Maximizing Business Value from Enterprise 2.0 through Fun & Motivation

When discussing E2.0, I often hear "Shouldn't we just implement these social tools and simply let business value "emerge"? My answer is NO, not if you want to maximize business value.

I am a strong believer that organizations, should focus and facilitate the use of these tools in order to maximize organizational benefits. To drive value, I've often referred to the engagement factors and in this post I wanted to focus on one of the factors, "Motivation".

How do we address motivation? Do we adopt the "build it and they will come" approach? No. But what about Wikipedia? it seems like complete "self-organization" has made it successful. But consider that only 1% of the people who visit Wikipedia actually contribute content. That's alright with a population set of the world, but 1% of your company may not be enough and if you have specific objectives you may need to motivate others to participate.

So what then? Should we use traditional motivation tactics (i.e. Carrots & Sticks)? For example, should we give bigger monetary bonuses or incentives to those who leverage social computing technologies to solve problems or provide innovative solutions? The answer yet again is surprisingly, NO.

In fact, bigger incentives causes worse results for cognitive tasks. Dan Pink has an excellent video that summarizes why this is, and has references to research by economists from MIT, Carnegie Mellon and sponsored by the US Federal Reserve Bank along with research by the London School of Economics which reviewed 51 studies on pay for performance. The bottom line is that pay for performance has a NEGATIVE impact on even "rudimentary" cognitive tasks.



Ok, so what then? Dan talks about a framework to address motivation but I wanted to remind you about that one motivator which is "fun"! Although it's been several several years since I've actually written code, I have to say that there was something fun about being able to solve tough bugs and problems which would motivate me to keep pushing at the resolution. The folks that update Linux aren't doing it for the money, so what motivates them?

Fun, as a design principle shouldn't be overlooked as it impacts the application design from look and feel, through context, content and process. It also should be addressed when designing events leveraging social computing technologies.

In a previous life, I had the opportunity to build a YouTube like environment to address concerns with recruitment and retention. Employees were allowed to do short snippets of why they loved working at their job. The results were amazing, for in a 2 week period the 3000 employees generated ~100 videos that were watched approximately 15,000 times. That's on average 5 videos watched per employee about why people love their jobs. 5 times employees choose to listen to these messages and engage. It was fun.

The power of fun is often forgotten. Perhaps it's because people still see work and fun as two separate things. After all, isn't the opposite of work, "play"? To illustrate how "fun" can be used to drive a specific outcome, there is a brilliant campaign underway by Volkswagan that does exactly that. Below is just one of their viral videos. So as you're having fun watching this video, just consider how you might be able to apply to this to your social computing endeavours...

E2.0 Evangelism & The Curse of Knowledge

Have you ever been in a presentation, where the speaker was obviously an expert but they just couldn't convey their ideas to the audience leaving them confused and uninspired?

In the past, I've written about the challenges of being an expert. Expertise can limit our ability to be radically creative and open to suggestion causing us to miss opportunities for disruptive innovation. There has been some great research in this area by William Torbert and David Rooke that looks at "experts" in the context of one of the seven ways people lead. Here is a quotation from their HBR Article, "Seven Transformations of Leadership"

"Experts are great individual contributors because of their pursuit of continuous improvement, efficiency, and perfection. But as managers, they can be problematic because they are so completely sure they are right. They will frequently treat the opinion of people less expert than themselves with contempt."

"Expertise" has several implications to the social computing world, including the long-tail value of "non-experts", self-organization, and creating a collaboration culture. In this post however, I thought I'd talk to the specific challenges expertise has on our ability to communicate and inspire.

The term "curse of knowledge" is one I borrowed from the Heath brothers, Chip and Dan who put out the very popular book, "Made to Stick: Why some ideas survive and others die". It's a great book, and quite practical. In their research, they examine why some concepts (even completely false ones) are memorable and others are forgotten (even the best, most innovative ideas).

Chip & Dan demonstrate through examples how the more you know, the harder it is to "not know" or remember what it was like to not understand. An experts' communications can become crammed with details that the casual recipient either doesn't understand, doesn't care about, or will soon forget anyways due to information overload.

For those trying to promote a culture of collaboration, and the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technology, we can become victims of our own knowledge. Sometimes this manifests itself as a laundry list of different technologies, often accompanied by a list of technical terms and a series of acronyms. Sometimes we drive into extreme detail on theory and academic research. Sure, to other social computing enthusiasts the concept of weak ties and centrality in social networks may be fascinating but will this win over the masses?

So what would Chip & Dan recommend to E2.0 evangelists looking to create a compelling message that is "sticky"? Well, they summarize the key principles of memorable messages in the acronym SUCCES.

Simple — find the core of any idea. Focus on that.
Unexpected — grab people's attention by surprising them
Concrete — make sure an idea is real and not too theoretical
Credibility — give an idea believability allow people to test it themselves.
Emotion — help people see the importance of an idea by tapping emotions
Stories — Stories are great ways to achieve all above.

I try to incorporate these principles when crafting communications, to help inspire folks around the potential of social computing and collaboration. Hopefully it'll help you too. If you have stories that have worked for you I'd love to hear them!

What I've been up to...

It's been quite some time since my last post and for those of you that have been asking, I thought I'd write an update on what I am up to these days.

In Mid-January I took on an exciting opportunity as Technical Director - e-Collaboration and Content Management at Research in Motion (RIM). It's simply such a great opportunity to continue my journey into the collaboration space and further extend my work in social computing, along with aspects of content management.

I can't go into any details of the specifics but I am extremely excited to get this opportunity. Perhaps in another post, I'll talk a little about how structured and unstructured content can intersect and diverge.

Leaving Bell was difficult but I know the collaboration areas are in the hands of some very capable people, and will undoubtedly continue to thrive.

Wrapping up my time with Bell, and starting my new role has kept me extremely busy not to mention all the fun winter activites with the family which seem to consume any time I have outside work (my excuse for not keeping up with my blogging).

That's it for now. If there are topics you think I should write about please feel free to drop me a line.

Enterprise 2.0 & The Economy

With the economy on everyone’s minds these days, it’s not surprising to see articles looking at the impact the economy has on usage of collaborative technologies (eg. enterprise 2.0).

I’ve found several articles interesting but not quite resonating with me. For example a recent Wikinomics article by Naumi Haque suggests that there are 2 emerging schools of thought on the subject: A) the need for productivity means greater investment in enterprise 2.0 or B) the need to focus on core takes priority over anything else. I actually don’t think it’s one or the other but both. If you could prove productivity/collaborative gains this actually enables greater focus on your core. But since it’s hard to prove, the concept of Risk/Reward needs to be considered.

In my opinion, there are 3 main variables that predict adoption of these tools: Corporate Risk Tolerance, Corporate Performance, and Perceived Risk/Benefit of collaborative technology. These variables are depicted in the visual model above.

The relationship between corporate performance (which is impacted by the economy) and risk tolerance is illustrated by the “U” curve. Basically, a corporation that is doing very poorly tends to take bigger risks as it becomes “desperate” or believes it has “nothing to lose”. Consider the example of Goldcorp that on the brink of bankruptcy decided to share it’s “top secret” data to the world in an attempt to crowdsource a solution to their pressing challenge of finding and extracting gold from it’s property. Would Goldcorp have been so eager to do this if it was doing well?

At the opposite end of the performance spectrum, those companies that are doing well can “afford” to experiment with new approaches and new opportunities while resting assured that the remainder of the business will still thrive and be able fund these initiatives. IBM’s investment in social computing and it’s World Jam for example are things IBM has been able to explore and develop while still maintaining sufficient resources in it’s other core business.

According to this model, companies that are doing “OK”, are least likely to accept corporate risk. “Why change if it ain’t broke”, and “we just simply can’t spend resources on things that aren’t proven to provide us a return”. These companies tend to be risk averse to supporting technologies which aren't core.

The curve is only part of the picture. The other variable is the concept of perceived risk. Risk in this model is loosely defined as the likelihood of an expected benefit versus the expected cost. Costs include implementation but also opportunity cost, and negative side-effects. For those corporations that view social computing investments as low risk/high reward the decision to implement social media in any economic climate is “obvious”. As perceived risk increases however, it would require the company performance to either increase substantially or decrease substantially relative to the perceived risk they place on collaborative technology.

So what does this mean when times are tough? Well, based on this model, I would speculate that corporate performance on average will decline creating a stronger likelihood for adoption of social computing initiatives even at higher perceived risk. Companies that in the past wouldn’t have tried to leverage social computing may actually be willing to “give it a try”. The success/failures of those initiatives will eventually have an impact on perceived risk as stories mount that either prove/disprove the real costs & benefits.

It’s a fairly basic exploratory model and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. Is your organization about to implement enterprise 2.0 applications? Would they fit this model?

Ratings & Enterprise 2.0

Be cautious in rating employee E2.0 contribution.

Andrew McAfee recently questioned the need and value for rating employees and their usage of E2.0 applications. The chart on the left is his example of some of the things he would consider.

Although these metrics may be of interest to those managing or designing various E2.0 programs, these statistics can be quite misleading. Specifically, I caution those that want to use these indicators as 1) the sole measure in determining the success of their E2.0 programs and 2) the sole means of ranking the value of a contributor.


Success of your E2.0 program can not be based only on adoption/usage percentages. The value of E2.0 includes just giving people an opportunity, enabling self-organization of the most relevant participants, identifying valuable conceptual outliers, reinforcing culture, accessibility for future benefit. These don't show up in adoption rates. I discuss these in greater detail in an earlier post, "5 benefits of social computing that adoption rates don't show". Success isn't a simple metric but requires various perspectives well beyond just adoption rates.


Without any ratings, how would you know whether to trust the content? Rating a contributor based on activity levels is intended to provide participants with a gauge to the "quality" or "accuracy" of the content. This is a dangerous and false assumption. Just because someone may post a lot, or interact a lot, doesn't mean that their content is necessarily of high quality. As an analogy, I spend a long time doing house repairs, not because I am good at but for the exact opposite reason!


A heavy focus on individual ratings will also diminish the real value of tapping into the long-tail. Clay Shirky gives a good example on how one can completely miss the point. He points to comments made by Steve Ballmer dismissing the open source concept of Linux as not really being true/valuable since the majority of work is really done by a small group of participants. Steve's flaw is that he's associating "value" with "quantity". The question isn't about how much input you provide. Even if you provide only one single piece of contribution, what if that contribution turns out to be a major breakthrough? Or in the software example Clay suggests, what if that one patch provided a fix for a major security hole in the software? What's that worth?


My suggestion for those looking at designing E2.0 programs is that ratings are valuable, but they should be at the content level. Individual ratings could be derived (aggregates or averages) from the various ratings of the individual contributions. There is sometimes a desire to use ratings as a means to motivate employees to contribute. If you focus on "quantity" you are incenting the wrong behaviour, focus instead on "value".


One final point. SIMPLICITY. Just because we can measure something, doesn't mean we should. From my perspective, having 6 metrics can be confusing and intimidating to participants. I prefer to get it down to a single metric which has intrinsic value. For example, in a recent application we've designed, we allow (and encourage) participant rating on the content by asking, "Did this content help you?". This means the rating is the total number of people helped by the content. It provides meaning to both readers and authors. Do we track other metrics that we don't display? Absolutely. Is this method perfect? No, but it is simple and in my opinion worth the trade-off.