Hutch Carpenter from the “I’m Not Actually A Geek” blog argues that companies should start employing Social Media Managers, because Web 2.0 tools – while phenomenally successful on the internet – will be difficult to implement in companies, because the pool of social media activists is smaller:

“The thing about social media is that once people get it, they really get excited about it. Facebook has experienced terrific growth. Twitter is edging more closely to early mainstream. FriendFeed is rapidly growing. But all of these companies had a chance to incubate and grow an enthusiastic set of early adopters, which leads to broader usage.

There are two issues for companies to address in the adoption of social media:

- Slow internal adoption can cause the initiative to die from lack of focus and budget.

- The real benefit of social media comes when many people participate. Slow adoption means companies won’t see good benefit for a while.”

Hutch continues to rally for Social Media Managers as socially active media advocates who

“- initiate discussions

- participate in discussions

- report on discussions”

and who “likely emerge organically from early users”.

[link to the blog post]

The Webomatica blog asked the question what criteria should be fulfilled in order for a technology to be considered “mainstream”. After all, not everybody is as tech-aware as, let’s say, the readers of this blog. Webomatica suggests four tests to find out:

1. “Joe Average Test”: Has the technology ever come up in casual conversations with “non tech obsessed” friends and co-workers?
2. “Spousal Approval Test”: Does your significant other like the technology, or think is has value?
3. “Aged Relative Test”: Have family members of older generations (e.g. your parents, in-laws) asked troubleshoot questions about the technology, or if it is worth using?
4. “David Letterman Top Ten List Test”: Did the technology appear in mainstream talk shows, for example on one of David Letterman’s top ten lists?

The post goes on to test a number of technologies that way (e.g. iPhone, Amazon, Facebook: mainstream; Digg, RSS, Twitter: not mainstream), states that

“a lot of stuff that the early adopter might consider ‘passe’ hasn’t yet hit mainstream awareness”

and makes a number of recommendations to increase the chances of a technology becoming mainstream – if that’s the plan at all.

[Link – via ReadBurner)

The art world, influenced by what happens in the business world, has picked up PowerPoint as an art medium some time ago. The most prominent example is “Talking Heads” founder David Byrne, who published a DVD Rom as well as various art installations exploring PowerPoint as an artistic medium.

Now a new art movement using PowerPoint has emerged: It is called “Pecha-Kucha” (“peh-chak-cha”), which means “chit-chat” in Japanese, and takes on the form of quasi-Poetry Slams using slides. The rules are simple:

• Create a 20 PowerPoint slides about any topic
• Show each slide for 20 seconds only

The result is a concise 6 minutes, 40 seconds presentation, which is quite fun to watch. This 20×20 format is slowly adopted in businesses as well.

[more about pecha-kucha]
[pecha-kucha official website]
[pecha-kucha examples on youtube]

The ReadWriteWeb blog says that Enterprise 2.0 – i.e. web 2.0 apps applied to business settings – will become a $4.6 billion industry by 2013:

“The top spending category will be social networking tools. (…) After social networking, the next-largest category is RSS, followed by blogs and wikis, and then mashups.

(…)

What this means is that much of the Web 2.0 tool kit will simply “fade into the fabric of enterprise collaboration suites,” says Forrester. By 2013, few buyers will seek out and purchase Web 2.0 tools specifically. Web 2.0 will become a feature, not a product.

(…)

Over the next three years, millions of baby boomers will retire and the younger workers brought in to fill the void will not only want, but will expect similar tools in the office as those they use at home in their personal lives.”

[Link]

According to studies (which unfortunately I can’t cite), public speaking is something that elicits a great fear in many people, greater than many situations of graver danger.

I like presenting, and if I am offered to do a speech in front of an audience about a subject I know well enough, I usually take it. The biggest internal audience I presented to was 200 people (on the introduction of the HR intranet); the biggest external audience 150 people (to psychology students at the University of Berne, about internal communications). I have copywritten many presentations for the my employer’s HR leadership, and a good friend of mine is a presentation coach – so I know a little bit about the subject.

There are three tips I can give you about preparing a good presentation:

1. Know your audience

The fear of public speaking stems mainly from a stress caused by uncertainty about the audience’s expectations. For this reason, you should be aware who is listening to your presentation, and what they expect from you.

• Write down a description of who you are presenting to, and why they are in the audience (out of curiosity? does their boss want them to be there?)
• Try to figure out what kind of questions you would have, if you were one of your listeners.
• Answer the most important of those questions in your presentation.

2. Structure your presentation

A good and easy model to structure presentations of almost any length is the WHAT/HOW/WHY model:

• WHAT is it you are talking about? – e.g. “Performance Management”
• HOW does that work? – e.g. “By setting goals, measuring achievements, and rewarding accordingly”
• WHY is it relevant to the audience? – e.g. “Because it motivates people to work well”

WHAT states; HOW explains; and WHY convinces. Make one slide for each of those questions, and you will have a neat, short deck you will be able to talk to. If you have more time, you can add sub-slides for each of the three parts.

3. Tell the audience 3 things to remember

The most common mistake in presenting is to confront the audience with too much information. You can present 20 different things to your listeners and tell them those are all important facts to remember. But guess what: If you’re lucky, they are going to remember one or two – and you have no control which ones they are going to be.

For this reason, summarize your presentation at the end to three things, and ask your audience to remember them. When I present, one of my final sentences is always: “In summary, there are three things I want you to remember – don’t forget them, even if you forget all the rest I have told you”. Not only does it make your message more effective, it also makes for an excellent wrapup.

In a recent article on the Harvard Business website, researchers John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas argue that people who enjoy computer games – especially those who play Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs) possess skills and traits that suit them well for today’s business world:

• They are bottom-line oriented (gamers are used to assessments, measurements and comparisons)
• They understand the power of diversity (because game challenges require the collaboration of diverse talents)
• They thrive on change (because in games they are involved in change itself)
• They see learning as fun (overcoming obstacles is fun)
• They marinate “on the edge” (push the boundaries of given systems to find unusual solutions)

The authors call the combination of those skills and traits “The Gamer Disposition“.

This idea is not new (and I advise that Talent Management professionals to look into this), but it is refreshing to see it published on a non-geek platform like HBR.

[Link | via Jon Taplin's blog]

My boss has cancelled our weekly team meeting because he received a short-term invitation to an important meeting (with his boss).

While this is a valid reason not to attend a meeting, I don’t think it’s a good reason to cancel the meeting. It implies that the only reason the team meeting exists is to inform the boss about what’s going on – and even more that team without the boss isn’t a team at all. Delegating the meeting chair to a team member and encourage the flow of information despite obvious absences is what I call empowerment.

What do you think? Does it make sense to have a weekly team meeting if the boss is missing?

Cognitive Edge (i.e. Dave Snowden’s blog) just published a good post on the importance of context information to solve problems and learn from other people’s experiences. His point: Too often people try to establish best practices out of other people’s actions by dismissing the circumstances under which these actions were taken. He calls it the “let’s all ignore the context approach”.

His remedy: Instead of prescribing best practices, analyze and report only context, along with the trends that emerge from it, and let the great pattern recognizers we all are do the problem-solving.

This reminds me of my own Masters Thesis, which dealt with learning from failure. One of the findings was that the very act of collecting those learnings might actually harm an organization.

[Link]

If you are interested in intranet design and usability, check out this summary of the latest Nielsen report on The 10 Best Intranets of 2008. My take-aways:

• Good intranets are found in big companies that have historically been interested in usability (e.g. banks, who need to provide good interfaces for e-banking clients)
• More integration via CMS (content management systems), which usually are designed to increase usability for content providers
• There are ways of keeping intranet brand autonomy while integrating content management
• More focus on centralized employee self-service, but small tools can boost productivity as well
• Single sign-on is a major factor in increasing user satisfaction
• The best intranets are created by teams which are dedicated to produce quality content – not by those who are focusing on ROI measurements

[Link] via the Melcrum CommsNetwork mailing list

Email is such an indispensible tool nowadays. As opposed to the late nineties, where email started to gain ground, we are nowadays dealing with much more messages, message categories (including spam and bacn), as well as social email conventions (e.g., when should you cc someone?).

Email clients, however, have not evolved as much as emailing itself has. Most people are either struggling with an overflowing inbox, or with an onslaught of category folders. It’s time for a thorough review of what an email client should do.

IBM did so, back in 2003. They called it ReMail. I’m still waiting for the launch.