IN THE BLACK
Are you a knowledge worker or a pen pusher? The likelihood is that you are the former, which means you are about ideas and -collaboration.
In that case, the expressions ‘social media’, ‘Web 2.0’, or more importantly, ‘Enterprise 2.0’, should be in your vocabulary, even if you don’t have a profile on Facebook.
While these ideas may seem a threat to old-school types, the reality is that most social media users are Generation Xers and Yers – the now and future CPAs. And social media is here to stay, according to Dr Steve Hodgkinson, Ovum’s IT research director in Australia and NZ. ‘There are two big waves coming,’ he explains. ‘One is the new generation. And the other is the increasing complexity of interactions in organisations. And both cry out for more open collaborative technologies to support them.’
Social media is the term that describes an abundance of Web 2.0 or social media sites, from the community-generated encyclopedia Wikipedia, photo-sharing site Flickr, videos on YouTube, bookmarking on Digg, blogging on Blogger or sharing your profile on Linkedin, MySpace or Facebook. Hundreds of these sites exist, and the technology is rapidly being integrated into business, using collaborative wikis.
Facebook, the current in vogue social site, had 925,624 Australian members in late October. And the big accountancy firms are in on the act, too. In late October, Ernst & Young in the US had 11,137 Facebook group members. The KPMG network had 8029 members and the Deloitte network page had 12,642 members.
BusinessWeek reported in its 13 September edition that ‘Ernst & Young uses Facebook to let prospective employees talk freely with real ones. Deloitte will show a rap video about office life – made by interns – to give students a realistic view of the company.’
Hodgkinson says: ‘I don’t think these Web 2.0 [sites] can be ignored. They have got to be dealt with. The only way to learn about them is doing it.’ Sometimes this takes some looking around and experimenting, what could be tagged ‘time wasting’. ‘But,’ says Hodgkinson, ‘it is actually people just experimenting and learning how to use social media.’
He likens the time people spend on social media sites as the learning process users went through in the transition from MS-DOS to Windows when the mouse was introduced. ‘People didn’t know how to use a mouse,’ he says. ‘What they did was introduce half a dozen different games that required you to use the mouse to use the games. People seemed to spend a lot of time wasting time playing games, but they were training their mouse skills.’
Ken Reid, a KPMG partner on information and communication, says that right now there is a lot of confusion about social media and whether or not it is a fad or a waste of
time.
‘If you ban Facebook you are going to alienate half your staff,’ he says. ‘You never banned Minesweeper when we first got laptops. You didn’t ban personal phone calls even though you probably tried. You have got to educate your staff. You have to give them some guidance and guidelines. You have got to have better monitoring to spot any abuse. And you have got to engage with your staff.’
Reid uses Facebook as a tool to keep in touch with current and former colleagues. ‘Facebook – it’s fantastic,’ he enthuses. ‘I’ve tracked down more people in the last few months through Facebook than I could have done through any other means. There are business benefits there for things like alumni programs, particularly in the younger generation of accountants who have left.’
KPMG is currently working through the politics of establishing its own Facebook group locally. ‘We are in the process of setting up a community within Facebook for our audit staff,’ Reid says, ‘who can share ideas, talk about what is going on in the world and feel part of something, even though it is kind of virtual and non-traditional.’
Serious business people possibly feel more comfortable on Linkedin, a business networking site, than Facebook. But there is a reason that Facebook is more popular, according to Anne Bartlett-Bragg, an academic specialising in social media at the University of Technology, Sydney.
‘Facebook is dynamic,’ she says. ‘And it’s happening, and it’s moving. I’ve sat on Linkedin for so long and occasionally someone sends you something, but not often.
‘On Facebook I can communicate without having initiated dialogue. I can send someone a wave, which says, ‘Hi I’m thinking of you’ and stay in contact without having to commit to an email or [suggesting] I want something. It’s fun and it works.’
In reality, staff will use social media sites even if a company bans them. At the time of writing, 39,246 pictures tagged ‘office party’ had been uploaded to Flickr.
Search for ‘CPA’ in YouTube and you will find a rap-based recruitment ad from Asia, interviews on starting a small business, and answers to tax questions. Search for ‘accountant’ and you’ll find comedy videos including the famous Monty Python sketch. Almost every major conference, especially those that are IT-based, will find its sessions recorded and posted.
‘People have a view that YouTube is just videos of people doing stupid things,’ Hodgkinson says. ‘Whereas there is a lot of very good business material.’
UTS’ Bartlett-Bragg says that Australia is behind in its uptake of social media. She noticed early this year that the local media had started talking about Web 2.0. ‘I just look at the uptake on wikis as an enterprise solution, and I guess we are three years behind but on a tipping point right now, right on that edge of acceptance on an enterprise level,’ she says.
Although she blogs, Bartlett-Bragg’s medium of choice is the wiki. It’s a way to capture collaborative thinking and sidestep overstuffed and unmanageable inboxes. ‘If you have it all on a wiki on a collaborative project space, the collective body of knowledge grows,’ she says.
In the UK, wikis are being introduced to KPMG to manage staff collaboration. This was previously outside the company firewall on Facebook.
Hodgkinson says that wikis are creeping into the workplace, often by stealth, because staff want to use them. It’s the same way spreadsheets became popular in the early 1980s. ‘It was just a better mousetrap,’ he says.
‘Before spreadsheets were invented you had to do FORTRAN or BASIC programming to do repeatable numerical calculations, or use a programmable calculator. And all of a sudden the spreadsheet came along, allowing anybody to do numerical calculations. Users just started using them and buying them themselves. They would go down to the corner shop and buy spreadsheet software. It just came into the organisation without the IT department or the CIO or anyone even knowing that it was coming or that it was there.’
KPMG’s Reid says that social networks and wikis are not a fad. ‘They are genuinely useful business and personal tools,’ he says. ‘Will we still be using them in five years’ time in the current form? Probably not. It will evolve.’
Hodgkinson already sees signs of the future. Google or ISP home pages are no longer the home pages of choice for browsers. Many people are turning to RSS feed-reading and RSS-sharing sites such as Netvibes as their own personalised portal. But many are instead turning towards their Facebook or MySpace profile as their primary portal and home page.
‘The advantage that people are finding in the ‘my media’ concept is that you are starting this dialogue within a context, with a set of discussions, with a group of peers rather than going each time [for] a Google search or something.’
And so it was that MySpace, the darling of 2006, gave way to Facebook in 2007. As INTHEBLACK went to press, Google had just launched its Facebook killer. The impact is a story for 2008.
Social networking: a primer
Prominent products
Currently the media darling, Facebook allows a user to create an online profile, link with friends and join groups.
The beauty of Facebook is that it aggregates the user’s information from other social sites. Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Del.icio.us bookmarks, blog feeds and much more can be shared. Thanks to plug-in applications called ‘widgets’, users can easily tag their favourite literature, film, music and much more. These same widgets allow users to communicate, for instance, through virtual food fights where a message can be sent with a jar of caviar. Facebook is better presented than MySpace.
Linkedin is a businessperson’s version of Facebook or MySpace. Users create a profile based upon their resume and work experience. Former colleagues and friends can be invited to join your inner circle and can be invited to give references. LinkMe does something similar locally, but with a focus on job hunting.
Film
YouTube is the biggest video-sharing site on the web. Users create an account and can not only upload videos but tag ones they like, leave comments and join groups with like-minded folks.
Known mainly for videos of stupid US college pranks, YouTube is being used by politicians, including John Howard and Kevin Rudd, as a communication tool. Hidden away are business gems. Search Web 2.0 to find Michael Wesch’s informative video or search QED wiki for a demo of an IBM collaborative technology. YouTube also allows for the sharing of rich content on channels.
News
The problem with search is that despite Google’s fancy algorithms it is still difficult to find what really interests you. Del.icio.us is one of the many sites where members can create a profile and tag interesting web pages for news stories. Other popular sites include Digg and Reddit. Becoming a popular tag can crash even some of the most robust websites. Del.icio.us items can be tagged direct from a widget installed in a browser.
Photos
Now owned by Yahoo!, Flickr is one of the most popular photography sites. Users can start an account for free and upload pictures, which can be tagged by subject and location (viewed by map) for search. Users can invite family, friends and even people who they don’t know to become contacts. Pictures can be shared on communal groups. Photo-editing tools are about to be introduced. Flickr competes with sites such as photobucket.
Blogs
Blogger is possibly the most popular hosted blog platform. Part of Google, it is free to use and is linked to a Blogger profile of users, who can tag team members and share interests. Blogs can be tailored with standard templates and URLs can be pointed to Blogger blogs. In short, it makes creating a web presence as easy as clicking save in Microsoft Word. According to the blog search engine Technorati there are over 70 million blogs worldwide. Competing hosted blog platforms include WordPress and TypePad.
Shopping
A Google search will never find the perfect gift but perhaps a site where members share their favourite shopping choices will. 3luxe, one of the many social shopping sites, does exactly this for luxury goods. Amazon was first with this idea, but it used neural networks to offer goods to users based on previous shopping habits.
Reference: December 2007, volume 77:11, p.32 – 35