The Workplace Blog

By Shiv Singh

A much ignored subject in conversations about the workplace is the role that social influence plays. Recent research shows that when making decisions (any kind of decisions) we are much more influenced by known peers than we are by anonymous people or anonymous information inputs. It is the people that we know and trust that we consider the most credible sources of information. Because we’re much more connected to each other online, we’re influencing each other more than we ever used to.

This  simple fact has huge implications for the future of work. With the enterprise going increasingly social, we’re all observing one another much more. Because we’re connected to each other via internal wikis, department blogs and collaborative workspaces, we’re always watching what our peers say. Some of us comment on that and participate in the internal conversations, others just lurk. But lurking too allows for social influence to take place. Since we’re forced to collaborate more, we’re in turn influencing and being influenced by each other much more too. What are the implications of this? Here are three -

a. Greater internal alignment. Call it the result of increased voyeurism or what you like, but the fact that I have a much better sense of what my co-workers in the neighboring cubicles think, influences how I think and act at work. We’re much more in alignment with each other or inversely my workplace behaviour is a negative response to their actions.

b. Increased external alignment. Not only am I paying more attention to what’s going on in the work lives of my peers, but I’m also paying more attention to peers outside my own company. What they think and say in this social world, influences my actions within my own organization. This is healthy as it makes me a more informed, educated employee but it can also serve as a distraction.

c. Potentially rebellious employees. Since we’re watching each other so much more, we’re also processing a lot more information and thinking harder about our roles in an organization. Questions like why did one peer get a promotion over another or why do the benefits in one department differ from another crop up a lot more. It means that organizations need to think harder about how it manages perceptions among its employees.

By and large, social influence presents an interesting opportunity for most organizations. They can allow for positive social influence to take place by pointing their employees to positive, thought provoking influences. It also means that that the organizations don’t control their employee base like they once did. Its just how the world has changed. For more on how social influence work, take a look at this article where I discuss the motivations behind influence.

By Shiv Singh

An often forgotten fact about collaboration is that the people who typically want to collaborate are also the ones who trust each other the most. They are also the people who recognize that they can benefit in some manner by collaborating. Those benefits usually extend beyond just learning from one another to also recognizing that their reputations get enhanced as more peers observe their ongoing collaborations. But these people aren’t always in the majority.

As we design and analyze Enterprise 2.0 solutions, many of us work with the assumption that people inherently want to collaborate and that they will given the appropriate tools and motivations. That’s not necessarily true. Some people are more prone towards collaboration - they are the ones that see the obvious benefits. But there are others too - people who don’t recognize the benefits (and in some cases there may not be any at all) and people who fear that the collaboration can limit their competitive advantages among their peers. In other cases, its also simply a matter of trust. People may not want to collaborate with each other because they don’t trust the other people to recognize their contributions and play fairly.

The next generation Enterprise 2.0 applications, won’t just make collaboration easy. They will need to focus on helping organizations to identify who are more naturally inclined to collaborate and who need to collaborate for their jobs. These future applications will give those people the right collaboration tools based on what they’re trying to do and with whom. They will also recognize that there’s a difference between providing sharing capability and allowing for collaborative production. The applications will also be designed with the assumption that not everyone needs to collaborate or should be pushed to collaborate. That’s a different mindset from today but a more practical, logical and desirable one. Hopefully, we will get to that place soon.

I just returned from the 3rd annual Avenue A | Razorfish Technology Summit in Austin. After sitting through presentations from Microsoft, Sun, Forrester Research, and Avenue A | Razorfish experts including Ray Velez, Amy Vickers, and Shiv Singh, there was one recurring theme that stood out: openness. Everyone seemed to be talking about openness: open standards, open source, open policies. But how open really are these companies? And how far are users willing to go?

While everyone at the conference agreed on the value of open source as a development concept, the most contentious issue centered on the openness of user data in a web 2.0 world. With the recent broohaha over tech cognoscente Robert Scoble’s ban (and subsequent reinstatement) from Facebook for “scraping” user data of his “social graph” (a word I learned means “all your connections on a social networking site”) via a rogue Plaxo script, the debate is quickly moving from the academic to the business domain. This will be a hot topic in the months to come.

The first related topic was Open ID. OpenID is an open, decentralized, free single sign-on system. Think of Microsoft Passport (I mean, Windows Live ID) but for a wide array of unaffiliated sites. Open ID eases that frustrating burden of having to remember a million user names and passwords for that increasingly complex ecosystem of sites you visit. With the proliferation of social media sites, there’s a lot of buzz about universal standards. Once you register with Open ID, you log on to all your favorite OpenID-supported sites/services with a single password linked to a provider of your choice (e.g., your existing Yahoo! log-in). Best of all, the user ID stays with you even if you switch providers.

The second related topic at the conference was data portability. Data portability is the idea of taking user data between different social networking sites. On day one of the AA|RF Technology Conference, Microsoft announced it was joining the Data Portability Workgroup, a consortium dedicated to defining inter-operability standards for data portability between sites. In doing so, Microsoft joins Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Google, Plaxo, & others. The open standards will “allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems,” reports TechCrunch.

Until days ago, Facebook stayed out of the circle. Why? Its business is based on owning your identity. Ever read its Terms of Service? Apparently, Facebook has the right to all your content for “any purpose, commercial, advertising or otherwise.” But, users shouldn’t have to read the fine print. And, they shouldn’t have to re-create their profiles and chart their complex social graphs next time the new hot social media site comes along. (You know how many hours it took to try to make myself look cool??!:-)

Microsoft agrees. Sr Technical Product Manager at Microsoft, Angus Logan, explained to AA|RF employees & clients that Microsoft will follow the “delegation” style of data portability. Translation: Windows Live tools will allow users to import their circle of friends and photos from other social media sites.

More details to come on this topic throughout 2008. Facebook’s recent reversals of its creepy Beacon ad product, Robert Scoble ban, and refusal to join the Data Portability consortium are steps in the right direction.

With the right security and privacy permissions in place, openID and data portability encapsulate two cornerstones of web 2.0: simplicity and user control.

As social media tools are increasingly adopted in the workplace, issues related to social identity will soon cross paths with the enterprise. Executives, be ready. Who do you think owns social data?

Last week Susan Scrupski published some great comments about Microsoft’s efforts to orient MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) towards Enterprise 2.0. She talked about Atlassian and Newsgator and how they integrate more tightly with SharePoint now allowing SharePoint users to find people and content more easily. It is also now easier to bring content into SharePoint and to take it out to other platforms and devices more simply.

And for those among us who are less inclined to go with SharePoint or for that matter any large company’s collaboration software, Susan recommends ThoughtFarmer which started out as a SharePoint project.

Above is a screenshot from ThoughtFarmer depicting an employee’s page.

I too met Chris McGrath at the Office 2.0 Conference and was very impressed with what his company is doing. Keep an eye on them.

A few days ago we had a wiki lunch and learn in our New York offices. The goal of the meeting was to educate peers about wikis and then talk specifically about the Avenue A | Razorfish wiki. The meeting was extremely informative both for the audience and for the presenters who got useful feedback on the wiki. The wiki redesign was also previewed during the lunch (left).

The meeting certainly drove home the point that the wiki can be defined in any number of ways. The lack of inherent structure exposes it to requests for many different structures Whether it be requests for a global navigation system based on company departments or something more fluid, categorization was certainly a hot topic. This conversation also showed that a lot of users think of a wiki in terms of an intranet. They expect to see intranet metaphors and functionality on it. Your challenge will be to either accommodate their needs or educate them that this is something quite different that needs to stay different.

A few weeks ago, Kevin Kearney whose a peer here at Avenue A | Razorfish, gave a talk on Playfulness in Interaction Design (PDF) to the Usability Professionals’ Association NY chapter.

The very first question at the end of the presentation was about introducing playfulness on intranets. This was surprising as Kevin hadn’t mentioned intranets at all during his presentation. As Kevin finished answering (saying that playfulness could be brought to intranets) another audience member chimed in mentioning MOM 3000. It made me think that MOM 3000 deserved a brief introduction over here.

So what is MOM 3000? It was the original Razorfish intranet. A much loved one well before its time. Why? Because it had a strong personality that we all loved. It wasn’t the most feature rich intranet and it probably wasn’t the most stable one too. But it had something special about it. Whether it was the Soup Can (which was a place where anyone in the company could add links) or the DHTML driven schedule (this was in 1999), MOM 3000 had charm.

When you design your next intranet, think about how you can establish an emotional connection with your audience. Just because an intranet is a business tool, it doesn’t mean it needs to be devoid of emotion. And nor does it need to be deadly serious either. An element of playfulness can give you those page views that you have been yearning for all year. The playfulness shouldn’t be gimmicky and it needs to be in harmony with your corporate culture but it could draw in more users than any single feature on your intranet.

The person who mentioned MOM 3000 in the UPA meeting left the company a few years ago but still remembers the intranet. Now that’s called establishing an emotional connection.

What is the best way to use Facebook? Can it serve as a business networking tool? Or is it just a social networking site that should be used to reconnect with personal friends? In an attempt to answer some of these questions, I’ve developed a set of Facebook rules. Rules for those who are in the workforce and a little worried about their privacy.

1. Only accept invitations from people you know.
We usually get invitations from people that we have at least a passing acquaintance with. But also some invitations from people we do not know at all. Quite simply, do not accept invitations from people you do not know.

2. Be picky about who you give access to your complete profile.
Many of us ignore the limited profile feature but it is very useful. You may not want someone you have just met to discover your high school nick name when he browses your “Wall.” Nor may you want him to see the photographs of the party you attended the previous weekend. The solution - provide access to the limited profile and only in time change those settings. Maybe establish a one year rule - give complete access only to people whom you’ve known for more than three months

3. Do not publish phone numbers online. An email address is enough.
Did you know that random strangers can view your complete profile even if they are not your friends? Facebook’s default privacy settings allows strangers to see the profile of all a person’s friends. That can be dangerous. Solve the problem by not including too much contact information.

4. Do not accept random application invitations. They aren’t worth it.
Alright, some applications can be a lot of fun. Whether its poker or the globe application, they let you share more with friends. But many of these applications also gather your personal information and market it to others. So don’t accept too many application invitations. Or if you must, at least read \the fine print first.

5. Ignore the pokes. It will save you embarrassment.
A girlfriend poking her boyfriend is very different than getting a poke from a colleague. The best solution? Simply ignore the pokes. Don’t poke anyone and ignore the pokes you receive. It’ll save you embarrassment. Instead send them private messages or add them as friends. Unless that is of course, you truly mean to poke them.

6. Petition Facebook to improve its privacy settings interface.
The truth is Facebook succeeds when our privacy is compromised. The more we share about ourselves, the more our friends and their friends get hooked on the service. So while Facebook may say they respect our privacy, they’d rather we be as expressive as possible. But at the same time, they need to educate us about the risks of sharing too much. And just as importantly, they need simpler interfaces for changing one’s privacy settings.
7. Don’t expect too much from the Facebook groups
One of Facebook’s killer applications are its groups. They combine the best of evite and meetup and are useful for organizing events. But beware of group invitations from strangers. If the groups are inactive or are marketing ploys, leave them immediately.

8. Use the send message feature. Friends may prefer it to the wall.
Everybody else may not be as open as you. Some may prefer to have conversations using the private messages feature rather than the wall. Keep that in mind as you talk to your friends. And whatever you do, don’t compromise their privacy by posting something confidential on their wall.

This wonderful slide deck explains what enterprise 2.0 is. It’s useful for the executive who’s trying to understand these new trends. Thanks Charlie!

Everywhere I turn people seem to be talking about Facebook. Whether it is the exponential growth, the shrewdness of Mark Zuckerberg or the new widget strategy, Facebook seems to be everywhere. In fact, the latest issue of The Economist magazine devotes a full page to the Facebook phenomena and to Zuckerberg.

But should you really care? Yes, and here’s something important that you need to know about Facebook.
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Danah Boyd is probably my favorite social networks researcher. She’s produced some formidable research and is one of the leading thinkers on social networks and the online youth culture. Here’s an interesting quote of hers in which she explains why social networking has captured the imagination of so many teenagers.

“Publics offer youth a space to engage in cultural identity development. By engaging in public life, youth learn to interpret the cultural signals that surround them and incorporate these cultural elements into their life. For a diverse array of reasons, contemporary youth have limited access to the types of publics with which most adults grew up. As a substitute for these inaccessible publics, networked publics like MySpace and Facebook are emerging to provide contemporary American youth with a necessary site for peer engagement.”

The critical question is what about us in the workplace? Do we have a shortage of “publics” in which to interact with one another? Traditionally conferences served as our publics. But our industries have gotten so fragmented that we need to attend several in a year to keep pace with our fields. Unfortunately, carving out the time or the dollars for this is often difficult. Also, with Internet time affecting every industry, attending conferences a few times a year don’t provide the immediacy and intensity of engagement that we now need. Maybe that’s why more companies are gravitating to online communities like LinkedIn and Facebook. We too are having to create new online publics!