The tools of flow and the value of community
This article describes the value of the next generation of Microsoft community investments to the customer. Actually it does so three times: short, medium, and large.
Short and sweet answer:
In the experience of most people, the internet makes available too much information. The new community services make it possible for you to filter out the noise and pay attention to only the information that matters most to you.
How is this miracle performed? It's the latest spin on the oldest trick in the book: we do it together. Simply put, you identify peers and experts you trust and allow them to filter the information vastness for you. You use an RSS reader to keep tabs on what internet resources they find most helpful. Identify the right peers and experts, and what they find most helpful will be very close to what you need. As your skill with the services improves, the greater the match to your information needs.
This link describes how to get started.
Not enough? Here's the medium version:
The medium and longer versions borrow just a bit from the field of system dynamics (stocks and flows). To be honest, I got this idea from a visiting consultant who told me about a post he recalled reading on the subject. I couldn't find the original reference, so below is my best effort to recreate what I imagine might have been the jist of it. And, of course, I've taken the liberty to relate it to my own projects.
The Microsoft communities team is evolving its information repositories from stocks, or collections of information for your reference when the need arises, to flows, or dynamic information systems delivering information as you need it. To be more accurate, our stocks will remain stocks, but they will become better and more accessible flows for an ever larger group of customers. This is important and leads to what may be a shocking statement.
If you ever have to search for the answer to a question about our products the chances are good that that we've already failed you. Ideally, you should never have to search for an answer.
Consider this: around a million people visit our forums every month, but fewer than 10 thousand new questions are posted -- some say much fewer, some say a bit more, in any event it's hard to measure (some questions are posted multiple times in different places by the same person, and the same question is asked by many people using different words). One of the major reasons why this should be so is that the questions most people are pursuing have already been answered. Now this is important -- really important -- ask yourself why it is that 990,000 people a month have to wait until they have the problem before they seek the answer if someone just like them, using the same exact product in a similar environment, has already faced and solved that problem? The answer is they're not connected; they are not communicating; their social networks have failed them. And by social networks I don't mean being chums and talking shop over beers. It's sooo much easier than that.
Technically, what I'm referring to are online weak-tie social social networks. But knowing that is not really necessary. The fact is that such networks are relatively easy to plug into, require little of you, solve information overload, and might even let you go home early on Fridays.
Let's not overstate the case. You will still encounter problems, but if you plug in to the new community solutions, over time your problems will be fewer -- and harder. Harder, because you'll know the answer to all the easy ones. You'll be operating at a higher level. You'll be longer and longer in flow, and spend less and less time in frustrating search. (And let's be honest, there is no happy way to be interrupted, only various ways of making it suck less. And of course, we are also doing what we can to make searching for answers suck less in those cases when your network does fail.)
We're trying to build networks by delivering social bookmarking and site tagging service, and later a claims service. Both represent a source of critical new flows in and of themselves. Perhaps more importantly, we integrate the new services deeply into the new forums and blogging platform. Then, through the magic of RSS the outcome is what we humbly believe will be the most fertile field of information flows on the planet. And of course the trick is in finding and plugging into the right flows. Find the right flows and the magic happens. Find the right flows, and information overload becomes information abundance.
If this is all you need, go here to discover how to get started.
If you want to know more, read on into the longer version...
Definitions:
Stock: In this case it's any collection of information. Examples include online forums, online libraries, knowledgebase articles, even wiki entries. Today most people access stocks when looking for the answers to questions. For the majority of internet users, the net is one big stock -- one big reference source you access when you need a quick answer. And, as far as it goes, that's clearly accurate.
And stocks are great when knowledge fails. But their limitations become clear if you consider the extreme case. What if you didn't "know" anything, except how to search? What if you had to search for the subject of every sentence. Every job would take a very long time. Put another way, knowing is like typing fluidly -- without thinking. Searching is like hunting and pecking on the keyboard. Which do you prefer?
Flow: I use this word in two different ways (sorry, both are very helpful). In the first case a flow generally refers to a dynamic process that effects the stock as in in-flows and out-flows. The question and answer process (or flow) contributes to the forum stock. The publication process (or flow) contributes to the document library stock. The local user group flow contributes to the individuals personal stock (the information he carries around in his head or has immediate access to), as does the technical publication to which he or she may subscribe. The latter two examples represent traditional information flows.
Another example of a traditional information flow is the information exchange between you and your coworkers (a strong-tie relationship that offers a different value proposition than the weak-tie relationships we're primarily concerned with here -- but that's probably more information than you're looking for on that subject). In many organizations email and the associated distribution lists are a widely adopted, even primary, information flow. Microsoft is one such organization.
Essentially, people plug into flows to maximize the information they have immediately available to them. You associate yourself with the information flows that deliver to you the most useful information and the least noise.
Here is the ideal condition:
You are happy. You are in the other kind of flow(a mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.)
But it doesn't always stay that way...
You encounter a question to which you do not know the answer. Now, if you are normal, you are very unhappy. So faced with an unknown, you either give up, or you visit an information stock looking for an answer. For most technology professionals, giving up isn't an option. So it's off to Google -- oops, I mean Live.com -- to search for an answer.
But if you've been paying attention so far, you already know that most of your questions have already been answered and that if you'd of been plugged into the right flow, you wouldn't have had to search in the first place -- you'd probably be on your way to your kid's little league game. Where are those flows? Enter the new Microsoft community services. In time they will deliver an almost unlimited number of flows for you to choose from.
(We can also offer some simple instructions to get you started. Later, in the upcoming year, we're going to automate this whole process.)
Here's how we've done it. We built some tagging services and a social bookmarking service on top of them (here's another link on social bookmarking). If the term social bookmarking is new to you it is worth you time to check it out. Obtaining feeds that refer to the tagging activities of the peers and experts you've found will be one of your principle information flows.
We've also built a claims service that will release in May of 2007. Claims will also be useful sources of information flows. What's most interesting about them is that the feeds they deliver link you to different information stocks.
Both of these new services have been thoroughly integrated into our new blogging and forum products, and rich support for RSS is available throughout. So here's the idea, let's say you have a blocking problem. You head to the forums and find an answer. Turns out it's a good answer. The person that provided it has some real expertise and is a skilled communicator. So instead of just taking your answer and going back to work, you obtain an RSS feed for that person. Next time they contribute something of value, you'll be notified. Tagging and claims make the experience better by allowing you to further filter based upon a stricter and stricter defintion of the what you're looking for.
Simple: you went to the stock, found an answer, and left with a new and valuable flow. We've embedded the new ideas and capabilities into the more familiar services. Thinking of deploying Vista this summer? Wouldn't it be a reasonable idea to plug into the key flows of information around that subject? How would you do that? Once we've migrated to the new forums, simply obtain an RSS feed for the contributions of experts you can find, or simpler yet, obtain an RSS feed for the tags Vista+deployment.
Today, these services are brand new. We haven't migrated the old forums to the new forum infrastructure yet, so the stock available in new forums isn't as rich as it will be later this year. In the meantime, the best thing you can do, is explore. There are lots of excellent flows out there. Yes, the interent is a fast reference source, a vast stock of information. But it's also a social space, and by using the new community services you'll be learning to traverse the new social spaces and to manage information access in that fashion. Take the time, develop the skill, and you'll be happier, better connected, and better informed for it.