Yammer and why activity streams are a key foundation for integrated applications and organizations

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I caught up with some of the Yammer team this morning, including Chief Customer Officer David Obrand, while they are in town for the Yammer on Tour series. 

I was particularly interested in talking with them about Yammer’s shift to activity streams. In the massive convergence of enterprise social platforms that we’ve seen over the last years, one of the major emerging spaces is activity streams.

Last year I wrote about activity streams in the context of Tibbr’s launch. Tibbr put activity streams squarely on the map, by integrating status messages from people with notifications generated by enterprise software including ERP, CRM, and HR systems. Employees are able to follow their colleagues and they can also follow updates on any activity, including events, projects, or even invoices. Tibbr was very well positioned to do that given Tibco’s history in providing enterprise integration middleware.
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Social Media Strategy Framework: Explanation and guide

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Our Social Media Strategy Framework has been one of our most popular frameworks, with well over 100,000 views, as well as more for the translations into 12 languages.

I have used the framework extensively as a starting point to help executives understand the space and clients to develop social media strategies. Many people have told me that they have used the framework with their own organizations or clients to develop effective social media strategies, or have shared it in presentations or online. I’m delighted that it has proved so useful.

However the visual still can be hard for people to make sense of, particularly in terms of how it should be applied to their own organization. To help that I have made a brief video explaining and going through the Social Media Strategy Framework. It simply provides a high-level overview of the framework, but for many people it will probabl ybe more useful to watch the video than spend time looking at the diagram. Feel free to use the video however you want if it is helpful.

5 things to tweet and 5 things NOT to tweet

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Earlier this week I spoke at a financial advisor retreat in the stunning Margaret River region of Western Australia, a region of wide-open beauty that is the source of many extraordinary wines.

I gave two keynotes at the event on subsequent days, on How to Lock-in Your Clients, and Success in a Connected World, which drew on my connected world visual framework.

I will write more later on the quite specific topic of Success in a Connected World for Financial Advisors. For now I thought I’d share a brief extract of the content I covered in my keynote on how to approach Twitter.

Around 15-20% of the audience had Twitter accounts, so my suggestions were intended as a high-level introduction on how to get started on Twitter, though the advice is relevant to anyone. The recommendations are based on my own thoughts as well as a range of research, notably the excellent Who Gives A Tweet? Evaluating Microblog Content Value from Carnegie Mellon University. This is what I suggested:

WHAT TO TWEET
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Le futur de Facebook et le rôle de la France

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Voici ma première vidéo en francais, qui est à propos du futur de Facebook.

Quelques miettes du video :
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Which countries have the most Twitter users per capita?

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Recently web monitoring firm Semiocast published a list of the top 20 countries in number of Twitter accounts.

Not surprisingly US was top with 107 million users, with Brazil coming in second at 33 million and Japan next at just under 30 million.

I am always interested in comparing the degree of social media engagement across countries, so we did a simple analysis to find out the proportion of each country’s population that has a Twitter account, as below.


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Facebook’s IPO and its plans for China and global domination

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Yesterday I was interviewed by Radio Australia in a piece titled Facebook IPO filing reveals China plans.

Their website includes a podcast and transcript of the segment. Below are the parts where I spoke.

BAHFEN: The question I put to Ross is…what do these excerpts from Facebook’s IPO filing say about its intentions, with regard to China?

DAWSON: Facebook has global ambitions and the biggest potential market of all is China. So Facebook has been very keen to get into China for some time, yet it is blocked inside China. In fact Mike Zuckerberg has been learning Mandarin which seems to probably reflect his ambition to get Facebook into China. At the moment there seems to be no possible way in the short to medium term that China will open up to Facebook, but it is possible and it’s certainly something which is high on the long term strategic agenda for Facebook.
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The many and varied risk factors in Facebook’s IPO

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My favorite part of reading S-1 IPO filings is always the risk factors. They are seemingly endless, as the company tries to cover its ass for all the things that might conceivably go wrong. But they are often very insightful in pointing to the real issues facing the company.

To save you reading it all, here is a highly selective summary of just a few of the interesting risk factors Facebook points to in its IPO filing:

If we fail to retain existing users or add new users, or if our users decrease their level of engagement with Facebook, our revenue, financial results, and business may be significantly harmed.
…
Any number of factors could potentially negatively affect user retention, growth, and engagement, including if:

* we are unable to successfully balance our efforts to provide a compelling user experience with the decisions we make with respect to the frequency, prominence, and size of ads and other commercial content that we display;
* there are changes in user sentiment about the quality or usefulness of our products or concerns related to privacy and sharing, safety, security, or other factors;
* we are unable to manage and prioritize information to ensure users are presented with content that is interesting, useful, and relevant to them;
* we adopt policies or procedures related to areas such as sharing or user data that are perceived negatively by our users or the general public;
etc.
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ABC TV: Facebook’s IPO, Apple’s cash pile, and RIM’s woes

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I was interviewed last night on ABC’s The Business in a broad-ranging discussion about Facebook’s IPO, Apple’s cash pile, and Research In Motion’s future.


Click on the image to watch the interview on the ABC website

I’ll add some more comments on these very interesting topics shortly.

The headache (and opportunity) of managing your company’s online reputation

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In a world of instantaneous information flows, managing company reputation is ever more fraught.

An interesting article in Techworld titled How to manage your online reputation goes into the issue, describing how pharma firm GlaxoSmithKline had one of its trademarks hijacked by a dodgy company. The piece goes on:

“Reputations are more visible – and more vulnerable – than ever before,” says futurist Ross Dawson, who cites reputation as one of the key themes for 2012. So what can you do to ensure that your organisation is remembered for the right reasons?

The article then suggests some strategies, including this quote from me:
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The decade ahead for media

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The latest issue of the annual publication Media Trends + Strategy magazine kicks off with a feature article I wrote titled The Decade Ahead for Media. Here is the article:

The decade ahead for media

The future of the media industry as a whole is extraordinarily bright. Alongside the extraordinary rise of social media and a connected world, in the last years we have learned the previously undiscovered depths of the intrinsic hunger humans have for media. As value creation in the global economy increasingly shifts to the flow of information and ideas, and every company can be considered a media organisation, those with the established capabilities, structures, and relationships in media creation and dissemination have an unparalleled opportunity before them.
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