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I like conferences when people report and share real case experiences, a process they went through which is described and explained for you.

Walton Smith’s (@walton3) talk at yesterday’s Webcom 09 was one of those. He introduced us to the Hello.bah.com social network’s implementation process which took place about a year ago.

When I checked out the program schedule, I relaized thatEnterprise 2.0 is a topic I know less than Marketing 2.0 and UX Solutions 2.0 but I got out of the conference with a clear understanding of the key drivers of implementation success from the Booz Allen Hamilton’s case presented. Here are my notes directly typed on my Blackberry during Walton’s presentation.

INTRODUCTION: About BAH’s organizational context
A large consulting firm of 23000 employees + 5000 new to be hired this year + lots of partners, all geographically spreaded throughout the world…

STARTING POINT
Walton’s team tired with “Do U know?” emails…

Hi Walton,
“Do you know someone who’s got sharepoint expertise?”

SN PROJECT’S GOAL: To set up an open but secure environment to unlock the power of the organization, meaning: to agregate useful content back to folks which can be tied to one’s profile.

TECHNOLOGICAL CHOICE
Process: Walton’s team sat down with big vendors to check out their solutions
But they needed an agile platform and opted for open source solutions which could be tied to the different tools they were already using within BAH.

This choice clearly reveals a focus on the users, not forcing them to switch tools, but adding to what they were used to login to…

FOCUS #1: CHANGE MANAGEMENT
Half of budget on change management, the transformational experience which requires internal buy in for new tools adoption.

• Train new employees on day one and transfer the skills to former ones with demos and hands-on activities for these are the ones which work best for improving adoption behaviors and the adoption rate.

• Don’t force usage upon folks but implement built-in intrinsic and extrinsic incentives through the choice of useful aggregating tools, search results with profile’s ranking based on participation, allow for peer evaluation and comments, and make sure employee assesment includes SN content contribution.

• Track adoption metrics and usage level statistics.

After one year: 50% of the company’s employees actively contribute to the SN, meaning they are hello.bah.com posters vs lurkers…

• Report back benefits to leadership!

ADOPTION 101
Before: BAH had a wiki that only a few used
Goal: to develop a day2day use of the SN
BAH first added a kind of LinkedIn app called Connexion to help people make connections… increasing the exchanging volume potential…and got more than 10000 profiles within 7 days
Key success factor: Ensure support within a 24h response cycle.

SHARING CONTENT: the key activity to unlock the power of the organization
To allow both unstructured collaboration with the wiki and structured collaboration with some sharepoint – from within and with external partners.

All employees at all levels can add and create content or community without hierarchy.

Particular case with employees of the Facebook gen: heavy users but would not add value to the system contributing, as if they did not have the intellectual capital to do so. Coaching sessions were set-up to train them and reverse the situation, transforming them into hello.bah.com champions.

FINAL KEYWORD: CONTENT AGGREGATION which can immediately go back to the community
Employee profile pre-filled with all info already known by the company to allow people to look for all employees with Sharepoint expertise for example…

Subscriptions to each and every content available via RSS or email alerts (piecemeal or group level).

If you are interested in learning more about this topic, I had the privilege of participating in the Webcom live and interviewed Walton Smith after his talk.

Also related to the topic, here is a link to the interview of Jean-Pierre Desbenoît who presented the recent pilot rollout of the intranet of the French Government Civil Aviation General Direction (DGAC) at Webcom 09.

Also, I want to let you know that all the Powerpoint presentations of this Webcom 09 edition will be available on their site within 10 days.

I am very glad to report that I enjoyed this year’s edition of the Enterprise 2.0 track at Webcom since it was not 100% the case unfortunaltely last year, as Andrew McAffee, the one that every one was expecting… left me a bit disappointed as I sadly wrote in my blog when I got home

I truly had the feeling Professor McAffee basically presented the key points from his article “Enterprise 2.0: the Dawn of Emergent Collaboration“, which is an excellent article but I had read it already since it was published two years before that Webcom edition he was presenting in 2006. At the time, the article’s integral text had been made available for free as a ‘classic’ for a short period of time in 2007 from MIT SMR.

Une nouvelle fois, j’ai eu le plaisir de participer avec Christian Aubry et Charles Prémont du Lien Multimédia au Webcom live, la méta-conférence comme l’a si bien décrit Christian.

Pour décrire la façon dont je le vis, le Webcom live est pour moi la continuité online de la conférence du Webcom qui se déroule offline. Il s’agit d’être présent-e sur place et de réaliser et diffuser des entrevues avec des conférenciers et des participants de la conférence.

Tout cela permet à ceux qui ne peuvent assister à la conférence en présence, de la suivre néanmoins de façon parallèle mais en temps réel et sur fond d’ambiance de la journée.

Durant la journée, j’ai eu la chance d’interviewer:

Panel animé par Sylvain Sénécal avec Justin Kingsley et Michelle Blanc.

Première présentation: Justin Kingsley BW/ bleublancrouge

Commence par nous inviter à nous faire des amis dans la salle…juste comme FB….
Parallèle avec église et JC avec son message…
Disciples/ambassadeurs + mort pour son produit + livre pour en parler…meilleure campagne publicitaire à vie…depuis le temps qu’on en parle…;-)
C’est pas plus que ça un SN, alors pourquoi ça fait peur?

Qu’est-ce qu’a change internet?
Accès immédiat à l’info

Qu’est-ce qui est différent?
Plus que jamais c’est la qualité d’une campagne qui compte

Comment rejoindre son bon public?
ex. Différence entre espadrilles et t-shirt pour un jeune?
Prévoir budget vs instant cash

Se poser la bonne question: C’est quoi l’émotion de notre consommateur?
celui qui achète mon produit par amour pour le produit, par amour pour la marque, pour la frime, etc.?

Blogs qui ont compris…à checker:
T-unit, Offthehook

Conclusion marketing avec les réseaux sociaux:
Fin des interruptions injustifiées ou justifier les interruptions
“Bye bye new and improved” ou pubs médias de masse du genre
attention le futur de la comm est dans le PR…
Il faut impliquer nos meilleurs porte-paroles…les consos de nos produits…nos consommateurs

Mktg classic steps:
step1: Qu’est-ce qui différencie ma marque et
step 2: qu’est-ce qui identifie mon public cible…
bien avant le step 3 qui est de choisir les outils…y a tout un process clé avant de prévoir une campagne de comm et quel outil web 2.0 utiliser…ce ne sont que des outils…

Seconde présentation: Michelle Blanc

Présentation plus centrée sur le sujet de la #genc que sur les réseaux sociaux comme la première.

Stats: La Gen C. (=8M) a depassé les baby boomers en quantité…watch out and be nice to them …votre sort de Baby boomer va bientôt être entre leurs mains…

Ne pas faire la joke à la Dilbert…du père qui ne va pas digger son fils s’il met un truc en ligne sur son blogue…

Se rappeler: la techno la plus fascinante pour un ado = frigidaire…;-)

Sans blague: Ados sont des natifs du multitasking (youtube, msn chat, sandwich, et itune…) et dans ce sens, ont clairement une avance sur les baby boomers en ligne grâce à cela…(note perso: quoique une étude récente de Stanford U indique que le multitasking serait un mythe d’efficacité…)

Comprendre et aller dans le sens des genc et de leurs pratiques: 39% 18-24 ans refuseraient de travailler pour une compagnie qui ne leur laisserait pas aller sur FB alors autoriser le Blackberry autant que le Facebook…

Embrasser le ‘chialage’ sur votre marque…plutôt que d’essayer de le contrôler…en jetant les jeunes genc de votre entreprise au coeur de la conversation avec vos consos…

Ne laissez pas votre place au cybersquatage: Exemple de Michelle dans son branding d’elle-même avec sa ‘marque’ qui sort en premier citée par elle-même sur ses espaces en ligne.

Questions de Sylvain Sénécal et de la salle

1: Sur la question de contrôle avec les outils web 2.0: tout le monde le perd un peu finalement, le conso comme les compagnies…comment adresser cela?

MB: recommande d’avoir une politique éditoriale de commentaires sur les blogues d’affaires (lien de son site) et suggère celle de la US Air force pour adresser les commentaires négatifs notamment

2: Comment réconcilier pub et attention?

MB: CMOs’ dilemna: Mktg de masse ne fonctionne plus et Mktg de niche ne rejoint pas la masse…

JK: Campagne Whopper sacrifice si vous sacrifiez 10 de vos amis on vous donne un whopper…23000 personnes…genre de campagne ‘faut que tu ailles checker ca’…

3: On a l’impression à vous écouter que y a juste Internet qui marche…mais en fait c’est quoi le mix idéal?

MB: ‘je vais te répondre par Internet’…;-))

JK: Integration de medias 360 + 10
JK: Pubs sur Madman via Web

From Quebec’s Centre des Congrès for the CEFRIO’s conference about Gen C

Here are my notes jotted down live during Danah Boyd’s talk

Youth Generated Culture: Growing up in an era of social media

Section I: General intro about SN
from the ethnographer

Approach: To get into the lives of people

Goal: to understand the practices and implications for education

Uses vary by the culture but there are some fundamentals
For young people primary reasons to use SN is to engage with people they know already, true friends

You have to ‘write yourself’ as a digital body to get over the basic IP address that everybody necessarily is on Internet…

Common pattern: People lie about their age, weight, etc. Inacurate info on profiles (sometimes for safety and sometimes because they feel there is no need because SN are just for friends who know everything already (ex. teens write that they are 95 y.o.)

Young people add html and other dev for appropriation of their own their sites, it is their crazy representations, not in the system

On SN friends are not friends in the same way because of the public articulation which is a unique thing and the very challenge of SN

SN are sets of drama for young people : list of boyfriends, etc

Their conversations may seem like a waste of time and pointless activities when you listen to young people (y.p.) conversations…how are you…what are u doing nothing…but correspond to social grooming just like our adults’ corridor conversations about the weather…constitute social maintenance…they do not say so much about what you say but what the relationship is about…

Sense of awareness of your people, life patterns are shared ‘live’ for ex. with status updates to keep in touch with people around you

Twitter changed the I follow you and you follow me…you can follow s.o. you don’t know and not necessarily be followed back… and vice versa…then you need to develop strategies to get attention by condensing massive quantity of info into 140 characters

Level of conversations are different with Twitter and even more with y.p.
Not around communities of interests like adults
Mostly interest for celebrities like the Disney starlets

Section II
Teen engagement

SN= places to hang out, the place to be, to mingle, to gossip, to joke around, to flirt…=their social environment…and not bec of the techno but bec of the people…just like the mall before…

Parents’ concerns: safety (outside is scary), focus on school/education, structured agenda…make the SN fill in the need to hang out with friends which is still there for y.p….

Public and private spaces/spheres
lack of privacy is a common excuse about the Internet… being too public…
But y.p. conceptualize privacy is different : for parents privacy is about control (parents can come in your room anytime they want and this is not a privacy issue) so y.p do care about privacy but they care more about control…so it is a different privacy model (more highly sophisticated) control based vs space-based as it is for parents

Section III
Reworking the public sphere

Some public network technologies’ affordances and constraints

Persistence: things remain online = digital dossier
Dealing and navigating with this is part of knowing technologies today

Replicability: duplications are the power of bits and that is where what was said in and from private environments become suddenly public from MSN reproduced to FB for instance with blurring frontiers

Searchability: everything is searchable online

Scalability: sometimes the scale is not something we want but the network effect creates it

Audience Invisibibility: there are invisible audiences when you communicate on SN not all audiences are visible at one point and you have to take into account this or imagine audiences of ‘friends’…who you think you are speaking to…what can be understood…

Collapsed contexts: SN bring together varied and foreign contexts in many ways without formal scripts to address them

Best counter-example is the one of the wedding: it is a very scripted context compared to SN which don’t have formal scripts to help you behave yet

Norms of groups vary: for ex. what is interpreted as Black power can be different for Black or White people and what happens then in terms of interpretations in such collapsed contexts?
Self-presentations have to deal with the expressions and articulations taking place within such life contexts wand hich then collapse online

Section conclusion: y.p. use technology very differently from the way it was designed, they bring their own set of expectations and become very creative in their IT use

Section IV
Social technologies and learning

Think of classrooms contexts: what you learn mainly are social skills ex how to talk to others and be listened to by them…it is the basis for collaboration
Use of web 2.0 in classrooms is just supporting that very social learning and as adults we tend to forget it even if we have grown up with it, taking it for granted four ourselves

Thinking of web 2.0 technologies forces us to think about the importance of learning to be social
Some very dedicated educators use web 2.0 technologies…leveraging these social technologies to allow for casual interaction opportunities which are not possible in the classroom contexts

Learning how to learn is not simple for y.p. : web 2.0 techno can help with how y.p. work out why they are in the classrooms and what and why they are learning things…teachers can use separate dedicated accounts (not their own private profile) which are very public and which allow to make clear that they are there to engage with students and there is no question of conversations behind closed doors…and it is very important to do so as teachers, educators, parents for y.p. are desperately in need of interactions with adults outside from the formal settings to make sense of what they go through in their learning/developmental/transformative experience

Forget about the myth: Lots of adults use social technologies more natively than young people. The difference is that y.p. play with it, use it, etc. but they don’t think about how they use these technologies…don’t reflect about how they are building a new culture or anything which we do

About all the attention paid to digital natives: yes they use it a lot but they are not using the tools in the perspectives adults are using it…what we can learn from them is their creative use but we can teach them how to think about their uses…as educators we have the knowledge and perspective for offering scaffolding guidance to help them work through the consequences of their uses…and they need it!

We need to offer a different kind of intervention and outreach by being engaged, as parents, as educators, to help them when they can become sometimes socially trapped by the technologies counter-effects and suffer from them (ex social rejection) and they have no one to turn to understand what they are going through, and to help them and protect them.

Conclusions
Information dissemination and collection is definitely changing so observing how y.p. use social technologies can teach us a lot about how to find new useful ways to survive in this informational world

For examples:
- in the professional sphere: What is expected from different environments: Hyper focused in school VS professional multitasking world…Technologies show us the ruptures in both ways and y.p. have to reconcile both
- in the democratic citizenship engagement (y.p. FB immigration contest example in L.A.)
…So engage in and find a way to make it work in your own world!

Je remercie Sylvain Sénécal et la Chaire de commerce électronique RBC Groupe Financier de me permettre de participer au colloque #genc