This is an interview with my friend Roger Magoulas, Director of Research with O’Reilly Media.  Roger discusses new devices that will change the world of work… Part of our discussion informed my recent Forbes article on mobility,

Meet your new laptop. Apple has not only opened a programming interface that allows developers to create applications that reside on the iPhone, the company has recently opened up the hardware interface. This means that, soon, attaching a keyboard and screen (among other things) to your iPhone literally will be a snap.

The staggering increase in processing and storage capacity per-square-inch, allied with the development of flexible OLED screens and palm-sized projectors, will allow our mobile devices to do more than our PCs. The mobile device is headed to dethrone the laptop as the de facto standard gear for knowledge work.

Transcript:
What do you do with an employee who posts less than professional opinions or images on Facebook about their employer, one of their clients or colleagues? What if it’s done on their private time?

Well the ground is littered with bad employee behavior on Social Networks – from Starbucks employees posting pictures of customers on Flickr alongside derogatory captions  to the recent Dominos employees putting videos on YouTube showing some pretty horrendous food preparation.  How a company responds has a lot to do with how they have set expectations.  We live in transitional times.  Never before have the boundaries between public and private, work and home life been so blurred as they are now.  On one side of this question; Some companies are essentially stating that all employee behavior on social networks – regardless of whether conducted at-work or at-home adhere to the code-of-conduct stated by the workplace – period.  Others are establishing looser guidelines that gently try to steer employees away from less-than-professional behavior.   In any case I think it is well within the purview of a company to establish a social media guideline that places a hard border around work and doesn’t allow the use of social technologies to publish denigrating, disrespectful or proprietary information to be released on social networks – regardless of whether this is done at work or at home.

The big point in either case is to have a clear set of guidelines published before any incident takes place. While we call the Social Web a “conversational medium” – and it is – this type of conversation is often searchable and findable by the 1.7 billion inhabitants.  Oh yeah, and it never goes away.  So companies have a very material stake in getting out in front of this.   However, if you are going to do this I will beat my drum again.   Establish clear guidelines in advance.  Don’t get surprised by this.  If, to your question, an employee posts something unfortunate, without clearly established guidelines you may not have any real means to counter it.

At the risk of offending everyone on planet earth… I thought this satire was an amazing bit of work…- Pure YouTube Genius.

What would you suggest companies do to quantify how Twitter is benefiting / hurting them? (from my Radar Post – Peter P)

(OK – so a big caveat here — The quality of  my counsel depends upon asking a lot of clarifying questions – an option not open to me when creating a 3 minute video for Forbes.   As a follow up to this post I have a few referrals…  On measurement – I would head over to Metricsman and his great posts on measuring Social Media. On adopting the proper tone when using these tools I would review some previous posts on this blog.)

Transcript: Well first I would get clear on Why the particular company is using Twitter – what are the business objectives? I have seen micro-businesses like CupKates – a cupcake truck that uses Twitter to notify customers of their location – Direct sales would be the measure in that case. Dell uses Twitter to broadcast promotions and attributes about 3 million in revenue. When Tim O’Reilly tweets about an O’Reilly book, you can watch the sales go up etc. So again, start with defining your objectives then get clear on how will you measure them.

The beauty of the web is that it is measurable… With Twitter you can use metrics from Followers – a shallow measure of reach, Retweets – how much influence are your Tweets having, and click-throughs… When you embed links, use a link shortener like Bit.ly that will provide you with information on how many people clicked on your link. If you own the landing page – you can track through to leads or even sales. If you objectives are based more around awareness You can use Twitter search to determine how/where your brand is being mentioned. If you want more depth you can use monitoring tools like Radian 6, Evolve 24 or a host of others that will mine the social web for conversations that are taking place about your brand on Twitter and beyond.
As to your question of “hurting” I have been beating the drum that companies need to create clear social media guidelines that are consistent with their culture and industry context. If your employees know what is expected of them I think that is the best form of damage control you could hope for. As the saying goes – an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Transcript:
How many social media applications are we expected to keep up with? I am overwhelmed!! - Anonymous

I know just how you feel. We are going through a Cambrian explosion in new forms of communication and it is hard to keep up. I would give you this piece of advice: don’t try to keep up with the technology. Use the technology to subscribe to people that you trust – and follow their lead. These people can be a filter on all that information – pointing you to the right things to keep up with. I use Netvibes, an RSS reader similar to Google reader, to have my own custom technology newspaper delivered to my laptop every day. If it is technology you are interested in — put David Pogue, Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel, Jeremy Toeman and similar people on your feed.

I also follow like-minded folks on Twitter who share their links and tips. Twitter, in fact has become my chief source of information on what is happening, what I should be reading etc. In this manner Steve Rubel turned me on to Posterous and Robert Scoble vetted new platforms for managing Twitter including the one I use today.. Just as you might turn to a cousin who knows everything about electronics for a tip on what digital camera to buy – you can turn to others to get the support you need and it gets at one of the most valuable elements of the Social Web – it allows you to directly subscribe to people for valuable information and tips. If you use it the right way, these tools should make your less confusing not more.

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2009 was the year that everything received a “social” prefix; social media, social web, social business and so on. I wanted to ask John Hagel – co-chair of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge – for his take on the significance of the term and its importance for business.
John starts with a great quote, “in many respects we are going back to the future:” the Internet began as a social tool with early bulletin boards that connected small groups with shared interests (mainly academic researchers).  Then the Worldwide Web came along and the population went boom. Millions of people flooded the system to look at basically static content… With the rise of social technologies like blogs, social networks, Twitter etc. we are just now rediscovering the web’s inherently social capabilities.  John goes on to talk about the value of social networks to connect people and surface tacit knowledge and the concept of serendipity on the Social Web.

This is the second in a series of interviews conducted at the Web 2.0 Summit last month.  First interview with John Hagel on the Real Time Web is here.  These interviews originally appeared as part of The Future At Work series.

Transcript:
Question: From a branding standpoint, what is the best practice when it comes to differentiating between an individual’s personal brand and their business’ brand? Where is the line between the two, particularly for small businesses? – Alora Chistiakoff

My Response: Employers have always expected certain individuals to bring their own personal “brand” to work – A newspaper columnist brings readers, a salesperson brings a rolodex, an executive brings credibility and a network of trusted talent and so on. So where is the line between the work you do on your own – say running a marketing blog, and the work that you do for a company – say running their marketing team.

Here is my advice For employees: I would say that it is in your best interest to build your own personal brand that follows you. This may be as simple as just a LinkedIn profile that allows you to keep a public, findable resume up to date – it may be answering questions and engaging with the LinkedIn audience – it could be blogging about your own expertise. Doing so will deliver value to your current employer or it may help you get hired by your next one.

Here is my advice for companies: Encourage your employees to build their own brands. Here is why: “Reputation” is substantial source of value for a company. And unlike intellectual property it can’t be patented and it can’t be “owned” in perpetuity. It’s earned through relationships. If you hire a marketing specialist – it is an asset if they have a record as a trusted blogger. If you hire a recruiter, it is an asset if they are a trusted personality on recruiting sites. I can’t really think of one area where bringing a strong personal brand to the table is not an asset. I do think you need to take some measures to protect yourself: (1) clear guidelines around the use of social media so that these rock star employees know what is expected of them and (2) clear measures of job performance so that you can feel comfortable that their attention to their personal brand isn’t coming at the expense of their job. If every employee is a rock star in your company, you should be so lucky.

I was fortunate enough to get a chance to sit down with John Hagel at last week’s Web 2.0 Summit and discuss a few big-ticket emerging trends: (1) the rise of the “real time” web, (2) the move from the information web (the web of documents) to the social web (the web of people) and (3) the continued promise of mobile devices.

John is the co-chair of Deloitte’s Center for Edge Innovation, has written,  numerous, influential books and is the co-author of the must-read blog, The Big Shift so I wanted him to analyze these trends from the lens of their potential impact on large organizations.

This first video discusses the rise of the real-time web which I am loosely defining as the convergence of three phenomena:

• Near zero latency communication protocols best embodied by something like Twitter but well described by Anil Dash as “The Pushbutton Web”
• Pervasive connectivity – our PCs are always on – able to send and receive up-to-the-minute with no barriers to “getting” online.
• Mobile access – Ubiquitous access to the web from mobile devices to view or create content wherever you are.

The effects of moving to the real time web are broad and deep.  Like the Internet itself there isn’t a single, totalizing meta-narrative to make sense of it.  John takes a slice of the real-time analysis and lays down an  argument that goes something like this:

A. The Internet as a global communications and computation platform has accelerated the rate of change for the enterprise –  faster product cycle times being one example

B. This accelerated rate of change depreciates the value of explicit knowledge (what I know – which can be summarized in documents, policies, procedures, workflow etc.) and privileges tacit knowledge (know how – the  “knowledge that is difficult to be transferred to another person by means of writing down or verbalizing”)

C. In this environment, the source of value for the enterprise is moving from what John calls, “stocks of knowledge” (what we know at any given point in time) toward flows of knowledge (what we know at this current moment in time).  Real-time “flows” of knowledge help an enterprise move at the pace of change but more importantly – they connect you to people – think about social CRM and being able to immediately recognize when you have customer issues (as opposed to surveys with huge lag times) and respond in the moment.   Real time flows provide real time feedback to assess effectiveness and recalibrate response.

John also talks about the “dark secret of the enterprise” – but you have to watch the video to get that insight.

So this is a hard question to distill into two minutes. “Is there a difference between online versus offline etiquette?” The answer is obviously yes. I have met a few trolls in real life and found them to be engaging and polite – often soft spoken. I would give the horrid commenters on YouTube the benefit of the doubt as well.
However the video series is aimed at giving people in business advice on how to behave so I took the answer from that perspective.

Transcript:
I read this question as, “what are the differences between online and offline social etiquette”
Ideally, none. In an ideal world – and my personal rule-of-thumb – you would behave online as though you were sitting at a table with your best friend, your boss and your mom. It takes a lot of the juicy bits off the table but do you really want to publish those pieces to the world? I don’t think so. Here are a few tips to keep you out of trouble online and off…

• Use your real identity – no one appreciates an imposter
• Listen and understand the context before you jump in
• Be Nice – sounds silly but just as in real life – it goes a long way
• Disclose any conflicts of interest or paid relationships up front
• Know your facts: argue for ideas and back them up. Never succumb to personality arguments
• Finally, Don’t Lie – This one sounds so simple but it is disarmingly hard in online business…What was considered acceptable business tactics in another generation, such as creating a front group to represent your opinions – Working Families for Walmart – being a textbook case – Is tantamount to lying when using a social technology like a blog – and no one takes kindly to lying.

The Social Web is about people – not technology – and as with any social grouping, etiquette are the tacit rules that keep everyone in check. So while the word etiquette sounds trivial – it is a critical success factor in approaching the Social Web.