The Heretech

All your authentication are belong to us

In my childhood, many of the bad guys in TV shows were corporate overlords. Tweed jackets and dark turtlenecks were the apparel of choice. They were ridiculously unctuous, spouting obliquely phrased threats like, "This Mannix fellow has become...Inconvenient." 

These villains were the creation of TV studios trying to capitalize on the post-60s, post-Watergate hangover, during which corporate executives were about as trusted as...Well, about as trusted as they are today. Corporate goons may be even less popular today than they were a few decades ago, after wrecking the global economy, plundering their own companies, and cackling gleefully as they collected their obscenely large bonuses. Heck, Steve Jobs even has a penchant for turtlenecks.

 Distrust of corporations is having a profound impact on an important issue in the technology industry, centralized authentication and identity management for the cloud. The more applications that go into the cloud, the greater the demand for a centralized mechanism for managing authentication across these systems. Most of the would-be guardians of authentication for the cloud are corporations like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, which poses a dilemma for these companies and users alike.

The big weapon that vendors have in this competition is adoption. Facebook claims that 60 million users per month use the Facebook Connect API as an authentication service for some other application. Meanwhile, the well-intentioned OpenID project, still hasn't cracked the one-half of 1% barrier for adoption among websites. 

What accounts for Facebook Connect's success? The fact that it's based on Facebook. People are already using the standard Facebook application to connect with friends, post status updates, and maintain their profiles. Facebook adoption sells Facebook Connect. OpenID has no comparable starting point. Instead, OpenID looks like yet another account that you need to create, yet another login that you need to remember.

Meanwhile, Facebook continues to proliferate across platforms. From your iPhone to your XBox, Facebook is there, easy to set up, easy to use. Other social applications, such as Twitter and Google are equally ubiquitous, so guess what? They're interested, too, in this authentication business. Google, for example, believes that Gmail and Google Apps provide a strong incentive for other sites to use their authentication service.

As impressive as the momentum behind these authentication services may be, the brick wall of distrust lies ahead. The companies that we've been discussing have all done something recently to increase anxieties about questions of access. Facebook keeps diddling with its privacy settings, sometimes to implement its own ideas of how people should use their services, at other times dealing with user complaints about these notions. While a single product group at Google may have been responsible for the Buzz goof, the backlash is directed at Google as a whole. Apple's decision to pull titillating content from the application store invites speculation about what other kinds of censorship it might exercise in the future. Microsoft's traditional problems getting people to trust them seem almost quaint.

Earlier this week, I argued that PM teams need a bit more security and risk expertise than they may have today. In companies that provide cloud authentication services, or use them in their applications, PMs need to deal with a complementary requirement that goes beyond purely technical details: trust. 

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

The machine is the message

I've just finished The Great Migration Of 2012. You're looking at one result, posting from my iPhone. It's interesting to see how much of a difference a device change can make in your attitude towards specific types of content. For example, Twitter seems more natural here than on my PC. I have far less interest in tweeting while working on the laptop, but using the iPhone to tweet while I'm sitting idly in a coffee shop feels OK.

You're not the boss of me, young man

Social media start-ups often seem to overlook an important demographic reality: age. These companies bet their business on behavior that works for young adults (say, 18 to 25), but may fall apart completely for people older than that.

Case in point: Geo-location applications. Maybe the business model for foursquare, Gowalla, et al. is a-OK with the idea of sticking to a younger set. Checking in where you are, and seeing where  your friends and relations have checked in, is kinda cool. Sprinkle in some useful information about where you are, and someone probably can make some money providing this service.

Of course, the thread that runs through that use case, and the product designed to support it, and the company built around that product, is the willingness to share information about your location. Pull out that thread, and the entire fabric of the business falls apart, unless it's designed to support only a small part of the population.

The Digital Age has been around for a while
The moment you look beyond that age cohort, you start running into problems. As colleague Dave Frankland discovered, the older you get, the less information you're willing to share. The reasons are rooted more in the realities of getting older than the effects of growing up in a digital age.

If you define Generation X as the people who are now 29 to 42, they already have grown up in a digital age. Long ago, they started ordering things on Amazon.com and heard how e-tailers collect and analyze information about you. They know that their ISPs have information about their web browsing. They lived through several generations of cyber-crime.

On the flip side, they've seen the Internet grow up, becoming increasingly useful with each generation of technology and capability. They knew what it was like to have a phone without Internet access, and they saw web publishing go from a dark art to something commonplace. They've seen the risks of the evolving Internet, but they've also seen its benefits. The Gen Xers probably take the positives less for granted than the generations that follow them.

Which is why it's important to note that Generation X's willingness to share personal information is less than Generation Y's. This cohort is hardly a group of fuddy-duddies, but they are the first step in a curve of increasing sensitivity to privacy, by age group.

The digital world has yet to replace real life
It's not hard to understand why. The older you get, the more focused you get on work. Your employer already owns a big chunk of your life, so why should they have potential access to information about where you've been and what you've been doing there? Also, a great number of life's landmarks, both good and bad, depend on a degree of privacy. The skunk works project you've doing for work, the trip to assuage the concerns of an angry customer, the romantic weekend get-aways (especially the illicit ones), the consequent visit to the divorce lawyer, the time spent in rehab, the visit to a friend who doesn't want everyone to know how sick she is...All of these events demand privacy, not disclosure.

Privacy is something that people want to control. A recent study by researchers at UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon showed how clear people are on the distinction between protecting your personal information and selling it. There is no "green field" of people who haven't formed preferences about disclosing their personal information.

If that doesn't convince you, here's another statistic that should shake your faith in the "Digital Generation" argument: the older the user, they more likely that person is to use online services to interact with government agencies. A young population may be steeped in digital culture, but they also have less reason to visit the city planning agency or the local IRS office than the older set.

Social media are revolutionary, for younger and older populations alike. Still, the next time someone tells you how earth-shattering something like geo-spatial apps will be, try imagining the twenty-somethings using it today when they reach their 40s or 50s.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

Design your own alien ecosystem

Back in high school, somewhere between the Triassic and Jurassic, I played around with designing an alien ecosystem. Change the conditions from earth (more or less gravity, bigger or smaller oceans, etc.), superimpose the ecological niches that might be standard across worlds, and go crazy with the types of species you might imagine. Pretty heavy science dorkdom, but it was fun.

Which is why I think this project is pretty cool. Project Snaiad brings together collaborators with the same weird interest in designing life on another planet. Not the most profitable use of social media, to be sure, but still, pretty cool.

Facebook's counterproductive privacy approach

Earlier this month, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained his company's privacy policies:

People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that's evolved over time...

So now, a lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the type of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and think: what would we do if we were starting the company now, and starting the site now, and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.

If you ever need an illustration of how technology companies don't understand their customers, file this item away for later reference. Zuckerberg's mistake goes beyond overlooking the genuine and justifiable discomfort that many individuals feel about Facebook's privacy guidelines. A bigger problem lies with how organizations feel about Facebook.

Certainly, many private companies and public agencies worry that their employees may be wasting time diddling with social networking sites when they should be working. This battle may already be lost, as social media adoption continues to roll forward across every demographic, and personal mobile devices make unsanctioned access to social media that much easier. The situation may not be as hopeless as King Canute dictating instructions to the ocean, but employers are increasingly accepting that there will always be some level of social media activity happening under their noses.

Where these organizations draw the line already is workplace content on Facebook or other social networking sites. Post pictures of yourself dressed in a ridiculous Halloween costume, and your company may not like the implication that it would hire someone as goofy as you. Post pictures from an off-site meeting, in which your company's plans for the next year are visible on the white board in the background, and expect the jumbo-sized can of HR whoop-ass to open imminently.

These concerns go beyond photographs, profile information, and other user-generated content. Applications deployed on a relatively new platform like Facebook open a new front in organization's war on unnecessary corporate risks. Any work-related application, deployed to a platform that appears to have a laissez faire attitude about privacy, or unplugged holes in its security, is going to generate executive-level conniptions.

Therefore, while many users treat Facebook as the center of gravity in their social media universe, they won't be doing their work from Facebook, even though there's no technical obstacle to doing so. Companies like SAP, salesforce, and Netsuite already have made portions of their applications available as widgets, mash-up components, plug-ins, or other fractions of bigger systems. In fact, nearly all companies that have "widgetized" their applications encourage their customers and partners to build their own widgets through a supported framework.

However, if you search the list of Facebook applications, you won't find a big library of comparable widgets. While some SaaS companies, such as Zoho, have invested in Facebook application development, others have yet to hop on the bandwagon. As of today, Facebook is a great place to play Mafia Wars, or send virtual flowers to someone with whom you're flirting, but it's not the place where salespeople enter opportunities, or loan officers get alerts about documents that need their attention. Why is that, do you think? (Hint: Last week's flurry of news reports about breaches of Google's network security didn't help matters.)

Even if Facebook utterly failed to attract work applications to its platform, it can still be a big success. Still, one has to wonder why Facebook would choose to limit adoption. Facebook's privacy policy aggravates tensions between itself and employers, not to mention many individuals who don't want to keep monitoring what Facebook has revealed about them. Unless there's some security-related defect in Facebook's underlying technical architecture, the company's decision to base its privacy model on the habits of people who market social media appears unnecessary and counterproductive.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

The social fact of social media

Getting dismally sick over the holidays had an upside. An incredibly geeky upside, the sort only someone doing research about social media could care about, perhaps. But it was a good occasion to test a hypothesis.

A lot of social media observers look at 2009 as the year that social media crashed into the pop culture mainstream. When a significant portion of the population use a technology for both personal and work purposes, we've reached a significant landmark in its adoption. When people regularly use a new technology to inform both B2C and B2B buying decisions, we've also reached some significant point in the history of advanced capitalism.

But how deeply have social media changed the way we live? Or, to put it another way, have social media become a social fact?

If you're not familiar with the term social fact, it's one of the oldest concepts in the history of the social sciences. Way back around the turn of the 20th century, Emile Durkheim proposed a way of separating psychology from sociology: the former examines how individuals thought and behaved; the latter looks into the forces external to them that shaped their lives.

The best example of a social fact is the Christmas holiday in the US. There's no escaping it, even if you wanted to. Unless you're an adherent of a faith that explicitly does not celebrate Christmas, you will spend the month of December meeting the responsibilities of a second job (all the Christmas-related tasks, from wrapping presents to making special meals), re-visiting the way you relate to other people (how you greet them, who gets presents, etc.), spending more money than normal, and mentally and emotionally preparing for the great crescendo near the end of the month. Christmas is such a powerful social fact that people worry what would happen if they ever tried to ignore it.

If Christmas in the United States is the social fact against which all others are measured, have social media reached the point where you cannot ignore them? Even if social media were 1/1,000th of a Christmas-level social fact, they might slip back into your life even if you tried to push them away.

My time stewing in my own bodily fluids is certainly not the critical test of this hypothesis, but it was interesting to see what happened as a result of being disconnected from social media for several days, except for a quick update on Facebook. Otherwise, no blog posts, podcasts, Twitter traffic, LinkedIn invites, or forum discussions.

Here's what happened:

• People did notice my absence. Certainly, if you're a regular participant in social media, people notice your absence. That's not exactly the same as shutting off your e-mail, which gets people angry at you for not responding to their messages.
• I lost track of discussions. I'm a regular reader and poster on some discussion boards. After a week away, I couldn't quite keep up with some conversations. Later, I realized that I had missed some altogether.
• I spent time catching up. There's enough value in social media that I felt obliged to devote some extra time to reading content that I had missed, and writing content that I might have posted (such as this blog entry).
• I cut back on some activities. It was probably a good time to prune my RSS feeds, or take a second look at how often I really needed to take a peek at Facebook.
• I felt guilty. The parallel to Christmas here is obvious. People would forgive you if, for personal reasons, you needed to take a break from Christmas. Unfortunately, you'd probably feel bad anyway.Similarly, I felt as though I had done something mildly wrong, even if I couldn't articulate exactly what it was.

This evidence is hardly conclusive, particularly since I disconnected from the social media channels for just a few days. Still, I did feel the mild force of something "external to the individual...with a compelling and coercive power by virtue of which, whether he wishes it or not, they impose themselves upon him." (Which, coincidentally, is also a good description of the flu.)

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

Vote for the On Product Management blog

One of the best PM-related blogs around is On Product Management. I link to it frequently, I read it regularly--in short, it's Heretech-approved.

On Product Management is also nominated for the Canadian Blog Awards 2009, in the category of work-related blogs. If you share my high opinion of that blog, go here and vote for On Product Management. (Not that I mind another Canadian blogger getting an award...)

Anti-social CRM

Using your community as a technical support resource may be a tool for good...Or eeeeeeeevil. Sure, their are plenty of healthy examples of vendors who have learned how to support their community as an adjunct to their regular support. Have a question? Post it on the forums, and someone, either from the community or the company, will answer.

That's not a new phenomenon. It's at least as old as the Microsoft forums, or the Oracle Technology Network, or the countless discussion forums that smaller companies use to augment their support capabilities. (Which makes me wonder why people are re-discovering this phenomenon, but that's a whole other discussion.)

Since community support is nothing new, we've seen cases where it has worked, and where it hasn't. Vendors who see good customer service as important will invest in their community to improve the customer experience that much more. Vendors who don't care about customer service might create a community, with the (ridiculous) expectation that it will replace their own customer support.

There must be a minor form of PTSD that horrible customer service can create, because all of us, at one time or another, have flashed back to the moment when customer service turned into an oxymoron. I have recurrent flashbacks to the time, several years ago, when I bought a Gateway computer with a faulty CD drive. Gateway purchased a bad batch of these drives, installed them in their computers, and instead of admitting to the mistake, kept sending them as replacements for identical drives until the supply ran out.

But that wasn't the worse part of it. Gateway compounded the problem with its, er, ground-breaking strategy for tech support. Rather than leaving you on hold until a representative was available, you broke into the call with the rep when you were the second or third person in line. Of course, that meant you had to sit through the conversation the rep had with the people in front of you in the queue.

Why? As one rep explained it to me, they were making it possible for other customers to help each other--presumably because the support person didn't have the answers? Or maybe you could just commiserate with other users about their problems, or feel lucky that your CD drive issue wasn't nearly as painful as the guy with the catastrophic hard disk failure.

Gateway may have had a remarkably silly take on community support (and I haven't even told you about holding the phone next to my PC!), but it was hardly unique in the chronicle of bad uses for your community. Forums where customers wonder aloud if any company representative ever reads posts. Fake customer accounts for posting positive things about the vendor. Threads deleted because the company felt embarrassed by the problems being discussed.

Maybe a few mediocre companies have a road to Damascus moment when they learn, through the community, how their customers really feel about the quality of their products and support. The chances are pretty slim of a similar epiphany in a company that could give a flying fig about their quality of support.

Sometimes, you measure commitment by the hour

During a breakfast meeting this morning, someone asked a very sharp question: Are businesses really operating differently because of social media? I then jumped in the car, drove from San Francisco back to our Foster City office, and heard how Cisco has used social media to change product launches.

The obvious change, of course, is lowering the cost, if you're not renting out the Moscone Center for a big launch party. Slightly less obvious changes include the ability to reach more people in more countries. , the virtual launch also makes it possible to reach more people, in more countries, than Cisco could with traditional face-to-face events.

So far, we're just considering changes in capability. Doing product launches cheaper, faster, better is an important innovation, but it's not a sign that a company is operating or thinking in a significantly different way. You might buy a cheaper, better, and faster car, but you might not change your driving habits one bit, or take more care to follow the traffic laws.

Therefore, during this conversation with Cisco, the one change from going to virtual product launches that really stuck out was operational: the marketing effort continues beyond the big ballyhoo day. Cisco employees remain engaged in conversations with customers through social media channels.

Contrast that with the old Moscone Center-style launch events. Everyone shows up for the big photo op, and then they go home. Sure, leads get entered into the CRM system, but that's hardly the same as continuing a conversation with the people you met at the launch event.

Of course, that means that some people at Cisco have to dedicate time to that continued conversation, instead of racing off to the next big launch event. There's a business decision behind allocating resources in this fashion, based on a different set of assumptions and calculations than the "marketer with a megaphone" launch events of 15 or 20 years ago.

Are social media for real? Yes, when they effect how companies operate.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

What was Technorati thinking?

Here's another item to file under Changes that customers didn't ask for: Technorati's recent makeover. The official "Welcome To The New Technorati" blog post trumpets how great it is that the company has put a big effort into different content channels (sports, entertainment, etc.). Unfortunately, for the bloggers who use Technorati to measure their popularity in the blogosphere, the New Technorati is, for the time being, a big step backwards.

And yes, I'm one of those irritated bloggers. I'm not that interested in the numeric "authority" ranking of my blog, though it's nice to see it get a bump every once in a while. I do care a great deal, however, about spotting the people who link to this blog.

For reasons unclear to practically everyone outside Technorati, the company decided to break those two features when it launched the New Technorati last month. Scroll down to the comments section of this follow-up post to hear the complaints. Some blog rankings mysteriously dropped to the lowest possible rankings (including mine). Others disappeared altogether. For some problems, the only workaround is creating a Technorati entry from scratch, which turns out to be impossible, since you can't delete an existing blog. And the backlinks feature, which identifies places where people have linked to your blog, has disappeared altogether, with no announced date that I can find for its replacement.

All of which makes the following comment from the Eric Olsen, Technorati's "publisher," exceedingly frustrating:

Now, as to the conceptual matter of original content on Technorati itself, I utterly reject the notion that Technorati has somehow betrayed bloggers. I am clearly biased here, but I see it diametrically the opposite - we are providing a new set of tools to help bloggers achieve their goals: readers, branding, exposure, community, and even more goodies coming. Of course, it's up to each individual blogger if he/she chooses to avail themselves of this opportunity, but I think it's a bit solipsistic to denegrate the entire movement just because one chooses not to be involved.

Which is a lot like saying, "We gave you a hacksaw and a box cutter, while taking away your hammer and breaking your screwdriver. Hey, we're not betraying you by making this move. We're just providing you with new tools."

Of course, the fact that Olsen's title is "publisher" implies that the corporate strategy is a lot like Yahoo!'s, several years ago: invest a lot into becoming a content provider, while putting less effort into your online tools. Could someone remind me how that turned out...?

P.S. I'm not being less forgiving of Technorati than I was of Oracle recent site upgrade drama, just because it's my proverbial ox that's gored this time. At least there were customers who were complaining about the old Metalink support site, and wanted a replacement. (For example, many Siebel customers, post-acquisition, asked for a better site than Metalink.) As far as I can tell, no Technorati customers were clamoring for the site to roll out a bunch of new content channels. I suspect that decision had more to do with how they thought they might "monetize" their directory of blog content.

A book of my tweets

In case you missed it, last week's Doonesbury series (starting here) was pretty gosh darn funny for anyone who follows social media. Or leads it. Or thinks they're leading it. Or even wants social media to go away.

Is "social product management" for real?

Here's an important rule of thumb, if you're a researcher such as myself: Don't name something unless it really exists. That sounds fairly obvious, but unfortunately, in the history of the technology industry, there's a sad history of failed neologisms. In some cases, these phrases exaggerated the importance or complexity of some relatively mundane aspect of the world. That's how the superheated usage of the term knowledge management turned into a four letter word. In other cases, people use neologisms designed to describe things that might (or might not) exist in the future as if they already existed now. I've heard some presentations about the Semantic Web that certainly fall into that category.

Therefore, when I use a phrase like social product management, believe me, I'm using it very carefully. Over the course of the last week, I've had occasion to use it on several occasions, most recently at last night's open house for PMs in the Forrester Foster City office. (Thanks to all who attended, by the way.)

Social product management passes the sniff test for neologisms because it describes something that's really happening: social media are changing the way that product managers and product marketers work. Here are a few manifestations, excerpted from the research I've been doing for the last several months:

• Social media figure increasingly in the to-do lists for PMs. Whether it's answering forum postings or monitoring "chatter" about your company on Twitter, PMs are spending more time using social media to get some aspects of their job completed.
• Social media demand new skills to master. It's abundantly clear that using social media, in either an inbound or outbound capacity, takes real skill. Unfortunately, not everyone has learned how to  spot the social media outlets where particular kinds of stakeholders congregate, or how to collect and interpret a representative sample of aggregate social media activity.
• Social media frequently require investment. It takes time and effort to figure out which social media channels are worth your attention. In some cases, new tools, such as listening platforms, can be a big force multiplier in these efforts.
• Social media require new attitudes to work. Everything falls apart if the company isn't ready to take social media seriously. Strangely, customers expect social media to be the place where conversations happen, instead of providing yet another brand of megaphone for vendors to announce their greatness. They also expect you to follow up on these conversations. Weird, but true.
• Social media foment professional crises for PMs. The natural consequence of the previous bullets are some tough conversations between PMs and their managers. Topics include How the hell do you expect me to do this in my free time to Why use these new sources of intelligence if we continue to make the same mistakes in the decision-making process? However these conversations turn out, the fact that they're happening at all means that social media are having a real effect on the PM job.

Let's be clear: I'm not saying that social media obliterate everything that PMs used to do. Far from it. In pretty much every aspect of the job where social media are relevant, they supplement existing PM tasks, deliverables, or resources. For example, as useful as innovation sites may be (users propose features, comment on them, vote on them), you still need to have occasional face-to-face conversations with people in customer organizations. If 5,000 people vote for a great new feature, Ion flux regulator, that doesn't tell you why it's important to them, how they expect it to work, and other critical details that bear directly on prioritization and design decisions.

Therefore, the phrase social product management does have weight and purpose, to the extent that social media are changing the way that PMs in the tech industry work. Me absolvo, it's not just another meaningless buzzword.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

Social product management workshop coming soon

For anyone interested in using social media as a resource for product requirements, persona development, use cases, and other customer insights, the workshop on this topic is scheduled for later this month.

The goal is to give you specific, practical guidance that you can use the day after the workshop. Therefore, I'm asking attendees to bring examples of their current challenges in gaining customer insights, from either a product management or product marketing perspective. We'll use those scenarios during some hands-on exercises.

Here's the link to the workshop, if you're interested. Space is limited, and based on the number of questions I get about this topic, it should be a lively session.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

Drop the pilot?

Via Rocket Watch, do you need to pilot the roll-out of enterprise-esque, Web 2.0-ish collaboration tools? Michael Idinopulos of SocialText says no:

But social software is different from traditional IT. Traditional IT enables individuals to carry out well-defined, highly standardized transactions. Users go into the system to process transactions--to transfer funds, purchase supplies, track inventory, etc. The nature of these transactions, and the system's ability to enable them, do not vary much according to the number of people using the system. Whether 100 people are entering orders or 10,000 people are entering orders, the transactions themselves doesn't really change. What that means is that a representative small-scale sample is an accurate predictor of adoption and value at full scale.

Idinopulos starts the post by saying, "Get out your pitchforks, I'm about to commit Enterprise 2.0 heresy." If he detects the smell of torches, or the clatter of pitchforks, it's not because his argument is heretical. (As you might guess, I have a lot of sympathy for heresy.) Instead, his argument overlooks the adoption process for collaboration tools.

Idinopulos' argument breaks down at the following points:

• While "traditional IT" (ERP, etc.) focuses on transactions, social applications focus on interactions. If you have ever had to deal with a rejected expense report, or negotiated a deal with a client, or handled an internal audit, you'll quickly appreciate the lack of clear boundary between "transactions" and "interactions." In reality, work is a combination of well-defined tasks, such as closing the books on the quarterly financial statement, and the large amount of collaboration needed to get those structured activities finished.
• Collaboration is separate from "traditional IT." As the previous bullet implies, there's not a clear boundary between the two. In a business setting, people aren't collaborating for the sake of collaborating. Instead, they're trying to get work done. In a Microsoft shop, a SharePoint or Exchange administrator might not see these other activities, or the applications involved (CRM for sales, document capture for contracts, etc.). However, those files, e-mails, and other unstructured content are part of a larger business process, not the whole business process itself.
• Collaboration has no specific shape or form. "This is the way we communicate new releases to customers in this company" is one of countless examples of how institutional factors constrain activities. So, too, do individuals themselves, who have habits, preferences, past experiences, lessons learned, and a limited amount of time and patience for experimentation.
• Adoption depends on the tool. Idinopulos argues that some social applications, such as Wikis, require more up-front work to make them useful than, say, micro-blogging. However, that's hardly the only variable, and it's not necessarily the most important one. Sure, as a customer service rep, it's easy to post a thought about how to deal with difficult customers via the company's Yammer account. However, you can't put much into that thought, and certainly, for someone looking for advice, it's harder to sort through a bunch of micro-blogging posts than a well-organized Wiki. The business argument for using a collaboration tool, as either a contributor or consumer, is just as important a determinant of adoption as the difficulty of using the tool itself, or the amount of content needed to get it started.
• For a new collaboration technology to be successful, you need to start big. Idinopulos cites Metcalf's Law, which "famously states, the more people there are in that network...the more value that individual derives from participation in that network." And, Idinopulos argues, it's hard to predict from a small pilot how other individuals or groups will use the technology. Unfortunately, people are not Christmas tree lights: you don't just string all the nodes together, stand back, and say, "Ooooh, impressive." Some people may figure out the value of the tool on their own, but for those who don't, a few good business arguments and use cases discovered during the pilot can be very convincing.

The very fact that you can't always predict all the use cases for a collaboration tool is the very reason why, in many cases, you need some use case as an illustration, even if it's not your own. Collaboration tools don't manufacture use cases; they create the means to address these scenarios in new ways. For example, I'd love to stay in touch with everyone that I've ever known. LinkedIn and Facebook just make it way easier to do so.

Social networking, Wikis, blogs, forums, micro-blogging—these are great technologies to address human wants and needs in novel ways. In the workplace, the communications and activities they make possible are connected to business processes.

Of course, IT people can get in the way of projects, deciding on behalf of employees the "proper" use of collaboration tools. Of course, you can smother some projects by making them too small. You can also ensure the failure of the very same projects by making them too big, if you throw new technologies in people's faces and expect them to figure out the use cases, and work out all the kinks of your technology, on their own.

How an ISV uses "inbound" social media

In this week's Heretech podcast, I spoke with Alex Bender of Archer Technologies about the role the Archer community plays in the development process, all the way through the release. If you click the thumbnail shown here, you'll see their process in graphic detail. While Alex and I didn't get into all the specifics of how they do it, we did cover most of their "social product management" approach in the podcast.

Among other interesting aspects of how they use their community as a resource for innovation and adoption, the role of partners really stands out. Of course, in the governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) space, you have an ecology of partners who are experts in things like Sarbanes-Oxley and risk management best practices. They'll tell you in plenty of detail why your product isn't really doing the job it should as a GRC tool.

GRC implementers and advisers have a very explicit kind of domain knowledge. However, if you stop to think about it, almost any partner has domain knowledge that's valuable to ISVs. To cite an obvious example, how does the average organization implementing your technology define the project? What obstacles do you impose at the critical landmarks in the implementation?

We usually talk about communities as consisting of customers. However, I think it's worth including partners whenever you talk about your community strategy.

OMG! U R trapped!

Apparently, you can rely too much on social media to communicate:

Two girls aged ten and 12 who were trapped in a storm drain used Facebook to get help instead of calling the emergency services.

Workshop on social media for development teams

In October, I'm doing a workshop in the Foster City office about social media for product teams. How can social media fill in the gaps left by traditional requirements? Which social media outlets should you use to answer particular questions? What skills and investments are required? What's the tangible business benefit?

A big part of the workshop is hands-on experience with the questions your team faces. Bring an example of a burning question that the product team needs to answer (e.g., What's the impact of dropping this feature? Is our product a good fit for similar business problems in other markets?), and we'll explore how to use social media to find substantive, useful answers quickly.

For more details, click here. Also, in a couple of weeks, colleague Laura Ramos is doing a workshop, "Making B2B Marketing Work," that chock full of useful content.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

Search in a social age

The killer application for the Internet has been search. While social media may not topple search from its throne, it has created a new center of gravity for content. The more content that social media generates, the more it needs to be searched...Or maybe not.

And here's where the core question for product managers and product marketers raises its head: What is the user trying to do? Thus far, the fundamental assumption behind Internet search design has been, "Users understand keywords, but nothing else." The clever algorithms behind Google or Bing base search results exclusively on what you are trying to find. The ubiquitous text box where you enter keywords doesn't ask you why.

The rapidly-growing pile of user-generated content, stacked next to the still-growing pile of standard material, may change search design. For example, if I'm looking for information about the White Stripes, I might be happy to get their official web site, the relevant Wikipedia entry, and maybe a few places where I can buy their CDs. I don't necessarily care that someone with the Twitter ID sirburpsalot proclaims his unrequited passion for Meg White every day, or that there's a lively discussion about the Jack White/Rolling Stones connection  in a Facebook group. At another time, that may be exactly the content I want to read. (Except for sirburpsalot, who's just an annoying twit.)

Declaring the purpose behind the search, or the kind of content I want to skim, is an increasing necessity. Of course, that raises all kinds of questions about the federated search architecture that's needed to make these declarations possible, which has echoes in the old-school, inside-the-firewall search challenges. There's always a good argument for being able to search your e-mail, documents, contacts, expense reports, performance reviews, and office supply orders all at once, but in many organizations, the implementation cost outweighed the business benefits. If you want to find out the status of your order for 100 mechanical pencils, go to the self-service office supply application.

For similar reasons, a lot of user-generated content may not get hooked into Internet search the way some people might expect, or hope. There needs to be a business argument for both Google and Facebook for one to be able to search the other in some new fashion. All of which makes this paragraph critical in the InfoWorld article covering this topic:

A music label, for example, would be interested in searches on YouTube, she said. MySpace, meanwhile, focuses on searches for people, while LinkedIn is about business searches, Dougherty added. "The actual content that's happening on each of the social networks is very, very different in terms of the searches that are happening," she said.

For product managers involved with social media or search, the use cases for search have a direct impact on the product roadmap and feature prioritizations. For the product marketer, these same use cases are the language that you need to speak to convey value.

Stalked by Sony

On a lark, I tweeted this morning about the movie Julie & Julia. I loved half of the movie, the part about Julia Child. I hated the other half, covering the "Julia Child" blogger Julie Powell. During the movie, I couldn't wait for Amy Adams, who played Powell, to get off the screen. After the movie, I learned that the characterization of her in the movie (earnest, waifish, sympathetic) white-washed the real person (foul-mouthed, narcissistic, and generally not nice to people, including her husband, friends, and even the 9/11 families).

A few minutes after I posted that message, Twitter alerted me that the user "Julie and Julia," a marketing vehicle for the movie, is now following me. Not only is this unwelcome, but it's also more than a little creepy. That's probably not the effect that Sony Pictures wants.

Tessaract now, before it's too late!

I don't have anything snarky to say about augmented reality (AR). It's an old concept (at least as old as some of the cyberpunk motifs of the 1980s), but there's now the underlying technology to make it a reality, however virtual. It's way too early to tell what the important applications of this technology will be.

Unfortunately, every new technology has its share of snark-worthy enthusiasts.  AR applications like the one that lets you see, through your mobile phone, where people you follow on Twitter is not, ipso facto, "world-changing." However interesting this technological trick might be, the majority of the population has yet to see a good reason to be interested in Twitter. Another obvious problem: not everyone wants to be tracked, geographically. Therefore, anyone who applies the adjective "world-changing" to this kind of application deserves to be verbally smacked.

Another sure sign that someone isn't worth treating seriously, as a guru of a new technology, is an inability to talk about said technology without using argot. Most argots sound a lot like the arcane, impenetrable language of critical theory, an  academic movement with a high BS quotient that reached full blossom while I was in college. Based on the name of one of critical theory's founding figures, I'll use a neologism, Horkheimering, to describe this species of argot.

Horkheimering is pretty easy to spot. Many critical theorists Horkheimered to death very simple concepts, such the unsolvable philosophical conundrum, "Is the blue you see the blue I see?"

Here's some Horkheimering from a recent blog post about AR:

It's important to put AR in the context of how it functions in relation to other synthetically-oriented technology:

"Social Tesseractions assist in shaping contemporary notions related to Sociorelational information. Just as raw geophysical encounters evoke varying psychological and communicative responses [think: Communication Accommodation Theory], Tesseracting engenders similarly relevant synthetic loadings. In attempting to establish a conceptual structure surrounding Social Tesseractions, contemporary theorists display a pervasive tendency to shrink all synthetic interactions to a geophysical/biological endpoint. In order to establish whether Tesseraction can be considered a tangible phenomena, this assumed standard of endpoint interaction should shift from a reductionist angling towards more appropriate markers...."

Social Tesseraction is described in full at Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1 – a project that discusses ”...the formation and evolution of synthetic environments.”

While it made a good plot device for a couple of classic science fiction stories, I doubt that the mathematical concept of a tesseract is the only possible way to describe "sociorelational information." (I also have doubts about sociorelational, too.) However, the word tesseract is the ideal building block of argot:  obscure, technical, and oblique. Classic Horkheimering, to be sure, but how does these word games advance the adoption of a new technology?

Tr.im not fit

The URL shortening company Tr.im is closing its doors:

After a number of attempts to sell the service, no companies in the Twitter space stepped forward to purchase and operate it in its existing form. Says the company, "There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening -- users won't pay for it -- and we just can't justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner."

Makes me wonder how many other cloud computing-esque, social media-ish services don't have a strong business model on their own, except if they're owned by one of the chief consumers of that service.

That was the week that was, part 1

If someone had stuffed me into the trunk of a car and driven to a remote location in the  Sierras, I could not have been more out of touch with the outside world than I was for a good chunk of the last week. As I mentioned earlier, I had two major projects to do on a short deadline, with barely enough time to finish them. Practically all other priorities went out the window, including (sadly) blogging and podcasting.

One of the projects covered exactly the same topic as a recent post, "Beware of the naked man," about differences in social media behavior across different demographic segments. The client wanted us to profile the same roles in different industries. Where did they go in Social Media Land, and what were they doing there?

The results from this study put these differences in stark detail. I can't talk about the specific roles and professions from this research project, but I can give an unrelated (and fairly obvious) example. If you were to look at doctors and college seniors, you'd see major differences, not only in where they go (forums, social networking sites, etc.), but what they do while they're at this locations. In this kind of research, we combine the social media behavior profiles (official name: Social Technographics) constructed from surveys with follow-on research about the specific locations and activities. Doing this kind of research is no small amount of work, which is why I was pretty busy this week.

These demographic differences are often the culprit behind Social Media Disappointment Synrdome (SMDS). Sufferers of SMDS have created some company-sponsored social media outlet, such as a CEO blog or technical forum,  and then waited for people to show up...and waited...and waited...Of course, the source of SMDS, in many of these cases, is the lack of motivation for anyone to participate in these social media.

All of which shows why our social media methodologies--the larger POST strategy for the entire company, and the PLOT approach designed for inbound activities--make the technology an enabling detail, not the starting point of the strategy. Social media don't connect people; people connect people. Social media are just a powerful technology for making these connections. The contours and content of a particular social media outlet must be appropriate for the type of connections these people want to create.

Forrester colleague Oliver Young recently noted how the term Web 2.0 has quickly fallen out of fashion. That's probably a good thing, since Web 2.0 has more of a technological connotation than social media does. A small semantic difference—one phrase starts with Web, and the other with social—reflects a profound insight into who's using these new technologies, and why.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

Beware of the naked man

Christopher Cummings makes a good argument for skepticism about many overheated claims about social media. You'd think that any overheated claim would inspire skepticism, but that ain't necessarily so.

In fact, you might write a history of the last century's overheated claims that never came to fruition, from Soon we will all be living in the dictatorship of the proletariat to In a generation we'll have permanent colonies on the moon and Mars to Dotcoms have re-written the rules of economics. People hope that the people making these overheated claims are visionaries, not idiots, or just opportunists exploiting the latest enthusiasm. Sometimes, they're actually right.

Obviously, we're going through a hothouse phase in the development of social media, when all kinds of speculation grow like kudzu. Chris takes special issue with the idea that social media will replace most face-to-face connections, or should replace them. For product managers, the risk is relying too much on social media for insights about customers.

Yes, social media done correctly in the PM sphere can help us hear about customer pain points, monitor the competition, and engage key influencers in the marketplace. But it comes at a cost that few seem willing to talk about.

I'll disagree slightly with that statement. Chris' target may be the claim, certainly overheated, that social media will entirely replace the traditional forms of requirements. If that's the case, we're not in disagreement at all. I'm a strong advocate for adding "inbound" social media to the requirements mix--heck, I wrote a three-part series on the topic--but I don't think that new media will elbow the old media out of the picture.

A lot of the traditional requirements sources were just as impersonal as a blog, discussion forum, or social networking site. In fact, they were even more impersonal, and in many cases, even more misleading. If only the specificity about enhancement requests in "I have a customer (IHAC)" e-mails matched their urgency. (If only you could have confidence in the urgency.) If only the enhancements recorded in the bug database were less cryptic.

In fact, if you were to replace the phrase social media with e-mail, you'd get something that a product manager might have written 15 years ago.

Face-to-face contacts aren't all they're cracked up to be, either. They have a very important place in requirements. In fact, they're irreplaceable. Any executive who thinks that you can do product management without face time with real users, buyers, and stakeholders is an idiot. Worse, the executive in question is contributing to the mistakes that cost technology companies time, money, and good will.

But executives are right in pressing for cost-effectiveness in requirements-gathering. If you have the opportunity to get supplementary information at a lower cost, why wouldn't you take it?

The big issue is how requirements gathering via social media should work. It's a new discipline, which is another way of saying, "It's going to take effort, time, and skill to do it right."

Here's one part of the discipline that's critically important: social media habits change by demographic. You certainly can't project your social media habits onto those of car dealers, research scientists, and accountants. By demographic slice, people participate more or less, have different goals, and vary in how much they participate in certain activities (contributing, commenting, collecting, etc.).

Therefore, if your requirements research depends on finding a lot of automotive engineers hanging around Facebook, you're out of luck. They don't "hang around" anywhere, in the physical or the electronic world. An automotive engineer who spent the day exposed to social media would be a major oddball, on the order of the title character of Randy Newman's old song, "Naked Man."

However, automotive engineers do use social media in other ways, so learning the inbound social media discipline is hardly pointless. I can tell you from both personal experience, and observing people trying to make social media work in this capacity, that it's damn hard to do right. But so is spending a day digging through the bug database for all the enhancement requests you've ignored during the last two releases.

Follow that man!

If you're not following anyone on Twitter yet, and you're interested in product management and product marketing, start with Jim Holland (@Jim_Holland). For PM issues, he's the most active Twitterite on PM issues, and he's a good pointer to other PM-related Twitter activity.

Plus, there are a couple of tags, #pmv and #prodmgmt, that help you pinpoint tweets of interest.

The misuse of social media

The "inbound social media" research grew to massive proportions, then underwent mitosis to become three separate documents, because it's difficult to encapsulate the discipline of using social media. Like any new field, social media are fraught with both opportunity and risk.

In the particular application that I was investigating, social media as a new source of requirements data, people can commit the same mistakes with this new source of information as they have with the old ones. For example, important players in the product development process often make decisions based on the customer with whom they last spoke. An equally common temptation is to listen to customers who echo what you want to hear, and disregard the rest.

In the best possible circumstance, you get a single person who appears representative of a larger user population, gives you credible insights, and even articulates their needs clearly. The obvious problem is that you're only listening to  one person, who will never be 100% representative of the larger population. That's especially bad if the population contains distinct segments of people with different needs, habits, and skills, and you have to build something that fits the bill for more than one of these cohorts.

If you're not taking advantage of the opportunity to use social media to collect more data than you could through traditional, labor-intensive methods  (for example, customer meetings), you're missing a big part of the reason for paying attention to social media in the first place.

And if you don't believe me, take a look at this item from The Guardian about how British businesspeople went gaga over a single 15 year-old intern's analysis of how teenagers use social media. To be fair, both traditional and social media contributed to the buzz around the document. But that's the point: you can repeat all the mistakes of old media when using new media.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

Picking the right social media for requirements

All three parts of the series on social media as a new source of requirements data are now published. The first shows how product teams can use social media to create reach more accurate conclusions than traditional sources of requirements (customer visits, enhancement requests, customer advisory boards, etc.) alone can provide.

The second document distills the lessons learned from attempts to use social media in this "inbound role" into a methodology, PLOT (persona, location, options, test). Since the choice of which social media can best answer particular kinds of questions isn't immediately obvious, I devoted the third document to that topic alone.

During the research for this series, it became glaringly obvious that there is a major dividing line in the type of information that product teams collect and analyze:

• Product-centric, which related directly to the company's products and services. How many people have voted for a particular feature is a good example.
• Problem-centric, which depicts the customer's world. The patterns in how organizations adopt particular kinds of solutions, for example, is vitally important for product teams, even though the best form of that information makes no reference to the vendor, or even the supporting technology, whatsoever.

Shown here is a graphic that summarizes the kinds of requirements information that falls into these two categories. To borrow a phrase from William James, the breadth of social media options appears, at first glance, as a "blooming, buzzing confusion." This distinction between product-centric and problem-centric issues is the first of several filters needed to select the right social media outlet to answer a particular question.

This distinction is also critical for determining whether the company's current investment in social media can be at all useful for the product team. Already in many technology companies, Marketing's enthusiasm for social media inspires skepticism in Development. In the worst cases, it's almost as if someone were to propose to John Calvin, "The papacy has some interesting ideas about transubstantiation. Why don't we look into them?

This product/problem distinction helps decide whether the existing social media channels will be of any use to the product team. In some cases, they certainly will be. In others, either the company will need to build additional social media tools, or the product team will need to look outside the company's web presence altogether.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

Twitter without the airbrushing

These statistics about Twitter are fascinating. (Here's some additional analysis.) We see Twitter without the circle of fawning admirers, with her make-up removed, being herself at home. She still looks pretty good, without the hype and glitz.

The statistic that will appeal to the cynics and skeptics: 15% of the people who follow more than 2,000 people are social media marketers. Yeah, I kinda suspected that there were more than a few people playing the You Watching Me Watching You game.

The rest of the numbers are what you'd expect from a relatively new social media outlet, so there's  no reason for Twitter to blush. Half of all users aren't active? A significant number of blogs are also inactive, dead, pushing up the daisies, rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.  A minority of users create most of the activity? Not exactly a shockeroo. I'd be very suspicious of the numbers if they showed a different picture.

The most interesting statistic for me, as a hybrid social/computer scientist, is the take-off number of 150 followers. That's the threshold where people where you, and the people who know you, have a real network going. It's also where people who don't know start thinking you're worth noticing.

And for you product design wonks out there, APIs really matter. Twitter's success owes a lot to applications beyond www.twitter.com.

The moral: You don't need to claim that Twitter has changed the world, or that Twitter now overshadows all other social media, to believe that Twitter is a success.

Pity the poor journalist

For the last several years, I've been watching how print and broadcast journalists have responded to the rise of social media. It's darkly comic to see, for example, a columnist at The Washington Post sneer at bloggers, and in the same daily edition, another WaPo writer plug their Twitter account. The journalistic profession''s troubled relationship with the social web is also one of the best case studies in how not to use social media.

Newspapers have had the worst time of it. While newspapers in particular have blamed their business problems on the Internet, they certainly helped create many of those problems. Rather than extending their business to include social media, US newspapers largely fought the trend. As a result, they've entered the news-oriented social media too late, and generally unconvincingly. (Why exactly would I follow Nicolas Kristof on Twitter?)

Case in point: The Washington Post's decision to fire columnist Dan Froomkin for reasons that remain unclear. The interesting part of the story is how quickly The Huffington Post hired Froomkin. While that doesn't portend an exodus of op-ed writers to sites like The Huffington Post, it's interesting to see how easily Froomkin made the transition. As did his regular readers, who won't be reading Froomkin at the Post or any newspaper's site.

The question of how successful the news-oriented social media outlets have been at complementing or supplanting some of the functions of traditional print and broadcast media is far beyond the capacity of this one little blog post to handle. It's still worth noting how people in the business of content can badly fumble their handling of social media.

Access granted

Zoho now provides a simple mechanism to convert a Microsoft Access prototype into a web application. In other words, Zoho has now provided what Microsoft never did.

I'm still baffled by Microsoft's unwillingness to take this step. Sure, Microsoft wants to keep you in their technology stack, but the path from Access to any web-based application platform, including Microsoft's technologies, hasn't been clear, or easy. Instead, a bunch of little vendors built their own Access-to-web-app converters.

You'd think that Access would have an interest in promoting this migration path, if that's what keeps people using Access as a prototyping tool. For example, a few years ago, I started building a prototype in Access for what would eventually be a MySQL/PHP-based departmental application. Soon into the project, I realized that the work put into the Access database structure was largely wasted. Oh well.

Should Google be the next Microsoft?

Google has announced its new Chrome operating system. Yay.

I was tempted to stop there, because there's actually very little we can say, at this point, about Google's announcement. The temptation to speculate, prognosticate, and extrapolate is powerful, to be true, but it's worth taking stock of the unknowns before we say much more.

Netbooks may be both an opportunity and a limitation
Google is right to see the rise of netbooks as a springboard for its browser-based OS. Certainly, netbooks are the one part of the PC market that's seeing growth. However, not every consumer who already has a laptop will necessarily buy a netbook. Corporate IT department are not rushing to buy employees a duplicate or replacement computer, just because netbooks are new, useful, or inexpensive.

In truth, a netbook is not a perfect replacement for a PC. As my Forrester colleague J.P. Gownder puts it, netbooks are a different form factor, which addresses a particular set of needs. There are other needs that a netbook won't meet. A netbook is perfect for my mom, but I couldn't see doing my old job (PM) or my new one (analyst) with one.

Yeah, yeah, I know, the Chrome OS is not predicated on netbooks alone. Since a lot of the "five minutes after the game" quarterbacking focuses on netbooks, I had to say something.

The Chrome OS depends on Chrome
The bigger dependence, of course, is the Chrome browser, which isn't exactly taking the browser market by storm right now. The Chrome OS may add to the reasons to use the Chrome browser, but that doesn't automatically mean that users will be convinced by those reasons, or even understand them. Which, of course, makes pronouncements about the death of the traditional operating system a wee bit premature.

Not all users may be overjoyed with this strategy
Google certainly has gained a lot of users for their productivity applications. However, they still lag far behind Microsoft Office in number of users. The reasons are many, and pretty obvious: My company isn't comfortable with sensitive data outside the firewall. We long ago standardized on Office, so don't ask me to certify a new set of tools from scratch. Google Apps doesn't do [insert feature], and that's a piece of functionality that's important for me. And so on.

Inherently, some desktop applications are more "displaceable" than others. It's going to take a while to see how many users will abandon their desktop applications users for Chrome-based alternatives.

Not all governments may be overjoyed with this strategy
Hey, does anyone else remember the Microsoft anti-trust battle? The one based on the assumption that it's a bad idea to let a vendor that's in the operating system business develop applications that are tied too closely to that OS?

Google is moving in the opposite direction than the path Microsoft took, starting with the application, from the applications to the operating system. However, the same concerns apply, with an added twist: how much user data Google maintains, and what they do with it.

Sometimes, the phrase "Google product strategy" can be an oxymoron
Google's "idea factory" approach to its product portfolio has its pros and cons. On the pro side, a smart, dedicated, energetic team can pull together an interesting new application or platform technology rapidly. Google employees have the freedom to explore new ideas, so invention does not always have to wait on the rest of the organization.

However, this approach doesn't make it easy, or perhaps even possible, to have an overarching product strategy. For example, the fit between Wave and other Google products is not altogether clear. (Particularly since many product groups didn't have any idea what Wave was, until the public announcement.) If the success of the Chrome OS depends on some constellation of applications, and there are gaps in Google's offering, how quickly will Google fill them? Or even realize that the gaps exist?

Where does the Chrome OS fit into the bigger world of cloud computing?
Complementing these questions about the relationship between the ChromeOS and the desktop, there's another set of questions, yet unresolved, about where Google fits into the evolving world of cloud computing. Does Chrome mean that Google is locking itself into an increasingly exclusive cloud strategy? Is it going to throw a lot of effort into recruiting other vendors to write Chrome-based applications? (You can ask that last question about both the desktop and cloud vendors.)

Serious technical challenges lay ahead
The browser-based OS is a new frontier frought with many interest technical challenges. Even with its impressive collective brainpower, Google won't solve them overnight.

And these are only the off-the-top-of-your-head questions. I'm sure that new ones will emerge.

Believe me, I'm not trying to be a wet blanket here. Google may very well succeed, and it may be a good thing for the industry that it does. However, it's way too early to conclude that either Chrome or traditional operating systems will "win," or if it's even an either/or question.

Are G-Men missing the G-Spot?

Yesterday, I ranted a bit about how Twitter is getting an amount of press that's disproportionate to its importance, relative to other forms of social media. While that result is unfortunate, and perhaps misleading for people who are building budgets for their social media strategy, it's not all that pernicious. People may later regret their behavior during a media bacchanal, but they've only hurt themselves, or a single company, in the process.

When the US government joins in the festivities, I start to worry.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), the government unit known as the "investigative arm of Congress," has launched a presence on YouTube and Twitter. Chuck Young, GAO's managing director of public affairs, says the video and microblogging sites aim to help the agency keep people informed about GAO's work.

You may wonder, how harmful could that really be? Just another sign of the millenials making themselves felt in Washington, DC, just as they did in Obama's campaign. Heck, it's just another channel of communications to help citizens know what their government is doing, right?

Wrong. What the US government says, and when it says it, and what happens to its statements, is a matter of public importance. Here are a few examples:

• During the Iraq War, both government employees and contractors have regularly left sensitive information on unsecure file servers.
• Researchers working at NASA, NOAA, and other government agencies were under pressure not to release findings that contradicted the Bush Administration's policies on climate change, contraception, stem cell research, the state of the economy, and other issues.
• Historians at the University of Illinois found alterations in documents on the White House's web site that covered the early phase of the Gulf War.

And these are just recent examples. By no means is hanky-panky with government documents limited to periods when Republicans were in the White House. Nor are incidents limited to the executive branch, or even the federal level of US government. Rightly, Americans get upset when the government mishandles important information, no matter who does it.

Which brings us to Twitter and YouTube. Both of these outlets are fine for public officials to use, as long as there is no long-term danger to the integrity of the information itself. Again, we're talking about when it was communicated, what it included, and whether or not it changed.

Twitter and YouTube do not follow the guidelines that restrict how government organizations handle, preserve, and (when appropriate) destroy public documents. Through no one's bad intentions, US government information, from the GAO no less, might disappear from Twitter's and YouTube's servers. Someone might accidentally delete the information, or scrub it from the system during a clean-up of content that hasn't been accessed for a long time. (Like, say, a video from the GAO.) Obviously, the more the US government fails to maintain its own backups of this information, the worse the problem is.

How a government official uses social media is a big part of this week's news cycle. After Sarah Palin's resignation, she posted an explanation of her decision on her Facebook page, and she has been responding to critics on Twitter. She was already a fairly active user of both media, where she regularly spoke about issues that, because of ethics inquiries, have already landed in the courts, and may do so again.  Who, then, is responsible for the integrity of these communications?

Government should think creatively about how to reach citizens. While Twitter and YouTube are easy ways to reach a big audience, they also raise questions about the trade-off between popularity and reliability.

Not everyone is all a-Twitter

Cindy Alvarez makes a much-needed observation: Twitter is not self-evidently interesting or useful to everyone. The fact that 90% of Twitter content comes from 10% of Twitter users may not be a hard ceiling, so the real topic of her post is, "How might the proportion of Twitter contributors increase?" While you might not agree that the 90-10 rule is a problem that needs solving, it's important to remember, as a Twitter enthusiast or skeptic, that most Twitter users don't see the value in tweeting.

Cindy's best quote comes from the comments section of this post:

I think Twitter puts a bigger burden on the user to figure out “what do you want from this” and I think that’s fine - but it would be great if they had more exposure to “What are the possibilities? How are other people using this? What are other peoples’ strategies for learning or publishing here?

In case you're wondering, I'm Twitter-neutral. I use Twitter regularly, but I'm not fetishistic about it. It has value for me, but I can't imagine an argument that might convince the majority of my friends and relatives to tweet.

In fact, I think we're rapidly approaching "fatweegue." People are talking about Twitter too much. In some recent discussions I've attended, Twitter got such disproportionate attention that every other form of social media became the things-that-are-not-Twitter, mentioned in an aside.

In fact, when listening to future presentations on social media, I'm very, very tempted to offer the speaker a $20 bill to avoid all gratuitous mentions of Twitter. If you want Andrew Jackson to be your friend, it must be absolutely impossible to make your argument without mentioning Twitter.

Update: Tweetcraft, a Twitter plug-in for World of Warcraft, doesn't expand the Twitter market. It's the Venn diagram depicting the intersection between two groups of enthusiasts.

Iran's regime believes in anti-social media

Iranian protesters are using many different Web 2.0 technologies to inform the rest of the world apprised of what's happening in Iran, as well as communicating with each other. However, Twitter seems to have grabbed the lion's share of press attention. Let's not forget what Facebook, YouTube, blogging sites, and other services are doing to keep the channels of communication open.

By the way, in one company where I worked recently, Iranian opposition groups used our service to organize and communicate. Their use of Web 2.0 technology goes back years.

Innovation and social media

Last week, I did a presentation that linked the recent research on inbound social media to the innovation process. Many thanks to Accept Software for inviting me. Here's the recording, and here's the written Q&A that followed.

What's the Dev team's interest in social media?

Most aficianados of social media emphasize the customer-facing applications of these technologies. By now, we've all heard interesting stories about how Marketing used blogs to get the message out, Sales used forum postings to help qualify leads, and Support used Twitter to respond to users wrestling with technical problems.

Exciting, new-frontierish stuff, to be sure, but you hear far less about Development's social media strategy. What about the "inbound" applications of social media?

That question was my inspiration for what turned into a three-part series on "inbound social media." The first research document appeared today (Forrester subscription required to read the whole enchilada). The second and third parts are coming shortly.

A lot of development teams are skeptical about their company's investment in social media. Frankly, they don't see what's in it for them. Worse, it threatens to be a distraction from their mission to execute, execute, execute.

But, as I found, social media fills an important informational gap, as long as you're willing to make the commitment to taking it seriously. You may have already heard my rants about traditional sources of product requirements, and why they stink on ice. (And believe you me, I speak from firsthand experience on that topic, as well as the vicarious experience of many PMs I've interviewed in this job.) If not, here's a sample.

The first document in this series is really a summary of why Dev teams should take social media seriously, and how they'll have to adapt to use it effectively. For example, inbound social media are a mechanism for answering questions, some of which will be ongoing, and some of which will be ad hoc. Most development teams (broadly defined to include QA, Doc, and PM) don't necessarily have the right organization and habits to juggle both of these types of inquiry. Driven by release schedules, teams focus on the questions relevant to the next release--not necessarily the bigger questions that span releases. Social media can address both kinds of questions, but teams will have to make some adjustments to find these answers.

Many technology companies will have to change the way they make product decisions. I used to annoy the heck out of stakeholders by saying, "If we've reached a question that we can settle empirically, then let's shut up and find the answer." Not everyone wants to sacrifice their dearly-held opinions, or their freedom of action within the organization, on the altar of the scientific method. But that wrenching change may be necessary for these teams to survive and prosper, given the challenges of convincing customers to buy and adopt new technologies.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

Teleconference on social media for product teams

Later today, I'm doing a teleconference on how product teams can use social media to make smarter product decisions. The presentation is based on a three-part series I'll soon be publishing on this topic. Click here for details.

Save the electronic seals!

PETA is working hard to save baby seals from club-wielding orcs. Of course, the second part of that sentence refers to World of Warcraft. Blizzard, the company behind World of Warcraft, is creating a special event to help raise awareness among gamers about cruelty to animals.

Snicker if you will, but it's no weirder than some of the Second Life special events. In fact, it's arguably less weird, if you think about how self-selecting the interest groups in Second Life are. If the point is to get to an audience that wouldn't already be thinking about the issue, it's worth giving the World of Warcraft experiment a go.

At the very least, it's a much, much better idea than flavoring tofu with George Clooney's sweat.

Marketing didn't start in the Fifties

Saeed Khan's recent series of posts about social media started with a video that purports to explain the new rules of marketing in which social media play a critical role. This video repeats a familiar argument: old-style marketing went one direction, from the vendor to the customer. The consumer, presented with a smaller number of choices than they have today, based their purchase decisions on a variety of motives, both tangible ("Costs less!") and intangible ("Be more attractive to the opposite sex!"). Vendors created their own messages and transmitted them through normal advertising and marketing channels, in the hope that they would deflect consumers in their direction ("We cost less, and we'll make you look even better!").

The video uses a familiar motif, a campy Fifties aesthetic, which is more than just an aesthetic decision. This isn't the first time that someone has used the Fifties as the baseline for measuring changes in modern marketing. Unfortunately, it's wrong to assume that we're the period of change, and the Fifties were a fixed starting point. The Fifties were also a period of social and technological transformation, to which the marketing professionals of the time struggled to adapt.

Ward Cleaver wasn't normal
The demographic story of the United States in the 1950s is by now familiar. After World War II, the US represented an unusually large amount of the global economy, on both the production and consumption sides. Post-war prosperity generated opportunities that American families followed in their exodus across the map of the United States. (As first-generation native Californian, by the way, I'm a child of that post-war migration from East to West.)

This exodus from one region to another, to jump from one job to another, had other aspects. Americans moved, in large numbers, from both the cities and the countryside to the rapidly-expanding suburbs. Ironically, as the suburban sprawl increased, people living in their newly-constructed tract homes felt more isolated from one another. The back yard replaced the front porch; the cul-de-sac replaced the neighborhood.

Simultaneous with these economic changes were major leaps forward in communications technology. Television may have been the iconic medium, but it was hardly the only one. Mass communications in every form, from the car radio to the morning newspaper, provided a wealth of  marketing and advertising activities, pitched to an audience enjoying a period of prosperity, opportunity, and even leisure time. This consumer society was open to suggestions about what to buy, including goods that previous generations might not have given as much consideration, from new homes to European vacations.

You usually don't have to look very hard to find some degree of condescension in depictions of this period. The Ozzie and Harriett-like nuclear families appear oblivious to anything but the quest for an increasingly middle-class existence. Consumers appear less like informed buyers, and more like credulous primitives excited about the shiny objects dangled in front of them.

Rod Serling wasn't abnormal
However, many Americans in the 1950s were all too conscious of the changes that had occurred, and the effects it had on mass behavior, often in dark and dangerous ways. A generation of social scientists saw this shift to a highly atomized society as dangerous for democracy. C. Wright Mills blamed the rise of a "power elite" on the emergence of a "mass society," which created a power vacuum that political and business power blocs were all too happy to fill.

In fact, this "mass society" was the cornerstone of many popular explanations of the rise of fascism and communism. Economic and social upheavals had sundered the lasting bonds of family, neighborhood, work, and voluntary organizations. Fearful of the future, and without other places to turn, citizens flocked to nasty political movements that promised to take care of them.

You can pick apart these theories of capitalist democracy and totalitarianism, as decades of scholars have. However, the important point here isn't to debate their merits. Instead, it's worth nothing them as signs that, not only were the Fifties an unusual time in American history, but people at the time were aware of how unusual it was.

Marketers in the Fifties recognized a good opportunity when they saw one. The unusual circumstances of the Fifties fostered the one-way communications between vendor and customer, because the audience was unusally receptive, and mass-scale communications channels made it easy to transmit their messages.

The marketing acumen of yesterday...today!
Product marketers today should not be congratulating themselves on how much smarter they are than the Don Drapers of some mythic marketing past. Instead, we should take a humbler view of how the marketing discipline adapts to current exigencies. That perspective makes it easier to understand why some traditional elements of the marketing mix, such as direct mail, haven't withered in the light of social media.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

The Heretech podcast, episode 1

In this inaugural episode, Tom interviews Oliver Young, senior analyst at Forrester Research, about social media and their growing role in B2B buying decisions.

Traditional requirements stink on ice, continued

First, let me belatedly acknowledge Luke Hohmann, who ranted eloquently about traditional requirements at his P-Camp session several days before I started this current screed. His observation was Hemingwayesque in its pithiness: "Requirements suck." Mine is more Faulkneresque, using an idiom ("stink on ice"), undoubtedly with a colorful origin that no one remembers.

The second reason why traditional requirements stink on ice is, ultimately, a question of perspective:

• Development teams build technology for people who are wholly unlike themselves.

• No team has the resources to live side-by-side with the people for whom they're building the technology. The users don't have the time or inclination, too.

• Most development teams rarely interact with people on a different floor in the same building, so living side-by-side with the target users wouldn't be an automatic mechanism for osmotic transmission of insight.

• Therefore, development teams generally view requirements in their own terms, and not the world as the end user sees it.

By necessity and habit, development teams think and speak in terms like features, projects, and releases. Occasionally, users may use this language to make themselves understood to you, but it's not the terms that define their world. They want to do their jobs more quickly and successfully, and  then go home and think about something other than inserting a table of figures into a Word document.

Traditional requirements both reflect and reinforce this language barrier. Obviously, at the end of the day, you do need to go back to your cubicle and work on features. However, at some point in the process of designing, building, and releasing technology for people unlike you, you need to speak and understand their language, not yours.

To illustrate, here's an archetypical exchange between an ISV and a customer:

Customer: "We've been asking for this feature for a while. When will we get it?"

Vendor: "Very soon now. Meanwhile, what do you think of this feature? We think it's a great idea."

Customer: "Sure, it looks interesting."

Vendor: "Cool, because we're hoping to get it into the next release. We thought you might like it."

While there are many, many things going wrong in this conversation, for our purposes, the chief problem is linguistic. Both parties are guilty of speaking the vendor's preferred language, without making it clear how it translates into the customer's. Asking where the ion flux regulator appears in the product roadmap doesn't clarify why it's important to have one in the first place. Nor does it help understand whether the etheric vortex stabilizer helps solve the same problem for the customer, or anything at all.

Here's when some Agile aficianados are jumping out of their chairs to say, "Oooh! Oooh! Let me tell you about personas and user stories!" I largely agree that these Agile-approved requirements media can go a long way towards understanding the customer. However, they're not complete solutions for two reasons:

• The medium often constrains the understanding. For people whose Agile approach involves a lot of Stickie notes or index cards, it should not be a shock to hear that minute tiles of information, as useful as they are, do not always automagically transform into a beautiful, accurate, or complete portrait of the target user. At least in practice, that is.

• The sources of information still deserve some skepticism. You might drop the jumbo Word and Excel documents for personas and user stories, but you still may be extracting information from an unrepresentative sampling of users.

Social media are not a panacea for this language problem, or any other congenital defect that afflicts traditional requirements. Nonetheless, there are ways to use social media to help crack the language barrier.

Mandatory caveat: As in other situations, it's possible to use social media badly here. For example, giving users the ability to vote on feature ideas is a wonderful thing. However, keep in mind that this new channel of communication you are allowing them to speak your language more clearly, without necessarily improving your ability to speak theirs. In fact, some vendors' parochial use of social media resembles what many Americans do when confronted with someone who doesn't speak English: "Maybe you people will understand us IF WE JUST SPEAK MORE LOUDLY."

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

Traditional requirements stink on ice

I've had to put blogging on the back burner for the last week because one research document, covering how product managers can use social media (blogs, Wikis, forums, etc.) as a new source of product requirements, underwent mutation, and then mitosis. Now, it's three separate documents, each of which demands all the empirical and stylistic discipline that Forrester demands. In short, I've been busy.

However, now that two of the three documents are drafted and in the capable hands of my research director, I need to vent. The target of my ire isn't the tribble-like spawning of new documents, which at the end of the day, is the right call, and has made the author much happier with the final product.

No, what's really churning in my guts is the inevitable outcome of talking to people about product requirements, writing about how to improve them, and re-visiting the topic during the editing process. Let's be honest: usually, they stink on ice.

I like that idiom because it evokes a truly epic scale of odiousness.If, in the depth of winter, when everything liquid or semi-solid freezes, and the great slab of ice on which you're standing leeches all the warmth and life out of you, slowly killing each of your senses in turn you're smelling something foul, it must be really foul.

No single post can hope to capture the complete odiousness of traditional requirements. I'll space this philippic across at least a couple of post, but let's start with the most obvious problem, and  the destruction that it wreaks on sensible product decisions, not to mention the working relationship between product management and development.

Wandering in the informational desert
What are the most frequently used sources of requirements in the technology industry? According to our surveys, the results are anything but surprising to us veterans: (1) customer meetings, either face-to-face or over the phone; (2) bug database entries; (3) enhancement requests transmitted through e-mail, often via mailing lists. Customer meetings are also the most trusted source of insight, because they provide far more information than a vague "I have a customer" e-mail from someone in Sales, or a bug report that conveys more frustration than information.

Of course, as "useful" as customer meetings are, they're hardly frequent enough to create a statistically significant sample. People should be skeptical, when the N is small, of how representative the customers are of the larger market, and how reliable the conclusions based on this information can be. Scheduling a few more conference calls, or getting leave to visit another customer on-site, will not provide enough empirical fuel to launch to slip the surly bonds of skepticism.

All of which leads to statements we've all heard before:

"He strongly

• holds the opinion of the last customer to whom he spoke."

• "This customer is full of spurious requests. How much can we trust their judgment?"

• "I've spoken to as many customers as you have. What makes you a greater expert on customers than me?"

• "We don't have time to keep going back to these people to see what they really want."

And so on, truly ad nauseum.

Therefore, one of the virtues of social media as a new source of insight into product decisions is the sample size. Would you rather base the next 12 months of development on an hour's conversation with five key customers, or information collected from hundreds of customers posting on discussion forums and blogs?

Certainly, there are lots of potential ways to misuse social media in this fashion. Aggregate information may be miles wide, but inches deep. Collected sloppily, the sample may be just as skewed as the handful of customers with whom you normally deal.

Still, it's hardly a courageous leap to say that social media provide some useful information that can bear on product decisions. At the very least, these other sources of information can supplement the traditional stuff.

When we return, be prepared to hold your nose as we wade through the other problems with traditional requirements. 

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

Agile, social media, and requirements

Speaking of social media, one of the two research documents now in the editing queue looks at using social media as a source of product requirements. Using Forrester's POST* methodology as a starting point, how can product managers harness the enormous amount of potentially useful information transmitted in the clear through blogs, forums, Wikis, and similar technologies?

The other document in editing is the "Agile company" piece, covering the results of the survey and interviews we conducted to understand how Agile development changes technology companies. To foreshadow the results, I had to divide Agile adoption into two stages. To date, Agile aficianados have focused on the first, Agile within the development team. Clearly, for the story of Agile adoption, that's only Chapter One.

* In this approach, the steps for analyzing social media involve people, objectives, strategy, and technology (POST).

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

Today's utter waste of time: 02/17/07

If there's one thing less useful than 4chan, which is like Digg, except for 13-year old boys, it's the Washington Post coverage of its creator. If moot, "the secretive Internet celebrity" behind 4chan, had not created the site, someone else would have put a few days work into coding a site for posting images of video games, Maxim models, hardcore pornography with Maxim models, Warhammer 40K, and WWE stars.

You can find something marginally more useful at the bottom of the article: the Post's implementation of Evri, which lets you follow bizarre relationships among topics. Let's see, coverage of 4chan leads to an article about Sarah Palin's hacked e-mail account, which leads you to Ashley Judd's denunciations of Sarah Palin, which lead you to Defenders of Wildlife's denunciations of Sarah Palin, which leads you back to Sarah Palin, at which point time and space collapse into one another.

And, if the singularity for this cosmic catastrophe were to center on Sarah Palin's cleavage, someone will have made an animated GIF of the event and posted it on 4chan.

Monitoring the GDrive glacier

I'm a regular reader of Download Squad, which is usually a pretty good source of information about Web 2.0 stuff. However, they seem unduly optimistic about the advent of GDrive, Google's alleged "file storage in the cloud" product.

I used to be in the cloud file storage biz, which is why these occasional Download Squad posts catch my attention. Sure, Google could provide its own version of countless other XDrive-like services. But will they? Mmmmm, not so sure.

It's logical to round out the other cloud collaboration tools--calendar, e-mail, Wiki, etc.--with files. It's especially interesting if Google wants to let users share the same files across these different tools, as e-mail attachments, Wiki-referenced documents, and the same file-based content appearing in other locations. Heck, it'd be really interesting, and blazingly obvious, if Google Docs shared the same back-end storage for this content.

However, interesting is not the same thing as likely, especially the way Google operates. If there's no strong constituency inside Google interested in developing GDrive, then it might materialize, but it's not going to be the universal back end for unstructured data that Google fans might assume it should be.

Does Google bear the weight of sin?

Four Google executives face charges in a Milan court. Their crime? Google allowed (or, perhaps to be more precise, failed to stop) the posting of a video in which four young thugs mock a boy with Downs Syndrome.

Obviously, the video is objectionable. However, in free societies, it's also perfectly legal--as is lots of other objectionable content on YouTube, such as white supremacist parades, flaming dog poop, and the video for "Total Eclipse of the Heart." The slope down which you tumble when you start policing content that someone might find objectionable isn't just slippery, it's practically frictionless.

Life in the Web 2.0, cloud computing, everything's-a-service-for-everything-else world makes the circles of responsibility even harder to draw. What responsibility does Facebook have for someone posting an objectionable video, hosted on YouTube, on their personal page? Does tweeting the link to the video ensnare Twitter in this web of sin?

And if you think "objectionable content" is hard to police, just you wait until you get into the whistleblower laws. What's might be legal, or just a minor infraction, in one country is a serious crime in another. Even the notion of what constitutes a state secret varies widely between, say, Denmark and China.

This prosecution may have more to do with Italian politics than Italian law. That's not the same as saying, however, that it's a sure thing that Google will win the case.