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 Yesterday Forrester’s Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li published a new version of their social technographics ladder as popularised by the 2008 book “Groundswell”. The ladder provides a useful framework to analyse and profile the social technology habits of particular markets, so enabling PR and marketing campaigns to be tailored to the particular online behaviours of these groups.
This updated version takes into account developments in social media over the last couple of years namely the rise of Twitter and the microblogging phenomenon. A whole new rung has been added, “Conversationalists” to account for people who update their social network status on at least a weekly basis, so using it to to converse with their networks.
According to Bernoff Conversationalists are:
“… 56% female, more than any other group in the ladder. While they’re among the youngest of the groups, 70% are still 30 and up.”
The new figures around Conversationalists, 33% of web users in number, are interesting but I’d suggest they don’t really come as a shock to anyone who regularly uses of Facebook or Twitter and has participated in their growth. However, I do find it a little surprising that “Critics” (those who might comment on a blog, post on a forum, edit a wiki, etc.) come in both lower on the ladder and higher in percentage than Conversationalists. My personal experience doesn’t really bare this out as I know of, and see online, much more evidence of Conversationalists than Critics. In addition, I would class being a Critic is a lot more participatory/proactive than someone simply using their networks to shout out their status (is this necessarily a conversation anyway?) and so would suggest that it should be on a higher rung of the ladder? I’m not party to the full research which is available to Forrester clients so perhaps there are regional differences that come into play, although US and European behaviours are typically not that dissimilar (Groundswell, p49).
On the whole the Social Technographics ladder is still a useful tool although some commentators, for example Blonde Digital Limited, are suggesting that the added rung and blurring of the boundaries between the behaviour categories are complicating what was originally a very simple and intuitive model. I agree that this seems a shame, but you could perhaps argue (as I’m sure Bernoff would) that it’s just a reflection of the ever more complex ways that people interact with their environments and each other when online.
 When does what you put on Facebook become your employers business? I was recently reading “A CEO’s Dilemma: Should I Take My Burning Man Pics off Facebook?” which tells the story of hotelier Chip Conley’s experience when Facebook photos of him at the Burning Man Festival caused a “mild uproar” among his employees. His experience is somewhat unusual as it’s usually the senior management within an organisation expressing outrage at employee behaviour on social networking sites rather than the other way round! It got me thinking about the whole dynamic though …
Social media policies are generally seen as a way for the organisation to protect itself and it’s reputation from the reckless, ill considered or just plain harmful actions that employees *might* enage in when online. However, when I wrote our social media and online participation policy earlier this year I felt I was writing as much to protect the rights of the employees as the employer. I’m aware of a couple of instances where people have been threatened with diciplinary action over things they may have posted on Facebook or groups they may have joined that have been deemed innapropriate. I feel quite strongly that, unless that person has identified themselves as an employee of the organisation or is being explicitly and openly critical, then it’s non of their employers business what they do on social networking sites - I was keen to put in place a policy that supports this view.
I recently read some truly awful social media “guidelines” that were obviously written by someone who doesn’t participate in any of the online activities they were dictating to others about. As a person who is pretty much living and breathing this stuff, I’ve found it can put you in an interesting position with regard to setting rules that you then have to follow yourself. On the one hand you have a true understanding of the mechanics of social networking and online collaboration, but on the other hand this understanding can lead you to agonise over every little detail because, at the back of your mind is the feeling that you’re quite possibly going to be in violition the very policy you’re writing!
For example, when putting the policy together and getting feedback from colleagues a number of issues that came up that made me feel uncomfortable, not least the issue of “personal gain”. It seems fairly reasonable to expect employees not to blog for financial gain but there was a suggestion that this should extend to personal gain too. What does that actually mean? Surely everyone blogs for personal gain (to enhance their professional reputation, to try and snare a better job, etc. etc.) so how could this possibly be upheld? And more importantly, how would it affect me?!! 
At the end of the day, due to the nature of the beast, any social media policy has to be a living breathing document subject to change as our use of the tools evolves. It’s a pretty obvious point perhaps but it’s essential that the policy owner understands what they are actually writing about and the implications that this might have for the real people who have to follow their words - even if this does lead to the odd feeling of guilt!
 Patient feedback getting easier for marginalised groups As a general rule I feel allowing people to post anonymously on websites and forums isn’t an especially good idea and is asking for trouble. When people have to “own” their comment in some way they’re generally more likely to respond in a considered manner rather than just send off an expletive ridden rant (not guaranteed of course!). This means that the organisation is more likely to receive comments and feedback that’s useful and actionable.
Earlier today The Guardian and E-Health Insider reported on how comments on mental health services can now be left on NHS Choices following a partnership with the not-for-profit social enterprise Patient Opinion. This allows service users, carers and their families to share stories and leave feedback on the care they have received. The key factor here is that this feedback can be left anonymously. Drug users and mental health patients can feel marginalised are often not receiving treatment by choice so may feel threatened or nervous about giving their opinions via traditional feedback methods.
The Guardian reports that:
“Since April 2009, all 61 mental health trusts across the UK have been able to subscribe to Patient Opinion, with NHS Choices paying the social enterprise to train and support trust managers in how to respond to postings. To date, 45 trusts have signed up.”
Reading the rest of the report it appears that this initiative is already creating a sense of ownership of the issues raised amongst staff, helping to really improve services and make a difference to patient care.
See also:
Update 12th January - On Friday the South Shields Gazette (“Campaigner slams mental health scheme”) reported that Margaret Baker, who formed South Shields-based mental health support group Hidden Treasure (who don’t appear to have a website), criticised the scheme saying:
“Nine out of 10 sufferers don’t have a computer, and the ones that do probably don’t know how to use one … My worry is once you’ve left your feedback, you’ll never hear another peep from them and nothing will change … The best way to hear about the problems people have is face-to-face meetings. For me, this scheme is just moving the whole system away from bringing people together.”
To me Baker’s opinion seems a little short-sighted, outdated and pretty condescending towards patients. As discussed above, the whole point of this initiative is so that people who may be uncomfortable about being critical of the care they’ve received can leave feedback in a way that feels safe to them. In addition, I’m no expert on mental health, but would suggest that there are a wide range of patients with very different problems who use services - not all of whom will be computer illiterate or lacking access to a PC.
Maybe not everyone will be able to use the online service but presumably offline feedback mechanisms will still be in place - it’s about using technology to increase choice.
 Chained to IG or free to be social? These days most organisations have a social media and online participation policy in place to govern how employees use these tools when out in the big bad world in an attempt to prevent reputational damage caused by any intentional abuse or inadvertent misuse. When I first started looking into writing such a policy for my own organisation early last year there was little in the way of guidance and even less practical examples to draw upon. This seems hard to imagine now as a quick search of Google today reveals many resources for policy makers.
At the same time that most businesses are embracing, or at least acknowledging, the value of social media to carry out conversations with their external audiences, employees are increasingly being given these tools to use internally too. Adoption of these new channels will hopefully break down the silo mentality inherent in many organisations, setting employees free from many of the constraints of traditional, rigid, formalised communication methods. However, this new way of working has some interesting implications around Information Governance, especially for the NHS and other public sector bodies.
The standard NHS definition of Information Governance is that it is:
“… a framework for handling information in a confidential and secure manner to appropriate ethical and quality standards”
This quite rightly means ensuring adherence to the Data Protection Act (1998), Human Rights Act (1998), Freedom of Information Act (2000), NHS Confidentiality Code of Practice (2003), the Health & Social Care Act 2001 and others (see the Department of Health Guidance on Information Governance). The principles of keeping information safe, secure, confidential and preventing it from getting into the public domain seem pretty obvious in most cases (although perhaps not when you consider some of the data losses that have occurred over the last few years!). I would suggest, however, that things become a little less clear cut when we begin to think about how both business information and patient data may be treated internally when employees use informal collaborative tools with colleagues. For example, consider clinicians discussing a patient’s condition within the context of an internal forum - can we be sure they don’t disclose details that make that patient identifiable? Who has access to this conversation? Is the forum thread considered ephemeral and therefore not treated as a record and subject to retention schedules? Can the Chatham House Rule ever apply online? Is it subject to FOI requests (yes, probably)? Similarly, if a business decision is reached using a collaborative platform, how do we ensure that this decision is formally recorded? All in all, how is the content generated within organisations by electronic social interactions governed?
Whilst I absolutely don’t advocate “hamstringing” internal social media initiatives with over zealous bureaucratic processes, which would after all defeat the point completely, I think the application of governance is an important, complicated and possibly overlooked issue. So, how to make sure that we can support and protect an organisation’s information assets but still allow collaboration and the free flow of information?
Perhaps this is a problem that really does need to be solved by the technology. Richard Dennison notes that:
“In reality, these tools are not actually ‘new’. They are, in essence, simple content management systems.”
so perhaps the key to the true Enterprise 2.0 systems of the near future (supported by clearly understood IG policies and guidance) will be to to seamlessly marry these simple, usable CMS features with more heavyweight (but still intuitive) document management capabilities to satisfy governance requirements … and at this point I’m possibly right back to my previous post regarding hopes for SharePoint 2010!
I found it harder than I expected to research this article as I couldn’t find much existing guidance or thinking around Information Governance in the context of using social tools for internal staff communication - this is an area that needs to be developed further and perhaps by this time next year internal social media policy will be as well developed as those pertaining to external, customer facing usage.
As ever I welcome any suggested sources of information and, of course, people’s opinions on this post. 
A few links:
 Your iPod, your choice ... When asked about the Facebook campaign, which has seen 600,000 users pledging to purchase the 1992 track “Killing in the name of” by Rage Against the Machine rather than see this years X Factor winner become number one yet again, Simon Cowell said it was “cynical and stupid”.
But surely this is just a backlash against not just what people perceive as the manufactured nature of the artists but the fact that a TV show now dictates the Christmas number one every year - for the last 4 years we’ve had:
- 2005 - Shayne Ward “That’s My Goal”
- 2006 - Leona Lewis “A Moment Like This”
- 2007 - Leon Jackson “When You Believe”
- 2008 - Alexandra Burke “Hallelujah”
- 2009 - Joe McWhathisface, or …?
All X Factor. All predictable. All boring.
Take a look at the list of christmas number ones we had before this, an eclectic mix of established artists and one hit wonders. Are we ever to see the likes of Mr Blobby or Renée and Renato reach number one again? No great loss you may say, but at least it represented a fair(ish), open and vaguely interesting competition.
The power of the Internet and social networking tools is that it allows people a voice and the ability to present a unified response to the kind of monopoly that the X factor has enjoyed over the Christmas charts - so who’s cynical? Facebook users or Cowell and co’s TV/newspaper media stranglehold? Perhaps the music charts wouldn’t be so prone to this kind of manipulation (from either side) if people got off their backsides on a Saturday night occasionally and went to watch a band rather than vegging out in front of their TVs and willingly ingesting this pap?
Disclaimer: this post in no way advocates Cliff Richard ever having a Christmas number one again!
Update 15 December - To reiterate the point I was trying to make, if you really want to “stick it to the man” don’t buy either track as you’re giving your cash to Sony either way - go and watch an unsigned band down your local pub instead!
 A patient using a mobile phone Following on from my previous post, it’s interesting to note that NHS Choices are also leveraging people’s growing use of mobile phones by launching a pilot project to enable patients to text their feedback on hospitals.
The SMS service is being trialled with the Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust in Essex. Patients who text their feedback will see their comments appear on the NHS Choices website, presumably after a moderation process.
Yvonne Blucher, executive director of nursing and patient care at the Princess Alexandra Hospital, said that:
“The text service complements the many existing ways in which our patients can feedback; this includes the hand-held Patient Experience Trackers, patient comment cards, hospital links with the patient council and feedback which is given verbally to our staff.”
For more on this story see E-Health Insider and the NHS Choices website.
 Getting ready for a night out on the town with your iPhone Earlier this week the Department of Health (DH) released the first official alcohol tracker application for mobile phones, helping people to track and monitor their alcohol intake over the festive period. It aims to help people work out how many alcoholic units there are in particular drinks, how much alcohol they have consumed over a set period and get personalised feedback on their drinking habits. The app also directs users to find local NHS clinics and advice centres should they feel they need additional help in cutting down their drinking.
This represents an admirable attempt by the DH to use new technology in targeting the demographic who are most likely to binge drink and be affected by the associated health problems. It’s likely that public sector bodies will be increasingly utilising mobile applications in the future with a predicted 44 % of UK mobile phone users having access to the internet via their handset by the end of 2009. Indeed a collaboration between businesslink.gov.uk and NHS Choices has seen the inception of a research and development programme called DotgovLabs which is, amongst other things, specifically looking at “what government services would be welcomed through an iPhone application” (Dotgov, issue 9).
Much as I agree with the intention behind the alcohol tracker, I do wonder how many people are actually going to be bothered to use it on a night out? Also, I hate to say it, but … it may be tempting for some younger, less mature drinkers (ahem!) to turn this into a new kind of “I had more units than you” drinking game!! This would somewhat defeat the object of the application I feel!
The alcohol tracker application is available from iTunes and the NHS Choices website.
Read more on the DH website or see the BBC article - “A mobile phone ‘alcohol tracker’ is to be launched”.
For a humorous review of the app and potential pitfalls in it’s use see Asavin Wattanajantra’s blog post, “A night out using the NHS iPhone alcohol app”.
 Connected teams At a Professional Developers Conference last Wednesday (18th November) Microsoft announced that Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 betas were now available.
As most who know me will be aware I’m not, to put it mildly, a big fan of SharePoint. Ok you can make improvements to it and there are some examples of good SharePoint “sites” out there, but out of the box and IMHO in the majority of uncontrolled, “one size fits all” implementations it’s clunky, unintuitive, unattractive and shows an appalling (and it could be said, criminal) lack of regard for accessibility. So what can we expect from SharePoint 2010 …?
Obviously people have only just started playing with the new version but going on the documentation I’ve read and a couple of very variable supplier demos we’ve seen over the last week or so some of the features it promises include:
- “Significant improvements” to the way in which the UI is implemented making it web standards and WCAG 2.0 compliant (it’s not really clear to me if this includes all the back end functionality but I have some doubts).
- The introduction of the Office Ribbon UI to provide a context based toolbar across the site.
- Social, folksonomy style tagging on all content including documents, wikis and blogs. Also allows managed metadata to enable centrally defined taxonomies.
- Improved MySite/MyProfile showing your recent activity, RSS feeds from other parts of the site and allowing you to follow colleagues and see their activity etc. essentially the SharePoint equivalent of your Facebook wall. You can also leave notes for colleagues using this wall feature.
- Ability to form editable groups and set permissions on these groups.
- Address book style people look-up and org chart style pages that show the relationships between colleagues and the skills they have (expertise tagging). This allows you to see colleagues with similar skills to your own which will help to build communities of practice across the organisation.
- Rate content using a star ratings system.
- Better offline access to files.
A more comprehensive (and probably accurate) overview of features is available on the SharePoint 2010 website.
Oh, and it promises better cross browser compatibility and might hasten the demise of IE6 which has got to be a good thing! Dare I say … so far … it looks potentially quite good …
Microsoft’s strapline for SharePoint 2010 is “The Business Collaboration Platform for the Enterprise and the Web” so it’s clear what market they are going after. The statement:
“SharePoint 2010 is the business collaboration platform that enables you to connect and empower people through formal and informal business communities, within the enterprise and beyond, and to manage content throughout the information lifecycle.”
Extract from a statement by Microsoft
indicates that Microsoft now feel they are in a better position to compete with current market leaders in this area and provide true social business, Enterprise 2.0 software. And where SharePoint may have the edge over the likes of Jive, for example, is in that many organisations already run MOSS 2007 to a greater or lesser degree so will therefore have much of the infrastructure and skills in place to support 2010. Whilst the benefits of a more social, collaborative approach to staff Intranets are well documented (Weinberger (2009), Li and Bernoff (2008), Azua (2009) see reading and offline references) the use of SharePoint may well seem more palatable to CEOs and senior management who can often be resistant to the idea of introducing a “Facebook for staff” but could be more easily sold on using a well established, known business tool to break down information silos, cut costs, improve staff productivity etc, etc.
It remains to be seen whether with SharePoint 2010 Microsoft can truly compete with some of their arguably more appealing rivals in delivering a usable, accessible, social media style business collaboration tool but something tells me I’ll be seeing a lot more of it over the coming months.
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The use of social media by charities and individuals alike to mobilise people into donating after the recent earthquake in Haiti has been widely reported. With Facebook and Twitter being the biggest referrers to the DEC (Disasters Emergency Coalition) website after Google and the BBC and a reported £8m being raised online following their first announcement on Twitter (see “Social media has huge impact on Haiti Appeal”, “Calls for Haiti donations spread thru social Web” and “Twitter and Facebook praised by Haiti charity”), I was interested in looking at how charities are using social channels for more day to day, you might say business as usual, campaigning.
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