Category: Work & Org Culture

  • Twitter – the official version

    There were some pretty interesting new things that came out at TechCrunch50 last week. TC50 was a conference that took place from September 8-10, 2008 where 52 of the ‘best’ startups were launched in front of an audience that consisted of the industry’s most influential venture capitalists, corporations, fellow entrepreneurs, and press. I guess that would be bleeding edge. I followed it, thanks to some excellent coverage by StartupMeme. And that’s where I read about Yammer.

    Yammer intrigued me because of its utterly simple premise of ‘Twitter for business’. Where Twitter asks ‘What are you doing’, Yammer asks ‘what are you working on?’ I was even more intrigued because that’s a question LinkedIn has been asking for sometime now.  While the premise is simple, it does create some interesting new propositions – it only allows logins through official mail ids, making it quite secure, it lets users start their company network, invite people, and then serves as a database with individual profiles and conversations. For any user, it would be like a Twitter limited to his colleagues. All this is free, and if the organisation wants to play admin, it has to pay. Yammer already has Blackberry and iPhone apps. Apparently its demand was such that about 10,000 people and 2,000 organizations signed up for the service the day it launched.

    And then Yammer just went ahead and won TC50. Chris Brogan smartly notes that the Twhirl client + a laconi.ca backend would amount to the same thing, with the added advantage that Twhirl also allows tabs of Twitter and Friendfeed. RWW just ripped the Yammer model threadbare.

    Now, I see some contradiction in all this. Twitter’s popularity lies in its simplicity, and a quite transparent way of communicating, and sharing. There is no officiating, there is nobody looking over your shoulder. To me, Yammer sounds a lot like Intranet 2.0, and assuming that organisations do allow it, later, if the organisation takes admin charge, I don’t know how many employees will still be comfortable using it. And why would organisations want control in the first place, if the idea is conversation? I’m wondering whether the existence of Yammer will make a Twitter enterprise solution irrelevant.

    There’s been some stuff happening over at Twitter too. The recent coverage of a funeral via Twitter led to questions about privacy issues. (via RWW) My take is that in a social environment, you avoid people whose conversations you don’t like, just like in the real world. In the long term, it will help people decide what they talk about and how. I’d mentioned two tools in my last Twitter post. A cool tool for marketeers – Twitterise, and Twiggit, a good mashup of Twitter and Digg. I came across two more tools – Tweetburner, a sort of feedburner for Twitter which could be a great tracking tool for brand and PR guys. Read more about it here, and Dwigger, another Twitter+Digg tool, but different from the earlier one i mentioned. In this you can paste a twitter message URL, or a new Dwigger only message, all in the by now familiar 140 characters, and submit it to Dwigger, to be voted and commented on. Hmm, more on that here. I also found a personally useful tool, which gives an analysis of your Twitter usage. They have done it using Yahoo Pipes, and rendered it using the Google Chart API. Very interesting. Check it out here. Meanwhile, Mashable has just posted their review on Fidj.it, ‘a micro-blogging service that’s like a Twitter and Pownce mashup.’ Shall check it out soon.

    To conclude, there are more and more twitter tools being developed for different user needs. If Yammer actually becomes a huge success, through some radically fresh employer attitude, I’d like to see a bridge between Yammer and Twitter. One service that allows absolute transparent conversations within the organisations, and another that allows brands and organisations to be transparent with its end users. It could be quite an awesome combination.

    until next time, feeling fidgety already?

  • Organisational Chats

    There was a very interesting post over at WATBlog, on whether Indian companies should provide employees the freedom to engage online. The advice to organisations is to at least listen to the conversations happening about them, since these conversations will happen anyway. The solution the post offers is to use prolific users of social media as brand evangelists. It reminded me of an earlier post on the evolution of the brand manager. And I agree almost completely to the WAT post.

    Almost, because, I lean quite a bit towards extreme transparency, and am of the opinion that it’s not just the evangelists who should be online and doing their bit, it should be the whole damn system.  Why not only the evangelists? Evangelists, to me are slightly utopian styled creatures, who love transparency, and organisations, which are just giving this whole conversation idea a customary spin, might have a problem dealing with it. There are two options then – the evangelist gets ‘corrupted’,  (I’d hate compromised use of social media) or he refuses to conform. In the second scenario, the organisation will strive for ‘control’, and the evangelist will be sacked, but what if the whole system is doing it? Which is one of the reasons why I think organisations will fight this thought. But there might be hope yet, check out Unilever’s efforts in this direction.

    There’s a great argument here on candour at the workplace, it also gives some interesting links. That last link looks at a ‘getting to know you’ level before complete transparency. The article calls this tact, and I have a problem with that too. It is precisely these kinds of convenient gray areas that led to white lies, which in turn spawned the complete opacity that we see around now.

    Meanwhile, there’s something else that might be forcing organisations- Users/Customers. Because once the conversation about the organisations, which will happen with or without their assistance, reaches a deafening pitch, it might force them to listen. To quote from this neat post on Enterprise 2.0, “when the irresistible force of social media hits the immovable force of a traditional enterprise, it makes a loud noise”. The last part of this post also throws light on this.

    And hey, its not any favor that the organisation is doing. In the long run, this will only help the organisation’s equity from an HR and Brand perspective. As talent sourcing becomes even more difficult, this might be the edge that an organisation can get.

    The earlier generation of organisations did not  ban the water cooler though it was reputed to be the source of a lot of conversations. Lets hope today’s organisations can look at the internet in a similar way, recognise that their employees are simultaneously part of not just their workplace, but a larger world outside, in which reside the organisation’s stakeholders and think carefully on how it makes sense to let their employees talk to the world at large.

    until next time, break the walls down

  • Stuck in a web

    I happened to read this a while back, and this recently, and finally, the presentation below
    While the last two are quite obviously connected, the first one is too, albeit in a round about way.
    Having worked now for over 4 years in a brand role, out of which at least 2 have involved quite some work in the online space, i tend to agree with what Mr.Desai says, especially this part, “The real problem is our mental model of the brand. We see it as a fortress which we must defend against all interlopers.”
    I have seen this in all the 3 brands i have worked on, and this is exactly why internet marketing is still in its infancy stage in India. In fact, even among the brands that do some stuff in the space, a majority are those who make internet strategy decisions on an excel sheet as part of the media plan – print – x lakhs, outdoor-y lakhs, internet- z lakhs. Nothing wrong with this, except that the strategy ends up as an adaptation of the print/outdoor creative, and the activity on the web is limited to that.
    And the next step, if it happens – in the typical knee-jerk reactions that are a regular sight everywhere, the CEO ‘discovers’ blogging, and wants someone to start a corporate blog, without even pausing to think what is going to be done there and whether it is sustainable. I know at least one example. 🙂
    The problem is in ‘letting go’. Brands and brand managers cannot come to terms with it, and are still stuck in a web that refuses to look outward except for the token market research, and we all know how that gets done. Ask the creative guys in agencies and they’ll tell you horror stories of subjective likes and dislikes being thrust upon them, not just those, but whims and desires, as well. And one of the mandatory things to go online is the understanding that you will get some brickbats and your brand will be tossed around. The key is in dealing with it, and converting that into a better consumer experience. Are you game for that challenge? The answer, in most corporates (from what i’ve seen, and maybe i haven’t seen enough) would be a resounding no!!
    Knowing the RGB configuration of the brand takes 2 minutes of mugging up, but understanding the dna of the brand and working on it is a different ballgame, and if there are consumers willing to help, i wonder why brand guys have difficulty in accepting it.
    and i bid adieu, brandishing my love for the internet 🙂

  • Tech Republic

    Upfront, let me admit that an intense subconscious jealousy might be the reason for the contents of this post, but thats a big ‘might’. and before i start off, let me assure you that i have nothing against the people i write about, only sympathy at the way they are being used.. and it may not be a situation which applies to everyone in the industry… disclaimer over, post start…
    A few days back, i read an article that a reputed software company is going to start a beauty salon, on its campus.. the reason being that since the employees start work early and end late,they may not have time to get a haircut or facial, and so the oh-so-concerned employer is taking care of it… sometime earlier, i had also read about how creches were the latest HR craze in the silicon towers..reason being that employees shouldnt be bothered about finding a safe parking place for their toddlers… i assume the forthcoming attractions would be a work station which will double up as a dorm at night, with facilities for brushing/shaving etc, entertainment facilities for the last generation of visiting parents, express mating services coz baby, who has the time for love and romance, mini sperm banks and artificial insemination procedures, so that the correct genetic ingredients can be used to make a perfect tech kid who might be able to start programming after uttering the cursory ‘papa’ and ‘mama’ utterances, and its formal introduction to them, and yes, before i really lose it, please, a toilet seat instead of the regular seat….
    Welcome to the tech republic, founded on the toil of a million professionals who bravely walk that thin line between their retina and their monitor, and their fingers and the keyboard… who are led to believe that their work is making a difference to millions of users whose life has been made easier because of the billion applications/programs that are being churned out… who are worth so much, thanks to their ESOPs, that it would make every other kind of professional hide his face in shame, but who wouldnt have the time to enjoy it.. whose life, for me, is still an enigmatic code… er, before we got diverted, wasnt the whole process about improving lives? i guess,like every republic has its own set of martyrs, so too does the tech republic…
    until next time < / post >