Social Media | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Corporate e-reputation is the visible part of an impressive iceberg

October 28, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : enterprises fear, and sometimes with good reasons, the impact on their reputation of what their employees could write on the web. But this fear is sometimes so disproportinate that it leads to ludicrous situations. New balances have to be found in this domain, but that’s not all. The image of the organization, its business behaviors, ethics, also impact employee’s pride, motivation, engagement…and their propensity for harming their employer. Even worse : beyond the visible part that is made of one’s image and reputation, the same causes impact deeper mechanisms that drives quality, performance and the sustainability of business.

Lots of businesses are careful about the impact of their employees’ behaviors on their reputation. Should something negative appear somewhere on the web and an impressive self-defense system is activated. Employees have already been sharing their opinion about their employer with family and friends for ages and there’s nothing new here. The point is that, now, they can share with so many people that the situation has become critical from a corporate point of view.

In some cases we have to admit that employees are going to far beyond what the law and his employment contract allow. Of course we can discuss the right for privacy but there are things one can’t say publicly…even not at all. Not because the organization is over-sensitive but because law says so. That’s as simple as that and apply to the web as well as to any situation in real life.

But, not being comfortable with this new and unavoidable transparency, businesses are sometimes over sensitive and react to anything that’s said about them, regardless to the subject and context. This may make us wonder about to what extent employees belong their employer and what is the limit to having and sharing an opinion. The following video may look caricatured but it raises actual questions that are not that far from reality.

Would businesses want it or not, employees can impact their reputation but not as much as they may think. Once the moment of panic that comes with the emergence of a new phenomenon has ended, they’ll have to accept what’s unavoidable, learn to know what deserves a sanction and not, what is like using a bozooka to kill a fly and what deserves no reaction. After all the absence of criticism is suspicious and transparency can, to some extent, made the organization more human with its qualities and defaults.

A more human organization…that’s the point…

Coordinated social media strategies by 2016 ? Why 2016 ?

October 26, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Gartner just issued their predictions about technologies that will deserve highlights in 2010, with a large part dedicated to social software. It includes both interesting and suprinsing things?

First, their analysis distinguish between “social networking”, “social collaboration”, “social publishing” and “social feedback”. Why not, after all. I even find that it makes sense from a learning point of view. Boundaries between social networking “stricto sensu”, tools that have a wide range of use or are used in the limited scope of a community and, at last, social spaces (that can be called “communities” or “groups”) are so blurred that organizations are totally lost. What brings a lot of confusion when they have to design any project related to these points. So this vision is relevant to help them understand how each logic works.

It’s surprising at the same time since it’s hrd to imagine one without the other. In order to make a social network help its members to go beyond strong ties, information is needed to identify people across the organization. So it’s hard to imagine a comprehensive strategy that whould nor articulate social networking and social publishing / collaboration. Let’s even push this logic further : in terms of product, it’s clear that any product that only offers one without the others will suffer from limitations that are more than crippling. Today, organizations can do DIY but the more this kind of issue will become strategic the less they’lln accept incomprehensive solutions.

For instance, social network analysis that Gartner puts in the social networking field would be more relevant if relying not only on ties but also on interactions…what brings us back to social collaboration and social publishing….

Gartner also says that, in 2016, social tools will be integrated with business tools. I already shared my point of view about that many times and have some other posts being writen : according to me that’s something unavoidable. Now, let’s talk about the 2016 dead-line. In my opinion, in addition to delivering more value by making the solution being one-click away from the problem (knowing that each additional click makes 30% users give up) such an integration has another upside : by making social activities more senseful, that favors tool adoption in order to make users come closer to community behaviors because they came to use tools for process-driven reasons. But I’m affraid that, until 2016, many people and organizations lose their breath in a middleware-employee logic.

I think the same about the idea according to which organizations will have coordinated social media strategies by 2016. That sounds obvious but let’s be careful ; if having coordinated tool strategies in one thing, but it doesn’t imply coordinated management strategies. Coordinating tool strategies will not solve the incapacity to share resources across silos, to use a social media as a channel to deliver anything or execute a plan instead of as a legacy media, to turn communication into service… I’m affraid that Gartner is mistaking technology strategy with global strategy…the latter needing to come become the former if one don’t want tools to remain on the shelf. It would be very dangerous for organizations to think that “everything will be solved in 2016″ just like by magic. Nothing will improve if they don’t start working on the needed global strategy to be ready by 2016

Je me fais la même réflexion par rapport à la prédiction qui veut que les entreprises aient une stratégie “coordonnée” en 2016. Par là entendons entre le networking et le collaboratif, entre l’interne et l’externe. Là encore, c’est quelque chose qui résonne comme une évidence. Mais attention : avoir des stratégies outils coordonnées est une bonne chose, mais dans ce domaine il faudrait également coordonner les stratégies managériales. On pourra coordonner tous les outils, cela ne résoudra rien à l’incapacité des organisations à partager leurs ressources entre les services, à se servir d’un “social media” comme un canal pour exécuter un plan ou un process et non comme un media, à transformer la communication en service etc… J’ai bien peut qu’ici Gartner confonde la stratégie outil avec la stratégie tout court…la seconde ayant intérêt à précéder la première si on ne veut pas que les outils restent sur l’étagère. Il serait dangereux, qu’une fois de plus, les entreprises se disent “tout sera réglé par magie en 2016″. Rien ne se le sera si elles ne travaillent pas d’ici là sur la stratégie en question.

Conclusion : A lot of things that make sense but I still don’t understand why 2016. Close enough not to be to far while letting enough time to issue other predictions and change one’s mindcin the meanwhile…

Lats point : analytics. I recently wrote things about bringing intelligence into social software and let technology do the middleware work that is often devoted to users. : the analytics concept is all about that. Globally speaking, the only value of social software today is to allow users to adopt more efficient practices. But let’s be frank : the software does not deliver any added value in addition to what people can deliver by developing new synergies. This step will allow enterprise social software solutions to add their own added value on top of user’s. Doing so, these solutions will be more appealing for users, so will be more used, so will bring more value…what is the start of a virtous circle.

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: business analytics, collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, gartner, social analytics, social media, Social Networking, social networks, strategy

Being done with the enterprise 2.0 value discussion

October 19, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Summary : many still wonder what new tools will bring to their organization and still have trouble visualizing the benefits. The reason is simple ; they imagine these tools in their current organization while it’s difficult to see their contribution out of a new way of working. Organizations built rules to accomodate to the constraints of existing tools. If these constraints are removed by new tools, organizations have to built new rules that will replace the current ones.

I recently found this post on the value (or lack of) of a new technology. It applies to new technologies in a general way, applying it to social software is very instructive.

First, let’s try to answer a few simple questions.

1°) What’s the main power of this technology

It makes information sharing easier and more efficient as well as enterprise-wide discussions related to business issues, the whole taking place out of organization and application silos. It allows anybody to identify, mobilize, put together all the information, data, expertises and people on a scale that was impossible before because of the above mentioned silos. So it allows, in fine, to provide employees with what they need to be efficient in what is called the “knowledge economy”.

2°) What are the limitations this technology is removing

The difficulty sharing unstructured data, identify information and people out of a silo.

3°) What rules were built to accomodate these limitations ?

In the context of a given business process, organizations started with the assumption the information needed for delivery and decision making was not findable. So they built operation models that rely on preset rules aiming at minimizing exceptions even it it meant to deliver an acceptable result in any situation but never something adapted to a very specific need. Assuming this, knowing that people will never have to look out of the process, the time allocated to informal-out-of-process-and-silos-collaboration was considered as wasted time…what impacted the way people were measured.

List to be continued…

4°) What rules should be implemented now ?

I won’t elaborate that much on this point because it’s specific to any situation and many contextual elements are needed to give an answer that applies to a specific business, industry, business process. But it may look like “service oriented organizations“, social routines,articulating structured and unstructured work activities, rethinking quality…

Taht’s only the starting point of a deeper investigation that has to be conducted within a given organization. Anyway, conclusions are the same than those I made about the ROI of enterprise 2.0.

- technology has no value by itslelf

- technology should allow to to things that couldn’t be done before

- rules were set to accomote the limits of previous technogies. The new technology has no value is old rules are not replaced with new ones adapted to the new potential that can now be harnessed.

In one sentence : rules have been set to accomodate constraints. If any technology removes constraints, rules have to be changed or the technology will be useless.

To end, when organization wonder “how to think” their social network or any social media project, they should wonder what rules have to be removed and what should replace them. Designing such projects without thinking a new way of working is removing all the value of the project from its beginning. It’s also the evidence that, to convince an IT dept, a value co-construction process has to be implemented with business people because it’s simply not their role to care about how business is done.

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: business process, constraints, Enterprise 2.0, enterprise-social-software, management, quality, ROI, service oriented organization, social media, social networks, social routine, soo, theory of constraints, value

Project Management needs social signals

October 8, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : It’s obvious that in many cases traditional project management methods need to become more agile. That’s not without bringing new issues due to the need to keep eveyrone informed of the status of a project that is continuously being re-designed. Social media are very good at addressing the need of narating a project beyond the traditional quantitative indicators of traditional tools. But there’s still something missing in the enterprise social media offer : even if some niche players offer project socialization features, most of generalist social software vendors don’t while it would make a lot of sense next to the conversational spaces that are the heart of their product.

In more and more fields it’s becoming obvious that agile methods are becoming the most relevant to manage any project and this approach, that used to be restricted to IT projects is nom being used in more and more areas. The reason is quite easy to undersrtand : in a world where cycles are becoming shorter and shorter, plans that aims at delivering something in 2 or 4 years are not relevant. Proceeding step by step, having functional deliverables that comes progressively and continuously redesigning the project in order it meets actual current needs instead of delivering something that meets what was needed years ago but is irrelevant to the current context seems to be wiser and more efficient way of managing a project.

When, during a projet, some specific expertises and resources have to intervene on certain specific parts, it brings an added complexity. In a classical project, anyone knows what to do and when because the project follows a well defined path. In an agile project, where the roadmap and the specifications continuously evolves, resources are often lost because they don’t know how things have evolved from the original project. It’s a matter of awareness.

What social Media Lack ? Intelligence

September 10, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : the increasing quantity of information generated by social media and the need for dealing with all this information regardless to its source is a barrier to an effective use that relies on users ability to priorize, classify and organize things into a hierarchy. Because of that, only a little minority is not scared by the flows that flow on their screens. To make future information systems usable we need to embed a kind of intelligence in the product rather than relying on the ability of a few people to use the tools in order to channel the flows and highlight what matters to each user, the ultimate step being to build conversing tools. After having tried to use the 2.0 logic to improve BI, now it’s time to use BI to improve 2.0 tools.

One of the main barriers to the use of social media in the workplace and to the transformation of work is that users feel lost. Two points are hidden behind this vague concept :

- lack of context. I won’t elaborate this point because Sameer Patel wrote an excellent post about this issue. Originally about Google Wave it can, in fact, apply to a wide range of things.

- fear of the mass of information that’s generated, of not being able to deal with it and manage it.

I think most people agree on the first point (now just wait to see how it will be turned into actual features), so let’s talk about the second.

If you are familiar with these tools, would it be at home or at work, you know that quantity is not a problem and is rather an opportunity once you know how to filter and prioritize. It can be done technically with the right functiunalities or tools, humanly by relying on the social filter made of your network. Information is like water, what matters is not to have less but to regulate the flow.

Now try to imagine the average user (what means 90% of users), facing any kind of stream (twitter, friendfeed or Facebool) and how his face’s going pale. Of course, these users can be trained, of ourse as time goes by more and more users will be comfortable with information flows. But what matters is today, and today it’s rather complicated. Missing the latest hilarious video shared by one’s uncle is not prejudial but things are not the same in the workplace. Add to that the the fear of admitting in front of colleagues that one didn’t see such or such important information, and you understand why there is a real problem.

The value of social media in the workplace relies on intelligence on two aspects :

- the intelligence people share with the tools

- the intelligence they use to survive in the flow and separate the wheat from the chaff.

Today the more active users on enterprise social platforms are those who meet the second criteria, sometimes because they already do it in their personal use of the web, sometimes because they learn quickly. That poses two problems :

Empowered : the service marketing (and even economy) manifesto

September 1, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I just finished the reading of Empowered, by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, that is in some ways the sequel of Groundswell which was a must read when it was published. To be honest, I have been quite deceived by Groundswell. Of course that’s a lucid, accurate and comprehensive photography of what the web is today and is still worth reading for many execs because there’s still an impressive gap between the usages of the web and how decision makers gets it. But something was missing in the conclusions : businesses must, of course, go on the web and join the groundswell, ok there are identified best practices about than? And so what ? Flirting with internauts is useless if it doesn’t create any kind of value for both the business and the customer.

That’s the new dimension brought by “empowered” : the book goes far beyond the nice discussions on the web to tackle what’s core in business :realigning the whole company with customer satisfaction. Everything starts with one assumption : facing a customer that can talk, compare, and impact the reputation of the company, there’s a need for employees able to fight with the same weapons, to join the customer on his own field. What means : use the same tools as the customer, meet him where he his and take any initiative to meet his expectations. The answer to customer’s needs will result more and for from an individual initiative from an employee, taylored and designed “on demand” that from the general and standardized corporate discours that aims at addressing anything without addressing anyone.

To do so, not only the employee has to want to engage in such a process but also the company must not prevent him from acting this way and, ideally, must provide him with the right tools and policies to achieve a good customer service. Saying that, the issue appears to be about management and IT policied that the book tackles in a pragmatic and lucid way. Some organizations that are comfortable with their good old practices from another century may not be comfortable with that but the arguments are clear and indisputable. That’s not about giving up control and let anybody do anything but facilitating things with a framework that’s secured at both the legal and IT level. Moreover, and that adds to the credibility ot the book, the authors admit that employees may be a danger to themselves and the organization and some risks have to be mitigated. That’s the first fundamental contribution of the book : for once, marketing is not considered as an isolated bubble but as a part of a global chain that involves the whole company and has to be perfectly aligned. The book is full of wise advices, best practices, examples and means to self-evaluate and compare with one’s industry leaders.

Second contribution, that is the logical consequence of the first : the concept of service. Marketing becomes service. Understand : instead of saying “look at how great my product is”, say “How can I help ?”. Of course it applies to people who are already customers to make them stay and spread the word, but it’s also an exemplary attitude towards those who may become customers in the future. In fact some companies already got it. And if I come back to my last dummy case, AirSocial would be a company that empowers its employees, not AirShy. That said, the question of knowing if service is replacing marketing or marketing has to learn service is still open.

Enough reasons to buy a book that, for onces, tackle the customer relationship issue from another standpoint than futile and lovely conversations in isolation.

That said, it makes us wonder about many things. The assumption is that there are HEROs (Highly Empowered and Ressourceful Operatives), or people who want to become HEROs, in organizations, and that they need to be supported by the management, by IT ect.. But it’s obisous than any HERO may need some help from his no-HERO colleagues, those who only want to do their job as they were told to do it, without taking initatives and risk. What to doin this case ? The non written conclusion of “Empower” is that service is not only about customers but that anyone in the company is an internal customer that needs empowered colleagues, and that, in the end, the very notion of collaboration in the workplace may be replaced by service too.

Months ago, John Chambers was talking (among other) about “Everything as a service”. Here we are, and “Empowered” indirectly lays the first brick of the concept of Service Economy. Not the way it’s been thought for decades, but the way it should be.

Get it on the “empowered” micro-site : http://www.forrester.com/empowered

Filed Under: Books I read, Customer Relationship & Marketing, Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: collaboration, customer care, customer relationship, Customer Relationship & Marketing, customer service, Empowered, forrester, governance, HERO, legal, maketing, management, risk, security, service, service economy, service marketing, social media, Software & Tools

Engage with customers. And then ?

August 23, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : It’s obvious that the use of social media within companies and between companies and customers are not compartmentalized but complementary disciplines. If the “internal” company is more and more trying to get in touch with customers, the world of marketing struggles to make his way toward internal departments. As communication is becoming service, initiatives that target customers can’t be separated from those that aim at reversing communication flows inside the organization, redefining roles and realigning the whole organization with the needs of employees who are directrly in touch with customers. To demonstrate its value, social and community makerting will have to replace “push” with “pull” not only in its interactions withn customoers but also in the way the whole organization works.

Even if the external/marketing/communication part has never been my prefered one, it has become obvious that it’s impossible to dissociate the evolution of work from what’s happening outside the corporate walls. First, because no company creates value on its own et a high level of internal performance is useless when a business is not as efficient with its external partners and clients that it is internally (theory of the limiting factor or bottlneck…as you prefer), second because the internal shift from push to pull logically leads to consider customers.

The time when 2.0 was either about marketing or collaboration but not both at the same time is over. Yet, the concept of enterprise 2.0 evolved overtime and everybdoy finds logical to include all external stakeholders into it, what is confirmed by the rise of social crm. But even if enterprise 2.0 is heading down toward customers, marketing struggles to head up toward internal activities.

I recently found this interesting deck about the failure of social media initiatives. It tells us that

- there’s a lack of strategy (81%) and most marketers don’t undestand the value of interactions…and how all these things work.

- consequently, businesses invest more on technology than on people and relationships.

Why Social Media Project<s Fail?! – A European Perspective

View more presentations from BSI.

I’d like to go a little bit further and sum it up in one sentence : when marketing and communication people use social media to communicate better and differently, there are two possibilities:

- either they (or their company) don’t get it and that doesn’t work.

- Or they understand how to make a good use of social media and…they deceive their customers.

Fun at work or fun in work ?

August 19, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Résumé : albeit the funny side of social media is often used as an argument for adoption, we have to admit that even if organization prefer to have happy employees they ae not ready to pay to make them have fun at work. Either we consider that’s regrettable form of schizophrenia or the consequence of a culture that dates from another century, facts are facts. So fun should only be the happy side effect of something else above all…be free. Used in the workplace, social media offer possibilities like nothing beforme : more than creating funny spaces and times in the workplace, they allow to make fun a part of people’s work, making it at the same time a consequence, a lever,and a part of a continuous improvement logic that interest and reassure organizations.

Amongst the issues that inspire me contradictory feelings about enterprise 2.0, fun at work is not the least.

There’s a belief shared by everybody in the workplace : employees who enjoy what they do are more efficient and it has a positive impact on work atmosphre. One of the best way to make it happen is, to some extent, to make work more fun. In the same way, everybody knows the value of a good atmosphere in the workplace. Note the difference between both : in one case we talk about the nature of work, in the other the context where it takes place : some people may hate they job but love their company, colleagues and the overall context (despite it never lasts for a long time).

A part of enterprise 2.0 value proposal is to bring fun, some even saying that in such a context the intranet looks like a big party were all employees gather. I fully suscribe to this point of view but, at the same time, I’m very uncomfortable with it

- because I experienced it (and still doing), I can tell it changes the way you interact with others, it improves relationships and, even if I consider my internal social network as a business too, I prefer to connect to it when I open my computing rather than openning my mailbox (in addition to the fact it’s a more efficient tool too…).

- no organization would refuse to make their employees happier.

- there’s a lot of organizations (even a majority ?) where the concept of fun at work is not seen as being compatible with work. It means that employees are wasting their time and would be more productive if they didn’t have fun or that they are not busy enough. Anyway, in such organizations, most of employees don’t want managers to think they’re having fun (and managers don’t want their superiors to think they’re having fun too even if they’d like…all are human being and share the same DNA). Maybe it’s a pity but the fact is things are more complicated that we would like them to be.

- most companies would be ready to invest to make their employees happy. None to make them have fun at work. I’m not saying that no one understands how it matters, but it’s impossible to come with this argument alone in front of any executive to get fundings for such a project.

- to some extent, even if the “productivity” side of enterprise 2.0 is seducing, many organizations may fear its “funny side”, only for self-esteem and image reasons. So that’s an argument that has to be used very cautiously.

So…how to do ? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: adoption, change, change-management, culture, fun, games, Human resources, intranet, serious games, social media

Software is business by nature, information social by purpose

August 6, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

At the first times of the coming of 2.0 tools in the workplace, they used to be conscientiously locked into secured experimental bubbles in order to tame them in a safe context. This kind of approach showed its limits and its counter-productive nature.

- the tools in questions were isolated from traditional applications (directories, workflows, business tools) they didn’t communicate and exchange with. Yet the proper of these tools was to improve discussions and information sharing. None of these are spontaneous and most of times they are caused by a situation, a context, a stimulation. What makes a situation, a context “happen” in the workplace ? Elements coming from business tools. Consequence : discussion was kept away from what caused it, problem solving from what constitutes the problem. Result : no participation.

- consequence of the previous point : the utilization of these tools was not integrated in user’s work flow. Since a tool is not linked to business systems, the usages and interactions it supports is not linked to business either. Moreover, it was a key lessons from many experimentations : the tool didn’t have to impact people’s day to day job, bring any change or confusion.What a paradoxical situation for many users : since discussions, sharing, exchange are parts of knowledge workers work flow, everything was done to make social software be used for anything but that.

So, integration and unification of both work and information flows are indissociable.

Slowly, reasion is taking the upper hand and the importance of integrating social software in the existing application landscape and in employee’s work flow is now understood by most people. A better integration of social applications with business applications is needed and that’s good.

But isn’t there something that sounds strange ? That means that, first, the value proposal and the positionning of these tools was not clear for all players and, second, that no lesson was learnt of many years of trial and errors : building bridges means than there is no understanding that we’re talking about one sole things.

Saying that social and business have to be more integrated shows that the first is not seen as being a part of the second yet. It means that they are still thought separately.

So it seems surprising :

- that many players in these field consider they are social before being business and are too focused on their own beliefs to understand business needs and constraints. Social is a means that is there to serve the business and not an end business has to give a reason to exist.

- that many companies still think that “social” is complementary since it’s a part of the very nature of business, most of all at times when communication, in all its forms, is key to execute many process. But, to some extent, it’s less serious than the previous point that, once fixed, will stop confusing the way businesses understand these things.

A product is “business” or is not. There’s no room for “almots” or “yes but”. Any information is not social or business. It’s business or not and has to be able to be the subject of “social” actions. Moreover we can wonder if the strongest barrier to social software adoption is the fact we tried to socialize people inside new tools instead of making it possible for them to “socialize” information wherever it is without having to launch any new tool that adds the impressive list of already existing one and forces them to split their attention to take one more information source into account while what stimulates information production inside the tool is always outside the tool and can be found anywhere, in any other business application.

sParadoxically, Social software will be a major and adopted trend the day when there will always be business applications in the workplace and social will be a transparent layer nobody will even notice. Articulting social with business, building bridges may be a a good first step but in order to create value for and with users one more step will be needed : fusion.

PS : I purposely use quotes when I say “social” or “socialization”, admitting that I’m using comfortable buzzwords that gives senses without having to say what it exactly means. Maybe explaining, and even debunking, the S word is necesary. Let’s say that, applied to information, it means the ability to share it, push it out of its original container and interact on / around it out of any organized and planned approach. Applied to people it would mean enabling them to identify, connect to and interact with / on people out of any beforehand defined system.

enterprise-social-software, intégration, logiciel d’entreprise, social software, social media

Filed Under: Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: enterprise software, enterprise-social-software, integration, social media, social-software

Are employees content producers ? No !

June 29, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

How many times did we hear the famous “content is king”, pushed as the pillar of a new world where social media is predominant. Consequence : the future belongs to those (people and businesses) who’ll produce the more content. A contrario, who won’t produce content won’t exist in this world. After all, why not…

By definition, a contents is defined regarding to a container so it’s logical to assume that the container is the raison d’etre of the whole what, in fact, makes no sense once you understand that content should be interoperable and volatile to be reused, shared, far beyond the orignal container.

But content is not self-generating so it’s important to have it generated by people. What sometimes troubles me is that this looks very much like “there are new containers, so let’s fill them”. In this approach, the value, the interest of any content is that it fills one or many containers and has few to do with its intrinsic value. I’m not even saying that it may favor noise and quantity agains quality.

Things become more complicated when it comes to the workplace. I have to admit that I nearly fall off my chair whenever I hear recommandations like “you must encourage your employees to produce contents”, “to stimulate your social network’s activity, don’t forget to generate contents”. This is often understood like “there are new spaces…now your job is to fill them” or “on top of the amount of work and responsability you already have as a manager, don’t forget to find things to say every day”. Hearing such words makes manager run away to avoid what they understand as a nonsense, a new improductive and useless burden they have to deal with.

Communication is a part of any management word. Besides that, we should be cautious when the world of communication invites itself (or is imported) in the workplace without paying any attention to the goals of the people it should apply to : produce and deliver results.

Employees are not paid to publish things on online media (social or not) unless they have a marketing or communication position. They are paid to produce and, to achieve this, have to exchange and share information. To be successful, they may need more relevant practices and the right tool to support it. Saying that, the approach to “content” dramatically changes.

People emit and share information out of necessity, not because they have a container to fill (what also makes them fear the “blank page”). They must say to themselves “I have such need so I need to communicate in such way” and not “what will I find to publish to please them today, get rid of this burden, and go back to my real work”.

Be caution of not applying to employees the same punishment as Sisyphus and turn the intranet into a Danaide’s barrel.

Employees are not and should not be content producers. They are people with a job to do and, even if communication is a part of everybody’s job, it should happen because of a given context and the added value of communicating, not because there are spaces to fill.

PS : to explain the business process approach to enterprise 2.0 during the last enterprise 2.0 conference, many people relied on the content/context articulation. A sign ?