What’s in it for me?

The first event started as a bit of fun and evolved into a deep conversation. The second was thought provoking – I had an aha moment. The third evoked a reaction, and I typed the first draft of this post. The fourth spurred me on until I pressed “Send to Weblog”… As each event happened, I kept thinking what’s in it for me? This question keeps coming at me from my friends at Financial Services firms as they look at Enterprise 2.0 tools and technologies and Social Media. They wonder if there is an ROI from weak ties (borrowing the term from “The Strength of Weak Ties” – the personal interconnectivity that is formed loosely in LinkedIn and Facebook are often “weak ties”, as you may not know the person particularly well). They wonder if all of this personal interconnectivity is helpful or harmful. While they can see the value for some of this in their personal lives, they wonder about it professionally. Is this a waste of time? What will their managers think of their use of these tools? Are they exposing themselves too much? Can FS firms allow these technologies? Can they stop them? Has the iPhone changed everything?

Event 1… I have immersed myself in e2.0, the tools, the thinking, etc… I’ve jumped in feet first, to the point that a friend of mine (a younger single friend of mine…) put on my Facebook wall on Monday that I am “more wired than the 20 somethings [he] typically date[s]..”. Okay, my pithy reply to his wall post could have been the end of it, but we started an e-mail exchange… Here’s some of what he sent me:

you’ve got plaxo, linked in, facebook, twitter, aim, and so on.. more than me.. and you’re using them more than the college kids I know.. seems a bit over the top perhaps.. I’m actually dropping nearly everything in favor of facebook.. and that’s only for real people i’ve met/know to see.. and while i might check it somewhat regularly, i’m personally lowering my networkedness.. it’s all too much.. too many things to manage, too many e-mail addresses to check, too many notifications of change.. gmail, my facebook, and my cell number.. that’s it for me now.. i’m not the only one feeling this way.. even seeing some retaliation from 25 year olds, who pretty much grew up in a post AIM world.. just saying.. and don’t forget… every time you change something in one of your networks, a message goes out to others telling them as such.. it’s fun at first, but after a while people might think you’re spending all your time on twitter and not enough on things that actually matter..

In my reply, I talked about the value of experimentation with these tools in order to understand the utility of them. However, it did get me thinking that I might be broadcasting too much information about what I am doing, and broadcasting it too widely.

Event 2… Tuesday, I was talking with a buddy of mine as we commuted into NY after a nice game of squash. He is a trader on a desk at a major Wall Street firm. He was asking me how with all of the regulations around electronic communications could firms allow iPhones on trading desks. People now have a good web browser, their personal e-mail, and the ability to IM friends in their hand – none of which run through the corporate compliance server or corporate firewall. I can imagine the headache this causes firms. As part of the settlement between the SEC, NY Attorney General, NASD, NASSA, NYSE, and State Regulators with Wall Street firms, firms are required to abide by the following:

The insulation of research analysts from investment banking pressure. Firms will be required to sever the links between research and investment banking, including analyst compensation for equity research, and the practice of analysts accompanying investment banking personnel on pitches and road shows. This will help ensure that stock recommendations are not tainted by efforts to obtain investment banking fees.

In practice this agreement and other like regulations require communications between various parties at investment banks to be monitored to ensure compliance with this agreement. The iPhone adds a serious challenge to the monitoring of the communications between various parts of the investment bank.

Event 3… Yesterday, a colleague of mine, Steve Douty, posted this post On Collaboration. He starts his message with this:

“Collaboration” is one of those vague, multivalent terms – like “Web 2.0” – that can mean many things, and also nothing at all. Because of this, it’s hard to get people to do it: “Why can’t you all just collaborate?!” It’s also hard to sell just on its own merits.

He proceeds to discuss the value of collaboration, and explores why Friendster has fizzled while Flickr and Wikipedia have flourished. He discusses 7 characteristics that make Flickr and Wikipedia different; these are: Vision, Purpose or outcome, Topicality, Running start, Continuous flow, Refresh, Logical end. While the discussion he started it excellent and thought provoking, I could not help thinking a lot of the adoption of platforms comes back to the utility of the platform in general, and what’s in it for me.

Event 4… The last night, another colleague of mine, Brian Magierski, posted this post on Social Media and the value of weak ties. Brian discusses the value of Weak Ties, and references the work of Andrew McAfee and Mark Granovetter (and like Brian, I’m not going to repeat it here). He then goes on to discuss his personal use of Facebook at Twitter:

I find that Facebook and Twitter in part do the job of keeping me aware in short snippets of downtime each day as to what my extended network of mostly ‘weak ties’ are doing (both small things and major life/career shifts). The job these SNS services are doing for me in part is to keep me connected and informed of the whereabouts and whatabouts of a substantially larger number people than I have ever been able to remain connected to in the past. These snippets get burned into my brain and my searchable SNS services for recall in an On Demand manner when required. Yes, it’s also entertaining.

I agree these two tools specifically are entertaining. As a social tool Facebook is great. As a work tool, I’m not convinced, but I see the potential. The mix between social and work people on my Facebook friends is a challenge or me – I don’t want my social friends and work friends to see the same info… This fact alone forces me to limit my use of Facebook artificially. I like having Twitter update my status there. I like the RSS feed out of it. Plaxo Pulse allows you to differentiate between professional, social, and family relationships. I think having that in Facebook would make Facebook more useful for me. Twitter has been a fantastic way for my co-workers and I to get stay in touch. My direct team is spread the northeast at our clients, and my extended team is spread around the US and Europe. Twitter is an easy and definitely entertaining way to stay in touch in 140 character so less…

Social networks, enterprise 2.0, web 2.0, etc… are all tools. They are the hammer and wrenches of this electronic era. These tools help us in our personal lives and they help us in our professional lives. As with any tool, you want to choose a tool that helps you with accomplishing something. You can’t drive a nail with a Phillips head screwdriver. Once you have the tools, it all comes back to a simple question of “what’s in it for me?”. I have tried all of the social networks, e2.0 tools, web 2.0 tools, etc… If there is no utility in the tool for me, I drop it, and drop it fast – I don’t have the time to linger. Yes, a friend occasionally asks me to take a second look at something, but that is the rare event. More often then not, the tool isn’t useful enough for me so it follows the usage trajectory that Steve discussed in his post.

While it is true that I have tried more tools that I care to admit, but I only use a couple daily, and I have set my browser (currently Flock) to open each of the following each morning:

* Google Reader – for reading my RSS feeds,
* Facebook – for fun and reconnecting with old friends, and strengthening ties with new ones,
* LinkedIn – for business networking,
* Plaxo – for address book sync’ing (but not yet for Plaxo Pulse as I don’t feel utility there yet),
* Twitter – for fostering teamwork within my co-workers,
* WordPress – for my blogging,
* SocialText – for our wiki work,
* Ning – for our firm’s private social network (note: I tried to create a social network within my family and there was no interest, so we dropped it – fast), and
* Kalivo – for collaboration with co-workers and clients.

All of these are useful for one or more specific things for me. Yes, some of the utility comes from the collaboration and conversation. Some of it comes from the weak ties it helps maintain. However, in all cases there is a utility for me…

What does this have to do with Financial Services and IT? Frankly, everything! My friends at the FS firms are struggling with the question of “What’s in it for me?” as they look at these tools. The IT leadership is struggling with the ROI of some of these tools. They are driven by short-term budget realities, and don’t have the funding to invest in Weak Ties. I’ll argue that this is short sighted, but it is the reality of their lives. The Legal & Compliance departments are struggling how to control the activities on such ubiquitous and disparate platforms. Using LinkedIn is commonly thought to be a sign that you are leaving the firm. People are starting to use it for business networking given the richness of the data there. Facebook is blocked by some firms’ firewalls as being not work related. However, our friends at Apple and Research in Motion have put tools in our hands that are more powerful then the desktop machines we had a few years ago, and these tools can’t be controlled in the traditional ways. Their use is going to only increase. FS management needs to decide how to respond. Are they going to be a NGE?

Office 2.0 – Consumers will drive Office 2.0 adoption

The New Platforms panel at Office 2.0 hammered home their idea that consumers will drive Office 2.0 adoption into the enterprise. The panel assumed that Web 2.0 platforms will be the standard for the enterprise, and the moderator called them all out on this. While this makes sense to me, I agree that is not necessarily the right assumption.

The panelists all agreed open standards are critical.

The conversation then gravitated to …. Facebook (shock!). From Facebook they have learned to keep the platform quite simple.

Allowing multi-vendor support through mash-ups allows the experts in a given component to enrich the user’s platforms.

Platforms that are adopted must solve a customer’s problem. While this is clear, simple, and obvious, firms must keep this in the forefront of their minds as they design their platforms and applications.

Office 2.0 – Social Computing Panel…

Still here at Office 2.0…

Is Social Computing just for kids? What happens when they grow-up? Will this change how we work? Is this changing already? The Social Computing panel which discussed this was quite interesting.

Firms and business people are already using Social Computing tools. Dove just setup a Ning group to discuss their products with their customers in Germany. People are using LinkedIn to get to know their coworkers better (do you really know what your coworkers did more than 6 months ago?) and to get to know people they are going into a meeting with. Plaxo is working to enable an Open Social Web with their new Pulse social networking feed. These are just some examples mentioned by the panelists.

The elephant the room was Facebook. There was a very interesting discussion about how the worlds of Facebook (for friends and family) and LinkedIn (for work) are starting to intersect. There were differing views on this… Should the networks be bridged or kept separate? Do you want your business friends to be part of the same group as your family and social friends? The social networks have not solved this yet, but all agreed that this is an issue and that this will be solved.

One thing mentioned that seems interesting is the Bill of Rights for the Social Web. I will read this later and comment on it then.

Facebook in Financial Services… Musings and Musings

JP Rangaswami recently posted a series of interesting Musings on Facebook and Financial Services here, here, here, here, and here. Well worth the read – it is detailed, thoughtful, and thought provoking.

In his post from the airport today, he had the following table from the Financial Times and the following comments about it:

It listed a number of investment banks and showed the percentage of staff on FaceBook. The top five looked like this:

Goldmans 5510 employees or 19.7 per cent
Deutsche 7636 employees or 11.3 per cent
Lehmans 2951 employees or 10.4 per cent
UBS 8101 employees or 10.4 per cent
Morgan Stanley 5689 employees or 10.3 per cent.

My thanks to Financial News for the research.

It’s been a long nine months since I left investment banking, and much may have changed since then, it is a volatile industry. But when I left it, people like Goldmans were not known to employ large numbers of unintelligent time-wasters.

When one in five Goldman employees use FaceBook, it makes you sit up and think.

I accept the numbers may be flawed: they may include contractors, duplicate aliases with legitimate mail addresses, whatever.

Even if I discount the figures by 50 per cent, they remain formidable.

I haven’t the time to do the research now, but my gut feel is that the FaceBook usage league table looks remarkably similar to the M&A league tables.

Relationship before conversation before transaction.

Social Networking is not going away, and I don’t see it as a bubble either.

Nice week for Enterprise 2.0 & WSJ – Twitter, Facebook, and Blogs

The WSJ certainly has been busy this week talking about social networks and blogs. First there was an article on Twitter which I commented on yesterday. Then there was a great video by Jared Sandberg about Facebook. The topper was the fantastic story that broke yesterday and is all over the press today about the CEO of a certain food services company and his rather interesting practice of posting comments about his firm and his competitors in stock messages boards – anonymously.

Blogging is something that I feel senior managers should be doing regularly. It is a powerful tool to connect with their staff, their stakeholders, and their customers. When I started blogging I asked advise from some smart bloggers I know, and the advice was simple:

(1) Have a point of view, and be comfortable expressing it.  In other words, write about your passion passionately.  Thanks to Susan for her timely post on the subject.

(2) Remember that once you publish it is there forever. Be proud of what you write.

(3) Understand this – only if you are relevant will people actually care.  Don’t be afraid to take the first step though…

What was never spoken about but was tacitly understood in this was that I would post USING MY OWN NAME. Don’t put unsigned stuff out into the blogosphere!  Don’t try to mislead the faithful reader.

Was I naive to think there would not be people trying to use Enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools for personal profits using unethical or at times illegal means? Of course not. People have been doing stupid things for all of recorded time. The benefit of these tools is that they are so public and collaborative in there nature that the risks someone like the poster rahodeb takes increases. Thanks rahodeb for reminding us to remember the simple rules around posting.