A webcare team monitors online conversations on Twitter, blogs and other social media and has a strategy on how to deal with various types of negative responses via social media. When necesary, they can join the conversation, offer support, provide facts or anything else to steer things in the right direction. But it is not just about customer care, the webcare team can also do PR (discovering and preventing issues) and marketing (educating customers or providing feedback to product development).

Why do companies actually care about what is being said in social media? More and more companies realize that, in line with the Cluetrain Manifesto, “markets are conversations”: customers trust opinions of friends a lot more than they trust company websites, and they use information about products and services found on social media to make informed choices.

Who should be in your webcare team?
From the type of work a webcare team has to do, it should be clear that this is not a job for the IT department. Instead, people from marketing and corporate communication should be involved, and maybe even experts on your products and services. Pick your team from people who understand the norms of social media and are able to respond from a personal perspective. As such, your manager PR and corporate communication is probably not a good candidate for the job.

The tools of the trade
Webcare teams get more and more tools to discover what is currently being said about their brand, products and services. Important tools of the trade are Google Alerts, Twitter search, Technorati and Google blog search. These tools are all aimed at discovering relevant online conversations, without having to spend the whole day looking.

What is a smart social media strategy?
Unfortunately, there is no universal recipe for a smart social media strategy yet. Nevertheless, an important starting point is to accept each opinion as such, and not call opinions into question. As with any employee that takes part in an online conversation, the norm is to identify yourself as an employee of the company and behave accordingly. Also it seems important not to be drawn into online discussions: seek direct communication with the person behind the complaint. For more inspiration on social media strategies, I suggest you take a look at the IBM Social Computing guidelines.

I would like to hear your experiences with webcare teams!

The slides of our talk (in Dutch) are available via slideshare:

1. Social Media Market – a workshop in which we take you and your team through the current Social Media landscape and explore which of these fit your needs and preferences.
2. Social Media Hands-on – a pilot in which you and your team experiment with a social tool of your choice. Apart from enabling and facilitating the use of the tool, we help you in gathering lessons learned and in assessing whether this tool actually provides added value for your team.
3. Social Media Strategic Advice – an independent, realistic advice on what social media could mean for your organization in relation to the business issues you are faced with. This series of activities help you to gain insight in whether or not to apply social media, how to introduce these tools in your organization and how to help your people use these tools in a smart and responsible way.

This line of activities is also a good way of getting to know us and our way of working: with a clear objective, timeline and budget we work together with you to achieve results and learn along the way. And hopefully raise your interest in broader research on future ways of working.

Security in the workplace - can pinguins be wrong?

Information security incidents have become part of our lives during the last couple of years. Popular media regularly report on incidents which range from lost pen drives filled with privacy sensitive data to financial fraud by employees costing financial organizations billions. The increase in reported incidents not only shows that security incidents are on the rise but it also indicates a change (yes we can!) in how organizations respond to incidents. Reputation and trust are increasingly important concepts in today’s business world, and organizations need to find ways to deal with security problems.

The openness that organizations are showing lately, both to customers, to employees, to other organizations, and to the general public is interesting. From a security perspective openness is a double edged sword: On the one hand, openness means granting access to parties which may not be trusted yet. This clearly complicates security administration. On the other hand, openness also stands for transparency and open standards which simplify matters. And simple things are easier to secure.

Security researchers who study organizational security associate the new found openness in organizations with de-perimeterization. De-perimeterization means that the perimeters of organizations are disappearing. This is problematic because most security strategies pay a lot of attention to perimeter defense: Concentrate your efforts on the perimeter and the rest of the organization is secure.

Is perimeter defense a bad strategy? Thousands of huddling Emperor penguins can’t be wrong, can they? And if you’ve ever played the board game Risk you know that the best strategy to defend a continent is to move all your armies to the border countries.

In part 2 we will have a closer look at de-perimeterization and see how it interacts with future workspaces.

A Living Lab experiment typically consists of 5 steps, as illustrated in the figure above:

1. We typically work demand-driven: a team or a team leader has signalled a need. As a first step, we perform our own observations and analysis of the current working practices of the team. This is done via interviews, working at the customer site and joining customer meetings. As a result, we gain insight in the real issues (which are sometimes different from the initialy indicated bottlenecks), we discover possibilities for improvement and understand the playing field for our interventions.
2. We continue by planning the intervention. Based on our observations and analysis we derive what (technology) intervention may be beneficial and a strategy for executing that intervention. Given that we use short cycles to experiment, we typically use a small group of team members to perform the experiment with. As part of this phase, we also identify candidates for the experiment.
3. We execute the intervention. Typically this means that we let a small group of team members work with an innovative technology as part of their normal work. For instance, in a process where they would normally create a document for themselves to gather information on a topic, we would set up a wiki where they would have to gather the information instead.
4. We collect and share experiences and good practice. We interview and observe team members to gather their experiences and good practices. Additionally, we organise a workshop with the team members involved in the experiment to share experiences and good practices. Typically, we also make sure the team members have some channel (forum, blog, wiki page) during the experiment where they can exchange tips and communicate with us for help.
5. We evaluate the intervention: What are the (perceived) benefits? What are the (perceived) costs (e.g., extra work people have to do)? How much was the technology used? For what purposes what it used? Does it fit their working practices? Does it fit their organizational culture? Based on the evaluation we advise the team about next steps.

In Future Workspaces, we use very short cycles of experimenting. Although we do extensive interviews and observations beforehand at the customer site, an actual cycle of an experiment takes 4 to 6 weeks. This requires serious commitment from the team, not just as passive test subjects, but as active participants in the experiment. Also, it means we have to be frequently at the customer site.

As Nathan argues, successful Enterprise 2.0 style collaboration requires both technical and cultural maturity. Also from my own experiences, I know that cultural maturity is usually the biggest hurdle: it takes bravery and trust to take a discussion to a shared space or even to an open space.

Therefore, we also perform personality tests during our pilots in Future Workspaces. We are testing a hypothesis that personality is an important factor that determines what workspace fits a person. (According to our hypotheses, other main factors are a person’s activities and personal working style.)

This would mean that for some people blogging or contributing to a wiki is a more natural way of working then for other people. However, even if personality is an important factor, this does not mean that you are “stuck” in a specific state, determined by your personality. I believe that in a culture of mutual trust and with appropriate support (starting small, sharing good practices, showing success stories, talking about things that are scary), people can learn to share more (intermediate) thoughts in an open space.

To lower the threshold for sharing in a shared space or in an open space, I combine two main approaches:

1. Help them find opportunities to embed this sharing as part of normal work processes: if they are used to creating a document with intermediate findings while searching for information on topic Y, why not put that information in a wiki page? Moreover, this may speed up the search process, as others may contribute as well.
2. Explain that sharing thoughts in a blog or in a wiki is not about sharing final results, it is about contributing to an ongoing conversation. That is one of the main reasons why I do not like to compare an Intranet wiki with Wikipedia, as it sets completely wrong standards for contributions.

• Being less dependent on your own memory to remember things
• Deciding more quickly about what you’re going to do when
• Getting a better grip on your time

The booklet can be downloaded here (English) or here (Dutch).

Purpose of the case

• Help Rabobank define a strategy for the introduction and use of a wiki for knowledge sharing across department boundaries.
• Train KIRA employees in working with a wiki and embedding in their working practices.
• Collect good practices for the introduction and use of a wiki for knowledge sharing

Key lessons learned

• Help people to embed the wiki in their normal working processes; avoid they see the wiki as an extra task.
• Employees have to perceive a personal need to use the wiki; just knowing what one can do with a wiki is not sufficient.
• Wiki use is hampered when the need or the culture to share information is lacking.
• Not understanding how a wiki relates to other technical means can be a threshold for wiki adoption.

Introduction strategy
For RaboWiki a grass roots introduction strategy is chosen, whereby a small group of enthusiastic employees convinces others about the added value of wikis, based on their own experiences.

Step 1: Identify key user groups

Step 2: Identify & analyze key figures

Step3: Turn key figures into “evangelists”

Step 4: Turn “evangelists” into trainers

Step 5: Stimulate (unintended) use

For more information

For more information about the RaboWiki case contact Robert Slagter: robert.slagter@telin.nl, +31 53 4850 488.