The Biggest Problem in Social Media is Content

Producing it, that is.

Without content, Facebook fan pages are as empty and hapless as a shuttered shopping mall.

Without content to link to, tweets are endlessly chatty and will likely fail to produce measurable returns.

Without a steady stream of content, blogs are updated irregularly, or with the turning of the seasons. Or perhaps those intermittent posts uncannily coincide with a product marketing manager's dental appointments, when he or she finally has some down time with a laptop and a mouth too numb to return calls.

We've all seen the pattern: Company X is won over to the importance of social media. They figure out what their blog will be about, who will write the drafts, what the approval process will be, and so on.

With much fanfare, the blog is launched. And the initial post sits there. And sits there. And who has time to write a second post? Or update the Facebook page? Or tweet?

To help company X (and companies Y and Z, as well, because this problem seems common), here are some suggestions for getting content on line.

Leverage What You Have

Has your company just launched a product, published a white paper, or hosted an event? Write a short description and link to the relevant Web page, PDF, or Flickr photo set.

(Speaking of Flickr photo sets, make sure someone on your team has a digital camera. Then set up a Flickr account and link to it from your blog, your tweets, and so on.)

Put Blogging on the Agenda

Track the production of blog posts, Facebook updates, and other social media content just like you track the production of anything else. Like any accountable activity, each content production task should be assigned a name and a date.

While your team is discussing projects, events, and announcements, ask what can or should be shared through social media. What could be published on a blog or Facebook page? What news or links could be tweeted?

Get in the habit of asking what social media content can be wrung from any major activity or milestone.

Let Us Join Your Great Conversations

Over lunch, you and a colleague had a great discussion about something relevant to your industry.

Share it with us. Ask for our comments. When we post comments, respond.

Make Jotting Ideas Down a Habit

Create a folder on your desktop for blog ideas. Or if you use a note-taking application like Evernote, set up a Notebook for blog ideas. Or simply carry a notebook or a stack of index cards.

When an idea pops into your head, jot it down. Then spend 15 minutes a day, sorting through your ideas and filling them out, converting your hasty note or outline into a short post of 250-500 words. It's best if you make that 15 minutes early in the day, before you're interrupted or trapped in meetings.

The nice thing about this approach is that you're suddenly able to accomplish big things (writing that content you haven't found time to write) by taking a bunch of little steps. You never have to face the daunting prospect of a Blank Page Expecting a Complete, Well-formed Piece of Writing (cue organ music and the Wilhelm scream). You're simply jotting down idea you've already thought of and that's practically begging you to record it, or you're developing an idea you've already written down and simply producing a short, pithy elaboration. And you're writing regularly. And your blog and your Facebook page are living up to your expectations. Wow.

What Have You Read or Seen that Inspired You?

Tell us. Ask questions about it.

Make Lists

Like this one. You can't only make lists. But a list now and then is a fine idea.

And The Most Important Thing Is . . .

Get going. Now.


Shopping mall photo credits:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/akasped/ / CC BY 2.0

Gandhi's Convertible Terms

A well known saying of Gandhi's is, "We must be the change we wish to see in the world." Often this is shortened to, "Be the change you wish to see in the world."

The shorter version makes the relationship between you and your effect on the world sound provisional. You have a choice. You can be the change (that is, you can be the way you would like the world to become), or you can not be. Perhaps you lack the motivation or rigor be that change right now. The world, in that case, will drift on its way . . .

Elsewhere in his writings, Gandhi links actions and ends more explicitly—and he doesn't let us off the hook. Gandhi says that means and ends are convertible terms. (In logic, convertible terms are terms that can be swapped.)

Your means are your ends; your ends are your means. Since you are always engaged in some kind of means (since you are always taking action, even if that action appears to be inaction), you are always shaping ends, and the nature of the former directly determines the nature of the latter, regardless of excuses, manifestos, talking points, or tweets.

In other words: Be the change you wish to see in the world? You are the change, right here, right now, whether you like it or not.

So how are you being right now? Because that's the way you are shaping the world.

Application for Business

No moment is a wasted moment. No interaction with a prospect or customer is unimportant. You are always shaping the company you hope to create some day.

Most people realize now that a company's brand isn't its logo or its Web site copy; it's the sum of its customer experiences. That recognition applies here, as well.


Photo of Gandhi statue at the S.F. Ferry Building by Yves Remedios. Creative Commons License, some rights reserved.

Using Social Media to Manage by Objectives

The New York Times recently ran an interview with Mark Pincus, the C.E.O of Zynga. It's an interesting interview. Pincus talks about the importance of employees feeling like they're in charge of something: everyone should be C.E.O. of something. He also talks about hiring people who are still hungry for success and managing people by asking them to articulate a few key objectives for the week.

Regarding his method of managing, Pincus says:

John Doerr [the venture capitalist] sold me on this idea of O.K.R.'s, which stands for objectives and key results. It was developed at Intel and used at Google, and the idea is that the whole company and every group has one objective and three measurable key results, and if you achieve two of the three, you achieve your overall objective, and if you achieve all three, you’ve really killed it.


We put the whole company on that, so everyone knows their O.K.R.'s. And that is a good, simple organizing principle that keeps people focused on the three things that matter — not the 10.


Then I ask everybody to write down on Sunday night or Monday morning what are your three priorities for the week, and then on Friday see how you did against them. It’s the only way people can stay focused and not burn out. And if I look at your road map and you have 10 priorities for you and your team, you probably don't know which of the three matter, and probably none of the 10 are right.


I can look at everyone's piece of paper, and their road map shows every item you were going to do and your predicted results and actual results, and then the results are in red if you missed them, yellow if they're close and green if you passed them. I think road maps are a great principle just for managing your life. It keeps everybody focused, and it lets me know what trains are on or off the tracks.

For me, the phrase that leapt off the page here was "piece of paper." Sure, one could track all these objectives on paper, but I think it makes more sense to post this information on blogs or wikis, where the objectives would be visible to all and where tagging could be used to tie individual objectives to larger departmental or organizational objectives. In other words, instead of using paper, use Jive or MindTouch or Thought Farmer. That makes the objectives amenable, too, to importing into BI tools or simple graphing tools sometimes included in these platforms. And if some objectives are sensitive or confidential, role-based access controls could be used to make them visible only to authorized managers.

There's been lots of talk about how social media platforms help workers share information and expertise. The oft-cited example is a worker discovering which colleagues in other departments have relevant expertise. Social media platforms help people discover and nurture such connections.

I hope that in the coming years, more organizations realize what powerful tools these platforms can be for strategic planning: for collecting information for use in strategic plans and for disseminating and tracking strategic objectives. Let's use these platforms for sharing information up and down the organization, as well as across, and for making strategic objectives visible and understandable to all.

Software Development by the Numbers

A couple of years ago, I was working with a software start-up that had designed an integration framework that could be used for transporting and transforming data for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). As we prepared for our product launch, we talked to analysts about RIAs, and we evaluated partnerships with software vendors who were building toolkits for RIAs. We listened to podcasts about RIAs. We watched developer presentations. We had RIAs on the brain.

Around this same time, I attended an event hosted by the American Marketing Association in Boston. During the festivities, I struck up a conversation with someone who turned out to be a principal at a local Web application design firm. They had been in business for nearly a decade and had some big name clients.

"Getting much interest in RIAs?" I asked.

"What's an RIA?" he answered.

Wow, I thought. Is my client way too much out in front, or is this nice gentleman's Web firm a tad bit behind? Was I paying too much attention to analyst blogs and Adobe's development plans? Had I entered the "reality-distortion field" of analyst pronouncements and vendor slide shows? These new Web technologies were undoubtedly cool, but how many people were really using them?

Who's Building What

A new survey conducted by Forrester Research for Dr. Dobb's answers these questions, and more. The survey of over 1,000 Dr. Dobb's readers reveals:

• Over a quarter of the programmers surveyed said they were developing RIAs. The survey authors note that "RIAs are slowly replacing HTML when it comes to Web site development."

The survey also found that:

• Nearly 80% of programmers are using open source software for development or application deployment.
• Over 33% of developers use Subversion for source code control. The next most popular source code control tool, Microsoft SourceSafe, has a market share about one third that size.
  
• The most popular databases for application deployment are (in order) SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and PostgresSQL.
• Most developers still write code on Windows PCs (only 5% use Apple), and Linux and Windows are the primary operating environments for deploying applications.
• Only about 4% of developers are deploying applications in the cloud (a surprisingly low number, I think, given all the talk about cloud computing).
  
• Less than 15% of programmers spend all their time writing in a single programming language.
• Agile processes are increasingly popular: 45% of developers are using Agile processes, and of those, 20% say agile is a key part of their project's success. How about project overhead? Dr. Dobb's found that "only 2% of Agile developers feel that their methodology creates significant busywork, compared with 27% of developers doing waterfall development."
• An impressive 60% of developers don't consider their work just a 9-to-5 job. They apply their skills in side projects and for other organizations.

Forrester sees the world of software development as being in transition. (In a sense, it's always been in transition.) Their advice?

Spend more time understanding what your developers are doing both and work and outside of it, and solicit their ideas about how these technology could speed up development and cut costs for the organization.

Good advice.

If you're a developer or working on a project that involves software development, I strongly recommend that you read the full article, which was written by Jeffrey Hammond of Forrester Research, and which you can find online here.

Photo of numbers Creative Commons License, some rights reserved, by hegemonx.

Making Email a Better File Cabinet

Yes, Facebook and Twitter are popular, but a recent study by Osterman Research found that email remains the most important channel for business communications. The same study found that 55% of business users say that over a quarter of the information they need for work is tucked away in email folders.

Clearly, we're all still using email, and we all still need ready access to the information that's buried somewhere in email. Search tools built into applications like Gmail, Thunderbird, and Outlook are a big help for tracking down messages that contain a specific search phrase or keyword. Nonetheless, there are a few guidelines that email senders can follow to make it easier for recipients to find the data they're looking for, even if the message arrived months or even years ago, whether or not recipients are using email application search engines.

1. Make the subject line factual and descriptive.
   For example, instead of "Chaa-ching!", write something more prosaic like "Sales Order from Liberty Capital." You can add "Chaa-ching" at the end of the line or in the body of the message, if you like, but keep the first part of the subject line—the part someone notices first when skimming down a long list of titles—purely descriptive.
2. Label like messages in like ways.
   If you're sending sales orders and you title every message containing a sales order with the formula, "Sales Order from . . . ", you'll make it easier for your recipients to lay their hands on the order they're looking for, no matter how cluttered their email inbox is. When I send clients review drafts of business plans, white papers, or other business documents, I always write, "PLEASE REVIEW:" followed by the draft number and the document title. My clients are busy people, and I hope this formulaic titling makes it a little easier for them to notice that a new document has arrived that needs their attention.
   
3. When the subject matter of an email thread has changed substantially, begin a new thread or change the title accordingly.
   At the time, it might have seemed natural for the discussion on the new office printer to somehow become a discussion of the a new network monitoring feature that product management is trying to cram into the next software release, but two months from now, when you're looking for the market data to back up product management, you might not think to look at messages whose title refers to the new HP printer on the second floor.
4. Tag a message high priority only if it really is high priority.If you label everything as high priority, then 1) after a week or two your recipients will roll their eyes and ignore your sense of urgency, and 2) when they need to find that truly urgent message you sent, they'll have a harder time.
   

Paying any attention at all to email subject lines might seem pedantic, but I think it behooves all of us to recognize that we're swamped with information that's chaotically organized, and that's little things can make a difference.

Microsoft did a study a year or two ago and found that business users spend roughly one day per week just looking for the information they in order to do their jobs. That's a colossal waste of time, isn't it? One day of your week, every week, just hunting for data? That's the equivalent of showing up for work every day between January 1 and mid-March simply to tidy your office. Wouldn't you rather be able to use that time getting things done?

Enterprise search tools and improved email applications obviously help with this problem. But a little discipline in email authoring can make a difference, as well.

File cabinet photo by mrmanc, licensed by Creative Commons, some rights reserved.

Can Joyent Create a PaaS Platform More Cost-effective than Amazon EC2?

At last week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, I had the opportunity to talk to James Duncan, Director of Platform Strategies at Joyent. Joyent is a cloud computing vendor in the IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) market. They sell virtualized servers called Joyent Acclerators, which customers use for running Web applications.

The idea behind IaaS is that customers can grow or shrink their infrastructure dynamically. Expecting a surge of business, or need to crunch vast amounts of data for a rush project? No problem. IaaS lets you instantly access as many servers as you need: 50, 500, even 5000 or more. Project over? Again, no problem. Shut down the servers at once. You've managed to meet your computing needs without buying, configuring, and managing racks of servers yourself.

In January, Joyent bought Reasonably Smart, a cloud computing start-up that James and his business partner Bryan Bogensberger had founded the previous summer. First on their own and now at Joyent, James and Bryan have been developing the Smart Platform, a PaaS solution that lets programmers develop server applications in JavaScript and then deploy these applications to the cloud using Git, an open source version-control system. Now branded as a Joyent solution, the Smart Platform is ready to go into a private Beta test.

I asked James why he chose JavaScript as the programming language for the new platform. Why choose a language famous for improving interactivity in a browser, instead of a language more commonly associated with server-side applications, such as Python or Perl or Java?

He pointed out that JavaScript was designed from the outset to deliver a lot of functionality in a secure, self-contained environment (known in programming as a "sandbox"). Secure autonomy is a great feature for applications and services running in a shared environment such as a data center, where virtual servers from several customers might be running on the same machine. He also pointed out that more money is going into training and documentation work on JavaScript than into other popular languages, such as Ruby, PHP, and Python. And, of course, JavaScript is a proven language, already popular with lots of programmers, who have been using it for years to develop sophisticated client-side Web applications. Now these programmers can apply their knowledge of JavaScript to the development of fast, efficient server applications that run in the cloud.

The Smart Platform offers a couple of other advantages that cloud computing users may find attractive.

First, the platform is open source. Joyent hopes that customers will like Joyent's PaaS services so much, they'll subscribe to Joyent and pay them to run the platform. But customers and even non-customers are free to move the entire stack in-house. Running the platform in house could be helpful for developing prototypes, running private clouds (shared, elastic services run entirely behind the firewall), or combining private and public clouds, as needed. Also, by making the platform open source, Joyent expects to ease customers' concerns about being locked in to a particular PaaS vendor. (Vendor lock-in has been much discussed lately in cloud computing circles.)

Another important advantage of the Smart Platform is that it's truly priced like a utility: customers pay only when an application is servicing requests. They pay nothing when is present on a virtual server, but inactive (that is, not processing data or interacting with other applications). This utility pricing model has the potential to make Joyent far more cost-effective than even Amazon's highly affordable Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) service.

James offered this example. Let's say you're hosting your Web site in the cloud for a month. On Amazon, you would pay for the Amazon Machine Image (the Amazon virtual server) for the entire month, even if the Web site gets only a few hits and actually active for a few seconds or minutes.

On the Joyent Smart Platform, in contrast, you would pay only for those few seconds or minutes of activity; you would pay nothing for all the time the server is hosted on the Smart Platform inactive. As a result, your bill should be a small fraction of what it would be from Amazon.

Pricing based on activity rather than deployment could make a big difference for customers whose hosted applications are active only sporadically. It could also be attractive for customers who have forgotten to decommission servers once a project is over and have then been surprised to receive a big bill from a cloud service provider.

If you're interested in participating Beta of the Joyent Smart Platform, visit www.reasonablysmart.com.

The Wit and Wisdom of Scott Cook

Intuit's mini-conference on "Startups and the Cloud," which I wrote about here, featured a lively Q&A session with Scott Cook, Intuit's founder and chairman of the executive committee. Scott—who impressed me as knowledgeable, personable, and down-to-earth—offered a couple of sage remarks I particularly liked.

"Familiarity is 90% of ease of use."

Scott talked about the pains Intuit went through, especially in the early days, to eliminate complexity from their products' user interfaces. Convincing novice computer users to adopt Quicken as their tool for managing household finances was quite a challenge, particularly back in the days when an unformatted floppy drive could flummox a new user. (Intuit's solution: never tell the user the floppy drive is unformatted. Format the drive automatically, and let the user get on with his or her work.)

On a quest for usability, Intuit bought the rights to the interface of another product that was already popular and easy to use. Intuit engineers copied that other product's interface, pixel-by-pixel, and built it into a new version of Quicken.

"Familiarity is 90% of ease-of-use." If an interface design is already familiar, users don't have to think about using it. They simply use it and get on with their work.

I think Scott's advice about familiarity is spot on. Don't try to be overly creative or clever with your UI. When it comes to UI design, simplicity and familiarity are the cardinal virtues.

Later in the Q&A session, Scott Cook said this:

"Behind every successful entrepreneur, you'll find a supportive spouse and a couple of very surprised in-laws."

That remark rang true, too, and made me chuckle.