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May 20, 2011
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Why StackExchange is Hotter than Twitter

Seth Godin and Ian Greenleigh propose promoting hashtags with books to facilitate persistent conversations about the books or topics.

This is similar to the experiment I participated in with StackExchange and Rally Dev last week at the RallyOn11 conference. (The idea was to keep the conference conversations going and searchable long-after the conference ended.)

StackExchange is the perfect medium to make this happen. Twitter is dangerously unmoderated for this to work there.

What we’re talking about is knowledge discovery and knowledge creation. The act of people finding knowledge, discussing it and creating new ideas.

Knowledge needs to function in a context to have meaning. This context can be provided by a community -by an audience. This is facilitated by creating ways to categorize knowledge or discussions.

By giving anyone the ability to publish to a hashtag, the knowledge loses context. It becomes highly diluted. Quickly. (Unless, Twitter comes out with a business model where there’s an entrance fee/ a gate to publish to a specific hashtag or to search on a specific hashtag.)

StackExchange has a community that puts knowledge discovery and knowledge creation into a meaningful context. It creates a taxonomy of knowledge and structure to the process of knowledge creation and discovery that is meaningful to the community (and highly findable). And since the privilege of determining that structure is based on participation in the community, it is theoretically open to all. (Shades of Wikipedia but with fewer barriers to entry into the editors club.)

What’s more, by providing structure and clear rules of participation, StackExchange has a built in revenue model waiting to burst: offering knowledge-process management services to organizations that value it. Like pharmaceutical companies, healthcare, telecom or aerospace, places where innovation carries huge multiples.

Longer term, unstructured conversations will become just more noise and meaningful conversations, conversations in context, will gain value. This is the challenge for Twitter, turning audience into power. This is where StackExchange currently has the lead.

UPDATE: Let me know if you have any questions on using StackExchange for your organization, particularly the project management or programmers site.

Aug 5, 2010
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Social Networking, Permission Boundaries and User Adoption

Last week I gave a presentation at the Internet User Experience conference on Social Networking, Permission Boundaries and User Adoption. Based on the many requests for it, the presentation is now available online.

The presentation introduces a framework for deciding which social media components to include in your company or in any software you run.

Given the tremendous growth of Facebook, Twitter and other social media networks, many companies and organizations are rushing to add social media components to their software or marketing mix. However, there is little in the way of how to decide on what to implement nor how to figure out if people will use it or interact with it.

The presentation takes a classic user adoption approach (the user’s cost/benefit calculation on whether some is a pain to do or not) and applies it Social Media components.

It introduces the concept of PERMISSION BOUNDARIES as a way of capturing the cost side of the equation.

It recommends identifying and describing specific SOCIAL TRANSACTIONS to capture the target benefit the user is going for.

This should provide a robust way to help make decisions on what will likely work or not, to think about whether people will interact with your company or not before you invest in the social media tools they could engage with.

Jul 25, 2010
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The Twitter Rule of Project Management

Twitter provides a great rule of thumb for what kind of information to share with other people on a project.

Before inviting someone to a meeting or sending them an email ask yourself:

Is this information something they’d choose to “follow” on Twitter.

If yes, send it to them.

If not, or if its something you just think they “should” be following, don’t.

This will help keep meetings in check and emails in check and hopefully more aligned with the specific information each person needs to do their job (and not get bogged down in useless information).

As discussed in my recent article in ComputerWorld, this works because Context Trumps Content (as the growth of Twitter makes abundantly clear). There is no end to the amount information people can find. What is valuable is not the quantity of information, but the quality of information. To be high quality and valuable, the information needs to be relevant to the recipient. (And Twitter makes it easy for people to receive only the information they find relevant to themselves.)