It is a blinding glimpse of the obvious but somehow this point gets missed over and over as big companies approach social media by rolling out training.   Don’t get me wrong – training is good.  Training is necessary.  But training isn’t enough.

We learn very little through training because most training is conducted over a small window of time, has no follow up and is conducted in a general absence of real-world context.  In training you do not get to see the product of your thinking meet real-world conditions.  You do not get to learn from failure, or make adjustments.

If you want your staff to grasp the operating principles inherent in social media it is definitely good to set up a training program.  But don’t stop there.   Create apprenticeship models, conduct reverse mentoring sessions and get your employees actually using these tools.

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There is a lot of fuss and confusion over the term “real-time Web” epitomized in this recent comment on O’Reilly Radar:

“I’ve been baffled about all the hype surrounding the ‘real-time Web’ in the past few months. Other than breaking news (which I already had no trouble finding online) I don’t see why everyone is excited about searching real-time content.”

To answer the question, real time is a big deal and it goes way beyond searching content on Twitter. Here’s why:

But real time has the most compelling possibilities for human interaction. Humans operate in real time–we receive information, process it and react in real time. Slowly our entire media and communications infrastructure–what Marshall McLuhan called “The Extensions of Man”–are moving into real time. On the Web this is most commonly understood through services like Twitter or Facebook where communications with your friends and their status updates flow as a constant, up-to-the-second feed. But that is just the beginning. The real-time Web is being used to coordinate group action as it happens–from protest actions in Tehran to Moldavia to California. As a consequence, the next decade will be defined by the rights and regulations surrounding privacy, anonymity, free speech and the right to electronically assemble–as citizens flock to the Internet as a means of promoting civil change.

Real-time systems also help to build social bonds and accelerate knowledge sharing. The power of Twitter goes beyond the information that flows through it, or the fact that it serves as an effective channel for “breaking news.” Twitter’s power lies in the fact that it helps broker social connections. As John Hagel, the renowned business and technology strategist, points out: In times of rapid change the type of knowledge that is valuable shifts from explicit (what can be contained in a document) to tacit (what is contained in a person). The promise of knowledge management lies in connecting people with other people, not with documents. Real-time communication flows will play an increasing role in making sure the questions find the right person (as opposed to the right document) and that we are in a continual state of connectivity.

Real-time testing feedback loops also put a premium on building a learning organization. Winners, on the Web and off, will be dynamically testing and improving closer to real time. Another way to think about this is to consider how Google would run your business–where every user action is used to provide a better service to the next customer. Considering the actions of your users as implicit feedback to continually refine your service is the heart of Web 2.0. It is also the future of being competitive in business.

With the rise of real time we are moving from lagging indicators (customer surveys, focus groups, long product cycles) to leading indicators (online analytics, real-time optimization, lean start-up methods for business). The lag time between question-and-answer and between customer response and company reaction is the arbitrage opportunity for many businesses today.

If the ’90s metaphor for the Internet was “the brain”–a giant, storage and processing system for all the world’s information–the new metaphor is the Social Nervous System, where all of this information is bound up with ubiquitous, real-time communications and used to direct activity in the world. In the Social Nervous System, the boundaries between online and offline become extremely blurry.

We are just scraping the surface of a real-time revolution–but make no mistake, it is a big deal. That is breaking news.

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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.

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I often hear executives struggling to understand the power and promise of mobile devices as it relates to their business. “I would never want to receive an ad on my phone for nearby pizza,” they say. Or, “The iPhone is a small percentage of the phone market. What does it have to do with my business?” This is a bit like looking at the emergence of the railroads in the 1800s and saying, “I have no interest in going to Chicago. What’s the big deal?”

Here are a few ways in which mobility matters:

With mobility, coordination replaces planning. As communications protocols accelerate to real-time (think Twitter) we are seeing more work processes move to approaches that favor just-in-time coordination over advanced planning. It is more efficient and more flexible. In software development, this is called the Agile approach where developers code in short, iterative loops, constantly processing the feedback to refine the end product. In product development, this is Fast Cycle Time. In organizational design, this is real-time collaboration and the flattened organization. In the Army, mobile communications are reconfiguring the traditional command-and-control hierarchy, pushing decision-making to the soldier in the field who has the most information about the situation at hand. The implications go beyond military maneuvers. With a workforce able to remain in real-time contact anywhere, possibilities emerge for new management techniques and an increased role for employees.

As we find ourselves tied to mobile devices, coordination will increasingly become the organizing principle that defines how we get work done; we will become a network of spontaneous gathering, loosely coordinated agents in constant contact.

Mobility is not about phones and it is not about computers. Most of us don’t consider how much sensing intelligence is packed into a smart phone. The iPhone is a rich portable computer with on-board sensors capable of gathering huge volumes of data. Specifically, it is a location-aware (GPS), motion-aware (accelerometer), directionally aware (compass) visually aware (camera that can gather visual input of the immediate environment), sonically aware (microphone and speakers), always-connected (wireless or 3Gs) handheld computer. In short, the iPhone does a whole lot more than display information. It is an environmental sensor.

This is an enormous leap forward when our devices are not only connected but actively accepting input from the world around them. We can track our own behavior, monitor our own health and get things done together (e.g., crowdsource maps of our neighborhood). At the far end of the spectrum, the iPhone is being used as a medical diagnostic tool. Doctors without borders, indeed.

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.

The new marketplace here, there and everywhere. Much of the future of commerce will lie in micropayments made at the exact moment of impulse or need–from music to subway tickets and so on. Smart phones now have bar code and QR code readers that allow the phone to act as a scanner (to find the exact product), research assistant (find the best price online, check product ratings) and shopping agent (buy the product on the spot). If you are a retailer, you are now facing a customer with more choices, information and bargaining power than ever before. You will need to rethink your value beyond simply carrying inventory.

In the developing world, where technology constraints often inspire innovation, people are forming alternative currencies, mainly in the form of sharable minutes on their mobile devices. This means, for example, that I can transfer 10 minutes of talk time to your phone in exchange for something of equivalent value–say, a spare part or carton of milk. The most basic peer-to-peer exchange of funds has already gone mobile in certain parts of the developing world.

Getting things done. Mobility is about how your customers are increasingly getting things done–from shopping to reading to wayfinding. Understanding how mobility will change your customer is key to understanding how you will stay relevant.

If you are a product manager, or in R&D, what can the iPhone teach you about product design? What can mobility developments in Africa teach you about constraint-based innovation? If you are in marketing or customer service, what can your younger employees teach you about your next customer? Consider doing a bit of reverse mentoring and prepare to be stunned.

If you are a senior executive, ask yourself how you plan to handle the management challenges as your workforce gets even more disconnected from workplace.

Staying informed about the incredible work occurring at the margins is one of the keys to getting to the future first. Don’t write it off. Embrace the big idea. If you want to talk about it, call me on my mobile. It knows where to find me.

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I think you listen too much to the soldiers.  No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated  by the experience of life as that your should never trust experts.  If you believe the doctors nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe.  They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.

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The story of the social web is a story about how people, when given the ability to freely communicate – do so in great numbers. And when they do they abide by social rules (be yourself, listen, build relationships through give and take etc.). Social Tools Follow Social Rules. When people are allowed to exercise their innate drive to be social they expect the companies they interact with (and work for) to get social as well. Thus social rules become the new rules of doing business.

The problem is, companies have spent generations codifying rules of conduct to make communications – with employees as well as customers – cost-effective, uniform and risk-reducing, not necessarily to be social. We have put in IVR telephone systems (“press 25 to transfer to another pre-recorded call representative”) to lower call costs despite the fact that humans prefer to speak with other humans. We have delegated all communications to the outside world to two classes of individuals: low cost (e.g. call center reps) and high cost (e.g. “communications professionals” and marketers) who serve as proxy communicators on behalf of the organization. Neither of these addresses the challenge of the social web.

This is the challenge.

How does an organization manage the increasing communications asymmetry between inside and outside?

On the inside, information flow is glacial and constricted to a few individuals at the top of the reporting pyramid. On the outside, information flow is kinetic and ubiquitous. Taken within the context and expectations set by the social web most corporations are now structured to be antisocial (communication by proxy) and non-responsive (overwrought workflows governing when/how to respond to issues).

There is no functional method within any organization I know (and I am familiar with quite a few organizations that are trying to tackle this issue) that is effectively handling the following questions:

• How can an organization reasonably (read cost effective and on-brand) be responsive to so many voices that are out there discussing your product or service?
• How do you calibrate your response times to the web where real-time tools like Twitter, Facebook feeds and blogs distribute information instantaneously?
• When and how do you decide to get engaged versus not when issues can literally metastasize overnight?

There are several mutually supporting solutions that need to be put in place and getting there will be a haphazard affair.

First, corporations are not predisposed towards listening (see Listening Beats Talking). We have companies preternaturally tuned towards talking. This is being addressed by the raft of social media consultants out there preaching the holy gospel of listening. Like all behavior changes, this change will come slowly. It will come as a slow market correction – companies that align to this new reality will prosper (think Zappos where customer service is their fundamental marketing plan).

Second, while we have monitoring tools that mine the social web for discussion, we don’t have simple means of connecting our insights into action. There is no “ticketing” system that can provide workflow and audit trail of a customer voice out on the web – and the company outreach that ensues. Another way to say this is that we don’t have any real, proven social CRM solutions. BestBuy has Twelpforce that allows hundreds of BBY employees to respond in semi-coordinated fashion on Twitter. It is a great program and a good start but we have a long way to go.

Now – what does this have to do with the War on Terror? The analogy is more of a footnote to this post but it is an important one and it leads to the third solution needed to meet the challenges listed above.

The U.S. government has approached the The War on Terror  the way a large, industrial corporation would; lay down a heavyweight strategy and marshal all of its resources for a big, resource-intensive push.   Meanwhile the enemy, like the Social Web, in this analogy, exhibits a few key characteristics:

• They are emergent: there is loose direction at the top but most of the action occurs on a cellular, self-directed level
• They are dispersed: geographically Al Qaeda has a confirmed footprint in multiple countries
• They are unknown – These are no longer state actors (in our analogy you might say these are no longer known journalists and “influencers” in the pay of a known corporation that you can negotiate with).  The lowest common denominator is an anonymous well-motivated individual or small group empowered to take a wide variety of actions in pursuit of their goals
• They learn fast, they don’t “play fair” and they are predisposed not to like you

Using a centralized model to meet a decentralized “threat” is a tricky game. The third issue that needs to be solved is that of communications decentralization within large organizations. How do you energize and mobilize your workforce to engage with the outside world? Companies that create a happy, dynamic work culture will have a happy, dynamic workforce capable of carrying the flag in social media (inside and outside the organization). This will allow you to move beyond the limited spokesperson model of today.  To get there companies need to (1) work on a culture of sharing, (2) co-create social media guidelines with their employees and (3) provide training that engages them in thinking innovatively about the potential of these tools and gives them familiarity with the cultural norms of the social web.

Companies that foster a culture of sharing will thrive disproportionate to companies that don’t.  And companies that address the communications asymmetry will be more likely to prosper.

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I have been writing for some time that business needs to “get” social in ways that go well beyond marketing gimmicks or pushing press releases through Twitter.   It is a new approach to doing business.   So I am excited to announce that I will be moderating an O’Reilly panel discussion with Boyd (Principal, The /Messengers), Kim (Managing Director at Dachis Group) and Owyang (Partner, Altimeter Group) on January 14 to discuss:

• What is the definition of Social Business?
• How can Social Business impact strategy, design, technology and customer experience?
• Who are the leading exemplars?

The panel will leave plenty of time for audience Q+A.

I would love to hear about any questions you would like to see addressed.

You can sign up for the webcast here.

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After the recent foiled airline bomb incident one thing seems clear; we are constantly retrofitting our security measures to defend ourselves against the last attack.  Often these measures seem like what Bruce Schneier in a great CNN article calls “Security Theater”

“Security theater” refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security.

What seems  equally true is that the media has ginned up a national hysteria over the incident that leads much of the senseless government action.   In the wake of blanket coverage officials are pushed to show a proportional response… the more hand-wringing the more actions need to be taken regardless of whether those actions have any salutary effect.  Most of the criticism that I have seen has been leveled at politicians lacking leadership.  Schneier concludes

The best way to help people feel secure is by acting secure around them. Instead of reacting to terrorism with fear, we — and our leaders — need to react with indomitability, the kind of strength shown by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill during World War II.

Amen.  And yet it isn’t people around me that I see freaking out.   It is the media, followed in lock-step by politicians.   One has to wonder if the United States of 2010 is capable of  the kind of leadership Schneier is asking for.   Are our politicians capable of leading when they can obtain personal advantage in either fear-mongering or finger-pointing?   Is the media capable of leading without the histrionics that sell ratings?

I am flying to London this coming week but I won’t feel any more secure  – just a lot more inconvenienced.

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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.

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OK, so this isn’t really that serious… but suicidemachine.org is offering in 20101what was  unthinkable in 2009…   Totally erase your social network presence at a  single stroke… Social suicide.

Opting out of the social race won’t get this extreme but expect 2010 to see a leveling off of Facebook engagement (as measured by average # of visits and time on site per user per day).  Meanwhile   Facebook will continue to move aggressively towards its end-game:  to serve as the source of truth for online identity…

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