At current growth rates everyone in the world will have a Twitter account by December 21 2009!

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ComScore has just released global Twitter usage figures for March, showing a 95% growth in the month to 19.1 million visitors.

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Using the same methodology as my At current growth rates everyone in the US will have a Twitter account by August 22 2009! blog post from last week (extrapolating current exponential growth rates)…

Everyone in the world will have a Twitter account by December 21 2009! (which will be a nice Christmas present for the Twitter founders)

US users currently comprise 48.6% of global visitors. It’s interesting that US growth is 131% compared to global growth at 95%. If these growth rates continue the US will again have the majority of global users, after having started as a mainly US application and then gained significant traction internationally. Undoubtedly by later this year global growth rates will pick up relative to the US (especially since everyone in the US will be on Twitter by August 22!)

10 DOs and DONTs of organizational change

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For a recent boardroom presentation to a group of CEOs of large organizations I prepared ten ‘dos and donts’ on my topic of organizational change.

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Enterprise 2.0 Implementation Framework

I drew on the core ideas in our Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report and framework (as above). Enterprise 2.0 is ultimately far more about organizational change than technology, though it happens to be driven by web technologies. As such much of my focus today is on how to change organizations, to literally create the next version of the enterprise. Far more details on how to put the ideas below into practice are in the Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report.

My list got an extremely positive response from the audience, so I thought I’d share it here.

DOS

1. Create a vision

The most important aspect of your vision is that it must be compelling. Unless people are drawn to it and want to help create it, it is useless. This means it needs to be focused on the benefits to everyone in the organization.

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Visualization: Wikis in the enterprise

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Today we are continuing our series of visual representations of social media tools inside organizations, taken from our Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report.

The diagram below was used in the chapter on wikis in the enterprise, to illustrate how wikis can be used in organizational activities.

Go to the Implementing Enterprise 2.0 downloads page for several free chapters, including the chapter on social networking on the enterprise, with its own diagram on how social networks relate to other Enterprise 2.0 tools.

More Enterprise 2.0 visualizations coming soon.

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Intranet Innovation Awards: Submissions open

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Unfortunately posting this a bit late, but there is still time to submit your awesome intranet work to the Intranet Innovation Awards – the deadline is May 1.

The awards are run annually by StepTwo Designs, and for the last two years have featured some fantastic examples of innovation in internal web initiatives.

One of my favorites from the winners is Janssen-Cilag. Nathan Wallace, who spoke at the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum both this year and last year, shares his story in this video.

Advanced Human Technologies is an awards supporter, so we’ll be sharing more when the winners are announced later this year.

An Argument for Heterarchy: creating more effective organizational structures

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The latest issue of People and Strategy Journal has an extremely interesting Point/ Counterpoint feature. Download the full article and responses here.

Karen Stephenson, a leading network theorist and practitioner, wrote an article Neither Hierarchy nor Network: An Argument for Heterarchy, examining how heterarchies, that bring together elements of networks and hierarchies, are the most relevant organizational structures for our times.

Leading people in the field were invited to respond to the article, with responses from Edgar Schein of MIT, Robert Eccles of Harvard Business School, Charles Handy, Tracy Cox of Raytheon, Patti Anklam, Barry Frew of Center for Executive Education, Art Kleiner the editor-in-chief of Strategy+Business magazine, and Ross Dawson of Advanced Human Technologies (me :-) ).

My response is below. If you are interested in how organizational structures can be more effective in a connected world, I strongly recommend reading the full article and responses – this is an extremely topical issue.

Heterarchy: Technology, Trust and Culture

Stephenson is absolutely right to emphasize both the rapid rise in interconnection that individuals, organizations, and societies are currently experiencing, and the resulting interdependence that stems from that. Relatively few have yet grasped that the degree of interdependence generated in a global connected economy significantly changes the drivers of individual and collective success. Central to these drivers are the organizational structures that coalesce value from disparate participants.

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Telstra releases social media policy: it’s time for organizations to get their act together

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This morning’s Sydney Morning Herald displayed a prominent headline Telstra lays down the law on Twitter. The article began:

Telstra has become the first major Australian company to set down guidelines on the use of Facebook, Twitter and similar websites by its employees.

First? According to whom? As noted by Stephen Collins, the Australian Public Service Commission publicly announced protocols for online media participation in December. A number of major Australian companies have established guidelines for social media, they just didn’t issue press releases about it as Telstra has.

In any case, Telstra’s social media policy a solid document and it’s good that Telstra has both created it and released it publicly. (See the social media policy itself and the blog post launching it.) Companies that have not addressed these issues are essentially creating a liability out of what could be a strong positive for the organization.

The extensive background to the announcement (including all the fun and games of @fakestephenconroy) is given in an article on ITNews titled Telstra staff given rules on use of social networks. In the article I am quoted:

Ross Dawson, chairman of social networking analyst group Advanced Human Technologies, described Telstra’s new policy as “solid and straightforward.”

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Des Walsh video interviews at Enterprise 2.0 Part 2: Stephen Collins, Ross Dawson, Steven Noble

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Following Des Walsh’s video interviews with Chris Lampard, Jenny Williams and Peter Williams at the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum, here are three more interviews from the event with Des’s accompanying blog posts…

Stephen Collins (trib), acidlabs

Des Walsh blog post on Stephen Collins interview

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At current growth rates everyone in the US will have a Twitter account by August 22 2009!

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ComScore has just announced that the number of Twitter users in the US went up by 131% in March.

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At this rate, everyone in the US will have a Twitter account by August 22 of this year.

In other news, CNN (which just acquired CNNbrk) and Ashton Kutcher are battling it out to be the first to reach one million followers.

With many million of synapses now firing frantically, the global brain is finally awakening…

Yet another logo competition – first public news of a new influence ratings engine

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I’ve just posted my third logo competition on 99 designs in as many months, as I am now firmly in venture generation mode, and have found that 99 designs can provide excellent results if you approach it the right way. After rebranding Advanced Human Technologies (full launch announced shortly) and launching events firm The Insight Exchange 10 days ago, I have just put up a logo competition for Repyoot, which will be announced soon pre-beta as what will soon emerge as a leading influence and reputation ratings engine.

So if you’re a designer or know a great designer who would like to create a very influential logo design, check out the logo competition!

Largest ever organizational network analysis shows how social networks drive performance

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For years now I have been trying to get the message out to senior executives that effective social networks are critical to business performance. By now that is well understood, in part supported by the large body research and academic literature on how social networks in and across organizations drive results and performance.

Now researchers from IBM Research and MIT have undertaken the largest study of its kind ever. BusinessWeek writes that Researchers at IBM and MIT have found that certain e-mail connections and patterns at work correlate with higher revenue production.

The report itself, Value of Social Network — A Large-Scale Analysis on Network Structure Impact to Financial Revenue of Information Technology Consultants, provides detail on their findings – for those interested in these issues it’s well worth a read.

In summary, there were four key results:

1. Structural diversity and centrality of social networks are positively correlated with performance for both individual consultant and project teams.

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