point, AFOLs were joining the community increasingly faster and more and more colleagues were getting interested in connecting with them. The Ambassador program was meant to create a more formalize structure for our interaction to a smaller group of fans who then could help to represent the larger community into the company, and distribute answers and content out to the larger loose knit community of fans.

When we started, we had a fixed 15 "seats" and the program ran in 6 month cycles. Every 6 months, every Ambassador re-applied. In our first cycle we had about 75 apply, which was impressive considering how minimal the information about the program was at that time. I've heard in recent cycles, the LEGO Community Team has increased the number of seats, and has also had a steady growth of overall applications.

Overall the program seems to work pretty effectively, helping to give the community a better, more focused voice inside the company. After all, the LEGO Community Team is relatively small and the community is huge. Ambassadors acted as a "congress", for lack of a better term. They represent the voice of the community into the company, as well as delivering news, asking questions from the company, and giving instant feedback to the company.

6.  What do Lego users gain in general from the Ambassador program? How do the Ambassadors interact with The fan-created LUGNET (Lego User-Generated Network)?

The company gets great feedback and an instant connection to the community through the Ambassador program. Ambassadors are just like any other fan, although they have a designation of "Ambassador." Many Ambassadors use the program icon as profile images or post footers on the various community sites like LUGNET or Classic-Castle.

7. Back in 2005, Lego product development got hacked by some adult Lego enthusiasts. Instead of freaking out, Lego embraced the hackers. Why?

That was in the early days of Lego Factory, a project that allows users to build a model on their computer, upload the model, then order it as a kit, arriving a short time later in a custom box. Lego Factory has many unique aspects, not least of which is that I can design something myself and have every Lego element pulled specifically for my model.

n the early days, however, we just didn't have the logistics down for fulfilling these custom orders. While the system has been refined and runs smoothly, at the outset, we settled on using the pre-packed bags from existing sets to deliver the custom orders. It was inefficient and turned out to be expensive for users, who had to purchase the entire bags.

The community rightfully decided to figure out how the pre-pack bag dynamic worked, so they could make more efficient designs, thus reducing costs. Despite press reports, in my view, it was less about "hacking", and more about crowd-source collaboration. Community members started digging into how the design software worked and how the site calculated costs and shared those results with other community members.

We were excited to see this level of engagement. Our customers helped us solve--or at least provide a better band-aid--to an inelegant implementation. Considering that they weren't doing any harm and were simply opening files on their computer that our software had installed or watching the website, we figured, "why try to stop it?"

8. How have the Lego online communities changed the company?

Significantly, and from top to bottom.

Of course, my view is biased view may be biased. The company I joined in 2000 was a much different one than when I left in 2006. It is even more different, from an outsider's view in 2008. Today, every product line shows some community influence; a stark contrast from 2000 when we didn't have any real connection to adult customers.

Generally, the company is showing the affects of remembering that there are real people doing real (and amazing) things with the product that is developed inside the four walls. The adult fans, while still representing a small percentage of overall sales, help to remind everyone from product designers to marketing folks to manufacturing line workers that the product they're creating and selling isn't a toy but a creative medium.

9. How did your experience at Lego change you personally and professionally? What are you doing now and why do you call it 'Ant's Eye View?'

As a kid my two career choices were astronaut and/or Lego product designer. Getting the job at Lego, quite literally, fulfilled a life-long dream. This taught me two important lessons:

1. You don't get anything unless you ask, and
2. When you ask, you better be ready to respond.

Beyond that, by working with the Lego and its communities, I witnessed first-hand that great products can bring people together. They can change lives for the better, and they can change the world. I've seen so many hugs and handshakes exchanged between people who have known each other for years but were only just meeting. I've seen events that light up a child's eyes run by volunteers who work hard to provide that sparkle.

My time at LEGO proved to me that your work can and should be significant. If you can't delight your customers and improve the world, why bother?

 

Jim Spath Rolls his own SAP Survey

It has been a long time since anyone has rolled their own answers to the SAP Global Survey on Social Media, Culture & Business, which I have been conducting on this site now for one full year. Early on, a blogger decided to post his answers to my questions on his blog, rather than mine. Then, another blogger took those questions and answered them on his blog, sending me a link. Next, yet another blogger changed a couple of questions making them more to her liking, and posted them.

For a while, the Survey was taking on a life of it's own. But then it just sort of fizzled out, and I've gotten to be the exclusive interviewer for the past several months, until last night when Jim Spath, a Maryland-based engineer, decided to role his own SAP questions.

I first met Jim Spath in Twitterville, where I enjoyed his tweets and his wry humor. Jim, a technical architect for Black & Decker, blogs and tweets on his own time. We finally met face-to-face at SAPphire, Orlando, earlier this month, where 15,000 members of the SAP community got together. Jim and I got to spend a fair amount of time together and I enjoyedit immensely.

Now, Jim has resusitated the Roll-Your-Own SAP survey with some excellent answers. Maybe this will catch on again. If you take these questions and adapt them, you can either send them to me or post them yourself, sending me the link. If they seem useful or interesting to my readers, I will post or link to them.

SAP Global Survey: Australia's Laurel Papworth

Building a Social Network for Arab Women

         

[Panel at Recent Saudi Workshop to launch Women's Social Network. Photo by Laurel Papworth]

Laurel Papworth is an Australian social media consultant, trainer and lecturer. She is best known on Twitter as Silkcharm, a name she adopted during her many years as an online game moderator for Ultima Online and Everquest among others.

More recently, I followed Laurel with fascination, as she blogged reports from inside Saudi Arabia where she was speaking and teaching at a workshop for Saudi women who have since launched a pan-Arab women's social network. I learned through Laurel that some of my perceptions of the lives of Arab women, social media and what they do online was pretty much offbase. While much of the outrages we read about are factual, there is more going on than oppression and suppression. While the fashions being imposed may be circa 6th century, the thinking and online activities is very much modern times. There is even flirting, so long as you do it anonymously and a family member doesn't catch you.

I asked Laurel to expand on what she has already written. The following is excerpted from our email conversation.

1. You have two blogs. One shows an almost stern-looking corporate sort of woman. The other portrays a free-wheelin' Aussie with pink hair. How do you reconcile these multiple personalities?

 

undefined, my Twitter and one blog presence evolved from the late 90s when I was a game moderator. In those days, we kept our real identity separate from our online persona.  SilkCharm is the name I have used for my primary avatar since the late '90s.

LaurelPapworth.com  is for those who feel more comfortable with a brochure 1.0 website than the aforementioned freewheeling exuberant blog. I keep it as one does a professional site - no comments or user content. Simply stark information: where I appear on TV, what keynotes I'm doing, which public courses. Plus the usual marketing guff: "this is the strategy I do with investors in Social Networks, these are my clients, this is my work at the University of Sydney and University of Western Sydney. " and so on.

I'm building a bridge from social networks back to traditional companies and these two personna suit my purpose. I want to have both sides of myself out there: the part that knows that to grow an audience one needs to have fun and play with them. And that part that knows that conservative companies would completely freak if they had to rely on my SilkCharm to sell my services to their organizations.

We are taking people on a journey, and if I need to start off by pointing them to a my 'corporate' site and then move them across to a more gonzo style blog, so be it.

Twitter is pretty well full of people who 'get it' - therefore I don't have to worry Laurel.  I point my profile to my Silkcharm blog. Blogs are, in marketing terms, one-to-many distribution channels for depth-of-content. This means the blogger sets the topic and tone for the discussion, which is usually indepth and thought out in isolation and then published. And the commenter's respond in a similar tone, usually succinctly in a few sentences.  Pretty well the opposite of Twitter which is many-to-many of streaming content. Step out of Twitter for a few days and the conversation has moved on. I use the blog to develop and build ideas and then Twitter and Facebook to distribute them. 

Incidentally, the academic Laurel (Lecturer Laurel) is different again from Corporate Laurel. But like most people, I can only cope with one or two nicknames at a time. 

2. How did you come to be invited to Saudi Arabia? Why did you decide to go? What scared you about going and can you talk about your problems getting into the country?

Why did I agree to go? Because I thought that giving Arabic women a voice was not only darned important but truly a social media revolutionary act. How could I NOT go?

How I got invited is a longer story.

I'm an irregular on several Australian podcasts including Extraordinary Everyday People with David N. Wallace  and Mike Serfang. Eventually,  Mike asked me to help him write a job description for a Community Manager position for an Arabic women's network for the Middle East. Then I was asked to keynote and run computer lab workshops at woman's network launch event in Saudi Arabia. 

We did this on the fly. Dates kept changing. Until the last minute I did not believe this was actually going to happen. There were difficulties with tickets and reservations. But there were four bigger barriers imposed on women by Saudis:

1. Women, are not allowed to enter the country without a husband or father-a male guardian or "Mahram."
2. There is a special area at the airport to escort women through. 
3. Women are not allowed to stay at hotels without a male family member.
4. Women are not allowed to drive or be transported in a car without a male "guardian."

I was not shocked by these rules imposed by Islamic culture. In 1999, I lived in Fes, Morocco, to study Arabic, sort of on a whim. But Saudi Arabia is not Morocco. And I had some real concerns.

First, kudos to Queen Sam--not her real name, but it suits her-- a young Arabic woman who was able to swing some visas for us. I don't know how she did it, but she did. So I met Sam at the airport in Dubai and got in line for Jeddah with a group of modern/traditional mixed Saudis. Some of the women wore their hair down and jeans with tops. Others were covered in the black Abaya (gown) and Tarha (headscarf), collectively called Hijabs. 

The coverup rules are based on Koranic quote: "O Prophet, tell your wives and daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks all over their bodies, that is most convenient that they should be known (as such) and not molested."

About 10 minutes before we landed in Jeddah, the women changed into their Hijabs. Queen Sam and I put ours on as we were flying over Mecca, that most holy of Islamic sites. By the time we de- planed, the women were covered. All were guided to the special waiting area for their Mahram to collect them.

Except Queen Sam and I didn't have a Mahram.

So she rang up Mideast Broadcast Company (MBC) a sponsor who added great credibility to this project,  and requested a driver to collect us. Yousef, our driver, showed up 3 1/2 hours later, an apparent indication of how important picking up two women guests at the airport is considered. . 

undefined delivered us to the Jeddah Hilton. Thankfully, we were allowed to check in. I was told the laws had been recently amended to allow women to stay in hotels. Some hotels - presumably those run by fundamentalists - still don't allow women to stay, but the Hilton was fine, and we would wear our abayas but our scarves stayed only around our necks, not over our hair.

One thing that intrigued me was that the alcohol-free restaurants were split into two areas. "Men" and "Family." If men are sitting in the family area and women come in, the men get up and move, not the women. It's more embarrassing for the men to be sitting where the women are, than dishonoring for the women to be sitting with the men. Sort of reversed to what I was expecting. It clued me in to a way to gate the online community for women only - use 'shaming' to identify male intruders. If Arabic men use the women's network, it should be made 'embarrassing' for them, not amusing. Shaming doesn't work in the West though! Some communities don't need to be 'gated' (where the member controls access to her profile) as the community manages themselves to get rid of interlopers.

3. Tell me about social media in Saudi Arabia. How is it used and by whom? How much access do people have?

This is one of the most switched on, connected, socially networked cultures I have come across - and trust me, I've worked in Amsterdam, Italy, England, Singapore, Indonesia, and right across Asia. I suspect it's because when you block one form of communication - men and women chatting and going to school together and so on -  we use other means.

First, the guys wrote their cellphone number on bits of paper and threw them out of car windows at the black clad women walking along the road. Then Bluetooth came along and changed all that. Turn your phone on, give yourself a sassy pseudonym--it's important! not to use your real name-- and wait for the offers to flow in.

And flow in they do. The guys don't know which woman is which: "are you the girl by the DVD shelves or the one by the ice cream shop?" So it's pot luck. But it doesn't matter, as most girls would never meet the guys in real life. This is cyber flirting, never to cross over from the virtual to the tangible.

So, why a pseudonym/avatar? "... a new Saudi law was submitted to the 150–member Majlis al–Shoura, calling for stiff sanctions for mobile phone "pornography," including 1,000 lashes, 12 years in jail, and a fine of 100,000 Saudi riyals, or around US$26,670." 

A bit more serious than being grounded for the week end because you got caught flirting on the phone...

I was told that YouTube and MySpace were banned in Saudi. They weren't - at least not at the Hilton in-room broadband, which was very fast (and better than Australia's). By the way, the Australian Government bans youTube and other social networking sites in government offices in Australia, and it's banned in schools in some states. So we have our fair share of censorship. I guess Australian children say "oh I better not go on YouTube if the adults are banning it".  Heh.

I thought I was going to Saudi Arabia to teach Arabic women how to blog and protect their identity online. Yeah. Right. I was kidding myself. These women are completely savvy and au fait with privacy and locking up their content. Whereas we are slowly waking up to the invisible audience and what can happen if someone mashes up our personal RSS feeds from Facebook, Twitter and blogs, Saudi women have it figured.

They are on Facebook but with a pet name like "Queen Sam." They experiment and flirt and are outrageous on instant chat channels - but in secret, privately. In a country where women are not allowed out of the house without their father's permission and a brother to drive them, they stay in contact with married sisters in other cities and best friends in the neighboring suburbs by sharing (gated/locked down) photos and poems and music. Poems more than music, interestingly.

4. In one of your posts, you wrote about an "as yet unfounded" online community for Arab women. Tell me more about it? How did these women enroll and what countries are they from? .

Why is this project important if this is nation whose women already connect, flirt, create and express online? It has to do with changing society from top down as well as grassroots up. MBC 4 (the Arabic women's TV channel) got behind creating a social network for women. And that makes a world of difference – no longer an underground movement but an online community that is ratified from the highest level – from the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia.

Perhaps the biggest leap is that MBC is behind ths project. Based in Dubai, MBC is believed to be funded by the Royal House of Saud. Some say it was set up to compete with Al Jazeera, which is regarded as being anti-Saudi and pro-Qatar.  For a media company funded by the establishment, 'giving' or supporting social media is a big step. Consider the Egyptian woman, Esra Abdel Fattah, who was jailed for creating a Facebook group complaining about price rises in Egypt  or the Saudi Arabian girl beaten then shot and killed by her father for being on Facebook. 

A brave and commendable act by MBC to launch imatter.mbc.net.

The women's online network launched just two nights ago as of this interview. It is now open to Arabic women all over the world. 286 signed up yesterday, bringing the sum total to 575 members in 48 hours… not bad!  Unfortunately, in my opinion, the British agency that installed the community solution –Dolphin – adapted the template poorly, didn't integrate (a simple bridge) the forum user database with the main community database and basically showed a lack of understanding building a community. It would've been helpful if they had got behind this project and made it a world leader, but never mind.  

You will see on the site that the primary purpose is to encourage women to submit applications for awards

• Art Matters,
• Community Matters,
• New Media Matters and
• Entrepreneurial Matters.

All to encourage women in the Middle East and other Arabic groups to state why they matter to the world and that their ideas matter.

The first 50 members were enrolled through the classes that I ran at the Effat College for Women in Jeddah. The others were encouraged in the last 48 hours through promos on MBC 4 TV station in Dubai and across the region. Queen Sam sent me a message on Facebook to say how excited she was to see the signups coming in and didn't want to go to bed. I fully understand –there's nothing so exciting as seeing a new community start to become populated rapidly!

5. How were you received at the conference? What was the biggest single takeaway for you? What did you say or do that surprised the Saudi women the most?

The conference and workshops were fun. The young women were interested in what I had to say, and  most were well traveled and educated (Saudi is a rich nation, and this is the best University for Saudi women). We talked non-stop, they made jokes about not wanting to drive cars anyway because Saudi men are such bad drivers. Every January there is talk about allowing women to drive but it comes to nought. I saw a school bus cross four lanes of traffic at high speed to take an exit.

I think my biggest takeaway was that there is no clear stance on any issue. Even I was starting to get confused – was my wearing the Abaya and Tarha a mark of respect for the women of another culture, or was I endorsing the patriarchal suppression of women?  One or two women were ribald, telling naughty jokes and having midriff tops and a peeking g-string in private, yet genuinely prudish and covered up in other situations.

I surprised them the most by showing how concerned I was about keeping my headscarf on. I really worried it would slip and reveal my hair and that would be massively disrespectful. It turns out that in Jeddah at least, most of them don't care so much except at evening prayer times when the religious police patrol the malls at prayer time five times daily to find people who are not in the mosque and not covered up. In fact, I was encouraged to remove my scarf when lecturing. Women don't cover up in front of women. It's seen as old-fashioned to remain covered at all times, and it also doesn't necessarily set the precedent for how the women lecturers want the students to relate to them. I removed my scarf, once I was convinced they weren't just being polite.

6. You wrote that for Saudi women, " one photo, one chat with a male alone can totally disrupt you life." Can you expand on that in terms of social media?

Saudi Arabia is an "honor" society. Like Asia, with their "keeping face," identity, reputation and trust are tantamount. In online communities, we develop our identity through our profile. We then build our reputation by submitting content which is judged (ratings, reviews, comments). After a period of time of building our reputation, we gain a trust quotient – the eBay method – people read our profile, watch our interaction with friends, consume our content and then decide what trust value to place on our responses to their questions and media submissions. In simple terms, a newbie on a network with a history of 1 day and 2 posts and 3 comments will not have the identity, reputation and ultimately trust that an Elder or a Leader will have.  The long tail of engagement and performance works for/against us in social networks.

In Saudi, the long tail of behavior in real life is also rewarded/punished.

"Last August, the capital Riyadh had witnessed the murder of a young woman by her father, after he came into her room and saw she was chatting with a young man she met on Facebook. Security sources assured Al-Arabiya.net that the father beat up his daughter then shot her."

While not all cases are that extreme, a woman who is discovered talking to a boy at the age of 15 may never live down the shame.  A girl who continually breaks the rules will have trouble getting married (and as jobs are limited, marriage IS her career path). The shame is wrought on the whole family – the police routinely pick up the girl's mahram (guardian) and warn him if she misbehaves or is found in a car with a man not her husband or sitting in a café in a mixed group. The shame for the father of being hauled into a police station is no small thing.

This is an interesting article on Saudi Arabia that goes into greater depthnon social media and Arab culture.

8. When building a woman's community, how can you ensure one is not a male? What would happen if that occurred?

Intriguingly, Arabic men may not like registering at the site. It's girly, pink and not macho. Not an environment these men will want to be caught in, even if the rewards of reaching a pretty Middle Eastern woman is high. A little like suggesting the football team dress as cheerleaders to pick up women – funny yes, but not typical dating behavior.

I think the girls will tease and shame the men who join. Men who join may keep their profile low key – an avatar picture of flowers instead of their own photo. There seems to be a sense of 'this stuff happens but it can't happen blatantly'. An acknowledgement that women get messages via Bluetooth on their phone, but as long as they don't act on them, it's OK.

The community can vote up or down participants so they'll mute badass boys. The usual community tools to reward good behavior and smack naughtiness. In fact, like any online community, setting up the Code of Conduct and Etiquette Statement, creating moderator sub-communities, ensuring that usability and sociability reinforce appropriate behaviors, setting good examples - tell them, show them, reward them. Reward leadership, assign roles and responsibilities, introduce karma and rating systems. They all bring about appropriate behavior and serve to limit the impact of inappropriate ones.

8. I was surprised that you said older women were pushing for change, but younger women are not; that younger women wear the Abaya [black cloak] and Toma [head cover] as badges of pride. It's a response, you say to 9.11. How so?

When my sister and I were little, we would fight each other, being nasty as only little girls can be.  We could've killed each other. Yet, if a stranger attacked either one of us, we turned in unison to protect our sisterhood and trounce the outsider. We still do it today, only not when her children and my niece and nephew are watching.

Perhaps it's easiest to see it this way: Some Americans may not agree with American Foreign Policy – or how politicians implement global initiatives overseas. They may even speak up about it – blog or talk to friends and family. Yet most Americans would not blame individual soldiers – it would be unpatriotic and downright disgraceful to be abusive to a man or woman just because he or she is in a uniform.

Now, imagine every time you travel, you are abused. Your passport is checked and triple checked. You and your wife and your children are hauled into immigration offices every time someone notes you have an American passport. Then you are questioned about why your wife wears a headscarf. Your children are called names and blamed for wars in far off places they can't even spell yet.

I think in that case, even American sons and daughters would change their mind about disagreeing with foreign policy and start to be more "patriotic" or at least, less willing to put up with criticism.  Stop disagreeing with the State and keep quiet. After all, when under attack, we must band together and forget about "petty" differences.

I suspect that is what happens to these women. They see their brothers refused entry to foreign universities, (We've just had a witch hunt against Saudi male students at some of our Australian universities,) their fathers humiliated at airports and their cousins reviled while walking down the street. I think I would be more patriotic to the abaya and scarf in that case too, a quiet show of solidarity and strength to one culture against another.

So it was easy for a woman one moment to say that women should be more free and not be penalized for not wearing the abaya, and the next to say it is a patriotic and religious duty to wear the national standard of dress for Saudi Arabia.

9. How do you think social media will change the life and culture of Saudi women? How do you see it impacting Saudi culture and relationships with the West overall? Let's stretch a bit: Do you think social media can contribute to greater peace and understanding between Arab and Western cultures?

Well to extend the discussion above, it could go either way: "Others stated that Saudi women suffered as a result to their presence on such websites, since they sometimes found mocking or insulting comments mostly written by extremists who browsed these websites and pages. "   

Web 2.0/3.0 changes the game not just in social media. Think recruitment and project management for examples. eLance and Rentacoder break the "dating" model of recruitment sites – brokerage and introductions – and manage the whole development and project cycle. Because a job on eLance covers the whole project management and escrow process, why can't an Arabic female architect or engineer, take on a project overseas, complete it, with no one the wiser that she is Saudi and not supposed to work in that field?

For women who don't have much time for themselves – family and religious duties are heavier in Saudi Arabia than the West - blogging and self expression online is a "personal me-time" that we take for granted. Also, as usual with the internet, anything banned immediately becomes more accessible and popular, so an openness is to be expected.

What we read changes our views.

But we also stay the same. If there's one thing I've learnt about social networks is that we do MORE of what we usually do. So if we are fundamental Islam or fundamental Christian, we are drawn to those communities. If we are academics interested in observing, ditto. Gun lovers find gun communities. If we are cosmopolitan, well educated, literate and polyglots, we will find a community with our values. Rednecks who are xenophobic love their online communities too. On a media platform where we don't just create the content but also filter (acting as a censor for oneself) we will continue to form and reinforce the world in our own image. For better or for worse.

 

10. Additional comments?

When I lived in Morocco for a year, studying Arabic, a young Moroccan woman asked me shyly "is it true your father sent you out to work and made you get a job when you turned 18?". Well that's one way of seeing it, though I doubt good ol' Dad will understand.  We can't judge another's world can we?

 

SAP Global Survey: H&R Block's Paula Drum

Social Media for Taxing Situations

It's that time of year again. Spring is in the air. Bird chirp. Flowers bloom, and in the US, a great many of us miss part of it, because it is also tax time. It is also the only time of year when the words "H&R Block" readily come to mind for a great many people.

H&R Block is the world’s preeminent tax services provider, having served more than 400 million clients since 1955 and generating annual revenues of $4 billion last year--that's pre-tax of course.  I don't know what percent of the US population uses their tax preparation services, but they can go in to any of 13,000 offices or use the company's TaxCut online and software service.

Add to this the fact that the company is based in Kansas City, and it makes H&R Block appear to be among the least likely  candidates for coverage in the SA Global Survey on social media's impact on business and culture, but recently, and quite quickly, H&R Block seems to be active in a great number of social media spaces. In fact, I can find no consumer retail or services company that is as active in social media as is H&R Block.

The source of all this activity seems to be Paula W. Drum, Block's VP of marketing for digital tax solutions. She joined the company recently--in 2006 and has driven a mass effort to reposition the venerable tax preparation company as an overall tax expert and she has used some remarkably innovative social media programs to achieve that goal.

So, I postponed my own meeting this morning to prepare this report on my conversations with Paula:

1. You came to H&R Block in 2006. You immediately began driving what is among the most extensive business-to-consumer social media campaigns in history. Yet, I could find little in your background to indicate social media experience. How did you become aware of SM and why did you think it was the right course for Block?

 

I'm flattered that you characterize our activities as "the most extensive business-to-consumer social media campaigns in history."  I've never thought of it that way.  When I came to H&R Block my mandate was to grow our digital business.  My background was in establishing the e-commerce and interactive marketing divisions for very well-known brands such as Alamo, Rent-A-Car and Days Inn. I've been in the online space since the beginning days of travel e-commerce when no one had much experience in e-commerce or interactive marketing. Those travel brands had flourished with a product that was perfectly suited to e-commerce and it was great fun innovating what was the first experience with the brand – making the reservation. Because the brands were well-known, consumers knew to seek us out directly online.  I was helping to facilitate the overall brand experience.  However, the challenge was very different at H&R Block. 

H&R Block enjoys great brand awareness (99%) but that is awareness of H&R Block as a brick and mortar tax company. Consumers were not aware of H&R Block as a strong contender in digital tax. The market leader, TurboTax, was becoming ubiquitous with approximately 70% market share. To grow our digital business and continue to position the brand overall, we needed to drive awareness that H&R Block was more than the traditional corner tax office. In my past work, I observed the growing power of social networks and user generated content.  My goal was to build awareness of H&R Block as an online brand as well as a brick and mortar brand.

 

2. What obstacles did you face at H&R Block in getting social media program implemented? How did you overcome them?

 

I was lucky. There was more support for testing and learning than absolute obstacles. In our first year I positioned most of our social media activities as "tests." They were not a substantial part of my overall media mix, so there was little perceived risk. Most senior executives did not believe that the YouTube contest was going to be as successful as it was. I also needed to convince some executives that SecondLife was a good venue for our brand as well. There were many negative articles about SecondLife before and after we launched our island, so I've had to continue to justify our activity there a few times. There were also some legal hurdles to overcome when we started blogging. Our legal department felt that a blog needed to uphold the same standards as a corporate sponsored advertisement so they did not want any executive expressing an opinion that could not be substantiated the same way that we substantiate our marketing claims. Yikes.   

Fortunately, our "small tests" had some great successes and paved the way to develop a more extensive program in year two.

 

3. What was the thinking behind your "Super Sweet Refund" YouTube campaign? Can you tell me about the responses in terms of numbers? Tell me about a few of the best/worst contest submissions?

 

I was amazed by the quality and creativity of the submissions.  There were some really great videos.  A few of my personal favorites are "Death and Taxes" and "Possibilities." We have them highlighted on our new site Digits . I still watch them. It's hard to get them out of your head once you've seen them.

To launch the contest we created some seed videos to serve as contest examples. We promoted the contest on YouTube's home page with the seed video "Candy." In one day, "Candy" received over 1.7 million views and YouTube tells us that we still hold the record for the most views of a home page video. In all, the contest videos received over 4 million views. 

Some of the biggest learnings for me were:

• How quickly our competition copied us with their TaxRap featuring Vanilla Ice.
• We should have leveraged the contest across multiple communities because people join more than one social network
• We should have made it clearer that the community selected contest winners, not us. The winning author did what it takes to win a popularity contest--She promoted herself, getting friends to vote. As a result we received a fair amount of negative feedback when her video was posted to the home page. People thought we had made the selection over other very creative contributions.

 

4. The name "HR Block Island" confused me because I have visited Block Island--off the Rhode Island Coast. But your "island" is on SecondLife.  What was the strategic goal of building HR Block Island? Did you have many visitors who were below the tax-paying age? Got a colorful tale? Can you give me some numbers regarding visitors? What do you feel it has done for the HR Block brand?

HR Block Island in SecondLife started out as "Tango Island." In 2006, we were going to soft-launch a new online tax preparation product that I named "Tango," because it is a "partnership" between a tax professional and someone who wants to prepare their own taxes. 

The new product was built on emotional-design principles and used new flash-based technology.  We thought the SecondLife community would be a great place to get some initial learning about our new product from early adopters. 

As we started building with Electric Sheep Company, I realized that this space could be much more than just a product showcase.  We were looking at the island prototypes with a Welcome Area, an auditorium, a product pavilion, office space and a ballroom--dancing is popular in SecondLife, and afterall this was Tango Island. Then it hit me that this was the perfect forum to highlight our tax expertise and offer something of value to the SecondLife community, free professional tax advice in avatar format. So the goal evolved to additionally highlight our brand in new ways, demonstrate our technical side and provide value through free tax advice. 

As a result,ComputerWorld named us among the top eight corporate sites in SecondLife.  We were mentioned in numerous blog posts, held a conference with the SecondLife Business Communicators virtually at the island.

Now in it's second year, we've learned a lot. A few observations:

• People have an unbelievable ability to multi-task. They can simultaneously make avatars dance, ask tax advice questions and follow multiple thread conversations. That's just on the computer. Who knows what else is going on? They could also be watching TV. Their two-year-olds could be crawling around the floor as is true in my case.
• Virtual Reality is very different from chat. There is something visceral about being able to see your avatar talk with another avatar. Last year, a blogger called it "the future of customer service. I believe there something to it.

To your other point, all our island visitors were of "tax age." Some, however were international visitors, who were not our target audience. There are so many colorful tales that I can tell you about SecondLife and our experience. 

Recently Stacy, a new member of my marketing team, has been coordinating our SecondLife activities.  And as you know, people choose many different forms of avatars from people, to angels, vampires, panda bears, foxes, cartoon characters, etc.  So, we are there on a tax advice night and Stacy sends me an IM saying "there is a vulture standing next to me."  I responded "Yes, I know.  That vulture is getting some tax advice from Hope (our tax pro in avatar form)."  It is truly an environment of non-discrimination!

We also have received numerous comments from our field tax professionals.  They are excited to see the brand "enter the 21^st century" as one wrote me.  It has been motivating for many of our 110,000 tax professionals to see the brand in new places and being progressive. We are even getting asked to host tax training in SecondLife.

 

5. Most readers know that I love hanging out on Twitter. But I find very few businesses flourishing there. H&R Block is prominent among them. When did you start it and why? What is the result so far?

 

Now we are getting into year 2 of our "the most extensive business-to-consumer social media campaigns in history." We took all the learnings from our blogging, YouTube, and SecondLife experiences as well as observations in the market place (i.e., The new role of citizen journalism and the power of the voice of one) and created a far reaching campaign this year. 

This campaign included Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook, a community site name Digits, Second Life and online outreach. I have a lot of my team dedicated to pulling together a more comprehensive and coordinated program. 

Twitter is Amy Worley's baby, so I'll let her tell you about it.

[Amy] We started on Twitter in December. I went in thinking of it as an add-on, a free way to get our message out to a small, but influential, group of people.

One wrong assumption I made is that the time commitment would be inconsequential. Another was that this would be pretty much exclusively a way to push information OUT. Big mistake.

When people join Twitter, they often send an update out into the world and then go away. Nothing happens. So they don't get it. But once they move in to Twitterville, as you call it, and really listen and reply and become part of the community, they're addicted. There's nothing like it.

When it comes to truly connecting with customers, I'd say that Twitter has been the most valuable and most effective component of our social media efforts. I went back and looked at our update archive and I realized that more than half of our updates are "@ replies." Not only have we shared tax tips and advice that serve the general community, but on a one-to-one basis we've helped people get jobs and professional tax training.

We've helped others overcome the anxiety associated with doing their taxes on their own for the first time. We're having a blast participating in @zefrank's Colorwars (how could H&R Block resist a "veryGreenTeam"?). We've discovered and resolved customer support issues and we've met and thanked very happy customers. It sounds crazy, but I actually feel like H&R Block has made some friends on Twitter. We even had a customer call us out as part of @garyvee's Good People Day! We couldn't ask for more than that.

6. Have I left anything out? What other social media programs exist? What's in the planning stages? Five years from today, what do you think will have been the impact of social media on H&R Block's culture and technology?

As I mentioned earlier, we actually have a broader reaching campaign.  We started this year with the goals of positioning ourselves as a tax expertise brand and a digital brand as well.

We created many different pieces of content that we are using across many different social networks. We didn't expect every single concept to be a home run. We want to learn and iterate on what works best. Here's a brief overview of some of the activities:

• Branded video content: AKA Truman Greene We don't try to hide the fact that Truman is manufactured. Our goal was to create an engaging and entertaining way to highlight the benefits of using our TaxCut Online. We characterize Truman as a brand evangelist and we put up a new clip or two weekly. Truman also has his own page on MySpace Our intent is to produce videos that can be used in multiple locations so we can go where the people are rather than build microsites where people have to come to us.  We produce original content  and even spoof other popular videos Truman has had over 560,000 views on YouTube and has 160 subscribers as of today. He has 3500 MySpace friends.

• Digits is our own community site featuring tax advice through over 40 podcasts and relevant conversations on tax-related subjects such as rebates. While we are using Digits for brand engagement, it is really an upshot of citizen journalism t is still in the listen and learn phase and will continue to evolve.
• Facebook. We have a fan page for H&R Block Online, created with the intent to create a presence with applications relevant to this community.We hosted free tax preparation giveaways for "fans" who joined. We have also created widgets that live across online communities such as "Tax Day Countdown," among others. We have over 825 Facebook fans.

• Blogger outreach and listening.  We listen to what is being said about us in the blogosphere and feel that citizen journalists are becoming as important as traditional media. 

 

7. Are you so immersed in social media because H&R Block needs to attract younger customers? What are the key goals of the social media programs?

We do want to reach younger audiences who may be doing their taxes for the first time.  We feel that our online products serve that demographic very well.  However, our goals are broader.  We want to ensure that when people think about H&R Block, they first think that we are the experts in tax and that we have a relevant solution for their particular need – whether they want to prepare their own taxes online or have a tax professional prepare their taxes for them.

8. What advice do you have for other companies considering social media? What warnings?

I think any company should be exploring ways to engage with their customer and prospects. The investment to learn is very small. However, newer tactics are hard to measure in the same way that traditional online media such as banner advertising and paid search is measured.  It is also not about how loud you can shout or how great your brand is versus finding ways to be relevant within the community to allow real brand interactions. It is a community commitment not just a quick marketing campaign. I think the other part to realize is that while some activities are free – meaning there are no media costs – there is a human capital cost. 

Finally, it is important to have a level of sincerity about the community.  Brands that are not sincere and transparent in their motives are going to receive a negative reaction.

9. Tell me about measurement. What does H&R Block want to get from these programs and how do you measure that? What tools do you use?

 There are a lot of micro-measurements.  How many visitors, how many friends, how many video views, how many uses of an application, how many blog mentions. However, the primary measure that we are using to evaluate these programs is awareness that H&R Block has digital products. It is a long-term brand approach for us.  Not just a one-time marketing program that we are going to continue if successful and scrap if it isn't. 

10.Additional Comments?

I feel like we are still in the infancy stages of social media and how it will impact the future of brands.  I feel very fortunate that I'm able to work with a great brand that can make a significant impact in this arena.

 

Australia's Silkcharm teaching Saudi Arabian women social media

Laurel Papworth, known in the Twitter community as Silkcharm is an Australian social media consultant. After surviving 2 glitches: (1) No international servivice for her N95 & GIf and (2) no require male escort from Dubai into Saudi Arabia, she is alive and well and in awe of the intelligence & openess of Saudi women.

Laurel is there to teach Saudi women about social media. I am sure that there are no  best practices yet established in this area and that every day she is breaking new ground, even as she worries about her scarf slipping from over her blonde hair.

When she is back safely into Australia, I will have to interview her about this experience for the SAP Global Survey.

SAP Global Survey: Africa's Erik Hersman

A talk on Kenyan Violence, Hope, and Social Media

Every now and then, one of these SAP Global Surveys on Social Media's impact on culture and business changes my fundamental perspective. Such is this one with Erik Hersman [TWIT] , an American who grew up as a missionary kid bouncing back and forth between Sudan and Kenya. While most of what we see in the news about Africa fills us with horror and sorrow, Erik speaks with love and optimism.

Erik is more than a little active in social media. I've met him at three social media community events in the last few months. He has an insider understanding of both American and African culture. "The constant bridging of African and American worlds started at such a
young age," he told me that it is embedded in my character. I find it easy to switch between cultures and enjoy friends and associates on either side of the ocean."

Erik works as a web consultant and application developer, as Zungu . His clients tend
to be larger ad agencies and organizations trying to figure out how to
work digital/web communications into their brand.  He was principal developer of Ushahidi, the history-making wiki that let Kenyans generate geographic information on where violence was occurring in their country.

Erik's knowledge of Africa is vast, but I focused just on Kenya, where he is hopeful that the usually stable country is returning to a period of prolonged peace.

1. What is your response to the current wave of violence in Kenya? How long-lasting is
the damage and, most important for this interview, what role did social media play among Kenyans during the violence?

The interesting thing about Kenya is that it has a history of peace, interspersed with small, politically motivated episodes of violence.This made the current crisis in Kenya hard for most of us to believe was happening.  We knew that it couldn't last forever, Kenyans as a whole
aren't warlike by nature, they would prefer a tranquil existence.  This is why we weren't surprised to hear of the peace agreement that was reached this last weekend.

There are three words that describe millions of Kenyan voters:

1. Disappointed with their current president, Mwai Kibaki, for playing Moi-politics
2. Angry with their ministers of parliament, voting an unprecedented number out of office.
3. Jaded  by the election results - wondering if bothering to come out for the next elections   is even necessary.

I would suggest that citizens being jaded is the most harmful in the long run.

There were a couple of interesting uses of social media in Kenya in the last year. Juliana Rotich [Twit] was upcountry when the violence broke out - in one of the worst locations. She used
Twitter, Flickr and her blog to keep everyone in the Kenyan diaspora updated.  Other bloggers like Ory Okolloh , DaudiWere and Joseph Karoki provided an invaluable service of keeping the
world updated with images and news.  These bloggers played a pivitol role in the first couple days as the government instituted a media blackout.

2. Tell me about Ushahidi.com. When and how did it get started and by whom? How fast did it's usage spread during the violence? How many people have made entries and how many people
visited it. What would you say it accomplished for Kenyans, NGOs and outside observers?

Ushahidi (which means "witness" in Swahili) was created after a blog post by Ory Okolloh mentioning how useful it would be to have citizen-generated reports of violence in Kenya, as the normal news sources weren't reporting all that was going on.  Basically, Ushahidi is a tool for people who witness acts of violence in Kenya.  They can send in reports via SMS, email or the website and it is plotted on the map.

Images, video links and data about the event can be added to the system by others.  All information first goes through a verification process, conducted by volunteers in the Ushahidi group who talk to NGOs, the witness and news sources.

The number of reports in continued to ebb and flow with the violence, in times of greater violence we received more reports and vice versa.  To date, we have received approximately 150 verified reports, 40k uniques and 160k views.  More important, Ushahidi has created a new type of
website within the humanitarian sphere for crisis events.  NGOs and Kenyans were incredibly happy to find out about it, and want to duplicate this type of tool in other areas of crisis around the world.

3.  In Kenya, about 100% of the visits to Ushahidi came by mobile devices. What percentage of the
population uses cellular?  How about computers? Is the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program making any sort of impact? What about computer cafes?

That's a bit of a bounce-around question, but I'll see if I can cover each of the items briefly.  Most of the visits to the Ushahidi site came from the web.  However, the Kenyans who interacted with it did that through both mobile and computer-related means.  Since mobile phones are far more prevalent in Kenya (almost everyone has access to a phone, (families often share one phone)  the easiest way to report an incident was via an SMS on their phone to our Kenyan shortcode number.

Many of the computer visits to Ushahidi were through Kenyan computer cafes. The costs of basic computer hardware, plus connectivity is too much for most of the population.  This, of course, is why the mobile phone holds the key to Africa's web and communications future.

I can't answer if the OLPC is having any type of impact in Kenya. Though, I can opine here briefly on the fact that I think any low cost computer in the hands of children in Africa is a big deal.  If you are really interested, I've posted about that.

4. Your Afrigadgets blog is amazing in many ways. I'm impressed the resourcefulness of Kenyans it demonstrates: bicycles built on bamboo frames, generators fueled by yeast and sugar. You've said the site shows Africa is the place for "innovation at the low end of high technology," what are the implications of that for a company wishing to do business in Africa?

I love AfriGadget! I have so much fun with that site, and the other editors who work on it with me are just the phenomenal.  I've stated a number of times that African ingenuity is born of necessity, thus the low-tech products and inventions seen on AfriGadget.  However, what this
also shows is the vast amount of creativity and entrepreneurship that is ready to explode in Africa given the right political and economic climate.  We see this happening even now, in depressed and backward countries all over the continent - wait until you see what these guys can do with an even playing field.

The first thing that I would do as company wishing to do business in Africa is realize that Africans will adapt whatever product I bring to them.  You can't just take something from Europe or the US and dump it in Africa expecting it to work.  There are too many cultural and geographical differences to overcome.  However, if you let the Africans lead your product development so that you get the right type of product for Africa, your chances for success and profit rise exponentially.

5. How can social media help African-based companies? How successful is something like Mama Mikes? Can you give me some additional examples of African businesses using social media?

Social media is new and hard to understand for most Western companies, even though the social media space in the general public is well ahead of the rest of the world. Generally speaking, Africans are new to the social media space. This means that companies operating there are
even further behind. Many don't even have a decent website.

If anything, social media can help in a couple of areas.  First, it allows individuals to circumvent inefficient governments and local regulations.  Second, it allows companies that pay attention, a chance to leapfrog past their competitors who are unaware of the feedback loop
that is now available.

In the "web as business" area, websites like Mama Mike's make a good deal of money because they are the only option - a first mover - in a space that has burgeoning demand.

Additional social media sites in Africa include Afrigator, Mzalendo, Muti, Mxit and others.  For a more complete list, you might enjoy my Flickr collage of African sites--with links.

6. What role can social media play in helping companies located in the US,, Europe or Asia wishing to do business in Africa?

This is a big one actually.  If you include blogs in your definition of social media, then Western and Asian companies are hamstringing themselves if they're not monitoring blogs and social media (including old-fashioned message boards) in Africa.  The types of information
available there is just too important for any organization to ignore.

Another interesting trend that I've just started to see in the last couple months is where organizations actually get in touch with bloggers, who are expert in a particular field, and get their direct input on a specific issue.  That's smart and more companies should do this.

7. While we are on the subject, business people as well as travelers are concerned with safety wherever they go. Can businesses really feel safe doing business in Africa? What role can social media play in helping them understand about safety and danger in companies with dynamic political environments?

The truth about Africa is never reported, only half of it - the bad half.  This means that the news and images you see on a daily basis are only the negative stories.  So, can businesses really feel safe in Africa?  Yes, unequivocally.  Do they need to be more aware of political and economic situations as well?  Yes, and that's where awareness and use of social media can prove to be a major advantage.

I spoke about Ushahidi earlier, what we're working on now is a global version of that platform.  Imagine how valuable it would be to know the crisis level of every country you operated in, and you were alerted about it as soon as something started to happen.  That's an interesting
idea, and one we're currently trying to work through as we create the new platform.  We see the aggregation of blogs, news and citizen-generated reports as a critical way to evaluate situations and think it could be a major help for not just businesses but NGOs and governments as well.

8. How is mobile technology and social media impacting the culture of Africa today? How will that look five years from today?

We're seeing an increasing number of Africans getting online, many times at those cyber cafes we spoke of earlier. The number of blogs, Facebook, MySpace, etc., accounts continue to grow.  This trend will continue as we see Africans finally being able to speak freely to the rest of the world, without being barricaded by prohibitive costs or government censure.

What is more exciting is the idea that someone out there is building a social application for Africa.  Something that recognizes the mobile phone as the primary platform, yet still integrates with the rest of the world via the web.  It's an exciting time, and it will only continue to
grow.  In 5 years we'll be looking at a completely different digital landscape in Africa!

9. You are a champion of tech entrepreneurial ism in Africa. Yet, you've moved back to the US. Why is that?

Interesting question.  I moved to the US before I got deeply involved in technology.  I travel back and forth to Africa regularly, and my ever-supporting wife Rinnie, and three beautiful daughters ages 2, 4 and 6.likely be moving back to somewhere in East Africa when the right opportunity presents itself.  That could be this year or next, either way it will be soon.

10. Additional comments?

Just a last thought on definitions for social media.  Depending what you
categorize as "social media" there are number of ways that Africans see
and interact with it differently.  I spoke at some length of the use of
mobile phones and how they are "Africa's PC", that they need to be seen
as the primary device to develop for.  There is also the radio, and
opportunities around multi-person dialogue revolving around radio, the
web and mobile devices.  What is it?  I'm not sure yet, but there's
something there screaming to be developed.

Africans, generally, already have well developed social organizations.
Tools developed for Africa need to augment the particular types of
social organizations.  The tools in the US, like Facebook or MySpace,
are created to work within the confines of our own disassociated
organizational norms.  That's why they can't just be thrown into Africa
and expected to work.  Africa has it's own unique atmosphere and
organizational needs that require a different type of application to be
successful.

SAP Global Survey: Jay Dvivedi, Shinsei Bank

Banking on the Internet in Japan

            

                        [Jay Dvivedi, Shinsei Bank's Tech Architect]

Social media is not really a component of Shinsei Bank's remarkable advent in Japan. In fact,  Jay Dvivedi, Shinsei's CIO who joined from Citibank and was principal designer and architect of the bank's internet-based system, eschews blogging and social media in his response to one of my questions.

But Shinsei has embraced Internet technologies in a way that no other bank on Earth seems to have done. It has placed the customer at the center and adjusted services to the customer's convenience. The bank had used online technologies to get closer to the customer, and thus, is a prime candidate for the SAP Global Survey. Joi Ito has called Jay his hero, which holds more than a little credibility with us and in most social media circles.

'Shinsei' literally means rebirth and in fact the bank was reborn from Japan's 50-year-old Long Term Credit Bank (LTCB) which went under in the year 2000.  I'll let Jay pick up the story from there.

1. You used technology to build a very different banking entity.  What assets did you maintain from the old LTCB and what did you discard?

We are under a new name, “Shinsei,” but we are the old bank with over 50 years of history and very deep relationships plus 2 million new customers. A key design criteria was to retain our old banking assets and add to it an extremely large investment bank.  We had to ensure that the old be in complete harmony with the new. 

However, in terms of hardware and network we have nothing of the old. Everything is new.

The way we do it is we create a parallel environment which mimics the old.  It’s what we call "parity." New systems behave like old ones. The employees and customers don’t see any change in functions and features; all products, all rules and all processes remain exactly the same. This work was done in about a year. Leveraging the new platform, we overlay on that a product-set which can outrun the competition. 

2.    Can you give me some sense of the size and scope of Shinsei today in terms of customers, deposit, etc. How many physical branches do you have? What percentage of your customers are Japanese?

Shinsei Bank across all its businesses has total assets of approximately JPY 11.8 trillion ($112 billion USD). The key lines of business are institutional banking, including investment banking; retail banking, and consumer and commercial finance. Historically, we were an institutional bank, to this we have added a retail customer base of 2 million customers and in our consumer finance business we have around 8 million customers. The bank has around 30 financial centers to service customers. An overwhelming majority of our customers are Japanese and our heritage is all Japanese. 

3.    Shinsei’s strategy was to create a customer-focused bank. Your vision and contribution was to use standard and inexpensive technology to accomplish this. What does Shinsei do differently than other Japanese banks? How do you become more customer-focused when you have fewer branches per customer than most Japanese banks?

A key principle is that our service should be easily understood. We try to see at it as, “How does it look to the customer outside.” We ensure we don’t create any forms so that when a customer walks in we don’t confuse him.

If you walk into the bank you will be greeted by a person who will talk to you on what you’d like to do. The transaction is conducted and we give you a receipt. To open an account and set up a relationship, all you have to do is sign a simple form and you have access to all our products and services.

We offer zero-cost ATM transactions, zero-cost fund transfers and a large variety of mutual funds. Our structured deposit product offering in its first one year of launch collected over $10 billion USD.

We have very satisfied customers. We have been No. 1 or 2 in customer satisfaction in surveys done by Nikkei, Japan’s leading business newspaper, for several years.

We have simplified the mortgage process. The customer fills in an application giving us just the basic information. Who they are, the type of house they are buying, the amount of loan etc .Based on this information the machine generates templates of specific documents, including samples. The customer can spread it on their dining table and match it with what they have and send it to us. They don’t have to wait till they have all the documents. The machine assembles all the documents electronically and process the loan, giving customers a very fast turnaround.

Nikkei ran a story about three years ago on our housing loan product, rating it the best in the market. We run the entire loan process under machine control and at the time the article was written, we were processing approximately 400 loans per day.

Our approach is very different from any other bank, anywhere. We look at the entire company as a large computer. This begins when we are in front of the customer and then continues all the way through all stages including the accounting and reporting. We focus on using machines for everything that we do. We have three classes of machines: (1) machines that run the processes, (2) machines to control transactions and (3) machines to control the machines. Most banks will have several dedicated networks, one for data, one for telephone calls, and another for ATMs. We have only one and for that we use the public Internet. This is very different from what other banks do.

Professors David Upton and Brad Staats of the Harvard Business School have written an article “Radically Simple IT” in the March issue of HBR that describes what we do. 

We don’t use officers to check transactions, machines check the transaction. We don’t use supervisors to manage the workforce; machines display the flow and status of work with complete transparency so people can manage themselves. If you walk inside the company you will see everything visually as if you are in a manufacturing plant for some machines; the displays tell you what is the work, where are the people, the picture of assembly line, what is the wait time, what are the queues. Its all visible to our staff and there are one or two team leaders to watch.

We do the same thing with our customers. If you apply for a housing loan then the entire process beginning with the application and documents as the customer assembles and sends them is made visible to them. In this way the customer sees what we see. 

4.    Your first year is legendary. You built your entire Internet banking system in one year, when it was estimated it would take you three. You also came in at an astounding 90% under budget. Tell me how you did this?

The Internet to us is not banking. If you visualize that we are building a large city, then the Internet to us are the highways and everything in the company works on the internet. Our telephone calls are through the Internet. Our call center runs through the internet and we have no PBX because we use software. So internet banking is not the right context.

Most large banks have a system where they present a small window of that over the internet to their customers, and call it internet banking. Our system is so designed that what we have inside, customers see from the outside. The capability, the information that is available either inside or outside is the same. If you use the ‘highway’ analogy, the internet is just another path for customers to come to the bank. We are not solving the same problem that most other large banks are attempting to do. By defining the problem we are solving differently we simplify it enormously. Simpler problem take less time to sort out.

Our cost advantage is 1:1000. This comes from using low cost standard components. If you compare the cost of a mainframe disc versus a Dell PC disc, mainframe memory versus PC memory, the source of our cost advantage will be very clear.   

5.  You actually dumped the old bank's mainframe and replaced it with server farms of standard Dell Computers. You off-shored data to India and you decentralized data storage. How safe is that? How does that impact costs? How quickly can you scale?

This is not what we did.

In 2000, the government of Japan sold the LTCB to a consortium of overseas investors. The new management led by our then-Chairman Yashiro had committed a timeline to rebuild the bank’s foundation of one year. Our challenge was to devise work methods that would get the job done. If we had waited to mobilize the huge number of people needed for this task, we would have a huge vulnerability, getting visas, getting people to move, finding housing and so on. So we had a few hundred people come to Japan backed up by ten times that number in India and other locations.

We broke down the work and transported it by Internet to wherever people were and assembled it in the virtual space. By working with multiple teams, doubling them on critical parts, we removed any single point of failure and ensured there was no risk.

Internet is just the transport medium. By itself it has no risk. We control where the people are, what they access and no customer data is ever sent outside of Japan.

Our ability to scale up and work at very high speeds comes form our use of small discrete machines. Unlike the mainframe, which combines everything into one and is actually a big risk, each small machine is discrete and work is organized around them such that there is no single point of failure. Work is spread out. It is literally like a factory making machines or cars and the machines are deployed like equipment in a factory.

6. The bank talks about being transparent to customers about technology. Can you expand upon just what that means and why customers should care?

We are transparent to our customers through our processes and technology. This is to make sure that given our lack of experience - we have only seven years of history - we don’t mess things up for the customer.  Everything about the customer that we know, the customer knows and is able to see. When they execute transactions, they do so under their own control. We remove the possibility that one of us makes a mistake.

7. Can you tell me a story of how the Shinsei system greatly benefited a customer that could not have occurred without your Internet-based system?

Let’s look at how we have grown, what our customers think of us. We have over 2 million new customers, over $50 billion USD in new assets in just seven years. Remember, we have only 30 branches in all of Japan. We could not have done this without the type of technology we deployed.

We have a large automaker for whom we process auto loans. Two years ago they were very unhappy with our service quality and were ready to walk out. By leveraging the methods and techniques we were able to deliver a completely new capability that delighted them in just six months. They have now asked us if we would be willing to work with them in other countries. That is the kind of impact we have achieved.

8. What lessons are there at Shinsei for other technology officers in other enterprises worldwide?

Technology officers would do well to read the HBR article I mentioned to get an idea of our methods and adopt them. They can simplify greatly the problem they are trying to solve and get tremendous speed and cost advantages.

We are working with leading educational institutions to codify our methods and offer them as part of their courses. I must point out that what we do is not new. We have used industrial engineering techniques used for decades in manufacturing and applied them to the service industry.

9.    This interview is part of my survey on social media’s impact on culture and business. I   could not help but notice there is no social media component to your story. Will there be in the future? Would you not want to use social media as banks like Wells Fargo in the US do to get closer to customers and build community?

Our model is one of being highly conservative and of being where the customer is and where they want us, when they want us.

We have tried to create that model where you can call us on the phone, or you can walk over to any of our centers. Everything that you can do in person you can do over the Internet. Everything is available on all the channels. We don’t have a physical community space because we basically believe, “We will be where you are.” 

As I said, our customer sessions are highly interactive where the customer is in full control of his or her own account in all its dimensions. It’s almost as if they were moving behind the teller’s desk, to locate their ledger while they are doing their transactions. We wrap the bank as well as the technology around the customer, whether at home or on the telephone, or when they come into any of our physical centers. Technology is focused around one customer, repeated 2 million times. 

SAP Global Survey: Richard Boly, US Embassy, Rome

Using Social Media to Spawn Italian Entrepreneurialism            

               

Richard Boly and I worked together in the early 1980s at Regis McKenna, Inc., Silicon Valley's legendary PR firm. I was impressed with both his intelligence and passion, but I was not surprised when he decided that PR was not for him and decided to return to college where I lost track of him sometime around 1985. Then, in 2006, out of the blue he emailed me. He had stumbled across Naked Conversations and was startled to find my name on the cover.

It turns out Richard became a career diplomat for the US State Department back in 1994. In the time since he and I had smiled and dialed for Silicon Valley clients, served in the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Paraguay, Italy, and Washington, D.C., where he worked on U.S.-EU economic issues.  He is the most junior diplomat to win the Cobb Award for commercial diplomacy. 

Between his PR stint and his diplomatic career, Richard was fairly diverse in his activity, starting a shrimp hatchery in Ecuador, consulting the Inter-American Development Bank, and raising money for charities.

When Richard found me he was serving in the US Embassy in Rome, where he was focused on entrepreneurialism for Italians. I remember him telling me over drinks, when we got together in Palo Alto, CA, " Italy is the most charming place on earth, but it's like living in a museum. Italians need new opportunities. They need to be closer to Silicon Valley and technology. He invited me to visit the US Embassy in Rome and speak with entrepreneurs. It has remained one of the great honors of my post-authorship career.

Richard serves now as the Coordinator of the Partnership for Growth, answering directly to the respected US ambassador, Ronald P. Spogli. In this role, he has, according to multiple sources, contributed significantly to Italian entrepreneurialism. In that capacity, he is also likely to be the person who has instigated more social media programs than any other diplomat. None of them is designed to extol the virtues of the US. All are designed to facilitate conversations that will help Italian entrepreneurs.

Here are his answers to my questions.

1. Can you briefly describe to me your duties under Ambassador Spogli at the US Embassy?

I work full-time on the Partnership for Growth (P4G), which is an initiative of Ambassador to Spogli, and the U.S. Mission in Italy to spur economic dynamism here.  We are attempting to:

1) Move research to market;
2) Grow risk capital markets;
3) Spur innovation by strengthening the intellectual property rights (IPR) regime; and
4) Create and promote Italian entrepreneurial role models. 

What is really unique about P4G is our creative use of new media tools such as blogging, interactive video webchats, BarCamps, LinkedIn, and even the cutting edge video conferencing technology of the Italian company TVBlob.  This approach has allowed us to create a nationwide network of like-minded individuals and groups in less than two years. They help form the backbone of a developing Italian new venture ecosystem. It has also allowed us to carry our message unfiltered directly to the Italian people.

Even more amazingly, we have achieved this during a period when the U.S. “brand” has been under significant negative pressure, especially among our target audience – young Italians. 

2. Why should the U.S. Embassy care about economic growth in Italy?

The simple answer is: enlightened self-interest.

We have no better ally and partner than Italy. Their economic development is in our mutual interest. Italy’s economy has grown at an average annual rate of less than 1 % in recent years.  We risk having a great partner with the experience and capacity to join us to address future challenges without the economic resources to bring to the table. 

We don’t have all the answers.  Entrepreneurial ecosystems in America have evolved through trial and error, not some grand master plan. We share what we hope will be helpful.

P4G has taken a bottom-up, grassroots approach to promote an ecosystem that supports high-growth scalable ventures. We also try to avoid  bureaucratic inefficiency and a slow legal system.  These issues require a political consensus and more years than Ambassador Spogli has in his tenure in Italy.

3. How, when and why did P4G get started?

Soon after his arrival in 2005, Ambassador Spogli organized an offsite for his senior leadership team to identify long-term, strategic goals for the subsequent three years.  He challenged us to look beyond our daily work and identify “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” worth pursuing. P4G was a key goal coming out of it.

We believe the P4G has created something in short supply in Italy: optimism.  A 2004 Pew Research Center survey asked a simple question of both Americans and Italians: “Does success depend on factors outside of your control?” 

Barely a third of Americans said yes, while fully two-thirds of Italians said yes.  We Americans believe we are masters of our fate. This is an essential element of entrepreneurial risk-taking.  Such optimism is in short supply in Italy, where all-too-often, private actors wait for the government to make the first move, before risking their own capital.

4. And just what did P4G accomplish in the three years since that meeting?

Here's a whole laundry list:

• Fulbright BEST Silicon Valley Immersion Program. Top Italian science graduate students interested in entrepreneurship spend six months in Silicon Valley. They take a crash course in entrepreneurship at Santa Clara University and then joining a high-growth company in their field of expertise.
• Angel Investor Boot Camp.  Twenty prospective angel investors spent two days with the Golden Angel Network based at Marquette University, and two days at the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City.  The learning and bonding that occurred led to the quick formation of the Italian Angels for Growth, a Milan based network that makes seed investments in Italian start-ups.
• Face2Face: Capturing Creativity [link in Italian].  This innovative, interactive video web chat allows students and budding innovators and entrepreneurs to watch live interviews with successful Italian entrepreneurs. Another Italian entrepreneur, who draws out the guest’s story, conducts the interview weaving questions from viewers, sent real time over the web. These live interviews are maintained as podcasts. The program has been well-received, with professors in nearly a third of all Italian universities weaving this program into their curricula.
• Deep-dive visits by serial entrepreneurs and tech transfer gurus. We’ve hosted nearly a dozen U.S. tech transfer experts and serial entrepreneurs who have shared information and strategies on the medical device, biotech, and pharma sectors.  We also joined with the Kauffman Foundation to allow researchers to easily share their innovations. We hope Italy will be the first location outside of North America to participate in iBridge.

5. Tell me more about Face2Face.  Was it the first online video program started by the US State Department? What has been the result?

Face2Face [Italian] is a video webchat “network” developed by our Public Affairs team in Embassy Rome.  The most prolific user of this network has been “Capturing Creativity. “ The real innovation of Capturing Creativity is that it is unrehearsed, unscripted and the host and guest are Italians only loosely affiliated with the Embassy.  We provide the platform, chose the guests, but otherwise let the Italians shape the discussion. 

This program has helped build both virtual and real communities on entrepreneurship. By the end of June, we will have nearly 30 hours of quality interviews with first-generation Italian entrepreneurs. I believe that this is the best existing Italian language web content on entrepreneurship.

6. Marco Marinucci, a Silicon Valley Google executive, has started Mind the Bridge.  What does the US Embassy Rome have to do with that?  What’s your personal role?

I first spoke to Marco Marinucci in late September 2007 and discussed his vision for the Mind the Bridge business plan competition.  It was a no-brainer to give Marco the full support of P4G and I urged him to speed up his launch so finalists could be announced at a high profile January 2008 Silicon Valley reception at which Ambassador Spogli would speak. We recruited great partners in Italy (First Generation Network) and Silicon Valley Business Association Italy America  (BAIA) and Silicon Valley Italian Executive Council (SVIEC). 

Mind the Bridge was launched in late November with a great social media publicity blitz.  (What do you expect from a guy who works at Google!)  We printed pocket-sized publicity cards and distributed them at universities around Italy.  We urged university professors to promote the competition among their most innovative students.  Ambassador Spogli taped a promotional video that ran on the Mind the Bridge website. 

In barely four weeks, Mind the Bridge attracted nearly 50 applicants.  Marco, BAIA and SVIEC assembled an A-team of Italian and Italian-American entrepreneurs and VCs to evaluate the submissions and chose the six finalists.  The finalists were teamed up with mentors in Italy.  Mentors will help the finalists polish their business plan and hone their elevator pitch. The Mind the Bridge finale will be public presentations by the finalists in San Francisco on April 1 (no joke!).  That same week, finalists will meet with potential investors or business partners in Silicon Valley.

7. Could you tell me about First Generation Network?  Are you involved in that as well?

First Generation, like Face2Face, grew out of a dinner I had in Milan in December 2007.  When I first met Marco Palombi, I was blown away.  I didn’t know that there were young serial entrepreneurs like him, because I hadn’t met any in Rome.  Marco said that Milan was different and so when I first visited Milan, I asked Marco to get some serial entrepreneurs together for dinner.  That night, I met Michele Appendino, who founded one of Italy’s few venture funds and who now is investing in the solar space.  I also met Gianluca Dettori, who as the head of Vitaminic was the youngest CEO of an Italian publicly traded company.  He now is investing in and mentoring a group of Italian start-ups – kind of like an angel investor on steroids. I met Massimiliano Pellegrini, who grew through the roof of Dada USA’s mobile phone content sales. 

This group observed that US entrepreneurs are treated as rock stars, while in Italy, they remain unknown. We talked about how the “young entrepreneurs” group within Confindustria (the national association of employers) had few 1st generation entrepreneurs, but were mostly the young scions of old money.  We lamented mainstream media’s unwillingness to help distinguish in the public’s mind between first generation entrepreneurs, who risk their money and reputation on a new venture, and the sons of self-satisfied incumbents, who devote more time to protecting their rice bowl than innovating.

I recounted the many conversations we had had with young Italians and the many blank looks we received when we asked them which Italian entrepreneurs were their role models.  Not only did they not have Italian role models, they couldn’t name any young Italian entrepreneurs.

I expressed my view that in achieving social change, sharing the experiences of pioneers representing the change sought is crucial.  If young Italians could see that people, just like them, had risked and succeeded (or failed, but had gone on to risk again and succeed), we could spread the acceptance of entrepreneurial risk taking.  I used the simple analogy of a packed beach on a hot summer day.  If you arrive and see no one in the water, you’ll wonder what’s the matter – sharks, jellyfish, razor coral. But when you arrive there are lots of people in the water, you’ll jump right in.   We needed to get the message out that Italy’s entrepreneurial waters were inviting and safe.

Marco and Michele began to recruit fellow first generation entrepreneurs to join the new organization, the goal of which was to provide entrepreneurial role models and mentor the next generation of entrepreneurs.  First Generation Network publicly launched in June 2007 at a “entrepreneurs’ summit” held at Ambassador Spogli’s residence.  In addition to Ambassador Spogli, luminaries who spoke to the gathering of 80 young entrepreneurs include: Andrew Viterbi, co-founder of Qualcomm; Carl Schramm, President of the Kauffman Foundation; Giacomo Marini, co-founder of Logitech; Alberto Sangiovanni Vincentelli, Berkley Professor and co-founder of Cadence and Synopsys; Renato Soru, Governor of Sardinia and founder of Tiscali; and Minister for Innovation Nicolais.  You can watch the event (all in Italian, except for Schramm) on the web. 

Being in the vanguard has at times been frustrating for First Generation Network.  For example, the leading business daily, Il Sole/24 Ore, recently did a two-page spread asking questions of eleven Italian innovators.  Six of the eleven were 1Gen members, but 1Gen was never mentioned in the article!  Frankly, the relationship with the Embassy has also presented challenges.  As I mentioned before, “dietrologia” or divining the “real” truth is core to the Italian press and First Generation Network has not been immune to such creative interpretation.

8. Are other US Foreign Service posts involved in entrepreneurship? Do they use social media? What advice do you have for them in that area?

Yes.  The State Department and other government agencies such as the Commerce Department have programs to support entrepreneurship overseas.  Some of the most noteworthy include: Middle East Entrepreneur Training as part of The Middle East Partnership Initiative; the Economic Empowerment in Strategic Regions – an inter-agency initiative led by the State Department; the Partnerships for Promoting the African Entrepreneur; and the Enhanced Partnership in Northern Europe (e-PINE), and the Department of Commerce’s Program for Entrepreneurial Growth.  Also, the State Department “America.gov” website highlights Entrepreneurship in its “Achieving growth through open markets.”

Partnership for Growth is unique in that it is a systemic initiative born out of the U.S. Mission Italy, based on dozens of consultations with experts in both Italy and the United States.  The P4G itself is a bottom up initiative, with elements of our Embassy in Rome and our Consulates in Florence, Milan, and Naples, weaving together literally hundreds of activities that support the four key P4G pillars outlined in question one.  We have also identified and in some cases help create like-minded Italian organizations that help multiply our efforts.

9. I am conducting this interview under sponsorship from SAP, a global software company.  Of what relevance should these entrepreneurial and social media programs be to them or any other enterprise?

The simple answer follows from the rationale for the Partnership for Growth: an economically strong, dynamic, and open Italy will be a good place to do business.  Italy is a founding member of the G-7, so its economy makes up an important part of the world economy.  Since increasingly, global companies bring innovation in from the outside through acquisition, a more dynamic new-venture ecosystem in Italy will offer fertile new ground to acquire new innovation.  A more dynamic Italian economy will also increase the demand for new technologies and services.

10. Several Italian entrepreneurs have either moved to the US, announced intentions of doing so or have based their businesses in the US.  Do you think programs such as you have started might stem the outflow of young tech talent from Italy to the US?

We hope the P4G will help create an ecosystem in Italy that will support young Italian entrepreneurs.  We have no interest in furthering the Italian brain drain, and in fact, the visa our Fulbright BEST scholars receive as part of the Silicon Valley Immersion Program require them to return to Italy at the end of the six-month program. 

We understand there are many models to building a new venture ecosystem, an exciting one for Italy being the Israeli approach.  A decade ago, U.S. VCs were not beating a path to Israeli entrepreneurs’ doors, so entrepreneurs from Israel moved their front offices closer to Sand Hill Road, while keeping their technical teams back home.  This lead to a rash of Israeli IPOs and VCs decided it was a good idea to open up offices in Israel to access the source of this entrepreneurial spirit.

There are a few examples of Italian companies taking this tact, something the Partnership for Growth has supported.  Media Lario is one.  Funambol, the open source software company that allows you to push your Outlook files to your mobile phone i.e. doing what a Blackberry does, has its software developers in Pavia and its corporate offices in Redwood City.  We hope by developing linkages between Silicon Valley and Italian entrepreneurs, that we can spark more such ventures.

SAP Global Survey: Michael Krigsman of IT Failures

Using Social Media to Rearrange the Deck Chairs         

       

I met Michael Krigsman because I was cold.

I had flown to Boston in December and to paraphrase Tony Bennett, I left my coat in San Francisco. I Twittered about how most parts of me were chilled to the bone. Mike showed up at my hotel presenting me with a bright blue down filled ski jacket, which he insisted I keep. We had a drink and talked and became instant friends.

That did not mean we would always agree. Back in January, he interviewed me for his Naked IT podcast-blog series on ZDNet and we discovered we had a decidedly different views of the role of IT in the social media future of the enterprise.

Topically, he is a most worthy adversary, a well-recognized expert on enterprise-related IT issues. In addition to being author of the respected ZDNet blog IT Failures: Rearranging the Deck Chairs, he is CEO of Asuret, Inc., a software and consulting company dedicated to reducing software implementation failures.  Michael is also  CEO of Cambridge Publications, which specializes in developing tools and processes for software implementations and related business practice automation projects. He has worked with more than 100 companies on IT-related matter including this project's sponsor, SAP.

Mike gave me my turn to describe my minimalist view of IT's role on social media related issues. This is his turn to respond. On close examination, I still disagree, but on fewer matter than I thought would be the case.

1. You are best known as the "IT Project Failures" guy. So tell me, what are the leading causes of those failures? Do you think social media could somehow reduce those failures? How so or why not?

IT failures are generally caused by management errors in human, rather than technical systems. Poor judgment, dysfunctional organizational politics, and bad planning are far more likely to cause a major project failure than a database failure, for example. The high profile failures that hit the newspapers, or that I blog about, generally arise as the culmination of many bad decisions strung together over time.

Large software implementations typically involve three parties: the customer, the software vendor, and the consulting services supplier. Considering this complexity, and the sometimes-conflicting agendas that result, the high rate of IT project failures becomes less surprising.

Can social media reduce project failures? To the extent social media improves an organization’s communication and decision-making abilities, it will also improve project success rates. Social media is not a magic bullet, but represents an organization’s commitment to streamline communication, share knowledge, and work more effectively as a team. These are characteristics of both healthy organizations and successful IT projects.

2. As you know, I have a minimalist view of IT's role in social media adoption.  Back in January, you seemed to disagree. Please express your perspective and explain why I am seeing it wrong.

When an individual downloads and uses Twitter or Skype (assuming the corporate firewall doesn’t prevent it), IT does not generally play a role. But suppose a big company wants its employees to adopt Twitter in a large-scale manner, and really use social media in day-to-day activities across the organization? Although technical management and IT infrastructure planning present their own challenges, merely making software available does not mean users will actually adopt it.

More significantly, the organization must define “rules of engagement” that encourage users to embed social media in their day-to-day work. From this perspective, planning the diffusion of social media through an organization is little different from planning a  traditional enterprise software implementation. Without proper change management, training, documentation and so on, social media becomes yet another under-utilized tool sitting on a server. The annals of IT failures are filled with cases of software that was purchased, deployed, and never fully used. Social media is not immune.

Coordinated deployments of social media across a large enterprise look and behave like any other enterprise software implementation. In both cases, IT and the business are essential partners in making the deployment successful. As with IT failures in general, the success of social media deployments depend more on human, rather than technical, systems and planning.

3. You’ve said social media can “flatten” IT. What do you mean by that?

There’s no doubt that individual users can circumvent IT far more easily with social media than with larger enterprise software. If an individual wants Twitter, for example, he or she can just install it, which is obviously not the case with large enterprise systems such as SAP. Social media puts power into the hands of individuals and that power ultimately comes at the expense of centralized IT departments.

In my Naked IT interviews with Ed Yourdon (author of 27 books and 550 articles, many covering IT processes that can lead to failure) and JP Rangaswami (who functions more or less as CIO of British Telecom), they each described the history of IT as “protector” of centralized computing resources. Social media is a force in the opposite direction.

4. Is this flattening good or bad for large enterprises?

In the short-term, this flattening can create disruption and confusion which are hardly positive qualities. At the same time, IT needs to change and if social media can help bring positive movement, then it’s ultimately beneficial.

It’s time for IT to leave the ivory tower and become part of the decision-making culture of the business. The entire notion of IT as being somehow separate, or having independent goals from, the non-technical parts of an enterprise is absolutely ridiculous.

I don’t want to paint this as being entirely the fault of IT – many senior business executives don’t fully understand how IT processes function, nor do they completely grasp the ramifications that technical decisions can have on non-technical business strategies. To the extent social media empowers users, and helps non-technical senior executives recognize the impact of technology on their business, it becomes a powerful positive change agent.

5. What role do you see for IT management in corporate adoption of social media tools and programs?

IT should be an equal partner supporting the acquisition, adoption, and diffusion of social media through an organization. Strategic business computing decisions, including social media issues, should reflect the involvement of three groups: end-users, business management, and technical management. In my opinion, IT should partner with, but not drive, social media programs. To the extent that social media programs are business-based, meaning their core function is providing non-technical benefits to users, then sponsorship should lie in the business domain. In this respect, social media is a business initiative like any other, and should be treated as such.

6. Is it your perception that social media poses a threat to enterprise security? How would you say IT should deal with that threat?

In my opinion, social media has the power to bypass many well-established enterprise security systems and IT is right to be concerned. On the other hand, some argue that existing technical security protocols are sufficient and that social media is really no different from other software already deployed in the enterprise.

From an information risk standpoint, however, I believe organizations must create policies that reflect the reality of social media. Remember, these tools are all about information sharing. If the enterprise does not want information to be shared, whether due to privacy, competitive, or regulatory concerns, then appropriate policies should be instituted.

As software evolves, information sharing policies must also evolve. When I blogged that “Twitter is dangerous” lots of people came out swinging. I suspect some of those who argued were primarily concerned about possible chilling effects on social media, rather than looking at the issue on its merits.

7. Do you see a strategic importance to social media in the enterprise? Do you believe it is an efficient way for customers and companies to come closer together? Why would IT oppose that?

Any tools, techniques, or processes that dramatically improve communication and information sharing will be strategic to the enterprise. It’s not about tools, per se, but about helping people work together more efficiently, and more intelligently, to accomplish meaningful results more easily.

Your book, Naked Conversations, argued that removing intermediaries between an enterprise and it constituents benefits both parties. When direct communication between groups increases, both sides tend to move closer together, assuming a desire to remain in relationship. It’s the same with businesses and their customers, employees, investors and so on. Is closer communication between these groups strategic? I think so.

On the other hand, if IT tries to interfere with new methods of communication between enterprise groups, then it will be doomed to fail.  There’s virtue in going with the flow, especially when the flow is inevitable. It should be a partner in helping the enterprise adopt improved tools and work processes. For IT to succeed, it must engage users in dialog and support their desire to improve communications and information sharing.

8. What should IT do when they discover users behind the firewall using unauthorized social media tools for business purposes?

Geez, I suppose there are times when turning a blind eye is the right thing to do.

9. Flash forward five years. What role do you see for social media in the enterprise? What role do you see for IT in dealing with it five years forward?

In five years, social media will be more common through the enterprise. If the past is any guide to the future, IT will still be struggling, trying to protect its territory against an onslaught of democratizing tools and work processes.

On the other hand, some IT managers will have recognized the power they hold to shape and influence how business itself functions. For those wise CIOs, there will unparalleled opportunity to impact major business decisions at the highest strategic level. Those will be good days indeed for smart CIOs.

10. Additional Comments?

Shel, you asked tough questions. Thank you for the opportunity to participate in your survey.

Clarification on the Roll-Your-Own SAP Survey

I've received a few answers to my request for a Roll-Your-Own survey and I greatly appreciate them, but I need to clarify something that I overlooked. If I am going to publish your Survey responses on my blog, what you have to say needs to be interesting or valuable to my readers. It needs to add a spoonful of insight to the general body of knowledge.

If you have a blog and you answer the questions I posted, send me the link and I will post a link back to your site. I realize that I voiced what I was looking for poorly a few days ago and I'm sorry if I raised some false hopes. But my customer is my reader and if I post something I need to believe some of my readers will find it valuable.

SAP Global Survey: hi5's Ramu Yalamanchi

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Perhaps the Greatest Untold Story in Social Networking

                   [Ramu Yalamanchi, Speaking in Mexico. Photo by IAB Mexico.]

(NOTE: This is my 65th interview for the SAP Global Survey on social media's impact on culture and business. You can find previous interviews from people in 30 countries by clicking on the SAP Category of this site, or just by Googling 'SAP Global Survey.')

Quick, a pop Quiz. Name the world's most popular social networks. Okay, narrow it down to US-based. Okay narrow it down to the online social networks located just in the Bay Area. Who comes to mind?

I'm betting very few of you named hi5 Networks. Yet, this is a network that has been around since 2003, has 80 million users in over 200 countries, is growing by 150,000 new users daily and has been profitable for over two years.

We asked Ramu Yalamanchi, who stepped out of eGroups after it was acquired by Yahoo to become hi5 co-founder and CEO how he accomplished this without spending much on marketing or PR and his answer seems simple. Offer something universally simple and highly localized and get people to want their friends and family to have conversations with them.

Here's my Q&A with Ramu:

1. Can we start by you giving me some idea of the hi5 size and scope? How many countries are you in? How many members do you have? How fast are you growing?

Alexa ranks us as a Top 10 site globally, and as the #1 or #2 most-trafficked in nearly a dozen Latin America, European and Asian countries. We are the #1 social network in Peru, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Portugal, Thailand, Romania, Macedonia, Cyprus, Greece, Mauritus and several other nations around the world.

As of February 2008, we had 80 million registered users in more than 200 nations. On the average, about 50% of these users are active on the site every month. Each day, we grow by at least 150,000 new users.

2. hi5 seems to be one of social media's great untold stories. Let's back up for a second. Can you tell me how and when hi5 got started? What was your vision then and how has that vision evolved?

We launched hi5 in late 2003 to provide a service that connected people to one another in a useful and meaningful way. The service was actually an evolution of a prior website Akash Garg and I had launched, a matchmaking service for South Asians. My brother actually met his wife through that initial service, making my mother very happy.

As we evolved into hi5, we expanded our service, but kept our focus abroad. While other social networks at the time were focusing primarily on the U.S. market, we were interested in the growing number of people coming online all over the world. We saw that as a tremendous opportunity to build a valuable service where people could interact with their friends and express themselves.

From early on, we focused on creating a service that would be easy-to-use and meaningful for people in many different countries and cultures around the world. We started with a simple design, made sure that we had high quality translations, and built relationships with media companies in regions where we saw a lot of usage. We’re now available in 14 languages -- with more coming online every month – and also offer customer support in Spanish as well. We’ll continue to explore culturally-relevant services and features that will enhance the online experience of our diverse international user communities. 

3. You are among the world's largest social networks, and yet we hear very little about you. A Google search produces very few news stories. Was this prolonged stealth intentional? How do users learn about you and join?

That will soon change. The U.S. media is realizing what a world class service we are building – as the online users in numerous countries around the world already do.

In fact, our user base has grown entirely through word of mouth. We haven’t done marketing – the users have promoted the service for us by bringing their friends into it. It helps make their experience meaningful when they have friends on the site. We’ll continue to listen to our users as they tell us what they want to see on hi5, and how we can make it better for them. In turn, we hope they will continue to tell more friends and the site will continue to grow in popularity globally. 

4. What are the primary reasons people join hi5? Can you give me some demographic information? Who is a typical user? Does this vary or stay the same from country to country or language group to language group?

Generally speaking, the bulk of our users are between the ages of 18-35, and we have a balanced mix of men and women. We are also particularly popular among the global Spanish-language community. 

However, given that we have millions of users in so many different locations around the world, there are a great number of ways that people use the service. As our members bring their friends onto the service, they build a shared history of their lives, learn what’s happening around them, and discover new people through the service.

The same cultural nuances that you find offline, you will also find online. A service feature that is popular in one country might be less so in another country. We look for ways to tailor the service to our users’ diverse preferences, involving them in the process through discussion forums and direct dialogue, and by working with developers to create a breadth of culturally-relevant applications.   


5. Do people tend to stay inside their own geographic boundaries or search elsewhere?

It depends on where their friends, family and acquaintances are located. If most are within their own geographic boundaries, then you will see them connected within that location. Very often, though, we see connections across geographic boundaries. For instance, we have Turk members living in Germany, Vietnamese living in Norway and Hispanics in the U.S. – all of whom are connected with friends in their current location, as well as with friends and family in their home country. 

I’ll give you another example: one user in Greece recently wrote to thank us for our service because he said he had made friendships “not only in Greece…but everywhere!” On a trip to Serbia, he said, he met friends he had made on hi5. He said, “They showed me their capital, we went out, etc. If I weren’t a hi5 member, I wouldn’t have had this opportunity to meet these people and see their country.” It is stories like these that let us know we are succeeding in bringing people together around the world.

6. You use Lionbridge translation technologies. How extensively is it used and how successfully?  Does slang hold up in translations? How long does it take for a translation between hi5 users, and are the users okay with the delays?

Lionbridge is one of many resources we use to make hi5 available in other languages. They have helped us translate hi5-generated content, not user-generated content. To date, we’ve worked with them on eleven languages, all of which were turned around rapidly – in a matter of weeks.

For slang, hi5 provides a glossary of terms that call out words requiring more attention by our translators. These are often terms that are branded by hi5 or might have specific meaning in the context of a social networking service. Since we usually have these words translated before we launch a new language, it doesn’t really hold up our translations. We also use a translation memory, which remembers phrases that were previously translated. This ensures that all phrases, especially the unusual ones, are translated consistently. Additionally, we have proof readers of the translations and engage the user base for quality review. With each new language we roll out, we launch an identical language discussion forum, and continually update the service and translations as new features are launched, or as users make suggestions for translation improvement.

7. Where is hi5 heading? Will you remain focused on a young and international user base? What new services do you think you will need to maintain your user base as it ages?

We believe Hi5's momentum will continue across the globe, and we’ll continue to draw new customers from all age ranges. Social networks are changing the way that people use the Web, and much of the way that people consume content and information will be on social networks.

The Revised SAP Roll-Your-Own Survey

I have to admit I continue to love my work on the SAP Global Survey. I have now posted over 60,000 words based on interviews with people in 32 countries on how social media impacts their cultures and business.

This is a lot, but in fact it is a small dent of the 100s of millions of people who are now involved in social media in more than 150 countries. I could use your help and participation.

When the survey first started, people began posting their own questions on their own blogs and answering them. Eventually, I served up a generic set of questions, which a good number of people filled out. But over time the momentum for roll-your-own survey takers has withered and atrophied.

So, here is a new set of questions. Feel free to fill them out and send them back to me, unformatted and in email to shelisrael1@gmail.com. Or post them in your own blogs, and send me the link. If you can think of better questions to ask and answers, just replace the ones I've listed below. All I'm really interested in is that you increase the body of knowledge on the subject, rather than promote you company product or agenda.

Here are my questions:

1. Describe the culture of your business or where you live. What role does social media play in it?

2. How has social media changed your business or your life (pick one or both)?

3. How has social media impacted your views of businesses, government, politics or education (pick one or more)?

4. Has social media impacted what you do in your spare time? How about other family members?

5. If you have children, or are close to young people, how does social media impact their time or opinions?

6. Is there a discussion of social media where you work? If so, what are the sharpest arguments?

7. an you tell my studio audience an interesting story about how social media impacted business or culture.

8. Additional comments

You can answer some or all of these questions. Do whatever you like with them. If you like to original set of questions, use those instead. Pass them on to a friend. If you know someone I should interview, please point me to her or him. I look forward to your answers and to the surprises that they so often contain.

SAP Global Survey: Michael Dell

The founder-CEO talks social media & its impact on his company and customers.

         

                                            [Michael Dell. Photo from file]

Back in December, I interviewed Lionel Menchaca for this SAP Survey of Social Media's impact on culture and business and was impressed with his passion, transparency and commitment to conversations with customers. I was left with the impression that "Dell gets it." The company understands the fundamental changes brought about by social media and in so doing has transfomed a recently hostile audience into one that is on Dell's side, rooting for it in the marketplace.

But how high up does that commitment go? Are Dell's increasing stockpile of blogs just the work of middle management or are the people steering the company committed to social media as well. Is blogging a smart play or a strategic initiative, I wondered. So,I badgered Dell's affable PR guy, Richard Binhammer for an interview with the guy who's name is on the company logo.

Michael Dell has answered 10, occasionally tough, questions below with candor and clarity. I believe it is the longest and deepest interview on social media ever conducted with a CEO of a Fortune 100 company. I am admittedly impressed with what he has to say, but I'll let you decide for yourself.

1.    I imagine 2005 and 2006 were not your favorite years. Customer disaffection began to appear in blogs in late spring of 2005. They, of course, reached a crescendo with Jeff Jarvis famous "Dell Hell" post in August '05. At what point did you become aware of anti-Dell blog posts? What was your first response to blog criticism?

Just to put this in perspective, we've been listening closely to what our customers have been telling us since 1984. We listen in person, by phone and, in 1995, we started Dell.com,  realizing the long-term importance of the Internet for our  direct business model. About 1.6 million customers visit us every day online and our teams do their best to understand what's on our customer's minds at all times.

With respect to 2005 and 2006, I don't think there was any single event but rather a series of events that came together. The marketplace changed, global markets expanded and there was tremendous growth in the blogosphere. What's most important, in the long run, is how we learn from any situation and improve the customer experience. The reality is that my response to finding out about a customer's problem with our equipment  is the same today as it was then – let's resolve our customer's issues as quickly as possible and let's learn from each opportunity and get better every time. I care about our customers and our team knows that it's not unusual for me to send an email at any time of the day or night where I ask them to figure out an issue ASAP. Every customer is important to me.


2. At what point did you start considering blogs as a strategic issue?

Well, when you look at the world and see that the number of people online will double from 1 to 2 billion in a few years, it makes a compelling case for understanding where this growth is occurring and what it means. Our goal is to join the conversation and speak directly and candidly with our customers. The more we engage, the more we learn and the better we can do for our customers.

Our teams have been exchanging information with customers online since the late 1980s with listservs, for example. By early 2006, we had established the Online Community Outreach team, a group of tech support experts that reaches out to bloggers around the world who have questions or may require assistance.  Direct2Dell   was launched in July, 2006. Later that summer, we expanded blog outreach to include any conversations about Dell.  We then launched StudioDell in September and then early in 2007, the IdeaStorm site was launched.

So, we've done lots but we're just getting started.

We also see a tremendous opportunity to partner with our customers to improve the world we all share.  This has led to our global recycling program where any consumer anywhere in the world can recycle equipment for free with us.  It led to the formation of Plant a Tree for Me, which allows our customers to offset the carbon equivalent of their computer for a small contribution to buy a tree.  And, most recently, we launched Regeneration.org as part of our commitment to become the greenest technology company in the world.  This site just completed a really cool graffiti contest that was on Facebook and had more than 1 million people vote on the best digital paintings of the environment.  We believe that when we join forces with our customers, we can really make a difference.

3. Can you tell me how the decision evolved for Dell to start blogging? Who actually made the call?  What was your role in it?

I asked why we didn't reach out to customers on the Web if they had issues and then, once we had that in place, I asked why we didn't have a company blog to further connect proactively with customers.  But all credit goes to our team who really took the initiative to make it happen.   And once we get going at Dell, we are absolutely committed to being best in class worldwide.

4.  What outcomes did you expect from starting social media programs? Has they gone the way you expected it to go?

You know, people talk about social media programs but I just think about conversations with customers.  We have hundreds of millions of them every year.  We listen on the phone and in the offices of our customers.  Why not improve our online listening skills and the number of ways we can do it?

We want our customers to walk the hallways of Dell. From our engineering labs to manufacturing plants to service and solutions teams. This means that when we're making decisions, we're always thinking about our customers.

We're appreciative of our customers on IdeaStorm who encouraged us to broaden the availability of Linux systems to include consumers. We actually made more than 35 business improvements related to IdeaStorm last year and we expect to do a lot more in the future.

We are sharing our thoughts and ideas now in forums or blogs in Chinese, Spanish, Korean, Portuguese and Norwegian and we'll continue to increase our outreach in the near future.

There's more work to do and there always will be.  But the most important point is that we are very committed to joining the conversation with our customers wherever they may be in the world.

5. What has Dell learned from blogging? How has it changed product and policy?

Well, we were one of the first companies to have an online policy that insists on complete transparency by Dell employees. Our team members must always identify that they are from Dell when they speak online.

I believe our teams like the opportunity to speak directly to our customers with video clips on Direct2Dell, when we introduce new products. You can see this is now the standard way we introduce new products. Our engineers didn't always get a chance to speak in the past, but now it's easy.

When we have an issue, we act quickly and we use Direct2Dell as a central point for clarity.  If you look at the battery recall, we shared continual updates on our progress.

In the future, you'll see us continue to innovate in how we share our product stories.

6. How do you think blogging has changed Dell's corporate reputation?

You'd have to ask our customers. We don't own our reputation we just own our actions. That's something our customers give to us in return for us exceeding their expectations.

For me, the question is has it improved our business performance? And the answer is yes. But as I said, we have plenty more to do.

7.  While Direct2Dell gets a good deal of attention, Dell has a couple of other significant blogs, IdeaStorm lets users tell Dell what they'd like and DellShares is a space for investor conversations. What value have these two other blogs had for Dell so far?

Ideastorm is incredibly powerful. The Linux community showed how this tool can not only get attention, but lead to change.  We brought back XP as an option for customers who wanted it. We reduced trialware and we get to listen to our customers discuss ideas in real time.

I can't think of a better way for us to know what's important. We can't act on every idea nor should we, but the dialogue and debates are well worth it. With DellShares, we want to make it easier to receive financial information.  We will do our best to discuss what is on the minds of our investors.

8.  Have you ever considered starting your own blog or posting on any of  Dell's blogs? Why or why not?

Yes.  We talk about it often.  Watch this space :) Our team also does a good job of capturing some of my speaking events online.

9.  How has blogging changed Dell's culture?

It reinforces how important it is to listen to our customers. And, when we see an issue in real time, we have only one choice and that is to solve our customer's issue and quickly too. I believe it's improved our reaction time, reduced our time to learn new critical information and made us a better company.

The blogosphere helps accelerate many of the great traits of folks at Dell. We have always cared deeply about our customers. With the blogosphere, it gets constantly reinforced to us how important it is to act quickly and accurately to share thoughts, solve problems and provide innovative solutions.

10. What advice do you have for other public sector companies considering social media strategies?

Just do it.  And we have great technology to make it happen. :)

Actually, we do.  And we often share our learning with our commercial customers.

I think a strong company is one that constantly learns.  One of the best ways to constantly learn is to really listen to customers. The rapidly changing tech landscape makes it efficient and easier than ever before to listen, learn and connect with customers.  The emergence of social media is a tremendous opportunity to bring the "outside" in to your company.

SAP Global Survey: Shashi Bellamkonda of Network Solutions

 

Using a personal blog to calm angry customers.

       [Shashi Bellamkonda of Network Solutions. Photo by schmoozing.]

I first met Shashi Bellamkonda through Twitter. In the virtual neighborhood where I hang out, everyone knows him as ShashiB and he is highly regarded. Shashi is a prolific Tweeter, generous with useful information. He also maintains three personal blogs and is on Linked in as well as Flickr.

The fact that I knew him for several weeks, or perhaps months, before I discovered that he worked for Network Solutions and would be setting up that company's first official blog. It's relevant because people who know Shashi trust him and when a firestorm hit Network Solutions, he used his personal blog to let his employer join a conversation and by so doing seems to have changed that conversation at least to some degree.

The issue was something called "front running." It has nothing to do with presidential politics. In domain registration, opportunists try to see what domains people are looking up, and then buy them quickly so that they can charge people and businesses who actually intend to use them, a highly inflated price. Global Neighbourhoods, for example, used to be a dot com site. It became a dot net site when I let it expire for a period of six hours. The Front Runner wh grabbed it anted $5K.

Just as Shashi started a new position as the first-ever Network Solutions social media person, Network Solutions took action in the area of front running. They said they were holding domain names for three days to protect users from front runners. Users said they had become front runners themselves, forcing users to buy a name from them rather than a less pricey competitor.

Shashi's first days as the Network Solutions blogger were filled with turmoil, shouting and accusations. They are not yet resolved. But the shouting has subsided. I'll let the Q&A pick up the story from there.


1. Can you give me a general picture of Network Solutions and social media? How many bloggers are there identified as Network Solutions? Are employees encouraged to participate in social media? Is there any corporate policy or strategy related to social media?

The very fact that Network Solutions realized that they need a social media person is a positive step toward joining the conversation. We got over the first milestone--getting people inside the company to understand the challenges and the power of social media presence. I have been part of discussions to open new ways for customer communication (blogs, forums).

We may be going slowly but we are trying and do it right.

Network Solutions (NetSol) employee advocates have long advocated we set up a social media “listening post.” By creating my position as the NetSol social media person we have taken a huge step. It did take a lot of pushing and convincing for everyone to be on the same page and may still require more pushing. But I don’t think that is uncommon in established companies.

Folks at Network Solutions have been reading blogs since the beginning and are aware of the best practices advocated by blogs and books on social media. I say this because being a technology company many employees engage in social media at personal level.  A lot of people I know read new media sites like Digg, TechCrunch, Techmeme, Slashdot, etc. avidly. We had to get everyone on the same page at all levels. I have read “Naked Conversations” and particularly liked the small business success examples you have in the book and quoted them to people.

We have been using Communispace as a social media tool for a few years and now we're taking steps in mainstream social media.  In a very small way, I experimented using social media to spread the word about a product that I managed called BuildMyMobi. I wanted to let people know that it was an easy to use tool to create a website for mobile phones. I joined conversations in blogs and forums where the people might be looking for such tools. We asked people to try the product. This helped us understand that with the right approach social media can add a new dimension to our efforts to reach customers.

I am thrilled that I moved to this new social media position and I think Network Solutions has gained as well. They needed a person already connected in social media and I was a perfect fit. 

To have some fun, I started a contest inside Network Solutions to pick a title for my new post and got about 34 entries. My favorite so far is “Social Media Swami”!

In a nutshell, the company has a blogging policy which is more of a common sense approach. The policy is for people to be conscious of confidentiality of information and to ensure there is no conflict with their work. Basically, it says be smart when you blog. There are some avid bloggers and most bloggers I know at work have personal blogs.

 

2. How long have you been at Network Solutions? What was your job before you became the company's primary blogger? What percentage of your time is involved in social media for your employer?


In 2001, I came in on the ground level, taking tech support calls. I have fond memories of talking with customers. Some conversations are etched in memory - people setting up websites to propose to their Fiancée or to commemorate the experience of having a baby. O once talked with a Bruce Lee fan who took me way beyond my shift .The customer was so concerned that the website had to look right. I stayed on the phone with him until we got it right.

My opportunity really came when Network Solutions introduced hosting. I could leverage the experience I had gained  at home in my basement, dallying with hosting and programming. I worked hard and learned quickly. This gave me  a chance to move up and change workgroups.

I am proud that my dream is coming true not just at Network Solutions. I believe in the American dream--that hard work and perseverance get rewarded.

I progressed from customer service management to marketing and then on to product management.  Before I moved to my new social media position I managed a product that I love – an easy to use website builder that I supported when I first joined Network Solutions.

I am now devoted exclusively to social media, not just for Network Solutions but because it has become my passion to be involved  in the DC social media community. I love blogging and maintain three personal Blogs along with enjoying Twitter. I am currently brain-storming new ideas and hope to create a good social media strategy for Network Solutions to reach the small business. We will learn as we go and I am confident that I will get a lot of help from blogosphere friends. We want to do it right.


3.  Last month, you got to experience the thrill of trial by fire over the issue of "front running," or grabbing the registration of an available website name for the purpose of reselling it . Network Solutions said it was reserving site names for customers. What was/is NetSol's thinking on this?

“Trial by Fire” is certainly right! In a way, I am happy that I started with a challenge. Having bulldozed myself into the position, this was the first opportunity to prove that there was a conversation about us in which we were not participating.

I've always advised people to buy the domain name immediately after finding it. So have other bloggers. Network Solutions decided to reserve domains in an effort to prevent front runners from scamming our customers. We were concerned with customer complaints that they search for a domain and find it has been registered by someone else especially when the chances of a coincidence are remote. We have taken it up with ICANN in the past.

In retrospect, we might have avoided such a furor if we had added more notification on the website and provided a better explanation to our users on this measure at the very beginning.


4. There were at least 200 negative blog posts. Your blog received scores of negative comments, some of them pretty ribald. What was your personal response to getting called so many insulting names? How did upper management respond?
    
I have been mentored well by the Blogging community. I ignored the insults and concentrated on the constructive feedback. I made sure the user's main complaints were discussed internally at a senior level.

Network Solutions listened and made changes quickly.

I posted these changes to the forums and blogs where the suggestions were posted. This is good for the community since the constructive criticism reached the highest levels of the company. Companies should be open additional channels like this for feedback.

Some of the principles of the Social media that I learned from the community helped me.

• Listen and participate.
• Help give your company a human face.
• When companies listen then the conversation changes dramatically. In this case, it changed from criticism to suggestions on how to make it better.
• Blogging will expose you. You must expect to deal with criticism.
• I will make mistakes but I have the conviction to pick myself up, dust off the mud and carry on with a smile. Everyone says my Twitter picture makes me look very optimistic and I am that way.

5.  Did anyone advocate taking the strongest comments down? Who decided to keep them up and why?

Nobody ever suggested taking down the comments. I don't moderate my personal blog posts, except in once where I stated that clearly.  I think the general feeling was that we were getting some good suggestions from the comments on the different blogs including mine. Many people supported my new role. I have been in the company for a long time and have a lot of friends and I had people stopping me in the corridors and asking me to hang in there.

Using my personal blog was my decision to be able to reach out quickly to people asking me questions on Twitter and other forums. In the end it achieved the objective for Network Solutions and the community. Bloggers, on the other hand, found out that someone was there in Network Solutions to take their voice to the highest levels.


6. Nasty language aside, there seem to be a lot of people who don't trust the Network Solutions front running policy. They suggested more user-friendly remedies to your locking the URL for several days. Are you considering changing your policy? Why or why not?

In my experience, Network Solutions has always worked on making the customer experience better. I know we are looking at making changes like the ability to reserve the name for the original searcher. This could form part of a future enhancement.
On a side note, I learned from blogs and comments that even some of our most vehement critics agreed that our "Who is" search and interface was more intuitive than others.

Our public position stated by Champ Mitchell is “A $0.25 non-refundable domain name registration fee would probably be enough to make domain tasting or front running unprofitable”. The good news is that ICANN just proposed a resolution to charge a 20 cent fee on domains held during the grace period.  Network Solutions will support this resolution and will stop our current practices as soon as that is implemented. ( There is a story in the Washington Post that has more info .


7. What has Network Solutions learned from this experience specific to url-locking and front running?
   
We definitely learned that as domain name pioneers, Network Solutions is held to higher standards. That’s a challenge the company accepts. The key here is that we listened to the community and customers and made the changes even if the majority of the detractors publicly stated that they just used our "WhoIs" search without any intention of registering the domain with us.

This reminds me of a Wharton classroom discussion about branding a few years back. We compared food & grocery stores like Giant and Safeway vs. food specialties like Trader Joe's. The customer’s perception is that the older and more established brands should always have milk and God forbid them if they run out. But if Trader Joe's were to run out of milk, customers are likely to just shrug and say they came at the wrong time. Network Solutions is in the same position in Domaines as Safeway is in groceries.


8. How do you think social media has impacted your corporate reputation?  Do you think social media impacts corporate accountability? How so or not so?

Prior to my position being created the conversation on Network Solutions was being held in social media channels and we were not part of it. A lot of employees used to read blogs and forums and pass around the information internally. Network Solutions may have responded on an ad hoc basis, but there wasn’t a formal process to respond. Now, we try to respond to the discussion in the social media, even if it is among domain holders who are typically not our customers.

Network Solutions has reinvented itself to focus in on providing tools to help small businesses succeed online- ImageCafé – the product that I managed was one of them (Publish a website easily with absolutely no tech knowledge.). Change within a large company takes time and is an evolving process.

As I said, we are already a changed company yet at every meet up I go to I am asked questions about Network Solutions and domain names. I use the opportunity to say that that’s only part of our business. Some people in the community seem to remember us for old times when we were a registrar and the registry. We have to keep engaging in the conversation with our customers and the community to nurture a relationship that helps Network Solutions and our customers work together better.

Network Solutions has good customer service and customers come for complete online small business solutions. The perception of Network Solutions as a domain name company in my opinion is yesterday.

I have a lot of aspirations on how my position will help our customers and the company and I am confident the dream will come true of making Network Solutions a social media success.


9. Looking forward, how do you think social media will change Network Solutions internally and in the marketplace?

The day when a company could communicate hiding behind walls and lobbing stuff over the wall to customers is over. My new position at Network Solutions will work toward empowering our customers to carry on conversations using social media. Companies always want to listen to their customers and are accountable to their customers.

I think about 40% of Network Solutions' business is from word of mouth referrals so we are very conscious of its power. As small businesses embrace social media, word of mouth will take a different incarnation. Social media now opens yet another channel for this communication.

Social Media is also the new citizen journalism. Some companies are starting to realize it and embrace it. We are among them.  As a Social Media person, I have to be the voice of the customer and the community within Network Solutions--sort of like a Ombudsman.

Seth Godin wrote t hatcustomers are now unionizing themselves through the social media. This is a good thing. Social media cuts down the hierarchy that existed in traditional forms of communication between companies and customers.

There are proven cases of companies where engaging in social media has proven successful in changing brand perception. We may be early. Small business is only now starting to engage.

I have a lot of work cut out for me. I have to do my duty to both Network Solutions and to the community. I will be fair and ensure a conversation where both sides are heard. If I am considered a mere mouthpiece of the corporation I will have lost my credibility. A  DC blogger, Andrew Wright says it well on his blog in reference to my position.

SAP Global Survey: Montreal's Michel LeBlanc

    

Candor on Montreal Culture and Radical Transparency   

 

                           [Michel LeBlanc File Photo.]

Michel LeBlanc is the most prominent French-Language blogger in Quebec Province, and probably all Canada's most popular French language business blogger. I invited him to participate in my SAP Global Survey of Social Media's Impact on Business and Culture because language is a continuously reemerging issue, and in North America, that triangulates to Montreal, our most bilingual city, and where there is a history of strain over language and culture.

But in speaking with Michel, I was surprised to discover that his personal life had traversed onto a significantly more controversial issue than just language. In so doing, this interview provides the best example so far of the benefits and influence of what he calls, "radical transparency."

A respected Internet enterprise consultant, Michel has impressive educational credentials. He holds an M.Sc. in eCommerce from HEC Montreal/U, an interdisciplinary program involving Law School, Computer School and HEC, Quebec's premier business school. He specialized in web management and conducted extensive research in Web marketing. He published extensively related to that.

His masters research was published at the Center for Interuniversity Research (CIRANO) on analysis of the organization which is usually only for PhD candidates. In connection with that degree, he presented his first of many keynotes on the impact of web services on businesses.

After graduating, he founded Adviso inc., Canada's first French-language Internet business consulting service, which he sold in 2005. More recently, he started Analyweb. Despite the corporate name, Analyweb is simply Michel Leblanc.  He works alone as a consultant, speaker and writer on Web marketing, web strategies and the use of innovative technologies in business settings. His clients are mostly North American and French blue chips, but he also works with small and medium enterprises that have a strong Web presence.

Here are his answers to my questions. I have taken some liberties, by inserting some of his comments from subsequent email:

1. Montreal is considered the most bi-lingual major City in North America. What percentage of Montreal speaks English and what percentage speaks French?  What percentage of Montreal is bilingual?

I do not have official statistics, but I estimate Montreal is 20% unilingual English; 80% French; and 40% bilingual. The French, of course, are a minority in our country and on our continent. Sometimes, the Anglos are so powerful that we feel we are a minority event in Montreal. Anyhow, we are submerged by Anglo culture and media on a regular basis.

2. Culturally, how much do the French and English speaking populations mix together? Would you say Montreal is a culturally integrated or separated society?  Is their much prejudice between the two cultures?

Historically Montreal is divided in two at Saint Laurent Blvd. West of it is English and East of it is French. Both cultures connect and mix on the boulevard.

There is still some prejudice and misunderstanding between French and Anglos. There is still a separatist movement in Quebec Province, but the clashes are coming mostly from outside Montreal and are rhetorical rather than actual physical confrontations.

3. When I met you a year ago at a wonderful blogger dinner there were more than 30 bloggers in the room, about half French speaking. I was later told that this was the first time French and English language bloggers had a dinner together. Have their been more in the last year?  Why or why not?

The dinner where you came is called Yulbiz and it is a meeting of business people interested in technologies such as blogs, and bloggers who are interested in business. This concept has been exported to other places and is now in five countries. I started it nearly two years ago.

Occasionally, English and French speaking bloggers get together and at another event called Yulblog (for any type of bloggers). Both communities mix well. But at Yulbiz, we still have problems attracting the core of English-speaking business bloggers. They started their own thing, the Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfasts. Both communities interact at events such as basecamp, casecamp or facebookcamp. But those events were started in the English world first and it is the French who joined in rather than the opposite.

 

 

4. Tell me about business. Do the French and English-speaking communities conduct business together? what language is used?

 

French and English business people are working together but it is always in English. I presume it would be the same scenario as with the Spanish speaking community in California. Minorities are the one that have to adapt.

 

5. Let's talk about you.  What social media tools do you use? Are they for business for personal use?

My blog really changed my business.

Right now, more than half my business has come directly from my blog and the other half comes from the perceived notion that I am "the" expert. My blog has attracted a lot of media attention. I am regularly asked as an expert guest by media that wants to discuss e-economy, the web in business context and innovation. This contributes to my "aura" of being an expert and helps me sell speaking engagements that again, brings water to the mill.

So it is all interconnected. I also am using LinkedIn to gather positive feedback from client and I use Facebook to get to know my clients on a more personal level.


6. How has social media changed your personal reputation?

 

I recently used my blog to reveal a condition from which I am suffering. I have Gender Identity Dysphoria and the only way to cure myself, is to become a woman. I started hormone therapy two months age and will change everything else in the following months.

Since I told my readers (Michel's English translation) customers and friends, I have received a wave of support like you could not believe. I have retained all my customers and even gained new ones because of the perceived truthfulness and courage they saw in my disclosure (In fact, it was rather survival and the belief in radical transparency on my part, but I am very happy about how it has come out). I also created a Myspace Account under a pseudonym where I am connected to two hundred transsexuals worldwide and it is, in fact, my personal virtual support network.

7. You must have had a great deal of faith in your readers and your clients to make that post.

It is a bit more complicated than that. I did not have faith in my readership support. As a matter of fact I was flabbergasted by it. I did it more out of conviction and because I did not want to lie about my physical changes than anything else.

 

8. Let's return to the issues of language and culture. You blog in French and you don't translate, although you speak English extremely well. Why do you not post in two languages the way Loic Le Meur does it?

 

It is a matter of time and resources. Loïc does not blog alone. His wife is by his side and he has a team that works with him. In fact, I also have an English blog www.web-marketing-frog.blogspot.com, but I do not maintain it anymore, except for the recent translation. Perhaps that will motivate me to return to it when I have more resources.

I am proud of my French origins and I know I can be of great help to my fellow French-speaking readers as in English, I would be lost in the sea of the Web and there are far more pertinent resources in English than there are in French.

9. What impact do you think social media has had on Canadians in business? How do you see that changing?

Facebook has been widely adopted by Canadians but business people are still scared of it. Several businesses are trying to firewall it and they do not see the potential benefit of knowing your business contacts on a more personal level. Although personal blogs have a very long history in Canada, business blogs are still just emerging.

In several ways, Canadians are not that innovative on the online scene (except for developers, Facebook is a Canadian product. So is Blackberry). My explanation for it is that while France was still playing with Minitel, Canadians were investing in mainframes and heavy business applications.

Then France caught up with the Web and started with a clean slate. Here, the traditional integrators are very powerful and are still "the" reference for major clients. Furthermore, they are still thinking of leveraging their old investments (in the wrong way with old school integration) rather than trying to see what else they could be doing. I wrote 5 years ago about how Web Services could change the way we integrate business applications and how much money it could save and five years later, I could count on one hand, the projects that are being developed.

 

 

SAP Global Survey: Lionbridge's Aaron Dun

Resolving the problems of Translation

[Lily & Aaron Dun outside Fenway Park, one of America's most hallowed institutions]

My interim report on the SAP Survey of Social Media's Impact on Culture and Business noted that language was among the most vexing problems toward turning the vision of an online world where all people in all places could speak each other into a reality. Yet every day, I see and hear reports of how little baby steps are being taken in that direction.

Still, I wonder how many little baby steps are needed.  To better understand the state of translation technologies, I turned to Aaron Dun, VP Marketing at Lionbridge Technologies, the world leader in online translation technologies.

1. There's a general perception that most translation software sucks. Why it is so hard to make it accurate?  Why would you say Lionbridge's software is more reliable than say, Babblefish or Google Translate?

Let me make a very important clarification. What you are referring to as translation software is actually machine translation (MT) software.  Generally, MT quality is not something you would use as a finished product in a true business setting.  There are a few examples where MT has been used practically and effectively, but those are usually in combination with a human post-editing process.  We could spend our entire dialog on MT strategies, but it would be a deeply technical discussion, perhaps better reserved for another day.

The majority of Lionbridge’s work is based on human translation services that we support with MT, as well as other technologies to deliver a high quality end product.  Our Freeway™ online language management platform helps companies efficiently manage the translation process—getting us content easily, tracking it as it moves through the translation process, and then getting it back into their systems for publishing.

2. How does your system work and what are it's benefits?

In its simplest form, clients send us files of any type in one language, and we send them back 5, 20, 40, 100+ language versions in the same format.

Freeway is effective for our customers for three key reasons:

    (1) It’s free. Our customers don't have to invest several hundred thousand dollars in software licenses.

    (2) It’s fast.  We automate the process of handing content off and streamline how clients get us the files, cutting days or weeks out of the process.  Since it’s all online, it’s fast to set up.

    (3) It’s flexible.  We don’t require our clients to rearchitect their workflow to fit our needs. We can work with just about any data type or content management system (CMS).

These three attributes give our clients the operational agility to meet global objectives.

3. Lionbridge has been around a long time. It only recently turned attention to social media companies. Was this a strategic decision or did an opportunity just pop up? Can you tell me how important social media is to Lionbridge moving forward?

The phenomenon of social media is a relatively recent development and we were pretty early into it.  As the largest translation services provider, our clients bring us complex challenge and social media is no different. We work with nearly every major social networking community to assist them with localizations.

4. Is the technology you use for social media the same or different from Freeway, your corporate translation platform? What are the technology challenges you face in social media platforms that are different than what you face with corporate customers?

Freeway is our central platform, so we use it across our business.  Social media platforms have two main challenges. First they are highly complex web sites.  But in that way, they are no different from eBay or Expedia, two of our clients

The second challenge centers on what to do with all of that user-generated content (UGC). Should it be translated? Are truly personal connections happening cross-culturally in ways that would require translation?  For example, if I post on my friend’s page in German, ostensibly that friend also speaks German.  Where this issue is starting to play out more urgently is in the retail sector where it is conceivable that a German review of a camera might be relevant to someone shopping in the US.

Once the need for translated UGC is firmly established, the “how” gets a bit tricky. Many people think that some sort of MT tool will be the answer; but your own personal experience is pretty indicative of the state of the technology today. MT generally works best in a structured environment where content is uniform and well-defined. That is, of course, the complete opposite of the typical content posted online by users.

At the same time, there is a general trend toward acceptance of less-than-perfect content. We are already sensitized to very casual conversations conducted over IM or through text messages. As a result, we do expect that a higher tolerance for relatively lower quality MT output is emerging in some well-defined settings.

Taken together, we expect a hybrid solution will evolve where there are levels of content on these sites, and levels of translation quality that match those levels, supported by an easy escalation path. So, perhaps the site structure will be professionally translated, the dynamic content will be translated by the community, and UGC will be translated on-demand through MT, or perhaps MT aided by translation memories.

5. You have deals with Hi5, MySpace, LiveMocha and Habbo. Can you give me a brief capsule of what Lionbridge does for each?

Generally, we help these companies localize the framework of the platform to push deeper into the global community.  Jupiter Research just put out a report on Web Globalization, and one of the key graphics in it centers on where the world’s online population can be found. Clearly, China and other countries and languages are reducing English’s Web prominence.  We are helping the communities push further into these world geographies.

In some cases, we are beginning to explore the UGC question and thinking deeply about the right model for this translation process. In other cases, not yet public, we are exploring ways to help social media companies engage their communities to participate in the translation process.

6. What are the particular challenges of social media translation technology?

The sites themselves are not terribly difficult. It’s the distributed nature of the content that is challenging. I don’t mean to oversimplify the problem, because the complexity of these sites is daunting. We just we have so much experience with them, we are well-versed in the challenges they present. In all cases, you need to deal with text expansion and shrinkage for different languages, and of course, right-to-left languages present different challenges, among many other specific web globalization challenges.

But with social media, you have dynamic content being developed across the platform and posted with dizzying speed. This often changes the dynamics of the pages themselves and impacts how the pages are set up, which impacts the localization process.

In addition, the sites tend to be updating and shifting structures rapidly. If the changes are developed with localization in mind, than these can be straightforward to manage, but if they are not, it can become very complex.

7. You use a human element in your service. How does this work in dynamic environments like MySpace?

While we use MT elements, nearly all of our projects are executed by professional translators. That means we engage a group of translators for a project based on their skills and experience. For ongoing engagements with social media clients, we may use the same group for consistency of tone and expertise.

We have a carefully culled “army” of around 25,000 translators in well over 100 languages. Last year, our army translated content into 145 languages.  We are constantly evaluating their performance and expertise to make sure we have a high-quality pool from which to draw for any given project.

8. MySpace has announced a comeback and one of it's first forays is a brave one, and that is a Portuguese language version which will be heavily marketed in Brazil, where the conventional wisdom is that Google Orkut owns the social network. Does Lionbridge contribute something to the new MySpace that you think will give it a fighting chance in Brazil?

I am amused by your notion of MySpace making a comeback. Did they ever leave?  Certainly Facebook has captured a great deal of buzz recently, but with 105 million unique global visitors in December 2007 (ComScore), I don’t think MySpace is going anywhere anytime soon.

I think the success of MySpace in Brazil will be much more determined by the power of what they have to provide to the Brazilians and how that resonates with the people. Certainly, the quality of the translation we provide is a key component of that experience, but these sites are so experiential. It’s hard to judge where or why one will be successful over another.

9.  Do you see a day when all people can talk to all people over the Internet? How far away is that day? What are the most formidable barriers?

Is the Internet the great Rosetta Stone?

I don’t think I am qualified to really address that question.  That gets more to the heart of culture and cultural difference than anything else.  Certainly, the web has grown up as an English-led experience, but that is changing rapidly. I suppose it’s possible to envision a day where like-minded individuals can congregate around a topic or a concept or an ideal online—regardless of language—but that day doesn’t seem near to me.

If anything, I think we might be going the other way where users retrench a little bit as more content is made available to them in their own language. But that should be relatively short lived, as the power of the collective global experience continues to flourish.

10. There are cases of localized social media companies that have over 90% market share. This sounds great except they have nowhere to grow. How could translation software solve this problem?

90% share of what I would have to ask?  We translated content for our clients into 145 languages last year and didn’t come anywhere close to covering 100% of the Worlds population.  If the World’s population is currently over 6.5 Billion people, and some 1.2 billion of those are online, these sites have a long way to go to reach saturation globally.

And that is really the key distinction.  Clearly, this is a global phenomenon.  If these sites can continue to paint a compelling value proposition for consumers around the world, and remain adept at tapping into the inherent need of people to connect with each other, then that 1.2 billion online (today) is their total market opportunity.  They won’t get there in English alone.

11. I could not help but notice the Lionbridge and its representatives do not seem to participate in social media--no blogs, picture; no Facebook group or Twitter account. Not even MySpace or Hi5, your customers. Why is this? Does Lionbridge use social media behind the firewall for either employee collaboration or to work with Content Management System partners? Does Lionbridge plan to join the conversation in the future?

While not necessarily widely visible, we are doing many, many things in the medium as we define our approach.

We have quietly launched our company blog in December. Several employees have personal blogs where they discuss technology issues relevant to their work, or their interests.  Our interpreter recruiting team in Washington DC is actively using Facebook to recruit people who speak a number of different languages.  This is a perfect medium to find folks in, or just out of college, who may be native speakers of the languages we are trying to source, and are currently living in the US.

We are hard at work in other key networks to understand how to use the medium to meet our objectives, but it would be premature to disclose too many details on our plans.  We are rapidly identifying areas where we can use the Social Media to impact our business. Suffice to say, we are active, if not entirely visible.

The reality of these communities is that they are not terribly relevant as a channel for someone marketing a B-to-B service…yet.  The vast majority of our customers are just plain not present in these communities today.

12. Additional comments?

I would just say this is an amazing time to be considering global issues. With the weakness of the dollar and the slowing US economy, clearly companies are going to be talking more about their geo-diversification as a hedge against the US economy.

What we are already seeing is major US companies starting to disclose their percentages of global revenue and it’s staggering.  This isn’t that it’s new revenue, it’s just the level of reporting is much clearer.  We have inherently known much of this through our direct work in getting these companies to global markets, but to see publicly how that work is paying off in revenue is quite impressive.

The notion of a truly global economy has clearly arrived.

SAP Global Survey: KD Paine

Measuring conversation is Difficult;
a talk with KD is Priceless

        [KDPaine with admirer at Measurement Summit. File Photo]

In the interest of transparency I need to tell you that KD Paine is my friend. She has been my friend for a very long time. We have both hung out in the tech-journalism-marketing-consulting communities for several decades. We both recall when once-weekly tabloids were fast enough and the state of personal communications art was the FAX machine.

I have always admired KD for her temerity, her ability to pick herself up, dust herself off and just get on with life, even when it deals you a blow. She is a breast cancer survivor who started running marathons to raise money to defeat the beast. When her 100-year-old family farmhouse burned down on a cold New Hampshire night, she built a new one that was true to the spirit of the cinders that had housed her parents and grandparents but embraced the comforts of modern times, including a kitchen that can easily feed 100 people, which happens with regularity. When I spoke at the Measurement Summit that she founded, my wife and I were guests in her home. 

She would have none of our talk about "Oh, we'll-just-get-a-hotel room." She gave us a tour of her amazing acreage and I discovered it really was a farm.  She showed us her bulldozer, the cellar where she preserves her jellied fruit  and the river house, where she wrote her latest book, "Measuring Public Relationships" and has already started on another.

This makes it difficult for me to formally interview KD. As the picture above shows, our relationship is up close and personal, but the issue of measurement is among the most complex flex points of social media and business right now. KD is the undisputed expert on this topic, and to NOT interview KD Paine because I know her too well, would be to a disservice to the readers of this survey.

And now, I give you KD Paine.

1. You have been called the Measurement Queen. Just what is that you measure and for whom do you do the measuring?

First of all, I prefer Goddess to Queen, since Queen implies a command and control society  and Goddesses are typically credited with giving birth to belief systems and are more inspirational.  Besides, there really is a Goddess of all things Measurement named Seshat.

What do we measure?

We measure the impact that media has on the reputation, positioning, messaging, relationships and business interests of our clients. By media we mean everything from Fortune to Salon to Global Neighbourhoods to BizRate to YouTube and Facebook. Typically we look at competitors or peer organizations so the clients understand the relative importance of that impact.

About half our clients are nonprofit and government organizations such as the ASPCA , the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, Georgia Tech and Bonneville Power. The other half are high tech, business to business and business to consumer companies like Facebook, Epson, Raytheon and Georgia Pacific. Our clients typically have titles like VP of Communications, VP of External Affairs, VP of Public or Media Relations.

2.  Measurement is one of the enterprise flex point issues when it comes to social media these days. Do you get asked about such issues as the ROI of a blog? How do you answer that question?

Yes, we get asked that all the time. The problem is that the “R” of ROI really depends on the organization.  For the ASPCA the ROI can be measured in how many new members are engaged in the organization because of the blog, and ultimately the “R” is the number of new members as well as the amount of new contributions.

For Ingres or SAS, they may or may not be able to draw a straight line from their blog to the sale of a $100,000 software system, but  they can certainly track the proliferation of ideas and concepts from the blog into social media and perhaps into mainstream media or directly to customers who subscribe to the blog.

For high tech companies and advocacy groups, I’d argue that the ROI doesn’t matter. Not having a conversation with your customers is no longer an option. It’s like an email or the fax machine. At some point you realize you no longer care about the ROI, you simply can’t do business without it.

For an internal blog the “R” might be lower recruitment costs or reduced turnover or higher morale. It depends on the purpose or goal of the blog. The reality, in far too many cases, is that the reason the organization started the blog was because the CEO or a board member said they had to do it. There are no clear objectives, so the demand to  measure ROI becomes a political football tossed back and forth between proponents of social media and the old-line command and control types that once said the internet was a fad that would quickly pass.

3. Media is all about the conversation, which I imagine makes it more difficult to measure than say, a press release. How do you measure social media?

You know the old adage “Measure twice, cut once?”  I think today you have to listen a lot, and measure once. It’s all about listening to what your constituencies have to say.

If you video taped a real conversation, you’d capture body language, you’d know who the players were talking to, and who they were going to talk to next. Computers are only beginning to do that. They can count the people in the room, but they have no way of knowing what those people are going to do next. What is a complete waste of time are those organizations that are still counting eyeballs and using text mining to just measure the words used.   

To evaluate social media conversations, you listen. You hear the tone. You note what subjects are being discussed, what words are used, what battles are being fought,  who is saying what to whom. The only thing you’re missing is the  body language, and the social media equivalent of body language is the avatar or photos you use to identify yourself.

What is most interesting to me is that measuring social media draws on research methodologies that are decades old. Basic sociological and psychological research techniques that have been around for decades are being dusted off and put to work measuring social media.

Jim and Laurie Grunig defined how you measure relationships a decade ago. It’s just been easier to measure column inches and impressions than to actually figure out what people think about you as a result of your actions and words. However today, there are no “column inches and impressions” for social media. There are just conversations and relationships. So we are going back to measuring people rather than ink and bits and bytes.

What technology has brought us is the ability to track not just this conversation, but the next conversation and the next. Social mapping systems like BuzzLogic enable you to follow the conversation wherever it goes. That’s the really exciting piece of measuring social media. We’ve been able to evaluate one conversation (think of focus groups) but we’ve never had the tools to be able to track what happens after the participants leave the room. Now we have that technology. It used to be that we measured reach and frequency. We are still measuring frequency, but social network mapping is the new reach.

The biggest problem are all those people out there that are trying to measure social media with tools that were invented in the 1940s to measure TV – panels and eyeball counting mechanisms that are meaningless to today’s consumer. 

4. Can you give me a good case study of how you've helped a company evaluate a social media program?

Before there was social media, there was consumer generated media and before that there were newsgroups. We began doing competitive analysis in newsgroups for a leading printer manufacturer (not HP) back in 1995.

At the time, we learned that even though the client was worried about negative newsgroup discussion winding up in mainstream media, the information was, in fact, flowing the other way. After PR launched a product, customers were picking it up and discussing it in newsgroups about two weeks later. This allowed them to determine which messages were actually being heard by their customers. A decade later, our measurement program for them now includes blogs, structured review sites like Amazon as well as traditional media and  online sites like Engadget.

We compare the impact that all these forms of outreach have on purchase patterns and what we’re learning is that the greatest influence comes from customers talking to other potential customers in Amazon and BizRate reviews.

We also do extensive research into the impact of social media for Georgia Tech. We look at the discussion about Georgia Tech as well as nearly a dozen other major research universities and determine what’s being discussed, and more importantly, what’s being shared. We look at what Georgia Tech bloggers are saying and what others are saying about Georgia Tech. We also examine the degree to which people are bookmarking and sharing information, so we can identify hot button areas that lend themselves to advancing Georgia Tech’s reputation. Ultimately we’ll be  looking at the impact that it all has on applications and requests for information.

For the ASPCA we measure traditional as well as social media and analyze it to determine which topics and which media are having the greatest impact on memberships and donations.

For a major computer manufacturer we did a social media analysis of their bloggers vs. the competitor’s bloggers. What we found was that their bloggers weren’t blogging as frequently as the competition, nor were people commenting as often on their blogs. So they revamped their internal blogging policy as a result.

5. How would you assess the current crop of social media tools. What do you recommend for an individual to use? Is there a different set of tools for an enterprise? How do you see them evolving?

We’ve gotten very good at teaching computers to understand words, the problems is that they don’t understand the nuances of conversations. Computers still can’t tell the difference between sarcasm and irony. And throw in slang and you have an even bigger problem. So computers are good at categorizing conversations as to what they are primarily about, or where they’re appearing, but as to the real impact of the conversation, it still needs a human.

Personally, I use Google Analytics to track the success of my own blog and IceRocket and Sphere to see how well I’m getting my messages out there.  We use Compete to determine “reach” Then I put the results into our own DIY Dashboard so I can keep track of trends over time. For my clients we use a variety of capture tools like Critical Mention, Cyberalert and BuzzLogic. depending on the nature  and market that the client is trying to measure.

Far more important is the tool that you use to measure relationships. The standard methodology is to present your stakeholders with a series of statements and ask them to what degree they agree or disagree.

This can be accomplished via free resources like SurveyMoney and Zoomerang or even by phone. In an enterprise where you’ve got a significant number of different elements to track and run correlations, you really need some sort of sophisticated database tools like SPSS or SAS. For an enterprise to truly measure its reputation in social media you need a solid mix of human analysts and interpretation with very sophisticated tools. Facebook, HP  and Microsoft did extensive research before selecting measurement tools and all three  insisted on human analysts. So I ask you if some of the leading players in technology don’t trust computers, why should you?

6. Why do you think an enterprise should allow employees to blog or engage in social networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook?

Because it will make them smarter and it increases social capital. Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone credited World War II and the draft for boosting social capital by forcing people to interact outside of their comfort zone.  Facebook and Twitter are today’s version of the draft and life in the trenches. They enable you to see and hear different points of view and perspectives from around the world. It brings you different perspectives – instantly. Besides in Facebook, the ability to ask questions and share ideas is a great way to listen to your customers.

7.  I've written that blogging helps companies get closer to customers. How do you measure something like that? 

Don’t ask me, ask your customers.

Do a survey and ask them how they feel about your brand or organization. Ask them whether they agree or disagree with a statement like “This is an organization that listens to people like me” or “this is an organization that likes to throw its weight around." Tally up the answers and you get a measure of the health of your relationships. Ultimately, do they feel closer or more alienated? You’ll only know if you ask.

8. Corporate reputation often comes up as one of the issues related to social media and the enterprise. How do you see social media impacting an enterprise that engages in it?

   

If you accept the premise that engaging in social media enables you to listen more closely to your customers, then it can only improve your relationships and ultimately your reputation. Blogging and social media imply, assuming you do it right, and that you are open and willing to listen. If society believes that you are open and transparent and authentic, research shows that more people will trust you. While trust is only one component of a reputation, I would argue it is one of the most important. Secondarily, depending on what the enterprise is blogging about, social media can help convey other reputation attributes like innovation, good corporate citizenship and community concern.

9. How do you think social media impacts brand?

That depends on what you’re trying to convey with your brand and how you implement your social media strategy.  Does being in SecondLife or on Facebook help Coca Cola’s brand?  Yes, it conveys that they’re hip and cool. Do they sell more Coke because of it? Probably not, but simply being there says something about their brand. Did being first in Social Media  help John Edward’s brand as the first candidate to Twitter? It might have had he actually been doing it, and not faking it. But because it became quickly apparent that it was Joe Trippi twittering and hired bloggers blogging for him, people stopped caring.

It also depends on who your customers are. If your customers are non-techie types raised in the 50s and 60s, social media will have a lot less impact than if your customers are Gen Y-ers.  Take a company like Lockheed Martin or Northrup Grumman. It seems inconceivable that they’d blog, since arms dealers probably don’t do a lot with social media. But if they’re trying to hire the best and brightest of today’s college students, participating in social media would do wonders for their brand.

10 Additional comments.

Measuring social media all comes down to measuring relationships. There are far too many media options and far too many messages to try to track what’s being sent out there. If people instead focused on what’s being received, and the impact that has on their constituencies, they’d know a lot more.

--
Shel Israel
writer. consultant. nice guy.
http://globalneighbourhoods.net
650 430 4042

Jennifer Jones Interviews me on Marketing Voices

This is the 2nd time I recently pointed to an interview with me and I promise not to make a habot of it, but I think Podtech's Jennifer Jones did a great job of asking me about the finding of the SAP Global Report on her Marketing Voices program. I think Jen is the Internet's answer to Barbara Walthers.  She has a soft style that just makes you want to talk with her.

The interview took place nearly two months ago before the SAP Report was released. It's now of course been published here in the SAP Report category, if you want to read the 8400 word version instead of Jen's pleasant 12 minutes.

SAP Global Survey: Like.com's Munjal Shah

[Munjal Shah, CEO of Like.com Photo by Miss Rogue (Tara Hunt)]

[NOTE: I have been retained by SAP to conduct a survey of people all over the world on the issues of social media and it's impact on culture and business. This is the 52nd interview in the ongoing series since it began last June.You can review earlier reports here, by going to the SAP Research Report category]

Munjal Shah was my first client after Naked Conversations was completed. My job was to help him get ready to launch his company Riya at the Feb 2006 DEMO conference, where the company would receive a DEMOGod Award. Riya, at the time would become among the most blog-covered startups of all times. In July 2006, it had a TechCrunch coming out party in Michael Arrington's backyard.  This would all sound like an incredible success story, except that it did not turn out that way. Within a year, Riya would be renamed Like.com and it's entire business model and market strategy would be changed. Anther significant shift was that the new company started with a large tech team in Bangalore. Subsequently, the company disengaged in India and built up its team in the SF Bay Area.

I was interested in two issues: (1) Why is social media less relevant for this former Blogger darling company. Had blogging as a strategy failed? and (2) Had the costs changed so much, that it no longer made sense to build a Bangalore tech team.

I'll let Munjal pick up from here.

1. Munjal, you were my biggest success story. You were the darling of the Blogosphere. Virtually every prominent blogger was writing about you in late 2005 and early 2006. What happened?

Bloggers were not writing about Riya because it was a cool social
media company.  Almost every post on Riya was about the technology's ability to search inside photos. That was the true blogworthy news.  Our core focus has always been on the technology of search.  Frankly, Riya was just not how people wanted to use this technology.  So we tried again with Like and now we are on to something.

2. When did you transform the company into Like.com.What's the new strategy?  Is it working any better now?

Like.com is approaching a $10MM revenue run rate after just 1 year of being live, so yes, it is probably working.  Our core focus was on using the technology in a way that people would like and in a way that had a business model. Like.com has both of these.  Riya had neither.

There are many ways to build a good business. Like.com has a higher click-through rate than any other soft goods shopping engines.  What that means is that our search technology is connecting people with the item they are looking for better than others.  This is what we do better than anyone else.  This is all we care to do better.  We work everyday to improve this.  Visual search is the core of how we achieve this.

3. Why doesn't Like.com use more social media to have conversations with customers?

Social shopping doesn't work.  Shopping is largely an isolated activity for soft good items (clothing, shoes, handbags, etc). Everybody thinks that women will chat with their friend about this dress or that shoe, but frankly, most online soft goods shopping is conducted by women at work in between meetings or late at night when the kids are asleep (our log files and data show this in spades).  Our customers just want to get in and get out. 

I would be careful in thinking that social media is the next generation of all types of sites.  In the case of commerce sites like thisnext.com and even Kaboodle have only gotten a fraction of the revenues that a non-social site like ours has.

4. What advice do you have for startups regarding social media?

Blog about the process of building a company and about your company,
there are many people who are interested in this story and they will
help you build momentum, but in terms of your customers, use it only
if truly appropriate.  There are many businesses on the web that are
about deep relationships, but not all sites fit that profile.  Think
of a weather site, are you really going to create a profile deeply
invest in that site no matter how many social features they have.
Think about a stock picking social networks.  I recently heard that
people are reluctant to discuss their picks online since too many
others can trade on it.  Even though stock picking groups and clubs
offline are very popular amongst day traders, online the speed of
information distribution makes folks want to share less.

5.  Do people use cell phones or PCs? ? What can you tell me about growth?

In general, Internet usage is limited but growing fast.  Mobile usage is much larger.

6. Another big change from Riya's early days is that at least half the team was in Bangalore. What were the advantages of setting up there at that time? How did they change?

Bangalore made sense when it was cheaper than Silicon Valley by enough of a margin to account for the costs of dealing with a remote office.

7. Has inflation really ruined the India advantage, or just bangalore. Why not just move to Chennai, Hyderbad or another emerging Indian City?

Like.com hit the inflation curve early.  We were only hiring the top guys in India and the number of these guys is very limited.  Hence no matter where you went the costs were rising or would rise in the near future. 

Others in India will see the effect, but they will likely be a few years behind us on that curve.  For many big companies cost is irrelevant.  I recently heard an engineer in Silicon valley say he would never work for a certain big tech company.  He would only work for a startup or for Google (the
current market darling).  Microsoft is loosing a ton of people to Google.  Company's like MSFT might not care if the cost in Bangalore is any lower, so long as they can get the volume of high quality engineers that they might have a hard time hiring here.

8. The 'Conventional Wisdom' is that social media is making the world at least a little flatter. Would you agree or disagree? Why?

In terms of startups, I'm not sure about this.  Facebook, Youtube, Myspace, Bebo, iLike, Hi5, Twitter, Digg, ... all are still companies that were started or really sprouted in the Bay Area.

9. What advice would you have to global companies regarding social media and diverse cultures?

Come to Silicon Valley if you are building for the US or global market.  Stay were you are if you are building for the local market.

SAP Global Survey: Australia's Lee Hopkins

               [Lee Hopkins.(file photo)]

When we wrote a chapter in Naked Conversations called Consultants Who Get It, we never mentioned Lee Hopkins. In fact, Lee was not yet a member of the social media community. He had pursued all sorts of careers including the Australian Air Force, a London singer-songwriter and a stint in San Francisco. He developed mostly in the London-based media industry until a family situation required him the return to Adelaide, Australia, where he had been raised. From a business perspective that placed him in one of the world's most isolated places in the Western World.

It was there, in Adelaide, where Lee became a business consultant to a portfolio of geographically distant clients that Lee rapidly emerged as one of Australia's leading social media evangelists in business. A prolific journalist and blogger, he is quoted all over the English-speaking world. He was my obvious choice to be the first Australian to interview for the SAP Global Survey and he has done a fine job of giving a sense of what is going on Down Under.

1. You come out of the editorial services field. How did you get immersed in social media?

I'd somehow heard about 'blogs' back in late 2004, but never really thought anything further about them. In early 2005, I Googled 'business communication blog' and came across Shel Holtz.

From him, I discovered his and Neville Hobson's podcast, For Immediate Release. I went on to become a regular contributor and their first foreign correspondent. On the strength of what I saw Shel and Neville doing, I further invested my time in blogging and found, to my delight, that I really enjoyed this 'Social Media' thing. The ability to write and have a willing audience, to be able to play with sound effects and inject my humor into my passion for business communication; these were the intrinsic rewards that I had been seeking for decades but until then had never found. Once I had been bitten by the bug, there was no stopping my wholesale descent into becoming a full-time social mediarist.

2. Can you tell me a bit about Australia and technology? How many people have computers at home and at work? What about Internet, broadband and wireless access. What are the current trends?

Australia has long been recognized as a country of 'early adopters' of new technology, whether that technology is home-grown or from overseas. Most families (except, perhaps, the long-term and multi-generational unemployed) have exposure to computers, either through the workplace for through their teenage children. Most Australian families are connected to the web and the vast majority of those connections are via broadband.

That said, one of the key areas of discussion in the recent Federal election was around Australia's lamentable broadband speeds when compared to other developed countries. For a considerable while, Telstra (the national carrier) was passing off ISDN as broadband as a way of meeting its agreed milestone for ensuring that 98% of the population had internet access. We're currently positioned in the mid 30s in terms of global broadband speed, but each month we slip further down the ladder.

While we are a nation of individual early adopters, at the business level we are very slow to update to new technologies. I could wax lyrical about the benefits of upgrading to Office 2007, for example, and how it is a vast leap in performance and productivity over previous Office upgrades -- but my cries would fall on deaf ears. Most Australian businesses are at least one and usually two generations behind in the technology race. It is only the micro-sized businesses, the tech-savvy or the very large corporations who would consider investing in upgrading to the latest technology. Most companies' IT departments are very risk-averse and so any initiatives to do with technology usually doesn't get past these influential gatekeepers.

Wireless access has been tried by a few companies in small pockets around the CBDs of most major cities, but it is yet to be comprehensively rolled out and supported. It is most often individual businesses, like an ISP, or a coffee shop that provides some sort of wireless access for its patrons. Internode is a wireless ISP that serves a large part of inner Adelaide, but the project never went further due to lack of funding at local council levels.

3. What social media tools do you use? Why do you use them? What is the result?

I predominantly blog, as I find that the easiest, most natural way of communicating. Yes, I also record the occasional podcast, and of course my weekly report for For Immediate Release, but podcasting takes up considerably more time to create a final product than blogging does.

I have also enjoyed playing with video, producing the occasional video blog, but like podcasting, the time involved to decide on content, record, post-produce and publish is significant. I find it works on this scale:

Writing a post - one hour;

creating a podcast - three hours;

creating a video blog - six hours.

Also, as a consultant, I dabble with most of the new whizz-bang tools that arrive every week-if mostly to decide whether they are worth my clients investing time in or not. So, of course I use Facebook, I Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce and YouTube. I would Seesmic but haven't been able to snag an invite yet... I belong to a number of social networks and I of course am active in Second Life, where I am conducting my doctoral research.

The result of all this has been astounding, at least to me. In the space of three years I have gone from being a 'nobody' in business communications to a world-recognized entity. I have been contacted by and consulted to companies that, before Social Media, would not even answer my cold calls. I have flatteringly been called a 'trend setter' and one of Australia's leading thinkers in online business communication. I regularly get invited to speak at conferences, most of which I decline due to not having enough hours in the day and enough dollars in the bank to fly out and attend for free (which conference organizers seemingly always want you to do, despite the fact that THEY are looking to create a profit by charging attendees a small fortune).

Whilst Adelaide itself is a 'backwater' when it comes to online business communication, I have been graced with clients in other cities who see the value of my services and who pay accordingly. If I could only ply my trade within Adelaide I would starve to death.

4. Tell me about social media and Australian business.  How many and what sort of companies are using social media tools? What tools are the most popular? Is there much growth?

'Business Australia' is at an interesting phase: my colleagues and I have spent the last two years waxing lyrical to whoever would listen about the power and influence that social media can wield. Of late, people seem to be listening. 

There is really only one private company, Telstra the national telco, who has launched itself into the social media space. The other major player is the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), the state-owned national broadcaster who immersed itself in social media years ago. But there is a feeling among us evangelists that something is stirring and will spill out in early 2008.

We know that AMP and Westpac (large investment and banking companies) are experimenting behind closed doors. No doubt there are other major corporations conducting similar experiments, hidden from our watchful gaze.

Because of the success that the ABC has garnered with its social media initiatives (blogs, podcasts, Second Life, downloadable TV shows inter alia), many commercial broadcasters have 'jumped on the bandwagon' and now release edited highlights of their most popular shows as 'podcasts.' The purists among us cringe at the use of the term when the files are really only downloadable audio, however it is at least a start. But apart from Telstra, the ABC and a handful of radio stations, the takeup of social media by 'Business Australia' has been lamentably non-existent. We are ever hopeful.

 

5. Tell me about your clients. To what sort of companies do you consult? What are the barriers you face? Give me a great success story.

My clients range from charities (a church, the RSPCA) to PR companies to banks and a pharmaceutical company. They are increasingly interested in finding out more about social media and, in the case of the PR company, their clients are increasingly interested too.

The major barrier I face is in helping clients understand that social media is not a 'fad', nor is it something only of interest to pimply teenage boys lurking in their mum's basement and chatting to others whilst clothed only in grotty, stained underwear.

The greatest joy I personally receive is when a client, or a client's client, suddenly gets 'that look' on their face and the penny drops, the lightbulb goes on and they suddenly realize that this social media thing is 'do-able' and doesn't need to break the budget.

The second greatest joy is watching their faces when they come across Twitter or Second Life for the first time; it's akin to watching a time traveller from the 19th century be introduced to a mobile phone. The look of incredulity, coupled with the mouthed but unsaid question, "why would anyone DO this?" is so delightful and amusing as to be almost sinful.

This was certainly the case with one of my clients, the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) in South Australia. They had been taking a 'beating' from the local media for years and had resigned themselves to always being the 'skapegoat' of others interests and failings. Introduced by another client of mine who was on their management board, I met with the CEO who was exceptionally skeptical of blogging as a way of turning the tables around.

I set up a blog, installed a blogging editor on his and his newly-hired PR manager's computers, then hand-held him as he made his first tentative posts. Within a fortnight he was blogging arduously on his own steam, and daily would call me to tell me how 'this' post had been picked up by the BBC in Poland, resulting in a phone interview, or 'that' post had been picked up by the local media and printed almost verbatim.

Within six weeks the tables were, indeed, turned; the media now went to the blog first to get the RSPCA's story before they went and interviewed the RSPCA-bashers, often resulting in stories that had both 'balance' and, miraculously, positive reviews of the RSPCA.

For the RSPCA in South Australia, blogging has been a transformational tool in how the media and the general public view and interact with them.

6. What about young Australians? What social media tools do they use?
Who do they talk to?

Young Australians have experimented with Facebook but many of them are staying with MySpace, which is by far the most popular tool for them. Facebook seems to have garnered an older, more educated audience, whereas MySpace was the 'only game in town' for teens when it first arrived. Indeed, it was so popular that MySpace Australia was set up, rather than (as usually happens with social networks) Australians become just another number in a database. The loyalty this act by Murdoch engendered is a lesson seemingly not noticed by other social networks.

Different global regions have their 'tools of choice'; I understand that AOL is the preferred IM client in the US, Friendster the preferred social network in Asia... in teen Australia it is MySpace for the network and MSNChat for IM. Nothing else gets a look in.

 

7. As young people enter the marketplace, how will social media impact business in Australia?

This is a warning bell that my colleagues and I have been ringing but few in 'Business Australia' seem to have heard. We all know that these tools are in use now (heavily), but 'Business Australia' prefers to put its collective head in the sand and pretend that these tools don't exist.

Many of the arguments revolve around the 'time wasting' aspect, and whenever I hear that old chestnut trotted out I roll my eyes up and sigh. I calmly yet passionately explain to the managers and their organizations that these tools are 'oxygen' for today's young graduates when they need to solve problems. They have been taught all through their school years to collaborate; suddenly they arrive in the workplace and the very tools that allow them to share ideas and collaborate are denied them. What sense is there in that? They are expected to innovate, to solve problems in creative ways, but they are denied access to the very paint and brushes that would allow them to create their problem-solving masterpieces.

The skills shortage in Australia is masked very cleverly by 'Business Australia'; if the young graduates knew how valuable their decision-making, problem-solving and research skills actually are they would only work for companies that give them the tools to do the job. But they are not valued, not told they are valued, and so, desperate for a job, settle for whatever they can get and get frustrated about working in an 'antiquated, production line' culture.

I strongly believe that employers who deny their workers the tools with which they are most comfortable are opening themselves up to charges of willful negligence, harming both the employee AND shareholder value.

8. Is social media helping Australia get closer with other places? Which ones? Is it business or socially related?

It is only socially that Australia is becoming more global and personable through social media. For example, I now have contacts, acquaintances and friends all around the globe and it is only social media that has allowed me the freedom to create these relationships.

I know that, within academia, social media has allowed many partnerships to form that add value to all partners and their research projects. This sort of global cross-pollination has, of course, been a strong part of academia for centuries -- social media is the latest transport mechanism and one that allows for exceptionally speedy cross-pollination, but social media is not the novel unifying force within academia that it is outside of the lush gardens.

But for 'Business Australia' it is still yet to be a force. Or even a tremor. Or even a whisper in the dark.

 

9. You live in Adelaide, one of the world's most isolated cities.  How has social media changed life for you there? How do you think it will change you moving forward?

Social media has allowed me to develop important business and personal relationships around the world, which I certainly could not do before it came along.

As a solo, SOHO, online business communication professional working in a city not known for its business innovativeness and willingness to try something new, making a living was like squeezing blood from rocks. I scraped together a survival income through building websites and writing newsletters, but because Adelaide is so dollar-sensitive I was very often outbid for work by students who were desperate to generate a dollar. I invested considerable time and effort pursuing the traditional marketing avenues: speaking to Rotary groups, writing articles for business magazines, and so on, but little came of it.

Suddenly social media arrived (for me, anyway) and I was rapidly able to reposition myself at the forefront of what I saw was a revolution in how communication could take place between and amongst businesses, their suppliers and their marketplace. Suddenly 'The Cluetrain Manifesto' could be talked about without being laughed at, at least by my peers.

Now, even though I am still living in and operating out of a price-sensitive city, I generate enough money from my consulting work with interstate clients that I can afford to charge 'top dollar' here. There are very few companies based in Adelaide that are large enough to afford me (if they can afford to hire expertise from the large consulting firms, they can afford me; if not, they cannot), so I do little business here.

Because of the 'flattener' that the Internet has become, in Friedman's terms, I can conduct business from anywhere, including the gorgeous Adelaide Hills where I reside. Because of social media I have been able to show thought leadership in my industry, connect with other like minds around the globe, be contacted by clients and potential clients from around the world, and network with some of the greatest thinkers of today. THAT is an incredible privilege!

As for the future, well... I am researching Second Life for my doctorate as I strongly believe that collaborative 3D virtual environments will become a major factor in how we communicate online and I am positioning myself at the forefront from a business communication perspective. The last three years have been a rollercoaster; goodness knows what the next three will bring!

10. "The incumbent Australia Labor Party has just imposed censorship on the Australian Internet. What do most Australian's think about this? How do you think this will impact both personal and business use of the Web?

Most people are experiencing emotions ranging from bemusement to outright despair at the stupidity of politicians. The Australian blogosphere is again laughing at another example inept political bumbling (and this is not the first time the ‘censorship’ card has been played) but also angry that the lessons it felt were adequately explained to the previous government by various interested parties have been forgotten in lieu of ‘being seen to be doing something’.

Like most political pronouncements, what is said and what is delivered are likely to be two very different things, and this is an issue that will probably find itself pushed under a carpet in a month or two as something far more pressing captures the government’s attention.

Saudi Arabia's most popular blogger is under arrest

The New York Times reports this morning, and several bloggers have noted that  Fouad al-Farhan, an outspoken 32-year-old Saudi Arabian blogger was “being questioned about specific violations of nonsecurity laws,” according to the Saudi interior ministry.

They must have a lot of questions, Fouad, who writes about social issues and is his country's most popular blogger, has been detained since Dec. 10.

The heartening slice to this story, is that friends have taken over his blog site for him, changing the title to "Free Fouad," and bearing the quote "I don't want to be forgotten in jail," as a subhead. That's the way a democracy is supposed to work. When one voice gets silenced, many voices rise.

Except that Saudi Arabia is no Democracy, not even close and I greatly admire the courage of both Fouad and the many voices that are rising in that country on Fouad's behalf.

Explaining the SAP Global Survey

Over on my Twitter account, I requested people to recommend themselves or people they know to be interviewed for my SAP Global Survey. It was presumptuous of me to think that everyone who knows me there is a regular reader of this blog.

It's also clear that some people who now follow this blog are not entirely clear what's going on with the survey, so let me explain again. I will probably do this periodically moving forward.

I have been contracted by SAP to investigate the impact of social media on business and cuture all over the world. I am essentially doing this through email interviews where I send questions and then post the answers on this blog. There have been 51 of them so far and you can find them on this blog in the Category of SAP Reserarch. They are all tagged SAP Global Survey, as well. At both places you will also find the Six-Part SAP Research Report, which summarizes the findings as of November 2007.

I am looking for people who can contribute to the general body of knowledge on the subject of social media and culture or business. I've organized this by country, region and discipline.  While the central focus is business, SAP and I both believe business focuses extend into youth, education, government, non-profit, citizen journalism and most anywhere that social media is causing change.

If you have an idea, a lead or think you should be interviewed. Please contact me at shelisrael1@gmail.com.

SAP Global Survey: Spain's Luis Rull

[Luis Rull @EBE07. Photo by Shel]

Luis Rull was a co-host of Evento Blog Espana [EBE07], in Seville, Spain,  where I spoke in November. I got the chance to hang out with him and Biz Stone. He seems to have grown up a child of the global Internet communications revolution with an abundance of stories to tell. What interested me for the SAP Global Survey is the Luis' soon-to-be implemented Spanish-to-English translation service for bloggers. Spain has an abundance of bloggers.  Very few post in English, although a good many of them read English language blogs. Like most people, Spanish bloggers are just more comfortable posting in their native language.  But they see the need to join a larger and more more global network.  That's where Luis' service will coe in, but I'll let him tell his story.

1. Tell me a bit about your background.

I was born in 1973 and raised in Seville. My father is a scientist whose research was about computer simulation of molecular dynamics. I played with mainframepunch cards and crayons   before I could ride a bike.

In 1982, My father's work took us to Copenhagen where I met people totally different from my family and friends. I played with kids from Argentina to Russia, and from all over the world, letting find new ways to have fun. We kids were fascinated by the strangeness each other's toys, especially the new electronic stuff that we shared with each other.

I went to college in Granada where I got my first PC. My dorm friends used it to write essays and do homework. There were no networks. We shared with floppy disks. Toward the end of my degree studies, Internet Cafés began came to Granada and used them to email my parents who were already using it at the University of Sevilla.

When I got a grant I got a graduate studies grant at Pablo de Olavide University, I was given free internet access and I became the unofficial IT guy for my research group and friends. I found myself very comfortable teaching others about computers.

In 2004, I read an article about US politics and the rise of blogs.  It motivated me to visit blogger.com at Google and start my first blog to keep my friends and family informed, but it also gave me a place, a notebook to write ideas as they came into my head, content that could not be published in any other place such as a scientific journal.

As I became more knowledgable about blogs and wikis, I kept helping others.  Eventually, I moved into the private sector as a consultant. A new world was beginning and I wanted to be in it. I joined some wonderful internet entrepreneurs from Valencia and we founded Blogestudio.com.

Mainly, I teach clients how to communicate through their blogs and how to discover, store and share information with colleagues and clients.  Now I am beginning my own company mecus.es with a great team in Seville, focused in Corporate Blogging and Knowledge Management, where I am developing a new service of translation for bloggers.

2. How did you come to co-produce EBE07? Why is it free to attend?

Some of Spain's blogging pioneers come from Seville. Two of them,  José Luis Antúnez and José Luis Perdomo called Benito Castro and asked us to do a kind of summit for bloggers and Evento Blog España was born.

In 2006, Seville's state government, Junta de Andalucía, and Microsoft agreed to be sponsors, with the understanding they would respect our freedom to invite whoever we wanted. Suddenly we had a free place to do it and money to pay the flights and hotels of international speakers. When other bloggers heard about it, the all expressed enthusiasm. Friends and enemies, colleagues and competitors all enthusiastically offered  support. We gathered a great group who knew each other online, but had never seen each other in person.

In our first year we invited Matt Mullenweg, and some of the most influential and interested people in some areas of blogging: Education, Politics, Technology, Ethics, Business, etc. We later discovered that the most interested conversations took place during the breaks and the beers & in tapas bars.

In 2007, the expectation was high and we grew from 200 attendants to 620. Our goal was to respect for the community. EBE 07 was organized for bloggers, and we tried treat them as queens and kings not as subjects. EBE07 was built on them, with low key sponsor presence, free admission and long breaks and social activities.

3. Let's talk about Spain in general. How any bloggers are there? What do they blog about? How many are in business v personal?

I cannot tell for sure, but the Spanish blogosphere is made up mainly of personal bloggers. The growth right now is incredibly fast. There are many more personal blogs than business or commercial blogs. The average audience per blogger is low but the long tail in Spain is really long. From MSN Spaces, to Bitacoras.com or LaCoctelera.com, small groups reign.

Business and professionals have just started to discover the value of blogs in the last three years. I believe that as they understand the profits of listening and gaining their own voice, they will all want to get into social media. There are a lot of resources to help them use the new tools. The number of talented Internet consultants is growing.

4. What other social media tools are popular in general and in business?

Places like meneame.net are very popular, but the management of recommended info thought blogs, twitter, google reader shared or del.icio.us are growing very fast, mainly because they are not very time consuming and are based on people you trust.

In business, the most important innovation is building relationships with people who share your  interest through blogs. News alerts and data mining techniques need a lot of improving, but my opinion is that the heterogeneity blogs are introducing to companies and people’s minds have a lot of potential. 

5. Is social media making its way into government, education and other large institutions? Why or why not?

I think it is only happening in a very small number of places. A few individual civil servant or teachers are using it, but only in a disorganized, decentralized way. The positive way of seeing it is that they are building their own way of using them. They are not following higher agendas or narrow paths. They are adapting social media to their needs, founding great things. My opinion on the lack of interest is that people on top do not want to lose the monopoly of knowledge and want to keep people isolated.

6. Most bloggers in Spain blog, of course, in Spanish. What are the pluses and minuses of that? Do many Spanish bloggers read blogs in other languages?

I cannot say numbers, but my opinion is that many influential bloggers get their influence by gathering information from blogs in English and writing about it on their blogs in Spanish. Many readers don’t have the time, interest or skill in English to get that information from those sources, and they trust these gatekeepers. The amount of information in English is huge and the additional effort only worthwhile for specific niches (For example: your hobby or you competitors)

On the other hand, most Spanish bloggers do it just to express themselves. They are not eager to reach large audiences, so they are not very interested in reaching English readers. But, the Spanish-speaking audience itself is huge because it includes Latin Americans. Internet is becoming more and more popular all over the world and our brothers from the other side of the ocean are no exception. The high quality of some blogs from Argentina, Chile or Mexico proves that.

7. I understand that you are planning to offer a translation service to bloggers. Why? What's the market opportunity?

The market opportunity is a two-way road. It’s obvious that English is the most common language in Europe. If you want to reach a large audience in Europe and USA, the easiest way is to write in English.  Spanish companies are getting more and more investment from abroad and start-ups are beginning to think in a broad way about their market. The world is flat.

Automatic translators do not work properly with dense and rich blogs, so there’s room for professional translators here. The biggest cost for a translator is to specialize in the vocabulary of an area, for example, software. With individual blogs, we can take that away, because the language, special words and expressions are similar every time.

Our products do not only include professional translations but also the adaptation of their blogging software to it. Taking care of SEO matters, ease for clients and freshness of content, we offer the translation of a post within 24 hours. The blogger only has to blog in his or her usual way. We adapt the templates and take care of the translated version. The clients get an identical blog, with the texts in Spanish, with no additional time invested. We only have done it so far  in WordPress, our favourite blog software, but we have researched others and would be able to do it as soon any client requests it.

8. Will it be just Spanish-toEnglish? Would you do English-to-Spanish?

We are also thinking about translation to Spanish. English, French and German are our first choices. We consider Spanish audience very attractive to some English-speaking bloggers all over the world. The consumption of social media in Spain is one of the fastest growing in Europe, and with the weight of Latin American audiences, our product is simply a good choice.

Translating into Spanish is also a good idea because Spanish tends to overrate foreign ideas and people, and that usually gives English bloggers a good first impression.

9. Let's talk longterm. What impact do you see over the next five years of social media on Spain? How about Spanish interaction with the EU and the US?

The shock in the last three years has been so hard that nobody can say for certain. Big media conglomerates had been trying so many defensive strategies that failed. Now, they all join almost any innovation offered to them. This is mainly because small media companies had been fast and imaginative and are succeeding in the growing market of digital audiences. You may see it in the number of newspapers that have easy access to social media tools such as del.icio.us, digg, technorati or meneame (a popular Spanish Digg-style site). You can even see in the content of some news in mainstream media: sometimes you see a TV newscaster saying something that appeared in a blog six days earlier.

It's obvious that the audio and video will have a great impact in blogging in 2008. The number of video blggers and podcasters are increasing in a rate higher than  100% per year. Self-producing audio-visual content is the big change in Spanish media.

The influence of US culture is huge in Spain. Although many Spanish companies are in joint ventures with EU companies, the audience is strongly demanding US content over EU content. With more translation from French, German and Italian we hope to change that.

About 52% of the Spanish population between ages 17 and 52 have Internet access and is growing very fast, according to trusted sources. They represent the more affluent and better education portions of our society.

Spanish people tend to be expressive and passionate about what they like. I see an explosion of quality content. Prepare yourself.

10. Additional comments?

Spain IT community is beginning to think about the world in a “flatter” way. Spanish Content generators will follow them

SAP Global Survey: Greece's Stefanos Karagos

[Stefanos Karagos. File Photo]

As I've recently written, Greece was a non-player in blogging, when we researched Naked Conversations three years ago. Now there is a great deal happening in social media there, and it seems that wherever you look, Stefanos Karagos is a contributor.

He is among the best known Greek bloggers having started earlier (2001) than almost all of his countrymen. He comes at it as publisher of the Greek edition of PC Magazine, the largest tech publication in Greece with 210,000 readers,  along with three other tech publications.

Stefanos first became active in online conversations back in 1993, when he created the first Greek BBS, which was used to discuss Windows.

He started his first personal blog,  to improve communications with Greek Internet users and to reach his magazind subscribers.  "As a public personality, I need to communicate often," he told me. "Blogging is the most interactive way for me to talk one-to-one and one-2-many."

 

Toward that goal, he has created several blogs including Anabubula.com which tests how the global market works and, " to prove that if somebody creates unique content, he'll have more opportunities to make a difference," he told me.

For each magazine, he has created a social media platform connecting the offline media with online, giving. He told me the online/offline braiding has given each a significnt boost in followers.  He's also created the largest Greek blogger custom search engine which is about to include social networking functionality. Very early in January, he will also launch  Foracamp.gr, the first vertical social media for 500 tech communities worldwide.

 

 

1. Tell me about technology in Greece. How many people go online and where do they do it? How available is broadband?

 

Greek Technology adoption has accelerated over the last 4 years.  Recent indicators indicators show that the penetration of Internet in Greece is more that 35% of the population but household broadband penetration is only 5%. This year, fortunately, the Greek Government pushed the National Telecommunications Organization [OTE] for lower prices of ADSL and in the last 6 months, we saw the biggest expansion of broadband connections ever in Greece.

As publisher of the Greek PC Magazine, I distributed 50.000 free ADSL modems and trial ADSL connections last September, giving the opportunity for more users to enjoy broadband. The prediction of ADSL penetration for 2008 is that it will more than double.

Another intersting fact is that 70% of the users spend more that 3.5 hours on the net, every day. There are 170,000 registered Greek Facebook users.

 

2. Blogging also seems to have taken off in the past couple of years.  What are the factors that have

contributed? Who blogs and why?

 

Most Greek bloggers are young people who adopted the medium quickly and use it as a personal communication platform. We are a Mediterranean country and many days of the year are sunny helping people to go out for coffee and drinks and this is one of the reasons that blogging was not so popular the past years.

But now with low broadband prices the 3G mobile networks to cover a big part of Greece users can use blogging and social media all over the place. Greek bloggers come from many professions and social level and this year, because of the National elections, many politicians to blog and use social media as well.

 

3. What other social media is popular in Greece?

 

International

Facebook.com

Hi5.com

Myspace.com

Youtube.com

Wikipedia.org

Flickr.com

Digg.com

Twitter.com

 

National

Wadja.com [Mobile Social Networking]

Zoo.gr [social networking]

Joy.gr [social networking]

Zuny.gr [a Facebook like special for Greek Universities students]

Pblogs.gr [most popular blogs platform after blogger.com]

Foracamp.gr [Social bookmarking for Tech communities]

Cull.gr [Digg clone for Greek Internet market]

 

New local entry in beta:

Me.gr [social networking]

 

 

4. Tell me about language. Other than their own, what other languages do Greek people speak? You speak English quite well.  You have even started sites in English. Have you considered translating your blog? Why or why not?

 

English is the most spoken foreign language in Greece. From the 23.000 Greek blogs which I monitor via blogz.gr search engine, more than 3.000 are in English. In my Greek blog I offer translation as a feature, via an automatic translation service, because of my very good SEO, 10% of the visitors come from outside of Greece. Translating a site to another language is not so easy and most Greek bloggers actually are looking only for other Greek Internet users.

 

6. How do most people earn a living in Greece? Has social media impacted them at all?

 

Tourism is the No1 market and many Greek people earn a living that way. Until now, social media hasn't played a clear role on everyday life here, so actually, it doesn't  impact most people. For example, there is not one Greek blogger earning a living from it. If blogs grow over the next three years the way they have in the past three years, we will start to see the real impact in Greece.

 

7. Has social media had much impact  in Greek culture so far? What about in the next five years?

I believe that over the next five years, social media will grow rapidly in Greece. 2007 was the  milestone year when social media started to make a serious impact on Greek culture. International Social networks, local blogs and the huge penetration of cell phones are the key reasons. Countires that have big cell phone penetration are on a different path toward social media.

 

8. How has social media changed your life?

 

Since I started blogging in 2001, social media has radically changed the way I conduct my media business, how I direct companies , how I attract and keep clients, or make friends, and even view my local market or the world. I don't think I would still be involved with anything regarding innovation and differentiation if Social Media didn't exist.

Without the ability to give input in a product or a service and see the same time the quick response from the audience, the Internet in my country would not have expanded as quickly without the technologies involved with social media.

 

9. Additional comments?

 

Social Media is a crucial factor for countries like Greece to provide the innovation and differentiation of their technological achievements.

SAP Global Report: Dell's Lionel Menchaca

         [Lionel Menchaca. Photo from File]

[NOTE-Jan 11, 2008. I rewrote the intro to this piece. It needed it. I also fixed a broken link. Lionel's Q&A remains unchanged.]

The Dell script pretty much follows the classic Hollywood formula: Sin, Suffer, Repent the Flourish.  Dell's sin was clear. In order to win a hardware price war it scrimped more than it should have on product  and service. It suffered by watching loyal customers migrate to such rivals as HP who overtook it for category leadership. It suffered further from seeing it's revenues and stock priced plummet into a prolonged and well-publicized freefall.

Dell is just now concluding an 18-month period of penitence. The CEO who steered the Dell Supertanker nearly onto the rocks was unceremoniously replaced at the helm by Dell Founder Michael Dell.  The company is buying back its still tepidly priced stock. It has begun a reinvestment program of $1 billion into support.  Reviews of new Dell products are mildly favorable but not quite laudatory.

Dell is most certainly coming back. Dents in its reputation have been hammered out. But the company has not yet returned to the sort of flourishing it enjoyed for more than a decade.

What makes this all so interesting to me is the role that blogging has played in this apparent comeback. The company started a blog in June 2006. Now called Direct2Dell, it has become the most popular blog published by a major global enterprise.

Direct2Dell is a team blog, but the face of D2D, as many people, including Dell folk call it, is Lionel Menchaca, who is the team's most prolific, passionate and frequent contributor. Lionel seems to specialize in the hottest of issues and he handles them in a calm authentic voice. His, interview appears below.

Will Dell actually enter Hollywood's predicatbly closing scene, the one where everyone flourishes and manufacturer and customers live happily ever after?  That remains to be seen. But because of Dell's new faces of social media, there are a whole lot more people cheering for the company than was the case 18 months ago.

Here is the result of my interview with him:

1. First, tell me a bit about yourself. Where were you born and raised?  When did you join Dell? What did you do at Dell before you became the primary blogger?

I was born and raised in Texas. I’ve been a hardware and technology geek since before high school. My career with Dell started 14 Years ago, in technical support—I was a front line hardware tech for two years, and an OS tech for a year after that. Back then, I thought excellent service and support was the best way to create loyal customers. I still do.

I spent the next several years managing and supporting product reviews for Dell, starting  with PowerEdge servers in 1997.  In the years since, I’ve been responsible for reviews and product PR for many of our product lines—everything from storage products to notebooks and desktops. Just before my current role, I also spent a couple of years doing media relations on the corporate side.

Outside of work, I have a wife and two young kids that mean the world to me.  I’m a huge music fan and have watched the Dallas Cowboys every season since 1976.

2. Most people know the general reason why Dell started blogging, but exactly what happened? What finally made Dell decide to blog?  Who made the decision? Why were you selected?

There wasn’t one specific issue that set things in motion, but Michael Dell has been a catalyst throughout the process. He was the one who asked us to reach out to customers who blogged about their Dell experiences to offer some assistance. That led to the creation of a team of Dell Customer Advocates back in April 2006 four months before we launched Direct2Dell. That’s when we started listening and engaging in conversations with customers throughout the blogosphere. During that critical four-month formative period, we learned a lot about what kinds of conversations were going on, and how to be part of them. For us, that was an invaluable part of the process.

Many people assume that we started blogging because of Jeff Jarvis and Dell Hell [read in reverse order], but that wasn’t it. Jeff’s situation was indicative of a bigger fundamental issue that was going on—our customer service levels in the US were slipping back in July of 2005. I blogged about it here. We started blogging because we knew that customers were talking about us, and we didn’t want to sit on the sidelines any more.

Why me? I think it was a combination of things. Throughout my years here, I’ve established contacts within many parts of the company, especially on the product side. Even though I wasn’t a blogger in the beginning, I understood both the technical and conversational aspects and had been reading quite a few blogs before this job became a reality. My technical support background  was also key. That’s why I was one of the folks tasked with getting the Customer Advocate team up and running. And by the way, that team recently celebrated passing the 5,000 blog post mark.

3. When the blog first came out you faced a firestorm of cynicism and criticism. How was this received among the various internal powers in marketing, legal etc. To your knowledge did Dell ever consider abandoning the effort?

You’re right, those early days were tough ones.  We faced criticism from bloggers and from customers alike. The level of negativity scared some Dell folks initially. Our legal department has been pretty realistic about things. There are a handful of issues that need to be reviewed by them—any safety- related issue, for example.  There are a couple of others but, by and large, it’s common sense stuff.

The other two departments that are directly affected by social media are communications and marketing.  By that, I mean they are the organizations that have to come to grips with the loss of control. We’ve made some progress in both departments, but we still have a long way to go. So far, I think we’ve seen some internal pockets of success, but it’s clear that our continued success hinges on convincing more and more Dell folk  within those organizations that open conversations will be a competitive advantage in the future.

I’ve never thought about abandoning the effort, and no one has asked me to.

4. After a few weeks, the conversation seemed to get a lot more constructive and polite. Why? What changed?

I’d like to think that we built our credibility by blogging the right way. To me that means blogging about topics that our customers ask us to address no matter how negative. That process took time because  we had to dig ourselves out of a credibility deficit that we helped create. By working through that, we earned the right to enter the conversation. That changed things.

5. Can you give me some statistics on the blog? How many uniques? How many comments? Growth?

We’ve been tracking at about 1 million page views per week. Unique visitors have reached as high as 300,000 per month.

One of the most important metrics is the change in the tonality of the conversations. In 2006, at the low point , almost 50% of the conversations about Dell were negative. Today, we are at about 23%. I don’t attribute all that success to our digital media initiatives, but it’s clear that they have accounted for part of it.

6.  As you know, many enterprise decision makers are fearful of being shouted at, lack of adequate measurement tools, loss of message control, leaking secrets and of course--no clear ROI. How would you address each of these?

I think all of those issues are reasons why corporations stay away from joining conversations. I would argue though that the benefits of being part of the conversation  outweigh all the risks. In my view, it’s really about facing the reality of the changes that are happening in front of us.  Companies need to admit that control is shifting toward customers. More and more customers are talking about companies they either like or dislike. Those conversations happen with or without companies being actively involved.  And it’s becoming increasingly clear that those conversations have more influence over perception than much of the marketing material and PR messages that companies produce.

We wrestle with measurement tools and ROI all the time for a couple of reasons:

•    This is a new, but maturing field, and that means it will take time to develop  tools and metrics that mean something on a broad scale
•    Proving ROI in social media almost always involves looking at a topic over an extended period of time

In my view though,  the real value in social media is that it has the potential to change customer perception in ways that just weren’t possible before.  Just because that’s hard to measure doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.  Time will tell, but it seems to me that not being part of the conversation is a far riskier proposition.

7. How has social media in general and D2D specifically changed Dell?

Direct2Dell has made us better listeners. It’s forced us to see things from a customer point of view, which we had gotten away from for a while. Direct2Dell also opened the door for us to expand into other digital media efforts like IdeaStorm and StudioDell. IdeaStorm is great because it’s community-driven. Our customers tell us how we can improve and tell us what ideas are most important through voting.

Between our own social media efforts and monitoring and engaging with customers in the blogosphere, I think we are have developed better listening skills in general. This work has shown us that how, how often and what we communicate is changing: timeliness is more important than ever and sometimes that means  setting expectations that we are working to address an issue before we have all the answers.

And while supporting our own properties is important, we realize that many communities that our customers take part in are outside Dell. What’s most important is that we ultimately join conversations wherever they occur, not just on our own properties.

8.  What are some of the stickiest issues D2D has caused you to face?

1)The exploding notebook in Osaka. It was a huge topic of conversation the first week that we had launched Direct2Dell. I blogged about it, and linked to Engadget on the third day after we had gone live. Inside the company, it caused some friction, but I think it was the right thing to do. That helped set the tone for what customers could expect from Direct2Dell—we weren’t going to shy away from negative conversations.

2) The battery recall. Back in August 2006, when Dell was the first company to announce a battery recall, we received some criticism. In the weeks and months that followed, other companies joined in after us.

3) The 22 confessions post on the Consumerist.  This was a situation that pitted the command and control philosophy vs. the new reality of the blogosphere. Here is my post that connected the dots.

4) Product delays: Starting with the XPS 700 gaming desktop which was launched before Direct2Dell existed, then products like the XPS M1330 notebook and later the Inspiron color notebooks. Making customers wait for products is a sure way to create a bad experience.

5) The XPS 700 motherboard upgrade issue. Not setting customer expectations properly created a situation of many unhappy customers. We worked through it and ultimately offered XPS 700 customers the option to upgrade to  a later product at no cost.

3 more 2008 Predictions

[Charlene Li (r) with Shirley Owyang, will her book beat Naked Conversations? Will Tara Hunt's? Photo by Shel]

I'm feeling clairvoyant today. It must be all those peas. In any case, I have a couple more predictions for the next year.

1. A book will eclipse Naked Conversations as the all time best seller in social media. The two best bets are ones coming from Charlene Li and Tara Hunt. It may be both of them. If I have to pick one, it will be Tara Hunt. I will be ambivalent when it happens. The only way Naked could end up on top of the pile over time,  would be to have the interest n the subject shrink instead of expand.

2. Google stock will see the north side of $1000 a share, even if the recession everyone fears becomes reality.

3. The number of Fortune 500 companies actively executing social media strategies will at least triple.

SAP Global Report: Egypt's Wael Abbas

I restart the SAP Global Survey on Culture, Business and Social Media on a day that started with reports on the murder of an Iraqi blogger. It is an ironic coincidence that I begin with
Wael Abbas, the Egyptian blogger who is among the most prominent at-risk bloggers. He recently received the Knight Foundation Award for Journalistic Excellence for his relentless exposure of  Egyptian acts of police brutality, harassment to women and government corruption.  According to the Knight Foundation, Wael, the first blogger to receive the award has "raised the standards of media excellence" in his country. He has also raised the wrath of those in power and that is because he has shown compelling evidence that at least some of those who hold power in Egypt are prone to abuse it.

Wael started blogging a few years back just as something to do. But in 2005, his focus zeroed in on government impropriety and he has posted pictures and over 800 videos of women being groped and harassed, a ballot box being stuffed and other abuses, but mostly, peristently and relentlessly, he has provided abundant and compelling evidence of police abuse. He has posted 100s of videos showing police slapping around uncharged detainees in police stations and on the streets. In one highly disturbing clip an young man is sodomized with a stick by several laughing police officers. In another a woman, charged with murder is hanging from a pole like a pig over an open fire, while police batter her.

His evidence has been picked up by traditional Egyptian media who had long ignored complaints that police abuse in their country was widespread.  Al Jazeera has broadcast interviews with Wael and shown his clips across Arab countries. More recently Reuters, BBC, AP,  CNN and most major media networks in the West have covered  Wael and shown his  video evidence. An English Literature major in college, who is proficient in English, Wael writes mostly in a slangy  Egyptian directed toward young Egyptians. Accommodating  increased Western interests, he recently began inserting key English phrases. But mostly, he uses the powerful universal language of visual content with sufficient abundance to disprove police counter claims that such abuses are rare.

"Police beating people--often people who are never charged with anything--happens all the time. Anyone in Egypt who has ever visited a police station has heard the cries of people being beaten. People who are brought into a station for routine questioning, routinely show up back in their neighborhoods with bruises and no one needs to ask what happened. I think the world should know this is happening."

He doubts the recent Western attention on him will protect him from an ongoing barrage of threats, detentions and beatings by police who regularly remind him that "they can do whatever they wish to me."  More important he says is that the West understand how one of their closest Arab states allies routinely treats its citizens. Egyot sits on the UN Council for Human Rights, Wael points out. "This is an allegedly democratic government."  Unrelated to Wael are long-standing reports that US intelligence agencies have turned suspected terrorists over to Egypt, to perform acts of torture might be detected in the US.

The point is that Egypt seems to be far from the safest places to dedicated your time, as Wael has done, to reveal what the government would rather keep quiet. Earlier this year, for example, Abdel Kareem Soloman, a blogging law student began serving four years in prison for criticizing Islam and  president Hosni Mubarak. Will the soft-spoken Wael be next. He has been detained and slapped around and verbally abused.  Police have threatened him, followed him, made threats regarding his family and otherwise made clear they think they have authority to do whatever they wish with him. In genral, the government, according to Wael, sees exposing their abuses as a crime, and considers trouble makers like Wael as ingrates to the Mubarak government.

He remains undeterred.

Says, Wael, "Bloggers are ordinary people.  We are not terrorists.  We should be treated as ordinary citizens and ordinary citizens should be treated with respect. The Blogosphere is the last free voice."

Suppressing, Wael's work and ability to communicate has had some help from Western resources. Two weeks after he received his Knight Award at the Ronald Reagan Center, YouTube took down all 181 of his video posts. They say they did it because people complained about the graphic content.  After numerous complaints, YouTube restored 177 of the clips, saying that Wael needed to make the contextual use of violent images clearer. Few observers believed that was the real reason.  Each of the posts have warnings that the clip shows police brutality, or similar comments. "How could the context be clearer than that" he asks. It is a rhetorical question.
At about the same time, Yahoo, without warning or explanation, blocked Wael's email. It was subsequently restored without explanation after press and bloggers pointed to it. YouTube's parent Google have some history of collaborating with governments attempting to suppress citizen rights. According to Isaac Mao, Google voluntarily deleted such "offensive phrases"  as "Tiananmen Square" and "human rights," on its Chinese version, without ever receiving such a request from the government. Yahoo played a historically unsavory role in fingering Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, sentenced to 10 years in a Chinese prison after Yahoo steered authorities to him. "Perhaps YouTube prefers I posts skateboarding  dogs," Wael wonders.

In fact, skateboarding dogs may pass muster at YouTube, but they might cause him a good deal of trouble in his home country, where Wael confirmed the ascending influence of  the Islamic Brotherhood, which argues that life today should be lived precisely as it was during the 6th century life of the religion's primary prophet, Muhammad. The Brotherhood also maintains that showing images of either the Prophet Muhammed or naked animals is blasphemous and should be harshly punished. The Islamic Brotherhood, which has been connected to the Al Qaida, Taliban, assassination of a  Dutch movie director, the Iranian Republic, the Cole incident to name a few also believes that all  non Muslems should be converted or killed.

More relevant to human rights, according to multiple sources, is the Brotherhood's determined suppression of women.  They are considered a prime reason for the reported increase in female genital mutilation and the return to the Burka, a caged framework of cloth that covers every inch of a woman.

The Burka is not required by Egyptian law, but it is being seen everywhere and fewer women dare walk the streets of Egypt uncovered, a common practice just a few years ago.  Wael says the Burka is a form of intimidation, not religious fervor. He told me that women often wear wear tight jeans, lipstick and heels under the Burka to avoid intimidation, beating or harassment on the street, sometimes by police," Wael said.

Wael was recently laid off as a correspondent by a German news service for reasons related to his blog. He barely gets by as a freelance journalist.  He's 33 and financially is forced to live at home with his family. He cannot afford to take a wife. All thing considered, why not just move to a Western country where economic and personal freedom are more  easily attainable?  "I have this problem. I love my country," he told me.

Ethan Bodnar, 17, Lands Book Contract

Ethan Bodnar is the youngest person I have interviewed for the SAP Global Survey so far. He's 17, lives in Connecticut and aspires to study design in an art college next year. I  immensely enjoyed meeting him for the first time for a few minutes last week in Boston. I often discuss him in my public talks on the SAP Survey because he's the one who made it clear how reluctant many members of the emerging generation are to work for an employer who will not trust them to blog.

http://www.grabbagbook.com/

Ethan has just announced he has received a publisher's proposal to publish Grab Bag his project-turned-book.  According to Ethan, it will feature 100 artists, be around 200 pages long, and will come out in Spring 2009. Each artists will have two images in the book(one of the creative task and one from there current field of work), a biography, and a short paragraph detailing their experience with the
creative task.

I have a lot of friends who are writing books. Ethan is the youngest, however, and I think it is a great idea that shows the collaborative disposition that also comes out so well in his fine blog.

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Reposting Survey Part 3: Social Media by Region

A couple of people have complained that they cannot access my SAP Global Report Part 3, posted on Dec. 3. I am not certain I understand how or why, but I am reposting this now. It is identical to the earlier post.

[This is the third of four parts I am publishing of the SAP Global Report on Culture, Business & Social Media.  It compares and contrasts what is happening by geographic region. You can see Part One here, which tells you the story of how the report was researched and Part Two here, listing my seven key findings.]

The Americas
.
•    The US continues to drive most social media innovation with most new products and social media products originating in traditional tech clusters. Silicon Valley remains home to the world’s three most popular blogging platforms; to four of the world’s five most popular social networks Facebook. It is a hotbed for microblogging and online video.
•    The time spread from geek to everyday people in the United States, as mentioned above, is widespread and accelerating.  Social media strategists talk about marketing between the coasts.”  Mainstream US enterprise shunned blogging just two years ago, they are now scurrying to embrace it. 
•    Other gaps are shortening as well. Young people, raised on internet communications are embracing social media innovations nearly in tandem to technology insiders. Likewise, geography lags are getting shorter as well. Tech adoption between Palo Alto, California and say Dubai or the Czech Republics have shortened from years to months.

•    Nascent social media projects have also begun to pervade government and educational bodies. Conferences for government workers, librarians, vertical publishers are being held for the first time and are well attended.

•    With few exceptions, Canada emulates adoption patterns in the US.  However, business blogging remains much rarer in Canada. Canadians latched on to Facebook faster than did Americans and today about one in 10 Canadians is a Facebook user. But, they use it differently than their American neighbors. Instead of finding new friends, they just talk to people they already know in the tangible world.
•    Brazil has Latin America's largest online population, with about 16 million monthly unique visitors or about 10% of total population. Nearly a third has broadband access.  It the Western Hemisphere’s leader in e-government. Last election, about 120 million of them voted electronically. Over 90% of its taxpayers files online. The country also has an advanced e-banking system and most people can access some of their medical records online. There are a surprisingly high number of CEO bloggers and it is not uncommon for businesses to experiment in the social media. Brazil, has a disproportionately young which may explain the very high popularity of social networks and other sharing sites. Orkut is the overwhelming social network of choice. Fotolog, Flogao and Flickr ,three photo sharing sites are among the most popular, as are Google and YouTube. Facebook does not rank in the top 100 sites. perhaps because its navigation is more text-intensive than Orkut and its applications are all in English.
•    Chile claims to be the most technologically developed country in Latin America. According to ISI 2007, in the first quarter of 2007, Chileans spent an average of $532 USD per person in information technology. There is no doubt that young  people are taking great strides in adopting social media. Internet's primary users are children and teenagers from 6 to 17, followed by young men age 18 to 29, mainly from the higher half of the country’s socioeconomic sectors. In the poorest neighborhoods, computer cafés are jammed with young men playing games online. Government has started allowing RSS subscription to websites and a couple of ministries post informational videos on YouTube.  But business remains slow to adopt, and when it does, the project is often internal.
•    Argentina, has been slower to adopt social media, partly because half the country’s population remains below the poverty line. The country’s emerging middle class is slowed by a home broadband connection cost of $100 monthly. This has lead to the high popularity of computer cafes, prevalent in most cities. People pay for connection by the hour. Igooh is a independent citizen journalism arm of La Nacion, Argentina’s national newspaper and online site. Igooh’s adoption is steep and La Nacion’s is flat.  People use Igooh to socialize and publish examples of personal creativity more than to consume news.  Igooh’s founder Ignacio Escribano believes social media is the most revolutionary innovation since the Gutenberg Press. “But Revolutions take time,” he observed. “Perhaps decades.”

Western Europe

•    Western Europe’s culture is diverse. This is a factor in a very uneven social media development. A second contributing factor is the equally diverse fluctuations of broadband adoption and cost from one country to the next.

•    Some European strategists believe in playing follow-the-leader with the US, allowing America to get wet at the “bleeding edge,” adopting only after technology is refined and stabilized. This “fashion following” frustrates Europe’s most innovative social media practitioners, two of whom have moved to the US during the course of this survey.

•    Social media has begun to disrupt “master-servant” business models in France and Spain.  Less so, in Germany and hardly at all in Italy, where broadband access lags.

•    Small countries see the advantage of social media. Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands are among the most blogging countries per population in EU. Irish entrepreneurs have used blogs effectively to establish US market presence.

•    Many European companies value social media as the most efficient way to reach American markets.

•    In Italy, one of the EU’s slowest broadband adopters, there are only 7.5 million visits to social networks in a month. 80% of them are under age 30.

•    Germany has been the slowest advanced country to embrace blogging.  But it does not lag in social networking, where, according to Comscore, 45 percent of Germans who go online use social networks. While MySpace remains the most popular site among Germans, StudiVZ, a German-language social network targeted to students received 3.1 million visitors in July 2007.  Facebook, which has grown this year across Europe at a rate exceeding 400%,  has not yet caught on in Germany. The reluctance of German businesses to permit blogging is often attributed to a love for privacy. A closer look would indicate it is more because German executives want to see a tangible ROI on any activity in which time is invested. In the rare occasions when German companies elect to use social media, they often outsource it to consultants, with the result being an ineffective product that is not integrated with the company culture.

•    Scotland is a world leader in using social media in education. Educators are using virtual reality as well as other innovations to engage students in innovative ways. A public school educator encourages students to work with teachers via social media to determine what they will be taught. Children of parents who have rarely left the UK are encouraged to interact with people all over the world. Behind it all is a strategy to help the next generation to leapfrog into the global marketplace. Facebook has gone from near zero in Ireland to over 130,000 users in six months. At its current rate it will overtake Bebo, which started in Ireland.

Eastern Europe & Russia

•    Countries that were under Soviet control until approximately 1990, started with fresh slates and have relatively high internet involvement. Several eastern countries are well-beyond their Western neighbors in terms of Internet and social media adoption. Citizen journalism flourishes in many of these countries.

•    Estonia is the most connected European country with free, virtually ubiquitous WiFi access provided by the government. It has a highly active e-government, and has a strong pan-European role in e-transactions including banking, purchasing and gambling. Over 90% of Estonian speaking people under age 25 use rate.ee, the localized social network. It’s dependence on internet-related activities for its national operations and economy made it vulnerable to cyber attacks alleged to have stemmed from Russia.

•    From 25-to-30% of Russia’s142 million use the Internet from home or work. About 30% of families have PCs, but not all are Internet enabled. Around 65% own cell phones, but not more than 20% of them use them to go online. There are at least one million bloggers on LiveJournal. Bloggers discuss more politics than business. There is a lot of localized information sharing.  Russians watch a good deal of US-uploaded YouTube clips and there are expressions of surprise of how much in common the people of both countries share. Nearly all traditional media in Russia reflects only the government’s viewpoint. This has given birth to citizen journalism, the first of which is Realno.com, has a network of 320 journalists.  Relatively new, it is receiving about1000 unique visitors daily, but appears to be growing.

•    The lack of business and technology legacy makes Eastern Europe a hotbed for rapid social media emergence. An example is Bulgaria, which fancies itself, “the Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe,” and boasts a low-cost, high-talent development community. One-fourth of Bulgarian households have computers. 75% have cellphones and a great many Bulgarians use them to get online. Internet penetration in Sofia, Bulgaria's capitol, is 50%, although the rest of the country is only 25%.  While older generations studied Russian, the younger is required to study English.

•    From 2000 to 2006, Polish internet users increased by over 307%.  With a population of 38 million, there are 25 million cell phones and 10-15 million PCs, with an estimated 13 million people or 34% using the internet, but adoption is growing fast and it is estimated 50% of the population will be online in three years. Broadband access, however is small--about 1.75 million. The number of home Internet users is increasing, while the number using it at work is declining. Citizen journalism, blogging and social networking are flourishing. Many young Poles see the Internet as a short route to career stardom. Bands have started there and flourished. Bloggers have risen quickly to points of significant national influence. . . Wiadomości24.pl is a citizen journalism network of 760 writers where multiple viewpoints are shared.

•    With the exception of Denmark, Scandinavian countries, Baltic countries and Germany have not glommed onto blogging.  But they are zealous users of Wikipedia and localized social networks do well. Wikis are relatively  popular inside the enterprise.

•    In Ukraine, a nation of46 million people, businesses universally provide internet access to employees. About 38% of it is broadband.  Despite, sometimes dangerous friction with it’s Russian neighbor, Ukrainians argue that it is one of the world’s most promising markets for technology in general and social media in particular.

•    In the Baltic nations, about 90% of young people are using social networks.

•    In the Czech Republic, there are 10 million people and 12.5 millions cell phones, 25% more phones than users. Among18-40 year-old men, having the latest mobile device is a status symbol. The country is wild for SMS. During Christmas 2006, Czechs sent about 60 million text messages. However, only about 500,000 people, or 5% of the population use mobile internet connection. About 35% of Czech households have PCs, purchased mostly for children. Their parents access the Internet at work—often for personal purposes. About 2/3s of all computers are Internet connected.  Older Czechs speak Russian, but their children speak English because the latter language has replaced the former in education programs. Social media has not yet really taken off because there are few Czech localized versions.  As more young Czechs become English-proficient, adoption is likely to escalate and the business and cultural changes are likely to be significant.

Asia

•    In China, social media is used more effectively as an instrument of social change than as a business tool. Business users, mostly blog to advertise or to create direct sales catalogs. Growth in social media is enormous. In two years, the number of bloggers has risen from 1.2 million to over 20 million. Bloggers range in age from 10 to above 70.  The Chinese are wild about Twitter and social networks. There are thousands of Chinese speaking English in Facebook Groups. Several prominent Chinese blog in English as well as there native language. The rapid growth has made the Chinese government demonstrably nervous. The burgeoning growth of China bloggers makes attempts to control who blogs and what they say, increasingly difficult because understanding the internet and how it works is giving social media users an increased advantage. They are adept at bypassing, what they commonly call, “the Great China Firewall.” Despite the well-document rapid rise of an enormous middle class, the cost of starting a tech-related business in China remains quite low and investment dollars are growing.  The start up community, still in its formative stages, uses social media to reach foreign markets. They greatly prefer the direct conversational opportunities of social media to going through official government channels.

•    In Japan 13.8 % of businesses now have blogs, including the country’s largest bank.  They use them to communicate with existing customers and market to new ones. In the last two years, these blogs have become more open, allowing comments where they once did not. No major Japanese company launches a new product without a blogger relations component. Companies host blogger conferences to tell their story. About 17% of small Japanese companies have blogs and “social networking services (SNS),” as they call it, are widely used by individuals and businesses.  Mixi, the leading SNS, attracts more than ten million users. Like Germans and Canadians, the Japanese do not use social networks to meet new people, but to talk with existing friends. For many Japanese, speaking or writing in English remains. Japanese corporations are starting to use social networks internally to improve innovation through collaborative efforts.

•    Singapore is ahead of the remaining South Asian Countries in social media. The upper echelons of government use social media in their efforts to slowly, steadily open up and previously closed society. But government is not in control.  Recent efforts to silence bloggers during a national election, completely failed. An instructor as a class of 40 college students recently asked how many ofhisstudents blogged.  39 hands went up.

Africa

•    About 4 million South Africans have Internet access, or less than 10% of the population. 25% of the users have broadband. Mobile is what matters in this country.  Young people use MXIT , a mobile chat and text message service is exploding as is Facebook.
•   During a lunch interview, an American NGO worker described Internet surfing in a Kenya Computer Café.  African children politely swarmed around her, fascinated by her visits to Yahoo, Google, blogs and email. “They don’t have the money to be part of it yet,” she told me. “But they know it’s there and they want in.”

•    Senegal may have the highest percentage of Internet users in Africa. The country is highly stable with a good economy and education rate. During the years of South African boycotts, global enterprises set up headquarters there and a generation of knowledge workers as evolved, with a new level of awareness of access benefits.

SAP Global Report, Part 6: SAP, Tools & the Killer App

[This is the 6th and final post on the SAP Global Report on Culture, Business & Social media. It covers perceptions, of SAP, social media tools and my take on the true killer app for social media.
Tomorrow, I will begin sending out questions to people all over the world to see how social media is impacting their neighborhoods. Here are the links for the prior posts: Part 1, Overview; Part 2, 7 Key Findings;  Part 3 Findings by World Region; Part 4, Business Analysis; and Part 5,  Communications and Culture. ]

Perceptions of SAP

A good deal of input was received by people with suggestions on what SAP should do regarding social media. The people who were the most knowledgeable about SAP current efforts were the most favorable.  But what also became clear was that SAP’s most successful programs were not generally well known.

A few random comments, are reported here. They do not necessarily represent recommended actions.

SAP should:

“Build ERP around social media and not the reverse.”

“Have a Facebook strategy.”

“Use social media to make SAP feel smaller, more nimble and responsive, rather than big, remote and stodgy.”

“Navigate a careful course to ensure it can deliver on customer needs without cannibalizing.”

“The reliance on 30-year-old technologies at premium prices isn’t going to cut it for SAP, Oracle, IBM and others.”

“[My customers] perceive Microsoft Sharepoint as easier to use and collaborate on than SAP Enterprise Portal. “

“Build social media into planning and strategy applications so that people inside the company, but outside of the department, can make suggestions .”

“SAP, like most ERP vendors forgets it is the user experience which matters most..”

“Most of the SAP [social media] efforts have been internal. They haven't told their story.”

“I would like SAP to deliver my services directly to SAP’s client desks. I’m sure, SAP clients would like it as well because their staff would have the information they need delivered [on demand]. The companies advertising their products and services to B2B would like it.” 

Tools, Trends & Global Neighborhoods

Just two years ago, there were merely two social media tools, blogs and wikis. Both were text-based. Now there is an entire warehouse of tools, all of which are used in tandem with each other, are remixed or are otherwise customized. Blogs are now filled with images, and film clips.  Some tools are not actually tools at all.  Social networks, for example, are meeting places. Mobile has more to do with hardware capability than software.

What is of much greater importance is what is done with any tool.  A hammer for example, can be used to build or bludgeon.  It is mostly the user’s choice. Now there are a great number of users.  Social media tools are like any other tools. They are adapted to accommodate existing needs. Small countries like Ireland, Singapore and Estonia use social media to reach larger markets. Scotland uses it in education to help its children leapfrog ahead of where their parents got. Oppressed countries use social media to enable free speech. Tools get remixed, recalibrated and redistributed in new ways at a very frequent pace.

As the focus has moved from tool to application, some tools are simply taken for granted.  In our 48 interviews, only one person mentioned RSS or tagging, two of social media’s most ubiquitous tools. Whether you use Typepad or Wordpress for a blog platform has become as relevant as whether you ship packages via UPS or FedEx.

Just one year ago the site and the number of visitors was considered extremely important.  There was much talk of the number of visitors at MySpace or YouTube. The general consensus is that such numbers are now less important than had been thought.  Social Media sites are rarely spaces for mass consumption. Instead people tend to bop from site to site seeing the same friends and colleagues at each, whether they are sharing photos, reading blogs, watching videos or sharing the virtual community benefits of a social network.

These personal networks are arranged around shared topical interests.  The most influential members of these networks are very often the most frequent to contribute valuable or interesting information to it.  I call them “Global Neighborhoods.”

Global Neighborhoods have become more important than sites.  Most of them are small; usually each has less than 500 members and often, fewer than 50.  The influence inside them is overwhelmingly peer-to-peer.

This poses an enormous challenge to traditional marketers accustomed to mass communications.  Instead of having mass markets where millions of people can be reached, the world is restructuring into millions of online micro markets where the only way to influence is to join in and through generosity, gain credibility.

The result of the myriad social media tools is a highly decentralized universe where marketing has lost its controls to the market itself.

Youth is the killer app

If one wants to understand what is likely to happen in the next 5, 20 or 50 years, the best way may be to study the habits of children and young adults. They are the Online Generation. They are as comfortable with social media as their parents were with television. YouTube today is better known and more often used than was Big Bird and Sesame Street.

Sites like Webkinz & Club Penguin are starting children into social networking early and possibly changing how they collaborate and connect with people through their lifetimes. Social media becomes a habit that is likely to stay with them through their 50 years or so in the marketplace.

The new professional employee is going to know where he wants to work because of social media, is going to use social media to do his job more effectively than did his or her predecessor and doing so will be as normal a process as using the telephone or email is to older employees of today.

As Ethan Bodnar, a High School student in Connecticut said, 

"I want to work at a place that has an office culture that accepted and used social media for work and play. "

He seems to be representative of his generation.

[This concludes the portion of the Survey which I will be posting.  The remainder consists entirely of specific recommendations I made to SAP.]

 

SAP Global Report, Part 5: Communications & Culture

[NOTE--This is the next chunk of the analysis portion of the SAP Global Report on Culture, Business and Technology. It continues with the analysis of critical areas.  If you missed early portions of this report, based on 48 interviews with people in 25 countries, please check these out: PPart 1, Overview; Part 2, 7 Key Findings;  Part 3 Findings by World Region. and Part 4 Business Analysis.]

Communications & Culture

I define social media as any online space where people can have conversations via text, video, photos or audio.  Although, VOIP, email and forums are somewhat conversational, they were not included in my investigation. While others define the term differently, the important point is to understand that social media may be used by marketing departments, it is not merely a tool of marketing. I am among those who would argue that it is in fact a great disruption to the way marketing has been traditionally practiced for the past 5-6 decades.

I see social media as a communications toolset. As such, its use in the enterprise is much broader. I have called social media a revolution.  It is important that this not a marketing revolution, but a conversational revolution. The revolution moves the corporation from one-way monologue to two-way dialog. Now, a corporation can listen and respond to what people who matter have to say and the implications to efficiency are quite vast.

Social Media allows news, information and rumors to travel from peer-to-peer-to-peer at amazing speed. If something inaccurate or malicious is said about a company or person, it can be responded to immediately. One person with a smart phone on a street corner, in a London Tube, or a plummeting plane can be heard or watched worldwide in minutes after an occurrence.  And anyone who cares can respond.

A company can no longer effectively manage and control relevant conversations regarding its business, products or services. Its traditional use of “communications channels” via traditional analysts and media is eroded and in some cases, has hit a point of near disintegration.

Demand-side revolution

Social media is creating a revolution in demand as well as supply” as industry guru Doc Searls said in his Survey interview. This may be the underpinning of a fundamental shift of control from large, centralized organizations out to communities of customers, prospects, partners and affiliates. Social media is driving a decentralization of power that has fundamental implications.

In fact, one of the phenomena that needs to be examined is the issue of decision-making powers. Evidence is overwhelming that power is moving from the center of the enterprise to the edge where an increasing number of decisions are being made. Social media is said to be a cult of generosity and the evidence would argue that the most influential people in social media are indeed the most generous. In short, generosity is good for business, and in fact, can be used as a competitive edge.

Culture & Language

My research shows more than a little ambiguity regarding language and culture.  There is some evidence that language is emerging as the language of Internet commerce and there are obvious benefits to the world speaking just one language.  While we may be closer today than at any point in this post-Babel Era, we are not significantly closer.

Most of China’s 1.3 billion people would disagree with any claims for English dominance, if they could read these words. While many Japanese business people read English; they are uncomfortable writing in it.  In Poland, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, the Czech Republic, Estonia and a great many other countries, English is taught to children and elite members of the business community speak English.

But regional markets speak local languages and this is unlikely to change for a very long time. A business wishing to use social media to conduct conversations in these markets needs to participate in local language conversations as well as those conducted in English.

Social Networks

While three of the world’s largest social networks, MySpace, Facebook and Bebo are mostly English speaking, Orkut and Hi5 seem to be strong because of their adaptability to multiple languages. Add to that, popular localized social networks in a great many countries, it is clear that a majority of social network users prefer local languages.

The wisest course for a multinational company of any size is to develop and maintain a two-pronged approach.

Culture shapes more than just the language. It also shapes who uses social networks and how they use them. Canadians and the British, for example, have embraced Facebook, but they use it differently than many Americans. While the Americans often use social networks to make new acquaintances, the British and Canadians tend to use it to just speak with people they already know in the tangible world. This behavior is reinforced by the fact that neither the British, nor the Canadians, or the Germans for that matter, blog in great numbers, perhaps because blogging can be viewed by strangers as well as friends.

Citizen Journalism

In cultures where society is emerging from monolithic governments, such as Russia, China, the former Soviet satellites and Singapore, citizen journalism is on a rapid rise.  In societies where a free press is entrenched it is emerging more slowly. Companies choosing to conduct business in these emerging countries should consider citizen journalism as part of their communications strategy that will increase in time.

German culture

Of the developed nations, Germany appears to be the slowest to embrace social media. While some say German business cultures stress privacy, there is greater evidence that German business is more concerned with ROI.  Like England, Canada, and for that matter Estonia, young Germans eschew blogs but embrace social networking.

[Next: Respondent perceptions of SAP.]

SAP Global Survey: Part 4 Business Analysis

[I have been publishing the results of my three months global research on state of culture, business and technology as an assignment from SAP.  This 4th Chunk is the Business Analysis section.  If you missed previous Sections, please click on Part 1, Overview; Part 2, 7 Key Findings; and Part 3 Findings by World Region.

The survey itself will continue as an ongoing project. If you think you have something to contribute to this conversation, please ping me at ShelIsrael1@gmail.com.]

4.    Analysis

The following are my subjective observations in various key areas, based on my SAP Global Survey findings as well as the additional conversations, mentioned earlier.

A.   Business

Over the past two years the business community has moved through the phases of denial, dismissal, contempt and hostility regarding social media. Now they are beginning to embrace them.  In some parts of the world, this is still occurring at a snail’s pace. In certain pockets of the US, there is an emerging sense of urgency being demonstrated. I believe this is a wise course that will gain momentum elsewhere in the world over the next few years.

The Pain Point

Many of the barriers toward business acceptance have diminished, but one remains. It is one that needs to be addressed on a strategic level and it’s focal point is middle management. While at the c-level and junior levels, there appears to be increasing enthusiasm for social media, middle managers are often more resistant. They often occupy the corporate seat where change causes the greatest pain. On one hand, middle managers are being prodded to creatively initiate new programs. On the other; they are held responsible for continued profitability and efficiency of existing ones. To them, social media can feel like a time-sucking distraction from their primary responsibility.

The Entry Point 

With this in mind, a good number of otherwise diverse companies have found it a wise course to determine a social media low-pain point of entry, one where disruption is minimal, risk factors few and deadline pressures soft. Internal wikis requiring large numbers of employee collaboration work well.  A Massachusetts company’s first project was a wiki to organize a sports team two years ago. They now have several public blogs and are integrating online video with them.

Like the Massachusetts company, a great many enterprise efforts start internally.

What to Measure?

A second set of  barriers involves revolves around the insatiable enterprise hunger for statistical evaluations .  How do we measure the success of a social media program.  How do we compare it to traditional marketing efforts? What’s the ROI on a blog? What are the industry standards?  Point me to a few Best practice efforts.

Social media is, in fact, in a dynamic stage and so are the quantification efforts.  There are some such as Google Analytics. More sophisticated programs are being pioneered by companies such as BuzzLogic. But they have not yet achieved any great level of sophisticated measurement.

Why is measurement so vexing to so many?

For one thing, the issue of what should be measured remains a challenge. While a traditional media relations campaign may look at newspaper article impressions, blogs work differently. The newspaper is a one-directional publisher. A blogger is part of a network, one containing 75 million or so nodes. A blogger can have very few readers and be extremely influential. Take for example a political blogger with only three readers. Measurement tools would determine this blogger to be irrelevant. But what of those three readers were the presidents of the US and Russia as well as the Chinese Prime Minister?

ROI is even more difficult to measure. Social media has to do with conversations, about getting closer to customers. It is no easier to measure the ROI of a blog or an online video clip, than the value of a good business conversation.  For that matter, how do you measure the value of a CEO spending four days traveling to and from and attending a conference, where he speaks on a panel for 15 minutes?

Social Media is just starting. In general business, it’s adoption is just now starting. There has not yet been sufficient time for Best Practices.  There are only good ideas, some of which will be refined and evolve into Best Practices.  Likewise, standards usually come in to play once a technology matures. Social media is currently moving too dynamically to be standardized.

A Hilly World

This Survey made clear that the world is not so flat as Thomas Friedman’s book implied. But it is getting hillier.  The Internet has made geography less relevant that the seller is in Chennai and the buyer is in San Francisco. But social media cannot replace the face-to-face experience. While the culture of business transaction is becoming globalized, local cultures remain diverse. Language remains an enormous barrier, which I will discuss in a few paragraphs.

A second factor of Global Hilliness is that the decisions are rolling downhill, from headquarters to the front lines. One Survey respondent noted that the same phenomenon has made armies more efficient because decisions are made fastest where the action occurs.

This, obviously, restructures the corporation in function, if not organization. Authority and influence are becoming decentralized and the implications to a global enterprise are significant.

Internal & recruiting benefits

The SAP Global Survey also showed the most immediate and universal benefit of social media in the enterprise often happens internally, not externally. Even employees who do not use social media themselves seem to enjoy the fact that management trusts them sufficiently to have the option. There is also evidence that allowing social media is likely to attract the best and brightest of the next generation. One high schooler told me, “I just won’t join a company that will not let me blog.

Corporate credibility

The SAP Global Survey confirmed what has often been reported. People trust what is communicated by everyday people online more than they trust authorities being quoted in traditional media.   As one interviewee put it, “I trust companies that are open and honest with me. I will pay more for their products and services because I can talk with and about them on the Internet.

[Next: Analysis of communications issues]

SAP Global Report Part Two: 7 Key Findings

[ This is Part 2 of--I don't know how many parts of the--SAP Global Survey Report on Culture, Business and Social Media. This summarizes the key points of what I learned while working on this report.}

2.   Seven Key Findings

A great deal of anecdotal information was garnered from these interviews. Braided into the survey were excerpts from 30 additional conversations I have conducted in Europe and the US as research for a book project. Additionally, nuggets have been gleaned from current news items. Finally, are observations I have from the many conversations I have held at conferences in Europe and the US and in Internet conversations with people all over the world.

In addition to this somewhat lengthy report, I will be submitting in the new few weeks an Appendix containing bulleted summaries of the interviews conducted specifically for this SAP Global Report. 

My greatest challenge for this report has been to boil down these entire finding to just a few easily digestible points.  The following section is my best effort.  While, they may appear a bit obvious, they are the result of a good deal of listening and thinking.  Each has significant strategic implications for a global enterprise, or so it seems to me.

1.    While it is proceeding at an uneven pace, Social Media is fomenting change in all developed and developing countries. The pace of that change is accelerating. The results will be fundamental and long-lasting changes to most large and centralized institutions including media, government, education and most certainly businesses of all sizes.

2.    The inevitably of this social media revolution rests in the fact that it is being driven by young people—under the age of 30 down to elementary school age. The revolution began, not with social media, but with the Internet. Most freshmen who entered universities last month were born after the introduction of the Web. Communicating and purchasing online is as natural for them as using the telephone is to their parents. As it enters the workplace and markets, this Online Generation is not influenced by traditional marketing, but by peers. They are unlikely to be recruited for employment by a Help wanted ad and they are unlikely to join an enterprise that does not allow them to use the social media tools of their choice. Online conversations will have great influence on what this Online generation buys, view, listens to, where its members travel to and where they stay beginning shortly and remaining for at least the next 50 years.

3.    While a mere two years ago, text blogs were the only power tool of social media, today there is an eve expanding social media toolshed. Blogs themselves have transformed into multimedia things that include video, audio and images. Micro-blogging, where people blog in tiny clips is now in nascent stages but is already wildly popular and demonstrates hw social media will go mobile.

4.    Of all the social media tools, the social network is far away the most popular. FaceBook is the most popular and fastest growing of them among the growing number of people who use English to communicate on the Internet. But people still prefer to use their native languages as is evidenced by the fact that Hi5, a seldom mention, San Francisco-based social network, that focuses on international languages, is among the world’s five most popular social media sites.

5.    Because geography is so much less of a barrier to peer-to-peer communications   than was true a decade ago, cultural differences may be lessening. There is evidence of a global cultural blending in the long term.  However, in the immediate future, language and culture remain highly important and need to be factored into any goal strategies. Someday one size may fit all, but that day will not come in the next five years.

6.     The “geek-to-suit gap is narrowing.” The time from technology enthusiast embracing something new to its adoption in the mainstream enterprise is growing shorter.  It took 12 years for the enterprise to address PCs in a programmatic fashion, after the first of them were smuggled in through the back doors of large companies. It has taken about two years from blogs to be the craze of the technically sophisticated to the current level of enterprise interest.  According to Blogworld, 89% of US businesses believe  blogs are becoming more important for their businesses, up from a Polaris Study estimate of 2% in 2005.

7.    Currently, few enterprises are paying much attention to either social networks  or online video. It is likely that the speed of which this changes will exceed the two years it took blogs to bridge the geek-to-enterprise gap.

The SAP Global Report--Part One

[For those of you new to this blog, I have been working on the SAP Global Report on Culture, Business & Social Media since June. It has been a massive, revealing and entirely enjoyable project for me, which will be continued before year end.

I submitted a lengthy report on my findings so far, earlier this month. I am working also on an Appendix summarizing what the participants told me.

The report has been favorably received by SAP who has given me permission to publish the report, minus my specific recommendations to them. Upon completion, I will also publish the Appendix.

I will be publishing the report here in chunks over the next several days. This is the first part.]

1.   Overview

My assignment was at once simple and monumental. Investigate and report on the state of social media in the world. Do it in three months and report to SAP on what I found.

I would approach the assignment, not as a traditional researcher, which I am not; but as a social media champion who has co-authored a book on business blogging transparently on my blog.

Instead of asking the same series of checkbox questions to a large number of people then compiling numbers onto a spreadsheet, I talked to just 48 people, residing in 25 countries, posting 53,000 words of interview results on my blog.  The interviewees were a diverse group, ranging from celebrity bloggers to high schoolers; from South African ERP consultants to Ukrainian citizen journalists, from Cambodian NGO workers and Kenyan orphans to China’s most famous serial entrepreneur.

In giving me this assignment through The Conversation Group, SAP’s Mike Prosceno told me a primary goal was to help SAP become a social media thought leader. That’s a daunting goal but the survey in itself became a significant step down the path required toward achieving it. The transparent approach we took made thousands of people aware of SAP’s interest. By sharing our findings, SAP has already demonstrated it understands that to be a social media leader, one needs to be generous.  By doing our work publicly, the public wants to know more. To date, I’ve received six requests to speak on the SAP survey. Mike has so far been asked to speak with me twice.

The process further demonstrates yet another important lesson of social media. Not only must a company be both generous and transparent, it must also understand that control is slipping from its clutches of organizations into the hands of its constituencies. When, I began the SAP Global Survey, as it has come to be called, I thought I was in control, when in fact I was not.

My very first survey respondent, Hugh MacLeod, author of the wildly popular Gaping Void and a Microsoft consultant, posted his answers on his blog rather than mine. Then Tom Raftery, an Irish IT blogger who was not on my list at all, copied Hugh’s questions, then answered them on his own blog. This was followed by Ken Camp, a Microsoft consultant,  whom I had never talked with who posted to his own site. However, he apparently didn’t like one of my questions, so he replaced it with one of his own, answering it. A little while later, Joe Thornley, a Canadian PR executive would answer my emailed questions with a video post which appeared on Facebook. This was followed by a couple of people taking it upon themselves to ask questions from the survey on both Facebook and LinkedIn. More than 100 people served up answers.

I had obviously lost control, and the SAP Survey benefited greatly by that loss. It demonstrated two central assumptions of social media and why it is so powerful. People are wired to collaborate and most people perform better when you don’t attempt to impose excessive controls over the process.

Of course, the results of these findings are what is of the greatest value, not just to SAP, but to the general public with whom we will share them.  As a social media professional, I will admit that the findings provide very few surprises to me. However, the survey adds hundreds of data points to the general body of knowledge. These confirm arguments that have been previously based merely on guesswork.

[NEXT: Seven Key Findings.]

SAP Survey to Continue & expand

SAP seems to be pleased with my 8400-word report and I will begin publishing most of it in chunks over the next few days. I am extremely happy to announce that starting Dec. 1, we will continue with it. I am looking for interesting stories about how social media is impacting cultures anywhere on Earth. SAP, of course, has a special interest in business stories.

I also announced that we will be spotlighting case studies on how social media has been used by marketing and PR to succeed or fail. These case studies may be incorporated into a training curriculum for SAP's communications professionals.

Finally, I want to learn more about how people and companies are handling the sensitive issues. How have companies in heavily regulated areas participate in social media? How has Sarbane Oxley impacted social media. Do blogs fall under them.  What legal and ethical issues have you dealt with.

If you have previously agreed to participate in the the Survey, I probably still have your name and I apologize for not having tie to interview you during the first phase. Please ping me again to be sure you are on my schedule. i am not the world's best record keeper.

I expect to start publishing the overwhelming majority of the report shortly.  Because of the length, I will do it one section at a time. I hope you find it as interesting to read as I found it to compile.

I am also discussing with Mike Prosceno ways that I can expand my involvement with SAP. We see some pretty exciting possibilities. It's funny, Mike is the only person I know inside SAP.  But, if the company adopts his thinking, than SAP over the coming years can be a pretty exciting place. You can say a lot of nice things about SAP, but right now, very few people would describe it as exciting. Hopefully, they will allow me to help change that.

Hey, Corp. Communications Folk. SAP Wants Your Case Studies

Well, rest period is over. 

Initial feedback from SAP's Mike Prosceno is that they like what they see in the 8200-word report I sent them. Needless to say, they need time to digest the contents, most of which will be publicly shared.

While that process is going on, Giovanni Rodriguez, a co-founder of The Conversation Group, which has brought me in to consult SAP, has asked me to conduct another transparent project for SAP. Giovanni  is working on a curriculum that will be used to train SA employee worldwide. We want to hear some great case studies.

Send them to me and if they seem unique, valuable or interesting, I will publish them here and Giovanni will incorporate them into the SAP curriculum. Please to not ping me just because your client started a blog.  But if you have gained some knowledge that will contribute to the general body of enterprise social media knowledge, I would like to know. I'm looking for:

• Cases where new ground was broken for any size enterprise or organization. I am particularly looking for problem/solution/measurable result situations.
• Internal use cases.  I don't expect you to share any company secrets. But, if you can share with me any examples of how social media is being used inside a company to improve, collaboration, communication, morale, efficiency or productivity, it would be very useful.
• Business-to-business cases.  This is where SAP resides.
• Business-to-public cases.  This is where many of the customers of SAP customers reside and SAP wants to understand how its customers can use social media in helpful ways.
• Lessons learned. Where have you tried and failed in social media? What doesn't work? What is the lesson learned and how would you do it differently next time?

I'm calling this new, but related, project SAP Case Studies and tagging it  accordingly.  You can email me at shelisrael1@gmail.com or leave a comment here. If I think it is a case that is either useful to SAP's curriculum, or interesting to my readers, I will follow up with you and write the case up. Or you can just post it on your own blog and tag it  SAP  Case  Studies

Update on SAP Global Survey

For the past four days, I've been pretty much buried into what will become my SAP Global Social Media report.  I was focused on the heavy lifting.  I have reviewed about 45 interviews totaling 51,000 words.  I have pored over questions asked on Linked In as well as Facebook.

I've extracted 13,540 words of copy points from the interviewers. My next step will be to take that document and condense it by as much as possible to make a good digest, which I will publish here.

By Monday, I hope to be working on the executive overview, the findings & analysis as well as the specific recommendations.

I am overwhelmed by the wealth of insights, information, anecdotes that have come out of this. As an author, I cannot help to comment that if I merged this with the interviews I conducted last October when I visited 12 European countries, I would have a Hell of a story about social media and culture.

But right now, I have my arms full with a report that I hope influences the strategic direction of one of the world's largest software companies.

2 Shifts: Celebrity Bloggers & Disagreeing in Public

I have just started immersing myself in the interviews I conducted for the SAP Global Survey.  I have my report to them due on Oct. 30 and this will be the main activity for the remainder of this month.

The very first interview was with Hugh MacLeod, who I unabashedly admit is one of my favorite bloggers. As I reviewed my interview with him, I rediscovered this useful observation:
b

"People finally figured out that yes, doing a blog well is actually very time consuming. Not everybody wants to be Robert Scoble- Hell, I'm not sure if Scoble wants to be Scoble all the time, either [Joke!]. Which created a lot of opportunities for less time-consuming web products.

This is us seeing Social Media evolving way from the time-guzzling "Celebrity Model", where people emulate "broadcasters" on a small scale, towards something that is far more useful to most people i.e. something that allows people to make friends and talk to their friends more easily."

This seems to me a profound thought worth revisiting. There is no surprise that the survey shows an increasing number of enterprises all over the world are embracing blogging just when celebrities like Hugh and Scoble are exploring new innovations.

I have said that blogging has started to normalize. Everyday people are starting to use them for everyday purposes in work and play.  They are posting long or short. Blogging is becoming like a telephone--just another conversational tool and the tool is less important than the quantity and diversity of the conversations that are being conducted.

While I was starting to write this post, I received an email from someone who knows Scoble, Hugh and me. He pointed to my recent post where I took issue with Hugh's praise of his client Microsoft. He wanted to know if Hugh had pissed me off somehow and if we were no longer friends. This comes at a time when I have become gun shy of disagreeing with Scoble in my blogs, something I have done from time-to-time since the very beginning of our collaboration on Naked Conversations.

Let me be very clear. These are too people whom I hold extremely dear.  They are two friends who have been very generous to me.  They are two mentors who taught me a great deal about what I now know about social media.

But this is supposed to be a forum, where there is a legitimate give-and-take on ideas. It is a place where we are supposed to take each other on to some degree. Otherwise, we will fill the blogosphere with pablum giving strong praise to weak thinking and blurry ideas because they come from our friends or business associates.

I hope this latter incident does not become a trend.

And BTW Hugh, I disagree.  Scoble loves being Scoble.

SAP Global Survey: Josh Hallett

                                 [Josh Hallett. Photo from his File]

Josh Hallett has spent more time than any consultant I know, talking to large and midsize companies about social media strategies. I've used him as a corporate business barometer over the past couple of years.  When Josh had lots of time, social media adoption was slow. Lately, he has been extremely busy and I think that is indicative of what's happening regarding social media in the enterprise, making him an ideal selection for the wrap up interview of this phase of the SAP Global Survey.

He's an internationally recognized thought leader in the convergence of social media and corporate public relations & marketing. Until this week, he has operated as  Hyku, LLC, consulting and doing development work to Fortune 500 firms, the traditional media and some of the world’s largest public relations and marketing firms.

Yesterday he announced he has joined the social media team at Voce Communications, a popular Silicon Valley PR firm where he has been consulting for some time.

He is the creator/producer/host/moderator of BlogOrlando, a regional social media conference and a popular public speaker. He is also a a Fellow/Board Member of the Society of New Communications Research as well as a member of the Information Architecture Institute and the Florida Public Relations Association.

1. Can you tell me how and why you first got into social media?  How has it
impacted your business and personal life?

Back in early 2003 I had just left the web development firm I founded in 1996 (now called CNP Studio).  I started Hyku to provide consulting to select clients on web/communication strategy.  I also started blogging. 

Pre-Hyku, many of my clients were PR firms and ad agencies.  One day an agency asked me to work up a presentation on ‘what’s next online’ for a staff retreat.  I developed an overview of blogging and other forms of online community.  The term social media didn’t really exist since there were no podcasts or videoblogs.  It was mostly blogging and forums.

That internal presentation in 2003 turned into, ‘Can you consult with us on that,’ ‘Can you present to our local PRSA,’ etc.  By late 2004, half my work involved social media. By the end of 2005 it was almost 100%.  I’m lucky to have a blend of the strategic, the technical and some design thrown in as well. The mixture helps me work across a number of roles on projects. 

Over the past few years I’ve worked for a number of large corporations and media firms as well as some great PR firms. Very recently, my role changed. I’m not on my own anymore.  I’ve taken a position at Voce Communications in Palo Alto, CA.  Hyku will become my personal site, and in many ways it has always been my personal site, just intertwined with my business.

How has social media impacted my business life?  As I said, I’ve been working in the field since 2003 and almost exclusively for the past 2 and a half years.  It has become my business.  The interactions I’ve had online have been innumerable friendships and connections around the world.

What’s ironic though, is that in this ‘virtual’ world, I’m traveling more than ever. You still can’t beat the face-to-face interactions. Some of the my most trusted colleagues are the ones I often see at various events around the country. 

On a personal level it’s been very gratifying to see the BlogOrlando conference develop into something. The ability of a group of friends to get together and organize a free event like that is something. Recently, Joe Thornley talked about the ‘cult of generosity’ that surrounds the social media industry.

2. What tools do you use? Which are your favorites?

This might sound like a cop-out to the question, because it’s not really a tool. It’s my network of friends.  Sure tools like IM, RSS, Facebook and Twitter allow me to communicate with those friends, but the tools do nothing without the friends.  It’s the ability to quickly communicate with individuals one-on-one or a group that has become quite the asset.

However if I had to choose just three things (well four technically) I’d say:

1.    RSS Reader – The ability to receive what I want, when I want is what RSS is all about.  I use NewNewsWire on my Mac and it’s always open. 
2.    Keyword Watches – Combine a persistent search in Technorati or Google Blog Search with RSS and you take the functionality of your RSS reader up a notch.
3.     MovableType/WordPress – The ability to quickly and easily publish content is what these platforms are all about.  Almost every single web site I interact with today is run on one of these platforms.  It’s amazing how much those two tools are a part of my worklife. 
4.    Flickr – As an amateur photographer, I love Flickr.  It does everything I need it to, and more.  Currently I have close to 13,000 photos stored online.  That number will probably double or triple in the next year.

3. You talk to a lot of mid and large size corporations.  What would you say
is the state of social media in their corporate minds?

This, of course, varies by company since there are always pockets of growth/resistance in any corporation. In my experience though, many corporations outside the valley/tech sector are still learning.  I am constantly conducting internal training sessions and it’s usually the same questions over and over again.  Granted there is more and more interest, which means means more questions and discussion, but that doesn’t always translate into action. The majority of firms I talk to realize they’re not ready. This could be related to: legal, cultural, etc.

If they do move forward often the first steps are usually either:

a.    Internal
b.    Related to a small event or project 

4. What motivates corporations to adopt social media tools?  What tools are
they most demanding these days?

I really hate to say, ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ or ‘Fear’ but sometimes those are great motivators.  They tell themselves about community and engagement, but it’s not until they actually get out there that they realize that those things are real and have a benefit.  This is especially the case for organizations that haven’t generally opened themselves up to the customer/public, etc.

Usually by starting small with an event or a specific product team a corporation can really test the waters.  I hate to say it’s a controlled environment, but often with a product team they will know their power users and (hopefully) have established relationships with them.  Social media just helps facilitate the conversation.

As for the tools they’re demanding?  My experience has mostly been with blogging platforms and how to integrate them with existing web sites. The majority of the work is either in WordPress or MovableType. However, there are quite a few people who still want/need to use TypePad.

Flickr is also being used quite frequently by clients. The Number One feature that organizations love about Flickr is the auto-resize of images uploaded.  Now via the ‘all-sizes’ tab they have the ability to quickly and easily post photos and it’s not just for their blog.

5.  What are the biggest barriers to enterprise adoption of social media
tools? Who is objecting the most?

Staff and time. You can throw up the standard legal/IT argument, but almost every project that I see proposed and that goes nowhere is because of staff resources. They just can’t budget the time for an individual or group of individuals to take ownership. Many fear it will become a ‘full-time’ thing, but if the project takes off, that’s what you want. 

There will always be things that legal will object to, but guess what?  You can probably build an initiative around something you CAN talk about. A social media project doesn’t have to be a complete inside look at your organization and what’s going on. You can start small with something you can talk about and manage.

As for IT, many times we’re doing an end-around. Via the PR or marketing departments the entire project is built outside the IT department on an external server, i.e.  blog.companyname.com. This can be done on a separate server with MT, WordPress or via a hosted service like TypePad.

6.  What trends do you see happening in the enterprise regarding social media?

I see two things happening. The interest and buzz will die down somewhat, but the adoption will rise. What I mean is that it seems everybody is talking about it now, but for a large majority of organizations after they learn about it, much of the clamoring for education will go away. It will be on to the actual implementation and use.   

Remember the days when building a web site was guaranteed to get you on the front page of the business section? That cycle happened all over again with things like blogs, SecondLife, etc.  Launching a blog or another social media initiative is no longer buzz-worthy. However, if planned and executed correctly it can be effective.

As colleges begin to adapt their curriculum, the majority of graduates will have some exposure as well and that will change internal corporate culture.

7.  Can you take a stab at telling me how social media will impact the
enterprise over the next five years?

I think this blends elements from Questions 3, 4, 5 and 6.  Overall, I think you’ll see more adoption of the tools for a variety of purposes, both internal and external.  However the lasting effects are what the tools are helping facilitate and that is communication.  Increased communication and the humanization of corporations are a good thing in my book, some industries may disagree though.

8. Do you have any good case studies to share with me?

Well Kami Huyse has already talked about the SeaWorld project that she and I worked on together earlier this year.

Kami handled the PR and outreach, while I worked on the technical aspects.

At Voce one of the most recent successes has been the Sony PlayStation Blog , which launched in June. The project started in early 2007 working towards a June launch. The primary goal was to establish a blog as a platform for conversation between SCEA and  PlayStation fans. 

Voce managed all aspects of the project from start to finish, including blog design and content planning, policy creating and internal protocol development as well as moderation and measurement. 

It’s been great to watch the level of commentary going on at the blog and see how a number of folks within SCEA are participating.

9. What advice do you have for SAP regarding social media and their global
business?

It starts with allowing your employees to engage others outside the workplace in a natural way. If they work in one specific field just let them be themselves online in external forums/communities.  Who better to know the intricacies of a culture or a situation, than those that actually live and work there.   

10. Additional comments?

It’s interesting to see how the answers get shorter as the questions go on, I noticed that trend with some of the other respondents.

Thanks for allowing me to participate and offering the BlogOrlando attendees a sneak peak at some of your findings.

SAP Global Survey: China's Isaac Mao Part 2

[Isaac Mao, Chinese entrepreneur. Photo by Shel]

Part 2 of 2

It is fitting that on a day that China's head of state is telling a political assembly that the Communist Party must stay in control, that I write about Isaac Mao who is doing a fine job of bringing entrepreneurialism into China. where he tells me, bloggers have little, if any, trouble bypassing the command and control policies of it's government.

Isaac is no Communist by any means. But he is a "sharist," and there is a difference. " In sharism, people have the same rights wherever they live.   "Under Communism, the state owns all property. In sharism I keep ownership but I like to share and it's up to me. Prosperity and ideas spread because people like to share," he told me last month when we met for a loing San Francisco lunch..

It's an interesting philosophy, one that he says he acquired from his mentor, Japan's Joi Ito, who first inspired Isaac to blog back in 2002. But it's also interesting because, like Joi Ito, about half of Isaac's focus is as a venture capitalist.

When we met,  Isaac saw no irony between sharism and venture capitalism. "VCs like to share wealth," he replied flatly.

While he is currently a partner in UCI Venture partners, Isaac was in the states to talk to denizens of Sand Hill Road.  He is raising a fund to start his own venture fund and is close to reaching his $50 million goal. In the US, that would be a miniscule amount, but in China, it will go a long way because costs in China remain so low, investment capital goes further.

His fund will focus on social media startups that can help to open China's culture to the rest of the world. But he wants to bring them a layer further. "I want to help them become profitable."

There are many venture capitalists in China. A good number of them are satellites of American private equity investors. Isaac is not worried. "I have the hometown advantage. I understand how China thinks," he said.

He also has experience 

Current investments under his management is called another.com  (temporarily closed), which delivers feeds through RSS and IM.

What's interesting about another.com is indicative of how the Chinese tech community is bypassing Chinese attempts to control social media. The server is located in the US. Users in China, can grab content from Six Apart blogs or CNN News.  Not only is the government unable to stop it, they cannot even see it, according to Isaac. Besides, the site breaks no censorship rules. He also asserts that Another.com is not attempting to defy government. "We are just a business trying to make money."

Isaac says that a high percentage of China's 20 million social media community members know how to access uncensored versions of Google using mime servers located outside of the country.

He expressed disappointment in Google because it self censors in China. "Our law does not require Google to remove content. They volunteer to do it it. They try to adapt to our hidden rules, which frequently change. Google goes along. Google loses. So do the Chinese people."

Throughout my interview with him, Isaac impressed me as fearless. He shrugs that off. He's just an entrepreneur and he sees great opportunity in China right now. Like in the US,  he sees his government, as an often inefficient, sometimes irritating obstacle, that can be dealt with.

Social media is flourishing in China. Twitter is exploding because the Chinese love it's simplicity.  The other half of Isaac's life is immersed in the Social Brain Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to building an "open source culture." It promotes free speech and shows people easy ways to bypass "the Great Firewall" of China censorship, which he also calls the Kung Fu Network.

Flickr had a half million Chinese users when a Chinese woman posted a Tiananmen Square photo in Germany. China's government responded, not by blocking Flickr, but by blocking every photo. So, in China, when you visit the popular photo site, you only see black squares where the photos would appear.

Social Brain is the numbers keeper and their most conservative way of counting says that bloggers and other social network participants have grown by at least twentyfold in the last two years and the rate of growth is accelerating.

Through the Social Brain Foundation, Isaac tries to experiment with different social media tool so that he understands the diversity. he uses wikis to allow bloggers to write whatever they want and have other bloggers answer. It is extremely collaborative with 50 of China's leading bloggers all chiming in to discuss censorship. They publish a weekly review of what bloggers were blocked. They link to thousands of Chinese bloggers. 

Isaac sees diversification of content as the growing trend among China's 20 million bloggers. Demographics are all over the board.  Blogger ages range from age 10 to over 70. The hottest topic is politics. A majority of people openly discuss social problems. There are significant chunks still absent, such as middle aged business people who do not blog in any great numbers.

Government is responding by imposing new regulations. It requires that bloggers register their full name, so Chinese bloggers respond by using aliases and nicknames. They know how to use fake ID numbers that cannot be traced back to the original senders and nearly all blogger do it.

The government has also ordered companies to share all content, and end user IP addresses including messages between

between bloggers. Government wants to see all messages. Isaac told me that most people don't even know the regulations and those that do ignore them.  The government cannot keep up with the billions of message, including IM, going about and they cannot track.

There was a time when Isaac was one of a small handful of prominent Chinese bloggers.  Now there are thousands and the number keeps growing. They cannot hide, but the sheer volume of content these prominent bloggers produce make it extremely difficult to suppress control or even discourage.

In short, as Isaac describes it, the government is pretty much screwed in it's attempts to suppress the free speech in the blogosphere.

"In China, we talk openly about the government system failure. People see a lack of balance between powers and society particularly at the grassroots. People are talking about their problems in public and those problems all track back to management and governance," he observed."

Where is it all going?  How will social media change China, and in so doing, the world in general. Isaac  see it filling the niche that government-blessed traditional media fails to fill.  We can reach more people through social media than traditional media in China can. He sees greater diversity of content and creator. Because search services like Google are failing the Chinese people, in his view, "We will use our own trusted resources in the future.

 

 

.

 

The Whole Global Neighbourhood

John Yunker has pointed me toward his newest ByteLevel effort, a country-coded map of all 245 countries of the world. It's a bit difficult to view even when you blow it up.  That may be why John is selling the map for about $30 through his site.

The larger the font, the more populous the country. When you look at it for a few minutes, your realize how vast and diverse the entire Global Neighborhood really is. You also realize how little of the world has broadband access, not to mention drinking water and safe haven from predators.

Powered by ScribeFire.

I'm keynoting in Spain at Thanksgiving

I don't often tout the places where I'm speaking.  I speak pretty often and after a while it makes the blog seem a bit self-serving. I have been invited to be one of two American keynoters at Evento Blog Espana,the other being the genius, Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter.  While he lives in my physical neighborhood of the world, Spain is likely to be the first time we actually meet.

Increasingly, my interest has been the international social media community. In fact, about half my readers now come from outside the US. I will be discussing my research for the SAP Global Survey, and perhaps filling in the gap  We did not interview any Spanish bloggers in the survey, but that will change when I get the opportunity to meet several hundred of them Nov. 23, 24, 25 in Seville, the beautiful Southern Spanish city. If you can possibly make it, please let me know.  I'd love to meet up with you.

Special thanks to Kami Huyse who recommended me for this honor. I only regret that new motherhood prevents her from joining me on stage. She was dazzling at the recent Measurement Summit.  Maybe next year.

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SAP Global Survey: China's Isaac Mao. Part 1

      

[Isaac Mao in a San Francisco Cafe. Photo by Shel]

China's Isaac Mao, according to Wikipedia, is "a venture capitalist, blogger, software architect, entrepreneur and researcher in learning and social technology. He divides his time between research, social works, business and technology." His main focus these days is as vice president of   and director to the Social Brain Foundation, advisor to Global Voices Online and several China-based Web 2.0 businesses."

He is also among the most inspirational people I've met through my lengthy and meandering social media journey.  It has been a very busy five weeks since I sat down for 150 amazing minutes with him in a San Francisco cafe. Yet, I still find myself flashing on our conversation and feeling myself elated by the pleasure of meeting him.

We had a history together.

I interviewed Isaac by email for Naked Conversations in June 2005.  It started as a pretty free flowing exchange of ideas and facts, but then, Isaac became more guarded in what he had to say about China, censorship and government.  When I asked him if he thought our conversation was being monitored, he answered crisply: "The policies of my government are well documented."

I got the message and backed off.  In December, I looked forward to meeting Isaac at Les Blog 2, where he was supposed to be speaking as well as Scoble and me. But he did not show up.  When I asked Rebecca MacKinnon, the former CNN China reporter and Global Voices China expert who had first introduced me to Isaac. She said told me her friend was having "a few difficulties with his government and it would be better if you left him alone for a while."

I did.

Then the book got published and my life got hectic.  I never circled back to Isaac.  But still I wondered what was going on and worried a bit. I kept checking his extremely popular blog and new he was posting regularly and, it seemed, in unfettered style.  But I never inquired.

So when I met Angus Lau at Office 2.0 and learned that Isaac would be in San Francisco, I immediately contacted him to request a meeting. Isaac, China's most successful tech entrepreneur was in the Bay Area to find partners for UCI, his new venture fund (we'll  get to that in Part 2).

I asked Isaac what had happened back in 2005.  I had wondered if somehow the conversations we had  held back then had hurt him with his government, a concept that he  found funny.  He had said nothing to me that he had not said in public many times. 

But it was about that time, that he realized the government was monitoring his calls.  He could hear them on the phone. "They just weren't good at spying quietly."

By the time Les Blogs 2 came along, he knew that the government was tracing his calls to see with whom he was meeting. That's when a car started following him around the streets of Shanghai. He knew it was a government car because the government always used the same kind of car for such purposes and the guys inside it looked like they came from central casting for surveillance."

Eventually, Isaac got pissed off. One day, he made a U-turn while walking down the street, going directly over to the car and knocked hard on its window.  The window rolled down and he demanded of the two men inside, "Why are you following me?" They looked at each other for a moment, rolled the window back up and sped off.

A short while later, the same two men came knocking on his apartment door and very politely asked to come in. They told Isaac they did not mean to bother him.  They had no evidence that he was doing anything illegal. "But we want more information on anyone Isaac knew," who were doing risky things to our government."

Isaac stood his ground.  "I don’t know anyone like that. It is not my interest. I don't want to improve our government. I just don’t want you to not harass me," he told them. They agreed, but politely requested he not to leave the country for a while. Isaac concurred, which is why he did not speak at Les Blogs 2.

The eavesdropping and shadowing trailed off. After all, Isaac is a spearhead in China's effort to join the global tech community, something China-a country that needs to create millions of new jobs each year--wants desperately. Also, his VC activity brings foreign dollars into China, creating jobs for young, bright Chinese. He may cause them some discomfort, but one would think China wants Isaac to keep on doing what he is doing.

What he says may make government officials nervous from time to time, but all things considered, they are likely to cut some slack to this highly visible, internationally respected member of the international social media community.

Over lunch in San Francisco, one of the world's most tolerant cities, Isaac told me it's different for China's real human rights activists. "They are totally harassed. It's rarely about getting thrown in prison, although that remains possible. They usually remain free, but their lives are made totally miserable every day of their life."

But he is convinced that the determination of his government to command and control over the country's 1.3 billion citizens is becoming about as effective as baling water from a boat with a lawn rake. We joked about movies such as the Bourne Identity that show government agents who are incredibly adept at listening, watching and eliminating citizens.

In real life, neither China's government, nor America's are as good as Hollywood would have you believe, although both governments cause a fair share of unnecessary human suffering.

But the numbers go against the governments. In the two years since we first talked, Isaac estimates the number of Chinese bloggers has exploded from 1.2 million to at least 20 million.  Others estimate that number is as high as 60 million, but Isaac discounts "blogs" that are diaries without RSS or Comments.

More and more these bloggers say whatever they damned please.

"Years ago, we had to self-censor, but more-and-more people are becoming more than Chinese. We are more now a part of the world because of social media and global business."

"This year," Isaac pointed out, "China had many problems [such as the lead paint in toys incident]. Government is more embarrassed by our own people, than from the outside, so they tried to tighten controls.  In the blogosphere, the more government tries to squeeze, the more people fight back. More and more bloggers are daring to speak out."

He said  government wishes it could remove "loud bloggers so the can say China is a 'harmonious society.' " He smiles and pauses.

"Bloggers go on the Internet and hack the word "harmony." In Chinese, you can change the word easily to mean 'River of Shit.' That's what we think of our government's 'harmonious society.' "

"If you want to be harmonious society you should respect diversity and free speech. You cannot sing harmony if all the people sing the same note."

[ Part 2 will examine how Isaac got started in social media, social media in China as well as it's amazing growth and strength in the last two years. We'll also have a bit more on how bloggers deal with censorship.]

SAP Global Survey: Chile's Juan Pablo Tapia

            [Chile's Juan Pablo Tapia. From his Photo File]

Juan Pablo Tapia, is a senior consultant in strategic communications, serving as a Projects Manager at Crisis ICC , a communications firm. He's also a professor of Strategic Communication at University Pacifico and UAH where, he tells me, he has "incorporated contents about the Social Media whenever I can."  Additionally, he is co-founder of the Civic NGO responsible for implementing TimeBanks in Chile. His personal blog, is a venue he told me "where I collect Typos." Juan and I share something in common on that one.

I hope you read it through, ir at least skip to the end, where Juan Pablo tells me the best case I have yet heard on social media changing government behavior. 

1. Tell me about your country.  How big, how populated, major industries, quality of life, education, etc.

According to Wikipedia, Chile is the world's 38th-largest country. It is comparable to about twice the size of Norway. Chile's 2002 census reported a population of 15,116,435. Its growth has been declining since the early 1990s, because of a decreasing birth rate. About 85% of the country's population lives in urban areas, with 40% living in Santiago, our capital.

We have a dynamic market-oriented economy characterized by a high level of foreign trade. In 2006, Chile became the country with the highest nominal GDP per capita in Latin America. Even though the exceptional Chilean economic results, the Chilean economy income distribution has been extremely poor. Chile ranks 80th among the countries on the list of income distribution, being the fourth in Latin America and ranking behind much poorer African countries such as Zambia, Nigeria and Malawi.

Chile has signed free trade agreements (FTAs) with a whole network of countries, including an FTA with the United States, signed in 2003. Over the last several years, Chile has signed FTAs with the European Union, South Korea, New Zealand, Singapore, Brunei, China and recently Japan.

We Chileans call our country país de poetas—land of poets. Gabriela Mistral was the first Chilean to win a Nobel Prize for literature (1945). Chile's most famous poet, however, is Pablo Neruda who also won the Nobel Prize in 1971.

2.  Tell me about yourself.  What do you do? When did you first get involved
in social media and why? What tools do you use and why? How has social media changed your life?

I define myself as a guy with the desire to learn and to make things in different scopes and Social Media is sure one of the most important.

The first time that I became jumbled with the Social Media was around 3 years ago, thanks to one of the first blog I've ever read ( www.leoprieto.com) made by a friend who is one of the refering ones of this subject in Chile. From that minute, the potentiality of being able to have conversations, virtually with any person in this world, hallucinated me; and even more, there were registries of those dialogs. To understand the phenomenon like a conversation is clearly thanks to you Shel and to your first book. Lately, that power to generate " responsible conversations between participants",  has interested me more from the point of view of the impact in the corporative communication.

At present I maintain two blogs juanpablotapia and bancodeltiempo One is in Wordpress and the other in Blogger. I use Google Analytics to evaluate both in terms of performance and impact. Also I have incorporated 2.0 tools like Podamatic, Slideshare and Scricblike to make them more attractive and to share different types of content. I use RSS for reading and Bloglines and Firefox. My Social Bookmarks are managed mainly by Del.icio.us.

Lately, I've been giving more attention to Facebook and Linked In because of their great potential for creating international and professional networks.  Finally, I maintain my accounts in YouTube, iGoogle, Flickr and others for active video and images.

I use Slide to share my classes with my students and my mindmaps are build on Bubbl, etc. I have a Myspace site to meet and inform me about new groups of music. Recently, I have incorporated Twitter and WIXI on my "software to evaluate's" list.

I am on a permanent search for new tools that allow me to handle the infinite information available at present. So yes, social media has changed my life within the last few years.

3. Do you use social media for your work? How and