The Working Network

My new organization uses these terms. We didn't. We used some others, but the end game is the same. Just to be clear, tenets call out what we value (though not necessarily why), and the KPI's (key performance indicators) are intended to help us measure our effectiveness against those things we've said are valuable.

And because I don't see any meaningful distinction between social networking and community -- it's all a question of types of associations -- we might also say this is a contribution to the marketplace of ideas on the subject of a core community tenet and it's associated KPIs.

To be clear, I'm not covering community site statistics of the following sorts:

• Number of unique visitors
• New member registrations
• Page views
• Retention/Attrition
• Member loyalty
• Member satisfaction
• Most active members
• Message posts
• and so on

Those are clearly important -- most clearly important for judging the health of any specific community site. At Microsoft we have many, many, community sites (thousands). Our partners have many community sites. The health of our community overall can't be found in the impossible task of rolling up the above sorts of stats across the sites we're able to identify. And to date, our polling mechanisms haven't been wired to answer those questions -- if indeed they could.

But we still have to do so. Here's what I propose.

Core tenet: associations

Call it relationship if you like. The point is, community is about connecting people to people. It may be that the purpose of the connection is to avail one member of the content produced by another, but if it doesn't involve people operating together it may be a wonderful thing otherwise, but it's not community.

KPIs:

1. Number of connections per member
2. Degree of connectedness between between member connections
3. Types of associations by groups and individual
4. Message propagation rate across the networks.

I might suggest one or two others, but that will do for now.

There are a couple of things worth pointing out. Most organizations won't have any ability to track this information at all (let me introduce you to yet another reason why we designed our services the way we did). Tagspace, the upcoming Claimspace, and finally the "subscription" services (ohhh, wait to you see this) planned for the first half of fy08, especially considering their integration into our discussion services, round out our story and make it possible to get one thru three. We're still puzzling over four -- but we know we want the information. I trust the business justification is immediate and obvious.

The other thing to consider is that while these aren't exactly site based, they do assume the use of one or more of our services -- and will therefore be limited in that regard. Still, the services it assumes members use touch many sites and indeed many people that may not be members. For those reasons the information these indicators provide offer another view on the health of our community. One that is different from, but complimentary to, and broader than, conventional community site-health indices.

Bear in mind, Claimspace has yet to ship in any form. It's sooo close to shipment (if only partial shipment), it's painful for those of us that have been waiting. Also, be aware that most of the capabilities I discuss below will not be apparent in the first release. This post is about potential, appropriate platform design, and the power of simple, flexible, reusable, components. I'm making a claim about the power of ideas.

Korby has done a good job of describing the value of Claimspace from the individual contributor's perspective, and from the community member perspective generally. And, indeed, it was originally conceived to meet those needs as the phrase "personal recognition elements", that he graciously recalls, suggests -- you make a claim, and people can vote on the accuracy of the claim, comment upon it, view where else the claim has been applied (Microsoft properties and elsewhere), and best of all get an RSS feed for the claim.

In that regard this emphasis is key: because the user can create/define the claim, Claimspace constitutes a long tail recognition system. It provides recognition possibilities for the greatest breadth of customers, not only the important, but tiny,  percentage that receive the traditional "five-star" type accolades. Those systems have obvious and ongoing value. But every IT professional and developer -- every single one -- has something to offer, is good at something, and has the right to seek recognition for it. This is fundamental.

Still, delivering recognition down the long tail (and thereby doing a lot to solve the "who can I trust issue") is only half the story -- perhaps less than half. Claimspace is also a generalized polling mechanism. The ramifications of that are not fully recognized and certainly not appreciated.

For instance, let's say I host a community and I'm interested in asking my community members how they feel about a proposed new feature. I create a claim about the feature, expose it, and watch the votes add up. I could even make ten claims regarding competing features, and see how the votes compare. I could do this on my blog, or in a forum. I could reuse the same claim in both instances and totals are calculated across both appropriately. I could ask 30 of my best friends to apply the same claim and because we support authenticated voting, we can avoid duplication and properly total across each instance.

Claims can be created and applied by anyone, including the people hosting the community. They could be built right into the forums application, for instance, to support assertions or claims such as "was this post helpful", or "this post answers the question asked". A library team could, for instance, create several standard claims (a claim/assertion taxonomy) that relate to the quality or usefulness of the posted library content.

We're only scratching the surface here. Because claims can be applied on non-Microsoft properties, the wealth of information regarding likes, dislikes, opinions, whatever, is almost incalculable.

A simple REST API gives everyone (and I mean everyone -- the mashup possibilities are just staggering -- caveat, keep the crawl, walk, run idea in mind) the ability use the data in a manner best suited to their needs: community (MVP or other influencer) reward programs, product design input, product feature voting, bug prioritization, and on and on and on, all without a ton of custom code. Any Digg-like application would love this kind of data. Can you imagine -- hottest claims, hottest people making claims, most used claims, newest claims, by product, by solution area, by geographical region, and the list goes on.

How many structured discussions can we imagine we'd like to have with each other?

Am I again stating the extreme case to make a point? Yes, guilty as charged. And worse yet, I have taken the liberty to discuss Claimspace capabilities that will not be available out of the gate. If this bothers you, well, I'm sorry. It's just as important to understand what can be done in the nearest term, as what will be available shortly thereafter. Our children are valuable not just because of their skill at kickball today, but also because of what they may become -- especially when growing up takes only few short focused development sprints of the Agile kind.

*Imagine my claim here: Claimspace has a lot of potential. Agree, Disagree, View Stats, Comment, RSS

Damn. It's just not simple enough yet. The stocks and flows discussion was too hard. People still find the idea of anticipating and answering questions before the "asker" has the occasion to ask incredible (as in not credible).

So I'm thinking that perhaps we can use the fact that it happens all the time -- though goes unnoticed -- to make it clear.

How about this...

Try to recall a time when you were fully engaged in some task for at least one hour. For that hour you didn't have to search the internet, or any other reference. Ask yourself why that was possible. Ignoring the possibility that you were channeling some other legitimately smart person, the answer is that already knew what you needed to know to get that job done during that hour. You had sourced the information prior to needing it from friends, books, TV, magazines, hallway conversations, or possibly you deduced it from principles you'd learned (that you picked up from books, teachers, whatever).

In every case, you sourced the information from somewhere, and then made it a part of your personal toolkit, to be applied whenever needed. You only need a reference, you only need to search, when your sources fail to properly prepare you.

Social networking, social filtering, is all about using a social network to do a better job sourcing -- a much better job. Because your ideal social network consists of people very similar to you, the social filtering provides what must be the most relevant, most highly targeted, selection of sources. Who or what can know better what you need to know, than people just like you that have already been where you're going. (Clearly, if you're always on the cutting edge, your trailblazing tendencies have a price. For 99 percent of us that's not an issue.)

Professional social networks share the burden of identifying the best sources. It's as simple as that, but the difference it makes is hard to underestimate. Understanding it changes the way we support community, measure community, and interact with the communities we serve.

The factors influencing the rate at which any given innovation spreads throughout a population are well known. Applying those factors remains a bit of an art, but the exercise is always instructive. That's especially so when we start thinking about marketing investments.

The single best source of information on this subject, imho, remains Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations. Although I've been told recently that Rogers has been challenged in some circles. I'd love to know more about the proposed alternatives.

Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition by Everett M. Rogers, Everett Rogers Read more about this title...

Overall we consider these things:

• The attributes of the innovation
• The nature of the culture
• The nature of the decision
• Change agent impact

Let's look (very) briefly at each of these with regard to how they apply to Microsoft customer adoption of online social networking services.

The attributes of the innovation are relative advantage, observability, trialability, complexity, and compatibility.

• Relative advantage: this should be a big plus for us. Adopters will have distinct advantages in terms of domain knowledge generally, and it's currency specifically. Over time this expresses itself as fewer surprises, less downtown, greater productivity.
• Observability: This one is harder. You have to be in close proximity and observe an adopter over a period of time to observe greater productivity due to improved knowledge acquisition. And the activity that leads to the improvements isn't highly observable itself. Therefore, we're going to have to increase observability. Contests, for instance, wherein the most connected people are provided observable rewards, come immediately to mind.
• Trialability: I don't know if this is an immediate plus or not. Everything we do is immediately trialable, but for compatibility reasons the success of the trial is questionable. Until we've had a chance to deliver the "social network placement" services -- aka subscription services -- ease of trial could be a problem with some people quitting when benefits aren't immediately (first week or two) apparent. Greater knowledge takes time to accumulate. Finding the right feeds takes time to do. As we simplify entry, this will be a big plus, but until then it may well cut the other way. Perhaps this suggests improved tutorial/getting started material?
• Complexity: Another problem for us here. While not exactly complex, it is different. We've found that even understanding weak-tie networks as community is something the uninitiated have a very hard time understanding. Once in, however, it all seems so natural. It's the initial bump however that's tough.
• Compatibility: Jeez, another problem. To most people using a feed reader is just adding more information to the already too long list of things to read. Microsoft's technology professional customers are mostly in the 35+ category -- me too, btw. That means long established work habits and corresponding habits of thought. Social systems are easily picked up by the under 30 crowd. The trick then, as we've always imagined, will be to integrate the new services into the traditional applications in a way that makes them easy to consume.

The nature of the culture here might just help. Information workers generally, and technology professionals specifically, remain effective as long as they have access to the right information at the right time. Therefore, they have an enormous amount to gain picking up the new tools. Because technology changes as often as it does, "new" is not as horrifying as it might be to some information workers. The pace of technology change may make it conceptually easier to jump into the new tools for the technology professional.

The nature of the decision is interesting in this case. No government is going to mandate participation. And not everyone has to play for the game to be productive. Further, we're already past the need for a bootstrap solution. There are already enough players to get things going for anyone that wants in. I say this is a net neutral -- maybe a positive.

Change agent impact is a wild card cause we're the change agent at the moment. We don't currently have budget, and we're still figuring out how the new organizational reality we face is going to effect us -- could go either way in the short term, though I don't think it can be anything but positive in the longer run. But do we need marketing budget? Part of me likes to spend money. And I do think spending money could accelerate adoption -- it could certainly raise awareness. On the other hand, no money forces us to be creative. We like that part of the job the most. Another part of me thinks there might be another change agent in the works...

That's just a very quick look. I can imagine expanding any of the above considerably. But it's a start. 

Ever used this model? Got a better one?

Tags: innovation socialsoftware community

Thanks to P. G. Wodehouse.

"It is not easy to explain to the lay mind the extremely intricate ramifications of the personnel of a Hollywood picture  organization... The chief executive throws out some statement of opinion, and then looks about him expectantly. This is the cue for the senior Yes-Man to say yes. He is followed, in order of precedence, by the second Yes-Man -- or Vice-Yesser, as he is sometimes called -- and the junior Yes-Man. Only when all the Yes-Men have yessed, do the Nodders begin to function. They nod."

And it works at all levels and types of authority, all forms of yes (sometimes the word "no" is used), and with a variety nodding styles.