“If you don’t ask, you don’t get” – trad proverb.

One of the greatest attractions of the web and internet technology is the ability to interact with others and widen one’s network of contacts, for business or simple pleasure.

In the first days of the web, physics students and the socially inept could publish their knowledge and inner thoughts to grey-backgrounded, courier-fonted, image-free webpages of interminable length. Even before the World Wide Web, online bulletin boards attracted hackers and phreaks sharing information and arranging real life meet-ups. If you don’t believe me, check out the bizarrely true story of early hackers that inspired the film 80’s film ‘War Games’, in Michele Slatalla’s melodramatically titled book “Masters of Deception: the Gang That Ruled Cyberspace”.

These early worlds of techies and geeks using their specialist knowledge has given way to services expected by most users of the internet, but each tool has a subtly different flavour. When the guys at creative design agency 0404 created the local and wild food brand River Cottage Community site blogs, forums and question/answer tools combined to give community members a range of ways to interact, but it’s important to see how these tools differ:

Blogs

Personal commentaries – like this blog – where individuals publish knowledge and opinion for others to read, with the ability to reply by posting comments, vetted before publication by the blog’s owner. Factoid … ‘blog’ is a contraction of ‘web log’ – a personal journal published to the internet
Good for: Freedom of opinion; building personal or brand reputation; speed of publication; moderating responses; being shared and forwarded.
Bad for: Not great at interaction as often passively read.

Forums

These are areas for debate and discussion. A question or opinion is published, often within a topic structure or taxonomy and members can respond in a ‘thread’ of discussion.
Good for: Starting debate and garnering opinion; encouraging multiple individuals to interact and respond.
Bad for: Forums can be cliquey with popular or long standing contributors and can lead to unpleasant behaviour and ‘flaming’; posting questions for quick and/or brief responses; can be intimidating for new members to join in.

Q&A services

Similar to forums, but often less structured and less formal. A question is posted and is open for respondents. The business networking site Linked In offers this ability, along with the choices of allowing anyone to view and answer your question, selecting contacts from your list to send the question to, or both.
Good for: Quickies (e.g. How do I do ‘this’?), garnering quick opinion from previously unknown sources
Bad for: Can collect repetitious answers (although this could help by weighting opinion); lack of visibility of question.

Why bother with any of these at all?

The obvious answer is for getting answers to your problems. However, asking a question is in itself a communication and can improve an individual’s or brand’s reputation through exposure, willingness to interact and implied knowledge and involvement with topic areas. For example, a company that blogs or asks questions about environmental issues implies a knowledge and care for such, improving the perception of their social conscience. Geddit? It’s like being chatty at a dinner party and instead of telling everyone else about ‘you’, asking about ‘them’ instead – by your questions and your answers people will be able to form opinions about the ‘real’ (or at least ‘perceived real’) you.

Go on then … what more do you want to know?

The Long Dog

“If you’ve got the time to do it badly, why haven’t you got the time to do it well?”, Gerry McGovern

Intranets are great. Believe me, I’ve worked on a few, and I think they’re the unsung heroes of a company’s digital paraphernalia. Great for providing a portal to a company’s own online services; great for providing virtual spaces for collaboration; great for broadcasting news and announcements across the globe; great for internal branding; great for supporting employees’ day-to-day tasks.

But … and this might sound like heresy … they’re not that good for internal communication.

By now any comms professional worth their salt has realised ‘newsletter comms’ doesn’t cut it. Broadcasting static information, voluntarily digested by mute, time-starved audiences only answers a small proportion of issues (see where I’m going?). Trouble is a lot of managers (some comms pros) see the intranet as The Answer –whack up the content, email a link and voila, communications done. Sadly, they don’t see that being digital doesn’t make it any better than a printed newsletter. All the printing and global distribution costs are cut, sure, but if the comms isn’t working, why not save even more money and just not do it at all? Hey, you could even do the comms face-to-face – now there’s an idea.

While it’s true an increasing workforce of generation Y-ers expect digital tools and unbounded internet access there are an lot of clever and experienced people spending an lot of clever and experienced time and money making sure their digital services survive against their competitors and provide what people want. Plugging new technology into an intranet then waiting for objectives to be met and the ROI to roll is unlikely to work.

One of the reasons networks like Facebook and Twitter work is they mimic real-world social interactions and their rewards but also their risks. Not everyone wants to interact through a digital medium: I work with an experienced digital consultant who hates the very idea of social sites, let alone Luddites who object to IT in general. On top of this organisations are often nervous about letting their little darlings loose on tools of free speech and the employees are often nervous about speaking freely for fear of ridicule or retribution.

Yes, intranets are great, but lazy managers can sweep communications tasks under the proverbial carpet and employees are often too busy to read lengthy web pages or, worse, PDF announcements *shudder* which they might liked to have kicked back with and read in print at their desks with cup of something steamy.

Intranets are often the solution cart put before the communications horse. Think of them as one of many channels, use all the good stuff they can do (global reach, real time publishing, feedback, audience tracking etc), but don’t forget they’re just one tool in the professional’s toolbox.

Some ranty reminders…

- Tailor your communications to the needs of your audience as well as your business (horse THEN cart)
- Don’t try and make a social networking playground unless you want people to treat it like a playground: the ‘in crowd’, the bullies and those who lurk in corners and solitude
- Your intranet is only one channel in a suite that can provide effective internal communications

The Long Dog

Usability has been around long before the web. How usable something is can mean the difference between life and death for a product or service.

When things are unusable – or at least difficult to use – people become frustrated and look for alternatives. If we don’t design for how people use things, more people will abandon our efforts and turn to other sources; in the case of internet sites, our competitors.

“If something’s not usable, I just don’t use it as much”, Steve Krug,‘Don’t Make Me Think’

There are some great ‘real world’ examples of why products have worked because they were more usable than their competitor’s offering. In ‘The Invisible Computer’, by Don Norman (of Nielsen Norman Group fame) he talks about the success and failure of the first home music systems: Edison’s phonograph and Berliner’s gramophone.

Before the advent of tape cassettes instead of loading the wax drum recording of our favourite artists we used vinyl discs – records. Why? One reason is that despite the superior sound quality of the phonograph’s wax drums, they were costly and unwieldy. Imagine the space needed for 40 drums, as against 40 albums. The discs were convenient, storable and … ‘usable’.

Unlike Edison, who decided to save money on marketing, Berliner also paid for the best stars of the day to be recorded which, while not improving gramophone per se, improved its ‘perceived’ value. People aren’t logical – we are wilful and fickle – and the audience for home music soon abandoned the phonograph for the more usable and more popular gramophone.

Q: Why aren’t we all driving around in zero-emission, electric and personal-propulsion powered vehicles first invented in the 80’s and retailing at less than £400?

A: The Sinclair C-5

Despite its undeniable environmental and cost advantages, it looked unsafe and people felt they would look ludicrous driving one (I think we all agree on this one – if not, pleeeeease check out the picture).

The only exceptions to this are covered by a usability ‘law’ which roughly says that the effort someone is willing to put into using a system or product depends on the perceived value. In other words, if I think I’m going to get a lot out of something, I’ll persevere: suffering the adverts to get free music downloads; the modern car (c’mon … pedals, levers AND a steering wheel all together?); getting married and cancelling your account with a utility supplier by automated or offshore phone service. As I write this on the train, the woman opposite meis knitting with five, yes FIVE needles – I rest my case.

Lastly, there are some things that are difficult to improve on: The Book. They’re portable, often attractively designed, they project something about us to others and for reference purposes you know that all in the information you have to search through is in your hands and not spread across the questionable quality and infinite wilds of cyberspace. How have we improved it with eBooks and the readers that accompany them? Ok, you can now carry many books in one device, but in terms of how we want it to work – we’ve upgraded the concepts of contents and index pages by adding ‘search’. Not bad for a couple of thousand years of product evolution.

OK … so … and the moral of this story is? Remember that regardless of whether it’s a website, a printed document, a face-to-face event, a new mobile device handset … whatever … make sure people can use it in the way they want or need to. If it’s too difficult … say goodbye to your phonographs.

The Long Dog

C-3PO: Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1!

Han Solo: Never tell me the odds!

How do the heroes of Star Wars succeed against impossible odds? Why does Mowgli make it to the man village without being munched, crushed or descending into beatnik monkey decadence? Leaving artistic licence and the need for a happy ending aside, one explanation is that it’s the mix of characters – of personalities.

In the workplace it’s just as important to understand the different personalities in a team, to be able to articulate the way people operate or for communicating the needs of others.

‘Insight profiling’ is a system of identifying different personality types, their behaviours and attitudes, so you can understand how you and others interact and avoid potential problems and personality clashes. I briefly covered Myers Briggs personality profiling in my post “We are all individuals … I’m not!” and while Insight Profiling can be as deep and subtle it can also be used in a quick-n-dirty way to reduce personalities to four broad types and their opposites.

I recently attended a client away day, hosted and facilitated by Colour Works, including some great Insight Profiling action. This post is unashamedly inspired by that day and is a VERY brief taste of Insight Profiling, by using Star Wars heroes and Jungle Book characters to illustrate how it works.

There are four main ‘colours’ of personality and traits peculiar to each. Choose which seems best to suit you, or predict which suit colleagues and friends:

To better understand how these work and interact, it’s possible to have a full profile done to see how each colour is represented (e.g. 40% red, 35% green, 10%yellow, 15% blue), so we can understand where our strengths are, but also how we complement or contradict others.

As a snapshot, it’s also useful to understand opposite ‘colours’ where we’ll find clashes or where we may need to rethink our approach to people (e.g.whether someone will make a good or dreadful presenter or leader). The colour wheel image shows the colours with their traits and which colour is the opposite (reds / greens and blues/ yellows). To help understand this and for a bit of fun, I’ve allocated heroes from Star Wars and some of the major Jungle Book characters to the wheel.

For those of you who’ve already or are about to ask the questions, the answers are:

- Yes, King Louie is a Yellow
- Yes, Darth Vader would be a Red and Obi Wan Kenobi would be a Green, in direct opposition to each other
- No, being an Earth Green doesn’t stop you from raining down righteous Jedi lightsabre retribution

The Long Dog (a Sunshine Yellow, but not a Jedi)

If you build an interactive social service like a forum, wiki, network, Twitter account, blog (etc) there’s a good chance that it might not work as well as you’d hoped.

A recent conversation with a colleague was about the lack of engagement with some forums she’d launched. I sent her the following potential diagnoses and suggested cures and here they are again for public consumption.

Personal confidence
Problem – The fear of ‘doing it wrong’ or ’saying the wrong thing’ is very human and why most people conform in societies. For those not used to using social tools, it can like asking them to stand up in a crowded room and give their opinion. Some will love it – most will be scared.
Cure – Find or incentivise champions who are willing to spend time contributing, and selling the ideas to others. Keep topics open and encourage champions to support newbies (see my personal rant “Antisocial networking behaviour – a case study“).

Culture
Problem – Forums, intranets, social networks and a whole lot of other services are often perceived as non essential. If people believe they should be working, or that their leaders will be judging if they working or not, this might not be conducive to voluntary engagement.
Cure – Make it possible to Integrate the social tools in people’s day-to-day work and make their benefit easy to see and articulate to others. For internal channels get seniors or respected figures to post, but also to respond ‘as equals’ to people at all levels and lead the way.

Visibility
Problem – I saw a site once that had a social tool that was dead in the water and one of the reasons was that it wasn’t accessible from the home page and there was no way to see posts or responses, other than by taking time out to go and have a look.
Cure – Raise the visibility. Make it part of a wider service, put a ‘latest’ feed on the home page, feature interesting topics or responses in other channels or areas, don’t forget a link on the homepage.

Technofear
Problem – People simply don’t know how to make the system work. What do I have to do to make or reply to a post? Will it go wrong if I press this? Remember, a lot of people still think the web is all about IT
Cure: Make the system as easy to use as possible. Showcase the forums in road shows or big meetings, and demonstrate how they work. Find ways of presenting the forums familiar to your audience.

Relevance
Problem – Is the service or tool really interesting to the general audience? Finding the balance between weighty problems that are stratospherically distant or irritatingly mundane chatter is difficult.
Cure: Allow all topics to be posted (within the usual bounds of decency, privacy etc) but nurture your champions to post relevant topics that people can then feel confident in engaging with. Use your own professional skills to identify and craft interesting topics with a call to action, so people are encouraged to respond and not just read and move on.

Population density
Problem – Someone whose name I forget did some research into forums and communities of practice and found that something like out of the 100% of people who engage, 1% are people who post, 10% are people who frequently reply, another 10% occasionally reply and the rest are ‘lurkers’ – those who read, but almost never reply or engage.
Cure – While it’s a question of ‘how long is a piece of string?’, consider if you have a critical mass of audience who will provide a healthy, interactive community.

All this can be summed up in one simple principle – If it’s going to work, it needs to usable and useful.

Before launching a social tool, consider some of these ahead of time, but don’t forget to understand why you’re doing it in the first place. What’s the purpose? What do you want the outcome to be? What will be the process or vehicle for reaching those outcomes?

Have you seen a social tool that was either particularly good or bad in engaging you?

The Long Dog