Who cares about Facebook privacy? Not who you think.

by Josh Bernoff

Go ahead. Name me one company of a significant size whose business suffered due to its treatment of people's private data.

Unless I'm missing something, you can't.

TJX put 45 million credit cards at risk. Do you even remember (it happened in 2007)? Has anybody stopped shopping at TJ Maxx? Can't see the impact.

In the online world, I can't name a single significant company that had a problem. They pay lip service to being concerned about privacy, but in fact, a small number of verbal people whine, but very few leave. If a site is useful, most people (not you, the smart readers of this blog, but average everyday people) vaguely wonder about what happened, but won't give up their site.

So let's take this context and apply it to Facebook. We've had multiple revisions of the privacy policy. We've had CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying that privacy is no longer a social norm. And we've had web searches on how to leave Facebook trending. But still, Zuckerberg says not many people are leaving.

Our own quick poll shows that few are leaving -- and our readers are way more knowledgeable than the general Facebook population.

Read the new Facebook announcement carefully. Here's my analysis of what Zuckerberg is saying: Facebook's engineering process led them into this spot. It's not that Facebook is against your privacy, it's just that they weren't paying close enough attention -- they were concentrating on connections to the open Web, like the "Like" button. But now the outcry is loud enough that they've fixed things with a simpler set of settings.

Not stated, but in the background, is this key fact: the more private your content is, the more Google can't index it. The more public it is, the more Google searches can land on it. Facebook is trying not to be part of the splinternet, but its own members won't let it.

What does this mean?

First, the most important impact of the Facebook flap is not on its own members, but on Congress. Regulation would cause lots more problems than a few members leaving. This is the real battle to watch, and the one that was probably quite persuasive in getting Zuckerberg to change his tune.

Second, if Facebook followed the path it was on, it risked becoming the first significant company to lose business due to not paying close enough attention to privacy. Eventually, some company will create something so compelling that they think privacy doesn't matter. At that point, we'll see which people prefer -- fun/utility, or privacy. And I'm betting fun/utility wins. Because while few will admit it, Zuckerberg might be right -- privacy isn't much of a norm any more.

What does this mean for you as a marketer or Web site? The angel on my right shoulder wants to tell you to behave carefully with people's information. But the devil on my left says you won't lose many customers even if you don't. Just remember, it only takes one violation to trash your reputation -- a lesson Facebook should have learned three years ago with Beacon and Charlene Li. Assuming you don't care about your reputation, your customers may just stick with you anyway.

(Speaking of Charlene: her new book Open Leadership cites Facebook as a very open company. I'm curious about what Charlene thinks about their most recent behavior.)

Photo credit: Rob Pongsajapan via Flickr

Thoughts on leadership in the social era

Charlene Li's book Open Leadership has generated some discussion about what it means to lead in a social world. I wanted to share some thoughts about leadership in the social era from our own research for Empowered.

Empowered includes lessons on leadership from Scott Cook, founder of Intuit; Rob Katz, the CEO of Vail Resorts; Bary Judge, CMO of Best Buy; and the management at Dell Computer. You've read about some of these companies before, and you'll read about them again -- it's not coincidence. Many, many companies have created social applications. Very few have transformed themselves as a result.

As you'll recall, we talk about HEROes -- highly empowered and resourceful operatives -- and the applications they create. HEROes move quickly to serve customers. This can create chaos. It takes a different management technique to stimulate this innovation without allowing the company to devolve into a welter of random projects.

The challenge, as Clayton Christensen pointed out in The Innovator's Dilemma, is that your competitors -- including little startups -- are innovating at this speed already. You have to embrace this innovation and manage it, or you'll get eaten up from below.

Here are few principles we've found that are common in companies that are encouraging and managing HERO activity well:

1. Share strategy continuously, especially changes in strategy. When Rob Katz changed Vail Resorts' media strategy to focus on social and short-lead media, he hired Mike Slone away from Razorfish to run his social application. Furthermore, he walked the talk -- look at this blog post from popular music-industry blogger Bob Lefsetz about how Katz engaged with him and solved his problem on Twitter. Slone's department doesn't just respond to tweets, it helps create and promote video of what's actually happening on the slopes, working with the existing staffers at each of Vail's multiple resorts. Leadership means not just changing strategy, but communicating with your actions, not just your words, how you will support that strategy.
2. Embrace half-baked ideas. Best Buy's marketing can move fast because Barry Judge is willing to support plans that aren't completely baked -- and he emphasized this half-baked quality in his interviews with me. That includes things like posting TV ads on his blog, opening up the API's to bestbuy.com for other sites to use, and engaging the whole sales and support organization for Twitter response: the Twelpforce. Allof these ideas had risk associated with them. None of them were completely debugged before they went live. But Best Buy launched them anyway, and adapted. Embracing this kind of innovation kicks your workforce and its customer-focused creativity into high gear.
3. Use councils to coordinate. There are over 100 social initiatives at Dell. Manish Mehta, Dell's VP of social media and community, is in charge of herding these cats. They don't report to him -- that's no way to stimulate innovation. Instead, Manish meets with representatives from all the major departments working on these activities weekly in a council, looking for best practices and efficiencies. Top-down is not the answer. Neither is chaos. Seeking commonalities in creative applications from around the company -- and around the world -- is the way to go. It also helps alleviate the "does anyone else around here understand what I'm going through?" feeling that social developers often get.
4. Celebrate failure. In Empowered, Scott Cook says "we have a high tolerance for experiments." And he acknowledges that most of them will fail. As long as you can prove you've learned something, there is not a penalty for failure. Look at how Jeff Bezos treated a high-profile failure in this Wired article (scroll down to the Jason Kilar part) -- he just acknowledges it and moves on.
5. Celebrate success. Don't overlook the power of an attaboy and an inscribed chunk of lucite. HEROes need public encouragement. At Comcast, service standouts get the Bowtie Award, named after company founder Ralph Roberts. An email celebrating a successful HERO project is never out of place. We celebrate success at Forrester a lot -- we have company meetings almost monthly, give out a lot of Veuve Cliquot champagne, and recognize values like collaboration and creativity. One of the Brits who used to work here called these "happy clappy" meetings (there's an awful lot of applause) but people love to get recognized.

What has been your experience with leadership in the social era?

Photo credit: Pedrosimoes7.

The Lion Roars. 2010 Ships. Productivity Cheers.

Guest post from my coauthor Ted Schadler. As you'll see, SharePoint 2010 will be a huge force in empowering employees.

Okay, so I'm a sucker for nostalgia. But being on the same stage as Gilda Radner and John Belushi and John Candy and Tina Fey was a thrill. And being in the same studio where Elvis Costello and the Attractions stopped "Less Than Zero" after a few bars and jumped into "Radio Radio" in defiance of NBC's wishes brought a rebellious, empowered smile to my face.

NBC's Studio 8H, home of Saturday Night Live, is where Microsoft launched SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 yesterday. It was a short, punchy, customer-filled event. These products are the latest in the "Wave 14" product set, a ginormous (as my 9-year old says) overhaul of the Office product line. And they're beauts. Here's my (admittedly enthusiastic) analysis of that Microsoft has accomplished with this product.

• The lion awakens and roars.

  Microsoft's Office business has taken a battering in the press as journalists chase stories about the important innovations from nimble startup competitors, open source alternatives, and Web-based productivity tools. But let's face it. Microsoft doesn't have 500,000,000 people using its tools for no reason. And while three years is a long time to wait for a product release (especially in this era of instant innovation via the Internet), Microsoft has re-confirmed its position as the most important driver of business productivity on the planet. This launch will crush the dreams of a 100 entrepreneurs and force another 1,000 to rethink their companies. That's okay. It's what happens when Microsoft turns a niche product for a geeky few into a global feature that anybody can use. As an economy, we need it.

• The empowerment is real.

  Microsoft is the original empowerer. Together with IBM and Intel, Microsoft created the premier groundswell technology, the PC. The company has always focused on bringing more power to more people. That's the heart and soul of empowerment -- give people the tools to solve the problems they need to solve. This 2010 product launch just confirms Microsoft's dominant place in empowering HEROes to solve customer problems. As a sidebar to the 2010 launch, you should expect to see your employees start using Office Web Apps on their Hotmail account to collaborate with customers and partners. It's basically Google Docs but with Microsoft documents.

• The features feel good.

  There's something in here for everybody. Outlook 2010 lets you work with conversations rather than messages, and suck in your Facebook and LinkedIn contacts, and ignore the email noise that's driving you crazy. SharePoint 2010 lets you browse the organizational directory using a Silverlight gadget, and use real social features, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Excel 2010 manipulates a million or more rows at lightning speed in memory. Backstage gives you a "cockpit for the document" so you can more easily manage, publish, and print it. PowerPoint 2010 lets you edit a video and compress it for sharing. Office Web Apps works in IE, Firefox, and Safari. And my favorite, SharePoint 2010 with the Office 2010 tools or Web tools let you co-author a document and see the changes of your co-author in real time. The feel-good feature list goes on and on and on.

• The timing is spectacular.

  We're coming out of the recession. We have a real operating system in Windows 7 to upgrade. We're looking to lock in the savings that the recession forced us to make in avoiding travel and improve collaboration. Our computers are aging. It all adds up to a perfect storm of opportunity to sweep out the old and bring in the new. I'm not sure I'd recommend throwing out the Office 2007 that you just implemented, but anybody still running 2003 or older has no excuse not to upgrade. And for advanced information workers, the 2010 toolset makes it worth upgrading from 2007. And it's probably worth pausing your new SharePoint 2007 rollout and migrate it to 2010 first.

• The economics make sense.

  Forrester has done some custom analysis of Total Econonomic Impact (ROI on steroids) of the entire 2010 product family. I participated in the user interviews and helped build the models. We heard over and over and over again from clients what the economic benefits of the 2010 product family are. They fall into several categories, including productivity improvements from better collaboration and productivity tools (two weeks a year per advanced information worker), email storage savings (2-4X in some cases), and much easier IT administration. It's a profound improvement over the 2007 product line and especially over the 2003 product line. And as usual, Microsoft has bundled in tools that you previously paid another vendor to provide. Storage, social tools, basic archiving, email filtering, etc. Add it all up, and the economics just make sense.

• The cloud strategy is significant.

  Software + Service is in fact a real strategy at Microsoft. The company has made a huge bet on hosting these applications in a true multi-tenant environment. Later this year, Microsoft will upgrade their Business Productivity Online Suite with the 2010 product line. It's a big deal to be able to buy these services -- virtually all of them, including SharePoint -- as a cheap subscription. Email list price is $5/user/month. Add in the full collaboration and SharePoint stack, and the list price is $15/user/month. That's chump change to a business manager with a $15M payroll. Add to this the ability to serve some employees from the cloud and others from the data center, and you have a compelling opportunity to offload cost and hassle to Microsoft.

Of course, the hard work lies ahead.

Now, the reality check. These are not upgrades. They are migrations. Sure, Office 2010 uses the same document formats as 2007. But you will need to staff up or buy help to implement these technologies. Don't do it without also overhauling your delivery infrastructure (Windows 7 on the client and Windows Server 2008 R2 on the server), consolidating your systems, redeploying staff and servers, and retiring redundant third-party tools.

No, it's not a perfect solution. But it's one that you as an information and knowledge management professional should feel good about. Let the wild rumpus start. Care to share? Please do.

Should you buy into "Open Leadership"?

by Josh Bernoff

Charlene Li, my coauthor on Groundswell, former Forrester analyst, and founder of Altimeter Group, has written a new book, Open Leadership. You should read it.

As much as I hate to start any post or book review with a disclaimer, the backstory on what you are about to read in this post is so complicated that I must. So: no one reading this should be under any illusions as to this being an "unbiased" review. From our very close work together, I know Charlene's mind and ways of thinking extremely well. Now, of course, we compete for the attention of clients thinking about social strategy, which complicates our relationship. Plus, I am the coauthor of Empowered, coming out in September, a book that bears on many of the same topics as Open Leadership.

Anyone reading this should know, first, what you are reading is my personal opinion, not the position of Forrester Research. And second, if you need data, research, or consulting on strategy or tactics for social applications of any kind, I fervently believe you should come to us.

So, what is there to recommend Open Leadership? Charlene starts out with this thesis: 

Open leadership is having the confidence and humility to give up the need to be in control while inspiring commitment from people to accomplish goals.

This is not just a paean to openness. First of all, Charlene makes the case that social technology gives customers and employees access to all sorts of power and information now, and more openness is the only response. And second, the book includes tools to help you, for example, assess your own level of openness and what your organization can tolerate.

I found some parts of the book a lot more useful or interesting than others. Here are three good parts.

1. Sandbox covenants. These are the rules organizations set up to determine what sorts of limits and conventions there are on openness. The book includes a link to social media policies of a bunch of corporations, not yet live, but I am looking forward to seeing that. This discussion, in Chapter 5, goes a long way to helping bridge the gap between social media backers within companies and corporate policymakers.
2. Organizational models for openness. Charlene describes three types of organization: organic, centralized, and coordinated, and shows when each one makes sense. Given all the questions I get these days about organization for social, this is quite relevant.
3. Leadership mindsets and traits. Chapter 7 classifies leaders according to whether they are optimistic or pessimistic, and whether they are independent or collaborative. Anyone who has ever had a boss will find this instructive. This is a fascinating way to look at leadership.

I did not love everything about this book. The biggest question in my mind is, who is the audience? CEOs can benefit, and there are leaders throughout organizations, but the challenge is for the millions of workers in the trenches in management, customer service, and elsewhere in companies. Transforming an organization to become more open is a huge task, and there is a lot here about what companies should do, but not enough about how to get there and how ordinary employees can participate.

I also experienced some confusion around the central idea of the book. If you are a social technology strategist or participant, this will read a lot like a book on social technology -- a sequel to Groundswell. At a recent event, I asked Charlene about how social relates to open, and she clarified that social creates the need to be open. But the book slips back and forth between the two concepts of social and openness without enough explicit attention to this difference. 

If you are a social media wiz (that is, if you've already read Groundswell), you'll find the four objectives described here awfully similar to the the five objectives in Groundswell, and the concept of "socialgraphics" highly parallel to our Social Technographics. There are new cases studies in the sections on social technology, but some will seem very familiar to people who've been paying attention to the social world in the last two years.

In person and in this book, Charlene is one of the most upbeat and optimistic people I know. This is quite a contrast to the dark and sardonic side that I personally have, and the dynamic between those two poles made Groundswell better. Open Leadership is a relentlessly optimistic book for the most part. Even so, my favorite part was the chapter on failure, and how to embrace it and learn from it. Stories about failure inspire me. These were the best case studies in the book.

As for how Open Leadership relates to Empowered: Open Leadership is more about the high-level philosophy of leadership in a social world. Empowered, first of all, will address more than just social technology, looking also at video, cloud, and mobile technology. And Empowered is designed to deliver practical strategy advice to people at all levels and departments of an organization, including marketing, customer service, IT, and senior leadership.

I wish you could buy both books right now. But get your copy of Open Leadership later this month, and hang on for our book a few months later. If social technology has got you thinking harder about how your organization runs, the ideas about to be on offer from its creators will, I hope, advance your thinking.

Groundswell: what's in a name?

by Josh Bernoff

I continue to be amazed that people are still finding Groundswell relevant, two years after we published it in April of 2008.

I've watched in delight as people have adopted the name as we intended -- to refer to the whole constellation of social technology phenomena, from Amazon reviews to YouTube. A twitter search on "groundswell" reveals people still discovering it, debating it, and just internalizing it as a word in the social context. Groundswell is also now pretty well established as a term for an uprising attended by social phenomena, for example, a groundswell of outrage or a groundswell of support. Cool.

Even as I watch this, I know there are uses of the word that would get a reaction from me and my employer, Forrester Research. For example, if you tried to publish a book called "Groundswell, Part Deux," you'd hear from us. And if you created a "Groundswell strategy workshop" we'd certainly have to talk. Why? Because you would be confusing people, purporting to deliver on intellectual property that we own.

One person you'd think would be tempted is Charlene Li, since she wrote the book with me. But the copyright belongs to Forrester Research, and Charlene is both smart and reasonable. She is certainly prominent in the social media world, but after leaving Forrester she never promoted herself with the word Groundswell, beyond identifying herself as coauthor, and she is building her own intellectual property.

I'm writing about this because I'm very interested in your reaction to something that happened recently around the word Groundswell. IIR is putting on an event this week in Boston, called "Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies." The people running the show invited Charlene, and started billing her talk as "What is the next Groundswell?" They also invited three past winners of the Forrester Groundswell Awards to take part in a main-stage panel. Check the Web site: Groundswell is a significant part of the promotion of this event, and they never asked our permission for that.

I volunteered to moderate the panel of award winners, which I'm doing. I feel very close to the people who have won the awards, having participated in the judging, and I feel I can do a good job of helping them to reveal what has made them special.

But I remain ambivalent about the outright use of Groundswell to promote this event, which we do not sponsor or participate in beyond my appearance. I thought a nice solution would be to ask them to help me out with a free event ticket for a colleague as a favor in return, but they were steadfast that they wouldn't do that. Apparently what we own, they can use, but what they own, they won't share.

So I put it to you, gentle readers. What's the right response? Embrace it as free promotion? Draw a line in the sand and say "don't step over this or you'll have to deal with us?" With the rampant borrowing and repurposing of content online, this is a real issue, not just for us, but for any company that owns any kind of brand or media. I'm very curious about your perspective on it.