Social is the new KM

People are getting Social Media, Social Networking, Learning and Knowledge Management (KM) mixed up thanks to a few misleading blog posts by two of my former colleagues at Gartner. Or are they? If you read the responses at HBR, you will see that people are calling them on it. To be fair, Jeff Mann does get it and his blog is also counter what was being said (see his blog).

First, on taxonomy, here is how I explain social terminology to clients. 

Social Media is generally viewed as the public consumer grade sites, microblogs, forums etc. where discussions or chats take place (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Linked-in, Youtube, Second Life). Using Social Media to market your products and support your customers is a good use of these mediums. 

Using Social Media to talk about your work is a bad idea, mainly because so many people are listening, including bad people that want to steal the intellectual property of the firm you work for. In fact, one of the research notes my firm recently published is titled, "Facebook is not a friend of your Enterprise". 

Social Networks, particularly Enterprise Social Networks are private communities, which when implemented properly with identity and access control, are safe places for people to share information, connect with people and accelerate the pace of knowledge dissemination at a company. Many enterprises are still formulating their social networking plans. They have deployed customer communities to build brand loyalty but often the internal social network is still a few steps behind.

On Knowledge Management, when Social Networking (an internal or external community) is done right, with certified profiles of people (what they are trained or certified on), and with the ability to collaborate with others informally, lots of great things start to happen. First, people in remote geographies connect with others, they solve problems and influence each other by the content and comments they share. Often there is an acceleration factor that kicks in, because the pace of interaction is faster and wider.

From a learning perspective, tying formal learning to informal activities, related content and discussions, is now referred to as Social Learning. It is real and it does work. There usually is an ecosystem manager that facilitates the correlation of formal training with some of the informal content, but at the end of the day, the Social Network, as it gets used more and more, becomes the Knowledge Network. People can search it and find what they need.

Since I've actually overseen the development of Social Networking platforms and also deployed Social Networks, I recently conducted a short poll of some Sales Execs who had been using one of the Communities for over a year. My simple question to them was this: "what do you use to find the information you need to do your job now?" Their answer was "we just search the network (community) and we find what we need". 

So, in reality, as an Enterprise Social Network gets used more, it will evolve into a Knowledge Network. People find what they need to do their jobs or they can ask someone in the community who can point them in the right direction. It is self-curated and self-sustaining, with a little help from the community manager and IT.

Hopefully, this has helped to clarify things. Social Networking and Social Learning are the new KM. We are covering Knowledge as one of our key topics in our Workplace Service at Aragon Research.

(Note: Jim Lundy is the Founder and CEO of Aragon Research.  He founded and led the Social Software and Collaboration team at Gartner and oversaw the Corporate Learning coverage for ten years).

Your Life, For Sale on Facebook

If 2011 was the year of the Like button for Facebook, 2012 could be called the return of the app. Today at their annual Developer Conference (D8) in San Francisco, Facebook unveiled new capabilities that increasingly are focused on allowing Facebook to monetize the nearly 800 million users that visit their site each month.

Facebook unveiled a new profile feature called Timeline that allows the history of your posts and activities to be displayed in chronological order (by year). More importantly, they added verbs (watch, read, listen, hike) to actions so that users can be listening to music, and that action (and the song you are listening to) is automatically shared with others via the music application (e.g. Spotify).

While digital natives will clearly enjoy this new way to show off their lives via Timeline, it also, at the same time, offers up a level of privacy infiltration that some may find undesirable. Friends and future employers can now get to know you in ways that they didn't before. Of course, users now have control over what they allow to be seen on their timeline, but over time, we expect that users, especially younger ones, will become less sensitive to what is there.

On the applications (apps) that so badly want to access your Timeline (and sell something), once an app has access to your profile, it doesn't have to ask permission ever again. It is clear that what is at work by Facebook is the continued expansion of its ability to grow revenues, which are estimated to be around $4.2 Billion for this year.

A friend that I worked with at Saba once said to me that her goal was to have zero information about her available on the internet. She is not a Facebook user. For those that are, with the coming launch of  Facebook Timeline, your life, at least what is visible, is basically for sale.

Author's Note: We'll be covering Facebook (and the implications for Enterprises) in more detail in our premium research that is at AragonResearch.com

Tech Recap Week Ending 5/13 - a new Clash

It was a busy week in Tech and May is usually that way, spanning back all the way to May of 1990,  when Microsoft introduced Windows 3.0 to the world. Things changed.

This week Microsoft was at it again and they announced that they were buying Skype, which at 8.5 Billion is a steep price to pay to get your Mojo back. See my take on the deal here.

Of course Google was at it too and the shot that hasn't yet been heard around the world is their new Chromebook. A nifty way to shift people from buying to renting a PC (prices are roughly US $20-28 per device/month) and more importantly some clever security and a new way of isolating of apps from the OS to stop intrusion attacks. Google still needs to show that it is committed to this approach with its partners, but this week it certainly showed it is dedicated to Chrome. The progress Google showed with Chrome in just twelve months is impressive and it also shows that Google's development teams are maturing.

The last item probably would have never showed up at all had it not been for a smart reporter that wasn't about to be duped and it has to do with the whisper campaign Facebook tried to launch against Google. While this has been widely reported and widely tweeted about, what is interesting is that this represents an epic shift of the clash of the titans.

I used to discuss Microsoft vs IBM as the big titan clashes. Now that the battle is in the cloud, it is Google facing off against Facebook. This time it is really all about Ad revenue. Google has it and now Facebook does too. I'll certainly be talking about Facebook in the future, but suffice to say, Facebook is pretty vulnerable to the same type of PR attack it launched on Google. Even more worrisome, Facebook is also an effective tool to use as part of a cyber-attack on an enterprise (see As Facebook Grows, so does Cyber Warfare).

So a busy week in tech and it doesn't show any sign of slowing down.

2010 in Review: As Facebook Grows, so does Cyber Warfare

If the growth of Facebook and the emergence of the Apple iPad were the most widely reported tech stories in 2010, the emergence of Cyber Warfare that targets governments and enterprises is the most under reported one, with far greater consequences.  In fact 2010, could be viewed as the year that Cyber Warfare emerged as a true weapon. Below I outline six steps to take to protect your enterprise.

It is now very clear that certain governments are using Cyber warfare to attack adversaries, including private/public companies. Some key things that occurred in 2010:

1. Facebook and other consumer social sites played a role in the Great Hack of Google and 34 other firms. However, it is worse than that. Thousands of firms may have been breached according to Kevin Mandia, CEO of security firm Mandiant.
2. Redirection of US Internet Traffic by China on April 8, 2010 and the attack of at least 5 other firms.
3. Confirmation by the US Federal Government that attacks against Google and other enterprises were ordered by Chinese Government officials (via CNBC).

A key conclusion from an earlier post: these new modes of attack, known as Advanced Persistent Threats, are far too sophisticated to stop with software and firewalls.  The best known method to protect your corporate assets (source code and intellectual property) is to isolate key corporate systems from the normal corporate network. In other words, you need two networks.

What does all of this really mean? Well, for starters, it is a new era of electronic warfare and this time it is information that is the currency that is being fought over. There stakes are very high: the future of countries and the future economic well being of both the country and the companies that operate in those countries.

Why? Well, the military and technology firms are linked together in interesting ways, as this article (based on research by Rand Corp) demonstrates. Companies have become fronts for governments and military organizations. Some may say that this is not new, but the scale of what is going on now has not been seen in the past.

For enterprises, all of the investment in products that represent the future could be wasted if those secrets are stolen. Cisco learned this a few years back when some of its code was stolen by Huawei Technologies Inc. The lawyer who represented Cisco, G. Hopkins Guy, won an injunction against Huawei and was widely recognized for his ground breaking work that resulted in a worldwide injunction against Huawei.
What does this all mean to you and your enterprise? For starters consider doing this:
1. . Develop a comprehensive strategy to combat cyber warfare and make sure it includes a training program (cyber war gaming) for executives, not just IT staff. 
2. Take the steps to isolate your corporate systems. No matter what you hear from major analyst firms or anyone else, physical separation of information on computers (e.g. a separate network) is the only sure way to stop intrusion right now. Look at models that the military has used (classified vs unclassified systems). This also has major implications for desktop/pc access.
3. Shield key data centers/systems from wireless access and wireless monitoring. For those with remote sites (e.g. retail branches), don't over look these sites as methods of access. If you have any doubts about this action, you need to read The Great Cyber Heist (courtesy of the NY Times).
4. Re-evaluate all browser and operating system security at an architectural level. Evaluate roadmaps from all providers and make the tough, but correct decisions on what platforms you will invest in going forward. Blindly following the incumbent provider may not be the answer that solves your issues.
5. Intrusion from the inside is also a growing issue. Compartmentalizing information so that no one person has access to everything is key, as is a practice of not keeping all source code in one location or on one physical server.
6. Block Facebook. As popular as it is, Facebook isn't secure and it isn't good for your corporate security. Run Facebook in conjunction with certain web browsers and you have the perfect system for intrusion. Many governments and enterprises block access to Facebook and now you know why. This won't be a popular decision, but it is the right one.


So, in 2011, expect to keep hearing more about Facebook and its growing valuation.  2011 may also be called the year of the Tablet (the rise of Android based Tablets). That is all well and good, but the number one issue your enterprise or government needs to prepare for is cyber warfare. 2011 is the time to get prepared for the attacks that are yet to come.....Happy New Year.

People Can Tell if You are Real or Fake

A post by a friend on Facebook got me thinking about real and digital personas and what it all means. The FB post started out like this:

    FB Post: If you're a jerk in real life, your a jerk on Facebook....uh Karen.....(not the person's real name)


    Later, Karen responded with something like: "I guess i'll never introduce you to your future husband...."


    My friend responded with a short comment: "I rest my case."

So what does this mean?  Increasingly, people are seeking out others they work with to find out if they are real (are you really a friend) or if they are fake (you're my friend as long as it helps me get ahead). The funny thing is that this sort of analysis has always gone on, but now it is easier and faster to perform a sentiment analysis on someone. It is becoming harder for people to hide who they really are.

We all got a peek into the private life of Tiger Woods over the last week. His sentiment analysis dropped 20 points in a week. That said, how can you tell if someone you work with is really your friend or not?  How can you tell if you can trust them? The historical answer has always been "only after they burn you".

A client asked me earlier in the year if I was really going to be their friend. The question really was: 'can I trust you'. I responded with an affirmative and months later I proved to be trustworthy after something happened. There is a lesson here for everyone.

Online behavior can sometimes make it easier to tell who is really a friend and who is not (or who you can trust). People can immediately rank or comment on what you do. However, that doesn't prevent someone from faking it. That said, people can still tell (and they do talk), but now sentiment analysis will be a growing part of who the real you really is. Sentiment Analysis is part of the growing area called Social Media Monitoring which in turn is part of what is called Social Network Analysis.

The fact that so many managers will be undone (via Social Network Analysis tools) is the reason why they are afraid of the implications of Social Networking. A Social Network Analysis of their online actions at work will show that many of them spend most of their time managing upward, not actually managing people (because of limited interactions with the common worker).

People that want to get ahead in the workplace often think that the only way to do that is to burn (e.g. deceive) others. It doesn't have to be that way, but today that is often the case. So, the next time you friend someone from work on Facebook, take a second to think about whether they are really your friend.