Personal InfoCloud

Why the Use of the Term Trust is Problematic

When I was working with people to help improve their social software deployments or use of social sites, as well as engagements in B2B and B2C arena the term trust was used a lot. I would ask people to define “trust” as they were using it, and they would describe what they meant by trust, but with in a sentence or two they had moved onto a different contextual definition. Sometimes I would point this out and ask them to redefine what they meant, pointing out the shift in usage. When I asked one group I was talking with to use other words as proxy for the term trust things started moving forward with much more clarity and understanding. Also gone were the disagreements (often heated) between people whose disagreement was based on different use of the term.

Once I started regularly asking people to not use trust, but proxies for the term I started keeping rough track of the other words and concepts that were underlying trust. The rough list includes: Respected, comfort, dependable, valued, honest, reliable, treasured, loved, believable, consistent, etc. Many found the terms they used to replace trust were more on target for what they actually meant than when using the word trust. There are some sets terms that nicely overlap (dependable, reliable, consistent and valued, treasured), but one term that came up a lot and generated a lot of agreement in group discussions is comfort.

Social Comfort Emerges

Within a few months of stopping use of the term trust, comfort was the one concept that was often used that seamed to be a good descriptor for social software environments. It was a social comfort with three underlying elements that helped clarify things. Social comfort for interacting in social software environments was required for: 1) People; 2) Tools; and 3) Content (subject matter). I will explain these briefly, but really need to come back to each one in more depth in later posts.

(A presentation to eXention last year turned what was publicly one slide on the subject into a full 60 minute plus presentation.)

Social Comfort

View more presentations from Thomas Vander Wal.

Social Comfort with People

Social comfort with people is one essential for people interacting with others. Some of the key questions people bring up with regard to social comfort with people are: Knowing who someone is, how they will interact with you, what they will do with information shared, reliability of information shared, are they safe, can I have reasonable interaction with them, and why would I interact with this person. One of the biggest issues is, “Who is this person and why would I connect or interact with them?” But, most social software tools, particularly for internal organization use provide that contextual information or depth needed to answer that question in their profiles (even in the organizations where most people have relatively “complete” profiles, the information in the profiles is rarely information that helps answer the “Who is this person and why should I listen or interact with them?” question.

Social Comfort with Tools

Social comfort with tools is often hindered by not only ease of use, but ease of understanding what social features and functionalities do, as well as with whom this information is shared. There is an incredible amount of ambiguity in the contextual meaning (direct or conveyed) of many interface elements (ratings, stars, flags, etc.) fall deeply into this area. This leads to the social reticence of a click, where people do not star, flag, rate, or annotate as the meanings of these actions are not clear in meaning (to the system or to other people) as well as who sees these actions and what the actions mean to them. Nearly every organization has a handful if not many examples of misunderstanding of these interactions in actual use. The problems are often compounded as sub-groups in organizations often establish their own contextual understandings of these elements for their use, but that may have the opposite meaning elsewhere (a star may mean items a person is storing to come back to later in one group and another it means a person likes the item starred and can be construed as a light approval). Even services where this is well defined and conveyed in the interface this conflict in understandings occurs. (This is not to ward people off use, but the to understand lack of consistency of understanding that occurs, although the 5 star (or other variations) are really universally problematic and needs a long explanation as to why.)

Social Comfort with Content

Social comfort with content or subject matter can hold people back from using social software. People may have constructive input, but their lack of their own perceived expertise may be (and often is) what inhibits them from sharing that information. The means for gathering this constructive feedback is needed along with the ability for others to ask questions and interact, which usually rules out anonymous contributions (additionally anonymous contributions rarely help mitigate this problem as that doesn’t really provide comfort, as well inside most organizations it is quite easy to resolve who is behind any anonymous contribution, so it is false anonymity). People often have contributions they believe are helpful, but may not be fully fleshed out, or are need to have the information vetted for internal political reasons or put in context (terminology and constructs that are most easily understood and usable) through vetting of others (whom there is social comfort with).

Improving Outcomes with Focal Shift

One of the outcomes of this shift from the term trust to others, including social comfort is areas that need to be addressed are more easily seen, discussed, considered, and potential solutions identified. The end results are often improved adoption through improved community management, improved interfaces and interactions in the services, better tools through iteration, and improved adoption.

Redundancy

Never the less, this brings-up an important point: Redundancy. One lesson I learned many years ago related to the web (heck, related to any thing digital) is it will fail at some point. Cloud based services are not immune and the network connection to those services is often even more problematic. But, one of the tenants of the Personal InfoCloud is it is where you keep your information across trusted services and devices so you have continual and easy access to that information. Part of ensuring that continual access is ensuring redundancy and backing up. Optimally the redundancy or back-up is a usable service that permits ease of continuing use if one resource is not reachable (those sunny days where there's not a cloud to be seen). Performing regular back-ups of your blog posts and other places you post information is valuable. Another option is a central aggregation point (these are long dreamt of and yet to be really implemented well, this is a long brewing interest with many potential resources and conversations).

With regard to Delicious I’ve used redundant services and manually or automatically fed them. I was doing this with Ma.gnol.ia as it was (in part) my redundant social bookmarking service, but I also really liked a lot of its features and functionality (there were great social interaction design elements that were deployed there that were quite brilliant and made the service a real gem). I also used Diigo for a short while, but too many things there drove me crazy and continually broke. A few months back I started using Pinboard, as the private reincarnation of Ma.gnol.ia shut down. I have also used ZooTool, which has more of a visual design community (the community that self-aggregates to a service is an important characteristic to take into account after the viability of the service).

Pinboard has been a real gem as it uses the commonly implemented Delicious API (version 1) as its core API, which means most tools and services built on top of Delicious can be relatively easily ported over with just a change to the URL for source. This was similar for Ma.gnol.ia and other services. But, Pinboard also will continually pull in Delicious postings, so works very well for redundancy sake.

There are some things I quite like about Pinboard (some things I don’t and will get to them) such as the easy integration from Instapaper (anything you star in Instapaper gets sucked into your Pinboard). Pinboard has a rather good mobile web interface (something I loved about Ma.gnol.ia too). Pinboard was started by co-founders of Delicious and so has solid depth of understanding. Pinboard is also a pay service (based on an incremental one time fee and full archive of pages bookmarked (saves a copy of pages), which is great for its longevity as it has some sort of business model (I don’t have faith in the “underpants - something - profit” model) and it works brilliantly for keeping out spammer (another pain point for me with Diigo).

My biggest nit with Pinboard is the space delimited tag terms, which means multi-word tag terms (San Francisco, recent discovery, etc.) are not possible (use of non-alphabetic word delimiters (like underscores, hyphens, and dots) are a really problematic for clarity, easy aggregation with out scripting to disambiguate and assemble relevant related terms, and lack of mainstream user understanding). The lack of easily seeing who is following my shared items, so to find others to potentially follow is something from Delicious I miss.

For now I am still feeding Delicious as my primary source, which is naturally pulled into Pinboard with no extra effort (as it should be with many things), but I'm already looking for a redundancy for Pinboard given the questionable state of Delicious.

The Value of Delicious

Another thing that surfaced with the Delicious end of life (non-official) announcement from Yahoo was the incredible value it has across the web. Not only do people use it and deeply rely on it for storing, contextualizing links/bookmarks with tags and annotations, refinding their own aggregation, and sharing this out easily for others, but use Delicious in a wide variety of different ways. People use Delicious to surface relevant information of interest related to their affinities or work needs, as it is easy to get a feed for not only a person, a tag, but also a person and tag pairing. The immediate responses that sounded serious alarm with news of Delicious demise were those that had built valuable services on top of Delicious. There were many stories about well known publications and services not only programmatically aggregating potentially relevant and tangential information for research in ad hoc and relatively real time, but also sharing out of links for others. Some use Delicious to easily build “related information” resources for their web publications and offerings. One example is emoted by Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb wonderfully describing their reliance on Delicious

It was clear very quickly that Yahoo is sitting on a real backbone of many things on the web, not the toy product some in Yahoo management seemed to think it was. The value of Delicious to Yahoo seemingly diminished greatly after they themselves were no longer in the search marketplace. Silently confirmed hunches that Delicious was used as fodder to greatly influence search algorithms for highly potential synonyms and related web content that is stored by explicit interest (a much higher value than inferred interest) made Delicious a quite valued property while it ran its own search property.

For ease of finding me (should you wish) on Pinboard I am http://pinboard.in/u:vanderwal

----

Good relevant posts from others:

• Why You Should have a Website - Jeremy Keith
• We can save Delicious, but probably not in the way you think
• Delicious in Purgatory :: TechCrunch

On Jul 21, 2009, at 8:59 AM, Thomas Vander Wal wrote:

The conversations models & how they map to the difference faces & steps in the communication progression from personal, collective, community/group, and collaborative have interest to me. Each are different design problems with very different interaction & communication needs, hence leading to different conversation models.

• Personal: Focussed on holding on to objects (including people & relationships) and annotating for refinding and aggregating as needed.
• Collective: Open sharing/stating around objects (with various possibilities around level of sociality) with some conversation directly with them in comments, but also indirect conversations (friendfeed, microsharing, etc.)
• Community/Group: Fully aware of others with interests around the object and interacting with the others in a manner that is open to others in the community/group.
• Collaborative: Goal is getting down to one view and one product. This requires the means to identify and work through conflicting concepts and understanding. Requires working together and identifying, addressing, and working through conflict to come to one resolutions (there can not be more then one personal day policy in an organization).

On Jul 21, 2009, at 12:25 PM, adrian chan wrote:

these are cats used by ross, clay and others that i'm not totally aligned with. primarily because I don't think they reflect anthropological or sociological distinctions in interaction systems or situations. (e.g. paired interactions, triangulated interactions, group membership, inter-group interaction, alliance, family, tribe, community, or now the social media-specific formations which seem to be "invisible audiences," "publics" or "audiences" depending on who you talk to.)

for example i don't think "collective" is a natural social phenomenon but if it occurs is a byproduct or outcome of carefully structured interactions in which personal social dimensions are minimized to reduce the bias of status, rank, hierarchy and other attention-getting behaviors. Which is why Hunch.com has shirky written all over it, or why we all use wikipedia as our reference standard for collective action!

in other words,

• a structuralist would tell us that these categories don't exist.
• a sociologist would say that forms of communication and social practices transcend these categories and may be found in the reproduction in any of these categories, so cant be the causal explanation for how these categories of content production are realized.
• a psychologist would say that user motives are not a reflection of a kind of social arrangement, that for example interpersonal stuff, attractions and flirting, lurking etc can all occur in social groups of different sizes and structure
• a social media theorist might say that it matters more how people see others, see themselves, and think they see how they are seen by others, and that the constraints on action in and results out are what govern behavior -- but that users wont have "collective" or "collaboration" etc in mind when they're acting -- that user centric view will prevail over an architectural one

i think where shirky has a blindspot is in motives -- he's a good pattern recognizer but patterns can be effects without being causes, or without being the goal or the motive of a certain user's activity.

where shirky sees structure as a way of possibly eliminating social distortions, i still think it's essential to know how the user sees himself in the social field to know where bias may be introduced.

and in today's highly conversational mediaverse, these structures are hard to map to aggregation, disaggregation, and other twitter/status feed phenomena. twitter and its kin are so fluid, so ephemeral and time-based, that it's hard to grasp the causes of social outcomes without using communication theory and interaction dynamics (which i sloppily call "conversation models"). challenge being that one has to capture what interests a user -- could be their own status, could be their reputation, their commitment to a higher goal, their need for attention, etc, all of which come out in conversation but none of which are governed by structural arrangements (like collab, collective, or community)....

in short the question you raise is: does the social order account for user behavior? Is the social order the user's orientation. I don't think it is, but that would be my bone to pick with ross or shirky (some day....)

what do you think? am i making sense?

On Jul 21, 2009, at 9:52 AM, Thomas Vander Wal wrote:

Your approach makes sense and fits wonderfully within social comfort. One of the things I have found working with organizations on the inside is the assumptions from the outside (open web tools) are broken. Adoption of the same patterns outside don't happen inside organizations, as the measures are vastly different (outside pure numbers (100k to millions of users) and inside is percentage of employees/customers). Our assumed understanding for tools and models from web 2.0 don't really work well when dealing with closed populations. What we realize is these tools are less than optimal on the web too. This was my huge problem in writing my book (Understanding Folksonomy) for O'Reilly, I could not explain value that was derived nor could I explain things that were broken.

Conversation models fit nicely in social comfort, which I currently have set within the elements of social software and build order. Unless the prior elements are met, there is no communication/conversation. The realm of social is far more complex and runs on many different planes and models at once. There is no pure model, but a mixture of models and understandings.

The elements of social software and social comfort are important in all of the faces of perception (where personal, collective, community, collaboration, newbie, system owner, and external developer) come into play as task roles. But, seen from the perspective of a cube or other polygon, we can see many sides at once and are participants in the various tasks and faces.

I agree and disagree with "but that users wont have "collective" or "collaboration" etc in mind when they're acting" as I see the mindset of whom am I sharing with (how broadly) and goals (stated or inferred) with the task type, when users are interacting with others on internal social tools. But, it is not the user's perspective that is at the forefront as much as it is having the proper tools with the proper elements to achieve each type of task. Most organizations do not think of the progression of tasks and ensure their tools embrace the needs at the various stages. Often true collaboration elements are missing as well as desperately needed tools for personal tasks.

Twitter and Microsharing for Enterprise

There were a handful of very well attended sessions on Twitter and similar microsharing tools for the enterprise this year (last year only one). The sessions were largely love-fests of "isn’t this great" and "here is the value", which is good. But, there are some downsides that need addressing and sticking my head in a few sessions (too packed to get a seat) and talking with others who attended the sessions, the downsides (they have solutions, but not quite built yet) were not highlighted nor were the potential solutions.

I am skipping the positives of these tools as they are can be found quite readily. The cautions and lessons learned relate to two points the volume & velocity of information and use/reuse of the snippets.

Nearly every organization that has successful adoption with microsharing tools quickly believes there can be too much of a good thing. Like my presentation last year at Enterprise 2.0 (After Noah: Making sense of the flood (of information) microsharing has great content flowing through it, but it needs filters (on who and what) as well as as attractors for grabbing things that are valuable that pass through when the user is not looking (the "if it is valuable it will find you" is not something that you want your organization to depend upon).

The second issue is use and reuse of that information. The information snippets running through the microsharing tools are often valuable, some have future value and are received out of the context of need, while others have current value. Most of the tools only focus on sharing the snippets not holding on to them or easily turning them into other valuable information forms (documents, blogs, aggregation of related items for discussion, etc.). Without thinking of what comes next with information flows in the organization’s ecosystem problems get created quickly from the cool adoption. That is not to say that the solutions are difficult or around the corner, but they are not in most products yet.

One service that I saw in the exhibit hall that used the organization’s ecosystem well was Brainpark. Brainpark is a mix of microsharing, aggregation of information and objects, and builds off of experience across the organization. It is a hosted solution that is a fully open space and transparent across the organization (depending on your organization that is good or less than optimal (Sarbanes Oxley peeks in).

Case Studies Predominantly from Government and Government Contractors

This year, just like the past two a majority of the case studies were government or government contractors. Susan Scrupski asked in a Tweet why this was so. One reason (having worked inside government as a contractor doing this things nearly a decade ago) is freedom to talk about what is going on. Many businesses look at these tools as competitive advantage and will talk about the their success on a high level, but lessons learned (downsides) start running into SEC regulations and admissions of less than optimal results (a downside for stocks). Also many of the companies using the new breed of social tools are technology related companies and often they are considering how to turn what they have deployed into a product they can sell in the future or at least a service offering. This sharing can run a foul of SEC restrictions. The government organizations and government contracting companies are freer to discuss their implementation of these tools and the contracting companies see this as a means to pitch their capabilities.

Last year Lockheed Martin generated a lot of buzz with their discussion of the platform they assembled and built. This year they discussed it in more depth, but the point that the only two infringements on their service were one person selling their car (no commerce is allowed) and one person criticizing a decision by the CEO (nobody is allow to criticize the CEO) were good for demonstrating how well people use the social tools with little concern (although the buzz from LM’s presentation to a person this year was "I will never work for LM because you can’t criticize the CEO").

Booz Allen Hamilton was the Open Enterprise winner and discussed in-depth their tool deployment and their use of open source tools and low cost for deploying. This was quite a different perspective from Lockheed Martin’s deployment last year that was incredibly costly.

Open Source Tools as First Step

One thing that I have seen across the years, not only at Enterprise 2.0 but prior, is that many organizations start their social tool endeavors with open source tools. While I am a big proponent of open source tools, one has to be mindful of the disadvantages as well as the advantages (just like every other tool). Open source tools are a good first step to see how tools could be used in an organization, but many of the tools need extensive customization to scale and to meet the the user experience and social needs of those who are not an organization’s early adopters.

In my presentation last year "After Noah…" most of the downsides and lessons learned came from people deploying Scuttle as their social bookmarking tool. Scuttle is a decent tool for small deployments in-house that do not need to scale, but the management of the tools and the lack of intelligence in Scuttle that is needed to deliver solid knowledge and understanding around the organization are not in it. There are many elements in Scuttle that limit adoption, unless in a very tech savvy environment, and require moving to a real social bookmarking and tagging solution after six month or a year. Not only is adoption hindered, but easily surfacing information, knowledge, and intelligence captured in the tool is really difficult. Scuttle lacks the algorithms, social understanding, contextual engine, and user experience to be a long term (more than one year) solution for anything more than a small division.

The other open source tool that is widely deployed and equally as problematic as Scuttle is MediaWiki. I continually see MediaWiki deployed because it is “what is under Wikipedia”. While that is well and good to get started, MediaWiki falls into the same problems as Scuttle with adoption, scale, lack of the essentials, and missing intelligence engines. MediaWiki requires heavy modifications to work around these problems. One of the problems that is most problematic are those around human social interactions, which nearly every organization I talk with lacks in their resources as they development and design teams that build, implement, and incrementally improve their products.

Both of these tool types (social bookmarking and wikis) have great commercial products that provide much better overall adoption opportunities as well as have full-time staff who understand what is needed to get the most value out of what is contributed and how to include the difficult pieces around sociality, which greatly increase adoption and long term use.

More Than Just Tools

This year there was quite a bit of discussion at Enterprise 2.0 around tools are good, but there is much much more than just tools as as a solution. Adoption practices were discussed broadly, but some of the best snippets that echo my experience were in the video clips captured by and used by Stowe Boyd and Oliver Marks in their Open Enterprise session (the full collection of unedited video interviews are available at Enterprise 2.0 - Open Enterprise [http://enterprise2blog.com/category/open-enterprise-2009/]). One snippet that rang very true was from Charlene Li where she talked about a large hindrance to adoption was people lacking the understanding of what openness is in the enterprise and that it is a possibility. I often find most organizations need to have the conceptual model (understanding of what the tools are and freedom and control put in the people’s hands as well as it is their organization allowing them to do this) into people’s head is the first step and not talking "carrots and sticks", which often lead to less than optimal long term outcomes and often are counter productive.

It was great to hear other people discussing this in sessions as well as the hallway conversations. If this is of interest the full videos have been made available to the community to listen to and use as an open resource. Please go take advantage of it and use them to help get informed.

Gaps in Sociality

Much of my discussions with my clients and potential clients as well as my 13 years of experience building, maintaining, and improving social tools for use involves focusing on what holds back adoption and use of tools. There are four elements that need to be in balance: Tools, user experience (ease of use), sociality, and adoption/engagement resources. Much of that was discussed in sessions at Enterprise 2.0 this year was tools and adoption/engagement strategies (as just stated there were some large holes in adoption and engagement strategies). On the exhibit hall floor the vendors were touting their ease of use and user experience that is built into their products.

The big gap that was really weak was sociality. As those who have deployed tools and worked to improve them have found how people interact with other people in these digital social tools is a large area that needs addressing. This is one area that really needs to be addressed within the tools as the depth of understanding needed inside organizations to add this is rarely there. There is a large education effort needed to explain what all of this is, how to think about it, how to evaluate tools/solutions around it, how to assess existing deployments, and how to then improve them. When I have IT shops or developers in my workshops this is an area that is really not familiar to most of them. Some of the user experience designers have an understanding of the need, but lack the skills to get the back end development in place to feed the front end components. Most decision makers do not have this on their radar (unless they have had tools and services running for 6 months to a year and are looking for that next step up), but even when they do they only understand something there is broken and lack enough understanding to know how to understand the problems and then address it.

As I talked with people in the hallways and late at night and mentioned scenarios that are indicators of problems in tools around sociality, nearly everybody said yes we see a lot. To a person not one of them had thought of sociality as a problem or even knew of anybody who could help understand it and address it.

This is the next hurdle to start getting over. Hopefully next year and at this Fall’s Enterprise 2.0 in San Francisco, this will be subject matter that is covered so to highlight where the problems lay and how to start working with vendors and developers on ways to improve on what is there.

[If you are looking to get a grounding in this I am finally offering workshops on Social Design for Enterprise, which is described in more depth in the Rock Stars of Social CRM. The real stories, experience, value to organizations, tethering CRM and interaction in social tools not only was great from a showing the power of use of tools in a manner that had deep business value, but the stories of real use and lack of tools and services around optimized use of the tools. This session really should have been not only in the main tracks, but could have stood out enough to have been a main session. It added credibility and depth of understanding social tools from a business perspective in a manner that makes the usual social media discussions look incredibly thin. Radian6, Chris Brogan, Paul Greenberg, Brent Leary, Frank Eliason, and Michael Thomas (National President of the CRM Association) did a killer job with this session and totally rocked the house.

Tagging

Lastly, tagging. While there was not tagging focussed session and tagging has become the sleeping giant (nearly every social software consultant with deep background asked why there was not a session on tagging as they are finding it is one of the most valuable resources in their tool belt for driving value to their customers). Connectbeam and Lotus Connections Dogear were on the Exhibition floor and were getting attention, I heard nearly every other vendor touting they have tagging in their offerings. This is a good thing and something that is also problematic.

About four years ago I prognosticated tagging would be in most tools, but that reality was going to be problematic unless tagging was done well (at a minimum object being tagged, tag, and cross tool identity of the person tagging). Well this last year I had one large client hit that problem and since I have heard of it five or six more times. While some commercial tools have done tagging well most home grown or open source solutions (see the WikiMedia mention above) do not.

My presentation from last year is even more relevant this year and there is a dire need for aggregation and disambiguation across tagging in various tools. At the Enterprise 2.0 conference I heard this echoed many times when I started asking about tagging in deployments. There is much more to write on this and to share (yes the book is still coming and much of this will be addressed there as well as in future posts).

Summary

Enterprise 2.0 has become my favorite conference as the problems I have been seeing for years and working on resolutions are echoed here. The reality of Web 2.0 and social interaction hits home here, particularly the lack of depth and problems in the Web 2.0 tools (which also need to be addressed, but with millions of users it looks like success not a really small percentage of adoption).

I am looking forward to next year as well as the Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco conference in the Fall.

Past Attendees have Said...

“A few hours and a few hundred dollar saved us tens of thousands, if not well into six figures dollars of value through improving our understanding” (Global insurance company intranet director)

From an in-house workshop…
“We are only an hour in, can we stop? We need to get many more people here to hear this as we have been on the wrong path as an organization” (National consumer service provider)

“Can you let us know when you give this again as we need our [big consulting firm] here, they need to hear that this is the path and focus we need” (Fortune 100 company senior manager for collaboration platforms)

“In the last 15 minutes what you walked us through helped us understand a problem we have had for 2 years and a provided manner to think about it in a way we can finally move forward and solve it” (CEO social tool product company)

Is the Workshop Only for Designers?

No, the workshop is aimed at a broad audience. The focus of the workshop gets beyond the tools’ features and functionality to provide understanding of the other elements that make a giant difference in adoption, use, and value derived by people using and the system owners.

The workshop is for user experience designers (information architects, interaction designers, social interaction designers, etc.), developers, product managers, buyers, implementers, and those with social tools running already running.

Not Only for Enterprise

This workshop with address problems for designing social tools for much better adoption in the enterprise (in-house use in business, government, & non-profit), but web facing social tools.

The Workshop will Address…

Designing for social comfort requires understanding how people interact in a non-mediated environment and what realities that we know from that understanding must we include in our design and development for use and adoption of our digital social tools if we want optimal adoption and use.

• Tools do not need to be constrained by accepting the 1-9-90 myth.
• Understanding the social build order and how to use that to identify gaps that need design solutions
• Social comfort as a key component
• Matrix of Perception to better understanding who the use types are and how deeply the use the tool so to build to their needs and delivering much greater value for them, which leads to improved use and adoption
• Using the for elements for enterprise social tool success (as well as web facing) to better understand where and how to focus understanding gaps and needs for improvement.
• Ways user experience design can be implemented to increase adoption, use, and value
• How social design needs are different from Web 2.0 and what Web 2.0 could improve with this understanding

More info...

For more information and registration to to Viget Lab's Social Design for the Enterprise page.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Why LinkedIn Needs to Have a Better Grasp of Social

A heavy user of LinkedIn, I have been hearing identical complaints to my own as regular business networking event conversation fodder for the last six months or more. Light users of LinkedIn as well as those of us who have over 600 connections have nearly identical problems.

At its core the social interactions design is severely flawed and poorly thought through. LinkedIn integrates social interaction components and features as if they were playing a game of "me too" with Facebook. This is problematic as much of the Facebook social interaction design is poorly executed. I have stated how Facebook's DNA does not support business use (in Facebook for Business or LinkedIn Gets More Valuable. Oddly, now LinkedIn seems to be building the poorly thought-through Facebook interactions, implementations which are directly counter to their reason for being.

Wake-up LinkedIn! You may have money to get you through some sort of recession that lasts for a while, but your business relevance requires you to get these things right and get them correct now.

Too Many New Features, Too Fast

LinkedIn now has conflict and confusion about its primary focus as a service and what is the primary social object. Prior to 18 months ago LinkedIn was more or less a live resume and work connections site. The social object was the individual person and the focus was clear and social actions, while limited, were clear and focussed too. The addition of more social interaction and services has completely lost that sense of focus and could be one of the causes of poorly built social tools.

The last 18 months or so has LinkedIn seeming like it wants to be more of a Social communication site,  workplace social platform, and/or  general social site like Facebook with a quasi-focus around work-life.The lack of central understanding of what LinkedIn is also has increased the scatter shot understanding of social and voice (based on really confounding contexts for understanding). The inclusion of social elements that bleed into LinkedIn, with similarities to Facebook, are executing on the same social understanding of social interaction design that acts as if the last 8 to 15 years in digital social interaction design and knowledge did not exist.

This is a compilation of things that have been increasingly bothering me with the rollout of LinkedIn's social features. They seem to roll out features that are not fully baked. Then, they release new features rather than fixing the poorly thought through functionality already deployed. I have delayed writing this as I have heard many of these items were going to get fixed (but have not after far too long). I also have many friends at LinkedIn and have not wanted to rock their boat (but many of them have publicly and privately encouraged me to write this publicly).

Another reason for posting this is I am seeing these mistakes many places. Far too many "social x gurus" are just users of less than optimal systems. They don't grasp the less-than-optimal features are holding back the tool adoption, in addition to a lack of social interaction design.

This muddled social mess triggered Jonathan S. Knoll to proclaim on Twitter, "LinkedIn: the online community of people you don't really like."

What Worked Well

LinkedIn worked well for me as an ambient social network for business contacts. The last 3 or 4 years LinkedIn has been one tab that was always open in my work browser (until a couple weeks ago when I got fed up). I would watch the ambient flow of who changed jobs, titles, connections, and what they were seeking. These were social business clues that I used as opportunities to reconnect with people and see where I could help out.

LinkedIn was a great tool for strengthening business relationships. Quite often I would offer help to someone job seeking or send congratulations on new role or job. The communications often lead to chatting about working together, which had a really good business upside for me.

Watching people connect has value in finding people I already knew and had not connected with, as well as having some understanding of who outside a community is looking for help (those who say they can tell everything about a person by who they connect to don't understand social interaction dynamics very well, particularly around business relationships and business growth).

LinkedIn's recommendation services for finding others to connect with have been really good. The only other service that is this strong in my opinion is Plaxo, which is a service that increasingly has taken the place of LinkedIn for me. Plaxo understands volume, various levels of relationship, and keeping contact information current where you need it (in address books, not is disconnected services). LinkedIn is also really good for capturing and making recommendations of one's work.

Something LinkedIn has done rather well is its iPhone application, which really should be extended to other mobile platforms for smart phones. It finally enabled the ability to use contact information in a use context that matters and outside their service (mail does some of this but it is broken as in LinkedIn responses and external responses are not coordinated).

LinkedIn's question and answers section has been done rather well. Many people find it valuable and get good use from it. There are many things that could be done to augment it, particularly around using it to build an understanding of reputation around subject matter. It also could use the ability to easily hold on to (and annotate for one’s self) good suggested answers. This is the sign of a decently thought-through social platform.

The second part to this post, LinkedIn: Social Interaction Design Lessons Learned (not to follow) - 2 of 2 looks at some specific lessons learned from LinkedIn.