Before you can pull insights from your data, you need data, but I'm hearing more concerns about data quality in social media analysis lately. Before, people asked about the traditional tradeoff in text queries: finding relevant content while excluding off-topic content. Lately, I'm hearing more about social data that's intentionally tainted. If you're looking for meaning in social media data, you may have to deal with adversaries.

Yes, and you've been playing without an opponent, which is, as you may have guessed, against the rules.
— "Anton Ego," Ratatouille

Ask a company with three initials as a name how many three-letter... Read the article

(Picture by Peter Farago & Inkela Klemetz-Farago)

This is something I’ve been thinking of for quite a while now.

Actually, since 2011 edition of the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. And this telling quote by Jamie Pappas : Social Business is more about soft skills than about tech skills. I’ve ben having this impression that ...  Read the article

I managed a few minutes out of my schedule last week to stop by the Yammer Tour event in San Francisco. I was in San Francisco doing a keynote for sugarCRM's user event and luckily the events overlapped. As I was listening to Yammer CEO David Sacks talk about some of the new Yammer features and interview some customers, I was struck by how much social tools like Yammer are changing businesses. Yes, I know that's almost all I've talked about for the last 4-5 years, changing businesses with social technologies and driving real cultural changes, but seeing that transformation really makes an impression. It's easy to get lost in all of the forward looking research and discussion on technology when in fact, what really matters is what businesses are actually doing with the tools to get some real business benefits. Does using social tools for business really make any difference? There are all sorts of ways to measure value when it comes to technology, we wrote a whitepaper on the ROI of social that has some ideas. Social business impacts business processes across the company and is having some interesting and very positive returns. Not all are as obvious as others though, and some of the less obvious are perhaps the most transformative.

First I should say that for me, social initiatives need to be clearly tied to increasing revenue, increasing margin, fostering innovation and/or increasing ... Read the article

This post is the first in a two-part reflection on two enduring management obsessions: control and employee engagement.

Shifting to the right

Following my post describing the Smart Work Framework, Harold Jarche (@hjarche) correctly commented that letting go of control would be an issue for businesses shifting to the right of the framework, from traditional structures characterised by place-dependent hierarchical structures to physically-distributed, networked structures.

Legacy of insight

As I have said repeatedly, in blog posts too numerous to identify, we have been here before. My contention is that social business developments are only the next phase in a trajectory of reform of ways of working, which began ...

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I am sure that this may have just happened to everyone out there and on a rather regular basis, too! Specially, if you are a blogger! Just as I was putting together a blog post on the topic of the 40-Hour Work Week (- “The Magic of Sustainable Growth”), which I published a couple of days ago I happened to bump into another really interesting and worth while watching video clip that touched quite a bit on the very same topic that I covered on that article: work life balance, although, like I said in the past, I have grown to be more fond of the concept of Work Life Integration, instead. The video itself comes from the Ignite series (Ignite Philly, this time around) and it’s a rather thought-provoking 5 minute-long inspiring speech by Pam Selle that tries to share with each and everyone of us how whenever we reach the tipping point of stating “Get a life!” we may as well ... Read the article

When we talk about the impact of the social web, social business, social CRM, consumerization of IT...almost anything that has to do with the changing business environment, the topic that universally comes up is the change in people's expectations. This applies to employees, who want a user experience for the enterprise that is as "good" as their personal web experience and who want devices that provide the best and most modern functionality. For collaboration they are either provided modern people-centric tools by their company or they work around IT and use consumer tools that more completely meet their needs (although arguably not always the needs of the company when it comes to security and IP protection). The list goes on, and on and is both a great opportunity for business and a challenge for IT and older paradigms of "control" ... Read the article

It is becoming clear that more and more people are using a variety of ways – not just training – to help them (a) acquire new skills and knowledge as well as (b) learn continuously in their jobs. (You can read more about this in my Learning in the Social Workplace article.)

Here are just ten key ways that people find of value to help them (learn to) do their jobs: …

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What level of change do you really want from social business?

Do you want a little bit, or a whole lot?

Do you want process improvement? Or,

Do you want organizational transformation?

Social technology means organizational change.

Social Business and social technologies are indeed bringing changes into your organization. That we know.

But what we don’t know is–what kind of change will ‘social’ bring? ...  Read the article

Here is an updated version (V3) of the WSD Framework with more charts and descriptions, and now available as a PDF  to download under a Creative Commons Licence.

Social tools are changing not only the way that professionals are working and learning but also the way that organisations are transforming into social businesses. In the new connected workplace, current training, e-learning or blended learning services, which take a top-down, ”command and control” approach to organising and managing “learning” will not be appropriate to support these new ways of working and learning. What will be required is a completely new range of services – which we might call non-training services – that are focused on supporting continuous performance improvement and learning in the workflow as people do their jobs...

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After some soul searching I've just started updating my various personal profiles around the web to say I'm a social business evangelist rather than saying enterprise 2.0.  I've got close to this before.  I wanted to explain why now.  For me that terminology change is a big deal because I'm not 100% comfortable with "social business", but it's not me rather the market that decides.  If we move the clock forwards 5 years I'm sure we'll be using different language again, and I believe the way the smart companies use social media and social tools in their businesses today will be as natural and essential to any organisation as a website, email, phones or  ... Read the article