Can someone tell Capitol Records that the music has stopped?

If you haven’t been following events, Capitol Records (EMI) has sued Boston-based Redigi (a used digital music marketplace) for what amounts to copyright infringement. 

Today, Google decided to enter the fray as a third party, and filed an amicus curiae brief (friend of the court) to ask the court to allow their participation in some key disputes.  In Google’s estimation, Capitol Records is attempting to blur the established fair use, copyright legal lines. 

Here is what Google is trying to protect:

1. The ability to allow people, at their own discretion, to move or copy their legally owned digital files.

2. That the service provider cannot be held liable for a users action with regards to #1

3. The fair use doctrine where users can copy their legally owned, digital files to other devices or cloud services controlled by the user.

4.  That ReDigi is infringing on Capitol’s exclusive right to “distribute copies or phonorecords,” despite Capitol’s admission that no material objects are distributed.  And that Google, “urges the Court to reject an internally inconsistent argument that would weaken the statutory restrictions on the distribution right.” 

Capitol is fighting for the old status quo and is willing to sacrifice anyone that gets in their way.  Their filing against Redigi is an attempt to rewrite and revise established law to suit their pre-digital interests. 

Why? As Google states, they are fighting over a 41 billion marketplace. A marketplace slowing slipping out of their control.  Instead of embracing the future, they’re endeavoring to fight it.

They may also be concerned about the conversations swirling around regarding some deep pocket investments and/or the potential acquisition of Redigi by some major players.  If that happens, the music industry will need a new strategy in its attempt to avoid irrelevancy. 

The Music Industry Needs a New Strategy

It’s as if the Capitol Records legal team is litigating for litigation sake.  Cranking up the last bit of fees in an attempt to milk the last bit of cash from the last bit of control Capitol has on the industry.

As Google warns: “The Court can and should deny the motion for preliminary injunction without reaching the complex and profound legal issues outlined above because any decision should be informed.” 

One has to wonder if Capitol has been informed that we’ve entered the digital age. Because their decision to fight, not embrace and profit from the new, digital era will only expedite their departure from it.

According to a recent Gallup Poll, about a third of all U.S. workers are dissatisfied with either the recognition they receive, their chances for promotion, or the amount of money they earn. Worse, seventy-one percent of American workers are "not engaged" or "actively disengaged" in their work. 

Since most of us cannot change the economy, I’d like to focus on what we can do at work instead.

I’m going to share a few strategies garnered from my discussions with Michael Wu, Lithium’s Principal Scientist, and author of The Science of Social.  And I am going to make you a promise.  If you follow these strategies and and act on Wu’s insights, I believe you’ll minimize dissatisfaction amongst the rank and file while increasing worker productivity.

Sounds too good to be true?

I know it sounds fluffy, but there’s some real science and empirical evidence behind the strategies. My hope is that it will motivate you to start changing how your company stimulates its most important resource. Your employees.  

Motivation Science and Worker Productivity

What motivates people?

Wu believes it has a lot to do with intrinsic motivation, “Dan Pink wrote about autonomy, mastery and purpose. But there’s another and it’s called relatedness. Scott Rigby is a researcher for motivation. He found that autonomy, competence, relatedness and reasons are essentially the four intrinsic motivations for people. That relatedness is actually what a lot of people just call social. It’s the social facilitation and the social competition.”

Strategy #1: Intrinsic Motivation, Place People in their Proper Positions

Do you have salespeople that seem to gravitate to Marketing? How about the CTO that is often found late at night programming new code to solve simple problems. Problems best left to the junior staff.  Perhaps there’s a mismatch in what they are currently doing, versus what really interests them. 

Wu suggests we figure out what motivates people intrinsically by letting them self-select, “People’s intrinsic motivations are fairly stable. They don’t change from day to day. They do change over long periods of time, but overall they’re pretty stable. You essentially have to let them perform a lot of things and let them choose what they like to do. That’s autonomy. Giving them autonomy to choose what they like to do.”

I know it’s not easy to simply throw away the old human resources playbook. But increasingly, not placing people in the role that intrinsically motivates them is not going to work. It doesn’t matter that the individual had a career path in Sales. If she is passionate about Marketing, then you must find a way for her to be involved with Marketing.

Sorry, this is the price you need to pay for a happier, engaged and ultimately more productive employee.    

Strategy #2: Work Needs to be More Like a Video Game

Most video games give the player enough autonomy to select his own path.  It’s not a linear path to success, but a series of choices the employee makes to reach a goal.  Sure the goals and objectives need to be defined by the company, but give people real choice and feedback along the way.

Wu expands on the importance of feedback, “You need to show an employee’s progress and give them rapid feedback. Typically this requires tracking and analytics. You need to track everything they do that’s relevant to their job. For an engineering organization, you may want to track how many lines of codes they submitted then compare it to their colleagues.  You need to provide specific, rapid feedback every time they check in. There’s also some long return performance metrics. Over a long period of time, a quarter or a year, you also want to be able to track their performance.”

Most people like video games because they are receiving rapid feedback (usually a score) about their performance. Better, the score increases when the player is closer to the goal, and may even decrease if they stray too far from it.

Wu emphasizes the point, “I can’t imagine playing a video game and not receiving a score until the game was over. That would be kind of a weird feeling.”

Why can’t work be more like a video game? We’d all enjoy it more.

Strategy #3: Gamify Employee Training

Muhammad Ali used to say that, “I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’"

The problem is that most of us hate corporate training and tend to tune out.  The drab, preach and memorize training methodology, is losing our attention to social media, television, blogs and other more engaging media.

Employees then become demotivated and less likely to follow procedure and thus don’t become champions. 

The antidote? Wu likes to cite an anecdote about Microsoft’s Ribbon Hero 2 as an example of combining training with gamification: “Microsoft made the training tool for the Office Suite into a game. It’s actually a serious, educational game,” Wu explains, “Ribbon Hero tracks all the features you use and then recommends a feature and challenges you. Suppose you are trying to write and publish content to the web using Microsoft Word. It will challenge you and ask, ‘Do you know that you can better format and convert graphics for web formats?’”

Once the task is complete, the game rewards the user with points or badges.

To make training more engaging and more motivating, provide training experiences that reward people for accomplishing the right tasks correctly. 

The brutal truth is that you’re wasting money on training consultants and internal support employees that are following the old playbook.  Spend that money instead on designing intelligent training systems that work.

Strategy #4 The Technology Choices Your Company Makes Impacts Success at Work

We have many technology choices at work. Some we like and some we dislike intensely.  Do you monitor the use of them in your company to determine efficacy and adoption rates?

Have you ever noticed how fast Yammer is adopted in most organizations? It’s easy to set up and use, anyone can participate, and the discussions are broadcast to subscribers in order to maximize distribution.  In turn, anyone can comment or post their own message to the organization.  No friction, no permission. 

Conversely, most project management systems are difficult to set up and use, require extensive training, and as a result, only a handful of people use them.  

Wu describes the need for gamification in business tools to create critical mass and engagement, “A lot of times the way we work is heavily dictated by the technology choice that a company makes. It changes the way that people work. I think an important aspect of that is for  technology vendors to infuse gamification principles in their technology to drive a social facilitation, a social competition which is related to aspects of motivation.”

You see, your technology choices can make your employees collaborative or solitary. The wrong tool choice can lead to apathy, while the right choice can launch your company to new heights. And that’s something worth investing in.

Strategy #5 Reward Failure, Expect Better Results

What if I told you that with one policy change, you can completely transform your organization while increasing employee engagement?  Would you listen or show me the door?

Employees rarely take unnecessary risks because of the fear of failure. ‘Failure’ and ‘loss of employment’ have become ‘cause and effect’ in most organizations. Yet in order to innovate as an organization you need to fail.

Fail by brainstorming new ideas. Fail by conducting myriad experiments. Fail by testing concepts with customers, thought leaders and visionaries.  Eventually, the organization learns from those failures and develops something remarkable.

Wu underscores the situation by highlighting how employees feel today, “Right now in big corporations, part of the reason that people don’t take the opportunity to self-actualize (Maslov’s highest level of need) is because they’re afraid to fail. They’ve been so entrenched in this kind of environment that punishes failure that they’d rather not take that chance.”

Bluntly, afraid to fail stifles innovation and creativity.

If you’re a Manager of people, change the rules. Encourage people to try new ideas, let them know it’s okay to fail (without retribution). Psychologically, your employees will open up new reservoirs of creativity and will share it with the group. In turn, the group will either make the ideas better or suggest new ideas instead.   

Either way, you win. 

In the Future, Companies Will Work Like the Movie Industry

The future, according to Wu, is about finding work that we enjoy: “It’s hard to find the jobs that place people into a mental state that psychologists call flow.  Flow of work that people enjoy. Most people are pushed into a corner to do routine things that they hate to do.”

Wu believes the future workplace will work like the movie business, where self selected experts participate as needed: “Every single movie that’s been produced works in the following way. You gather the right people, people who have the specific skill you need – the lighting specialist, the makeup artist, the actors, the film crew – you put them together, they work on this project and once they’re finished they disperse.”

For me, it’s hard to tell where the future workplace is headed.  I do know that the five strategies Wu highlighted above should be implemented today in order to reverse the dissatisfaction trend. 

Study them, better – implement them. Take the opportunity to be a leader while improving your organization’s effectiveness. 

Do you have stories to tell about employee motivation? Have you tried gamification techniques?

Please share your own ideas in the comments below.

(all images are creative commons from Flickr and are linked above)

The song Blackout is moving up the Music Industry charts, and is bound to reach number one because it fits the industry’s belief systems.

In what can only be described as acts of Dumb and Dumber, the music industry is now targeting businesses in their quest to censor the internet and control our rights to digital goods. 

Just recently, EMI filed suit against Boston based Redigi in an attempt to shut down the company’s facilitation of used music sales.  In EMI’s complaint, the company claims that, “While ReDigi touts its service as the equivalent of a used record store, that analogy is inapplicable: used record stores do not make copies to fill their shelves,” and further, “ReDigi is actually a clearinghouse for copyright infringement and a business model built on widespread, unauthorized copying of sound recordings.”

Apparently the Music Industry, EMI and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) forgot to re-read the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) which states, and I’ve borrowed from blogger Bijan Sabet here:

1. Users take responsibility for content they upload
2. Content owners notify website owners of infringing material
3. Website owners receive the notice, review the notice and then take down any infringing content.

In other words, Redigi is protected from legal action because the user is responsible for their actions. That’s why sites like eBay and YouTube are not shut down or sued by over-zealous copyright holders. 

In it’s response filed today, Redigi counters that it’s not creating copies, but legally facilitating a sales of legally owned music. Redigi’s service is so sophisticated that it can detect legally owned music from copies and thus only allow the sale of legally owned, digital goods.  Also, that first sale doctrine applies in digital goods as it does in the analog world.  In other words, Redigi only allow users to sell legally purchased digital music and that right is secured by law. 

From my viewpoint, we are dealing with part two in the horror of the grotesquely senseless. That Hollywood and the Music Industry haven’t yet understood that they are in a new world. A world not controlled by scripts, stages, sets and lights.

And after years of preaching about infringement violation, they are attempting to infringe on ours. They are effectively saying that we no longer have the right to the digital goods we buy. That they still own them even after we pay for them.  That first sale doctrine is suspended because they say so. 

To further understand the lunacy of the Music Industry’s attitude, observe the RIAAs callous reaction to the Wikipedia self imposed blackout RIAAs:  "After Wikipedia blackout, somewhere, a student today is doing original research and getting his/her facts straight," tweeted spokesmen Jonathan Lamy. 

Notably, in the practice what you preach department, Lamy later deleted the tweet in an ironic act of self-censorship. 

From my perspective, the music industry possesses neither the mind nor the initiative to understand that the world has passed them by. They are stuck in a type of mind-set epitomized by the intellectually sterile.  No new ideas, no understanding of new business models, and no reason to connect with the 21st century.

They are having to deal with irrelevancy, and are striving to bring the rest of us with them. 

I can’t help but laugh at the TechCrunch gang’s corporate ad hominem last week. It seemed more of a personal attack than any real attempt to provide a product review. 

TechCrunch didn’t merely reproach their building mate, they reprimanded them. Stranger, most of the article really didn’t say anything at all, because they were not talking to us. They seem to be too entranced by TechCrunch.

I have to agree with Alexia Tsotsis’s dating analogy when referring to their relationship with Yammer, “Everyone knows someone who dates a girl that they’re not particularly into but for some reason they haven’t made the move to cut ties.”

I imagine Yammer feels the same way. I imagine how they want to respond in public but as the more mature party, they’ve taken the high road.  I imagine if they were to have responded, the retort would have gone something like this:

SUBJECT: “Let’s Just Be Friends”

How do you manage a relationship with a gang of Sybils?

You’re practicing the kind of journalism that psychologists refer to as Dissociative identity disorder. You love us, you hate us, make up your many minds.

Your behavior is like the boyfriend that is obsessed with us on one day, and then is slashing our tires the next.  The guy that sends us flowers in the morning but prank calls us at night.  The girl who claims she “needs her space”, but later stalks us like prey.  

Your Jekyll and Hyde routine seems to be triggered by random, dissociative acts or simply for the computer-game fun of it. It’s hard to tell which.

As you may know, Mark Twain once said: “character may be learned from the adjectives which she uses in conversation”, which is telling given the number of times the word ‘sucks’ is used in your article. He should have added that, in order to properly judge ones work, you must have undertaken the responsibility yourself.

So let’s add up and compare the tangible contributions to society and business.  We have millions of users around the world collaborating, sharing and creating new products using our software. 80 percent of the Fortune 500 are using Yammer to break down communication barriers to surface and improve on ideas. We’re facilitating real connections between a company’s suppliers and partners from Brazil to Russia to India to China in order to strengthen relationships across cultures and geographic boundaries.

And what are you creating? How are you benefiting society? Are you working for or against it?

But, to be disappointed, you must first have an expectation of something good and this is your journalism we’re talking about. You seem to be acting like the snob who snubs for the sake of snubbing.  Or that we missed our protection shakedown payment and your making us your public display.

We’re left to wonder if Fred Wilson’s warning is coming true, that after Michael Arrington and a few others left, the media powerhouse would lose its swag.  After pondering the issue, Wilson closes his thoughts with, “But I’m not terribly worried about it. The TechCrunch audience, including me, will find new sources of news, information, and entertainment elsewhere if that’s what needs to happen.”

But hey, let’s let bygones be bygones, alter egos be united, hurt feelings be forgiven – in fact, let’s just be friends.

I was thirteen years old when I first saw it on TV.

An army of blue-gray drones march in lockstep through a long tunnel into an auditorium filled with more drones dressed in futuristic, grey drab. All eyes are transfixed on a big-blue image of a man speaking from a theatre-sized screen, extolling the virtues of its ‘Information Purification Directives.’ Suddenly, a woman in orange shorts and a tank top runs into view carrying a large sledgehammer. She spins to gain momentum and hurls it at the image, causing a large explosion.

Confused, I turned to my dad and asked what this was all about. He said something like: “Well, IBM is being portrayed as a Socialist company that controls minds and stifles creativity, and we’re supposed to reject that.”

The TV scene was from Apple’s 1984 Superbowl ad, and it was a clear shot at Big-Brother, IBM. Apple portrayed itself as the small, underdog hero and IBM the Orwellian, thought police.

But this does not represent today’s IBM – or Apple for that matter.

Today’s Big Blue is the antithesis of Big Brother. It’s ‘Big Open’. A transparent, nimble, collaborative organization known more for listening and engaging customers than for dictating to them. While ironically, some say Apple now resembles Big Brother given their propensity for tight controls.

And that’s why IBM — not Apple — represents the future workplace.

While Apple has been wildly successful, IBM’s Social Business is much more attainable and sustainable than what Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky describes as Apple’s genius led, culture of fear. For the genius is always, as Benjamin Disraeli and later Peter Drucker predicted, succeeded by a “lieutenant of Marines” who understands the business but nothing else. So the company is only left with an innovation vacuum.

In IBM’s social business culture, the genius lies in the 400,000 employees who are free to create circumstances that enable their associates to build on each other’s ideas. Its genius lies in fostering innovation through co-creation with its employees, suppliers, partners and customers. Remove one genius, and there are thousands more in the network to fill the vacuum.

Bottom line: IBM’s Social Business is creating real shareholder value. Allow me to make the case.

<Click here to see large Graph>

Two years ago, had you invested $10,000 in IBM, your investment would be worth over $14,000 today. That means in just 2 years, IBM has created over $60 billion in shareholder value. To put that in perspective, that’s more than the total market value of Hewlett Packard.

The company has been so successful it attracted the world’s most successful investor, Warren Buffett who has long avoided investing in technology stocks. Buffett felt IBM’s management had done “an incredible job” and subsequently accumulated more than 64 million IBM shares, which represents a stake of 5.5 percent.

Another sign of success is how IBM’s competitors are reacting to it. After Oracle missed its latest revenue expectations, Business Insider’s Matt Rosoff wrote about Larry Ellison trash talking IBM. That’s usually a sure sign of fear.

IBM has been so successful in its last few years, that it’s outperformed the S&P 500, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Google and Oracle. Among the world’s largest technology companies, only Apple under Job’s stewardship has outperformed IBM. But without Jobs at Apples helm, where would you invest your money?

Is IBM’s Social Business the Reason for IBM’s Success?

To hear IBM’s Vice President, Sandy Carter’s perspective, IBM’s social culture is partially if not directly responsible for IBM’s success: “Our employees use social computing tools to foster collaboration, disseminate and consume news, develop networks, forge closer relationships, and build credibility. As a result, they’re better informed and prepared to take action on behalf of IBM.”

Carter also likes to cite an IBM Business Value Study where companies that use social business tools outperform the non-social group (in terms of EBITDA) by 57 percent. She takes it a step further to say that, “If you’re not transforming your company into a social business, plan to be out of business.”

I believe IBM’s Luis Suarez agrees with Carter, citing how the 8 million strong IBM-run developerWorks customer community is helping IBM technicians improve IBM’s products: “It’s a rich innovation ecosystem with a direct channel of communication between customers and developers on how to fix IBM products and make them better.”

Leading By Example

Work creates a unique social bond – it is the interface between people, technology and culture. Work’s social bond must also evolve. It must responds to market conditions and customer demands. There isn’t a large company that does this better than IBM.

It may be too early for some organizations to come to grips with social business as a strategy. They are stuck in a corporate dystopia, ruled by the equivalent of an Orwellian inner party which condemns individuality and transparency as thought crimes.

But I’m having a great deal of fun with the knowledge that we’re watching a near-extinct species: the command and control organization. I understand how a business historian must feel when she observes a corporate anachronism; much like the giant music publishers, unaware of the digital disruptors that built new business models and ultimately forced the publishers to play by the new rules.

This in fact is my key takeaway from 2011. That old business must evolve into Social Business. That companies need to be social internally and externally. That business leaders need to create and foster a culture of collaboration and transparency, without retribution. That social organizations outperform their non-social competitors. That rapid innovation is the key to future business success.

That is IBM.

Don’t believe the world’s businesses are going social?  Take this recent declaration from CapGemini’s Managing Director, Global Head of Practices, Didier Bonnet when discussing Social Business with me: “We’ve actually repositioned the entire practice around digital transformation. So for us it’s not just changing one service offering; it’s our entire focus globally for our teams to deliver and to sell.” He came to that crucial decision after MIT and CapGemini interviewed over 160 executives throughout Asia, Europe and North America and discovered that businesses are digitizing. 

CapGemini’s decision was further supported by Andy McAfee, MIT’s Principal Research Scientist for Digital Business, view that, “analog companies eventually are going to get swept aside by digital companies. It’s my firmest belief about the future of business.”

While Bonnet and McAfee are careful to avoid the S-word, “social” in our discussions because for most executives it still equates to happy hour, social technologies are an important aspect of their research.  Bonnet explains, “it’s becoming a powerful and common word so we’re not fighting it anymore.” Indeed, executives are still terrified of their employees wasting time on social activities, but the visionaries are embracing social as a competitive differentiator.

Here are 5 major reasons why:

#1  The Company’s Innovation Culture is Weak

Does your product or service trigger a yawn or a smile? Are you producing products that quickly resonate with your target market?  Do you have a list of hundreds or better thousands of customers that will buy anything you create?  Instead of expensive and generally worthless focus groups, a true Social Business provides a digital platform for employees, partners, suppliers and customers to give input on new and existing products. 

#2 The Competition has a Rich, Vibrant Community of Customers – Some of them Yours

We are present again at one of these significant turning points in communication – just like how the telephone revolution, email revolution, and internet revolution helped business better communicate with their customers. But now the revolution is about building online communities to connect with customers to foster loyalty, trust and engagement.  Those companies ignoring communities will soon find their customers moving to better neighborhoods. 

#3 Increasingly, Consumers are Engaging Brands with Mobile Devices

“We saw two companies in the same sector – insurance in this case – create mobile applications but with two completely different outcomes. The first company tried to simply replicate information found on their website. But the other company took an end-to-end approach and was able to get their prospect to sign a contract on the spot because he had access to all the back office information,” said McAfee giving just one example of how mobile is a competitive differentiator.

Companies will need to quickly adopt a mobile strategy that fits their own set of business use cases in order to keep up with how customers are making purchases. 

#4 Integrating Digital Information is Allowing Companies to Gain Global Synergies While Remaining Locally Responsive.

‘”We saw some really good examples of people in hotels and entertainment companies, for instance, where they integrated customer data from their CRM system, with data from social media, with location based mobile data to start recommending offers,” McAfee explained to me when referring to a best-in-class example of how companies can integrate data for increased sales.

I’ve been struck by how few companies understand the power of integrating data on a single technology platform.  We’ve all experienced a customer service call where we have to dial in our personal information only to have the data disappear once a live agent jumps on the phone.  This is but a small example of the overall problem that most companies have.  The role of the digital leader is to now meld all of the bits of information they have about their customers and to create better experiences and sales opportunities. 

#5 Companies Need a Social Business platform for a Common View of Customers and Products

The MIT and CapGemini report states that: “The most fundamental technology need for digital transformation is a digital platform of integrated data and processes. Large successful companies often operate in silos, each with their own systems, data definitions, and business processes. Generating a common view of customers or products can be very difficult. Without the common view, advanced approaches to customer engagement or process optimization cannot occur.”

For me, the big takeaway from the report can be summed up as follows.  While social interactions are fundamentally a human function, organizations need a digital platform (like SharePoint, Salesforce.com, Yammer, SocialText or Jive) to facilitate social interactions on a global scale. Here as Peter Drucker liked to say, “neither technology or people determines the other, but each shapes the other.”

For our purposes, the technology enables the social interaction, but the social interaction shapes how the technology is used.  Each feed off each other until the organization becomes more effective. 

But why haven’t more companies jumped on the social bandwagon? According to Bonnet: “One of the key findings in the study was that one of the main barriers to achieving a successful social transformation – 77% of the time was lack of skills. Lack of social media skills, advanced mobility application skills and so on and so forth.”

Still, one-third of the companies they surveyed have an effective digital transformation program in place.  The other two-thirds need to quickly get their act together or risk falling behind. Perhaps this is why CapGemini is one of the first top tier consulting firms to change course and build a social business practice.  Indeed, who could blame them?

Every time I see an anti-email blog post or even more amusingly a company that issues a zero email policy, I’m always reminded of one of my favorite Einstein lines,  “"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the the universe."

You have to admire CEO Thierry Breton of Atos for taking a very public stance on the issue, telling ABC, “We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives,” he goes on to say, “At [Atos] we are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organizations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution.”

Thanks Mr. Breton but in our universe that is infinitely stupid.  Let’s see, comparing digital email to environmental pollution when your own company is selling even more digital solutions that are contributing to the problem is pure lunacy.  They pay this guy €2.5 million Euros a year to come up with this stuff.

Breton later clarified that his zero email policy only applies to internal situations and not external, to which the rest of us are left scratching our heads and wondering how external emails will be handled internally.

Imagine a customer sending an email into an Atos imposed, email black hole, where the customer is seeking answers to their questions.  The Atos employee then cuts and pastes the email into the Atos intranet and hours later the Atos employee presumably receives an answer from another employee.  The Atos employee then cut and pastes the answer back into the original email and sends it back to the customer.

But the customer isn’t satisfied with the answers and wants clarification.  So she sends another email back to Atos with documents, images and a link to a video describing her issue.  Since email is banned, the Atos employee needs to cut, paste and upload the media to the Atos intranet and the process continues until resolution. 

Remember Breton’s environmental pollution analogy? Ironically, this situation creates even more digital pollution and human capital waste. To further emphasize how absurd Breton’s solution is, my friend David Lavenda of harmon.ie explains, “Another problem with this strategy is introducing another tool for internal communications, while continuing to use email to communicate with the rest of the world – it’s a total non-starter.”

Breton’s policy depends on accepting the false premise that email is inherently tied to information overload and that by killing it the problem will rectify itself. In reality, it doesn’t matter which communication system you use, there will always be information overload if it isn’t managed properly. 

The kindest interpretation of Breton’s policy is that he is trying to fix a problem we all have in the enterprise; which is how do we manage all of the information coming at us? The harsher view is that Atos is unable to effectively manage information and their executives are taking extreme, unproven measures to somehow control it.

The zero email policy isn’t really a policy at all.  It’s a fantasy.  A fantasy made particularly ridiculous by the fact that Atos is in the information technology business and should know better.  The idea that a large organization is eliminating the only means of a communication technology that easily and efficiently enables any user to communicate with anyone else in the organization because of information pollution, is the operational equivalent of abolishing mobile phones because they produce noise pollution.  

I’m afraid Breton is confusing his information overload symptoms with its assumed cause: email. But email is not the cause, it’s only a vehicle for information.  He can find convenient scapegoats for his own information problems, and let his company’s policies escape the blame. But disconnecting email rather than making it more effective is a folly that deserves our scrutiny.

The problem with email is that it’s too successful a solution. So successful that people use it for things that it’s not intended for, but use it anyway due to its ease-of-use. As I’ve covered rather extensively, solutions like Yammer, SharePoint, Jive, Socialtext, Salesforce.com, IBM Connections, and SAP Streamworks are fantastic solutions that work with but do not intend to replace email. 

The creators of these technologies recognize email for what it is, a simple yet powerful communication tool that is part of an effective social business.  

P.S. I sent an email to Atos asking for an explanation. Presumably it’s buried In their intranet somewhere.

The world’s largest gaming company is going through a remarkable transformation into a Social Business. Electronic Arts understands that today’s technologies, unlike those of the past decade, are no longer limited to the individual.

They impact everyone. Impact that’s revolutionizing the way customers communicate. Impact that is forcing companies to listen, to learn, to adapt, to change its infrastructure and culture in order to stay competitive. Impact that is causing considerable anxiety in the C-Suite.

I first met Electronic Art’s (EA) Bert Sandie at a recent SharePoint Conference in Anaheim. His self-appointed title ‘Director of Technical Excellence’ stood in stark contrast to the trendy Angry Birds shirt he was wearing. But the more you talk to Sandie, the more you notice how well these ambiguities somehow support one another.

Electronic Arts Social Platform SnapShot

Is EA a Social Business?

When asked if Sandie considered EA a social business, he was quick to respond, “Externally for sure. If you think about what we do from a consumer perspective There’s a lot of discussion inside EA, then after some deliberation, it’s delivered externally and direct to the consumer. Our goal is to constantly answer the questions: How do we understand our customers better? How do we interact with them? It may sound easy, but it’s very challenging to do in practice.”

For EA, this isn’t just a theoretical matter. They put it into practice to improve the bottom line. Each game has a community manager that learns from its players through personal conversations. But at a point where most companies are satisfied, EA takes it much farther. Sandie explains, “We do a lot of analytics. We study how people are reaching the page and how they consume and interact with our content. We also watch what they download. It all helps improve the user experience.”

Still EA wasn’t satisfied and wanted to learn more about their customers, “There’s also deep telemetry and analytics on any online game. So we want to see if people are playing a certain feature, how long they’re playing that feature, which character did they play, which costume did they pick, which helmets do they like, you name it, we measure it,” explains Sandie.

Sounds a lot like EA’s own reality version of The Sims to me. Find out what people want, create it then insert it into the game. By serving demand, consumers are happy and EA profits. An excellent example of how Social Businesses can increase revenue by tuning in.

But is EA an Internal Social Enterprise?

So does EA apply these same social concepts with their employees? According to Sandie they are just beginning but cautions, “because we work in so many countries, we are careful around privacy and we have offices especially in Europe and Canada.”

But, then, what are they analyzing? Sandie explains, “We collect a lot of analytics through some proprietary tools we built on top of SharePoint 2010. More than people might imagine. We look at how many people, fill in their profiles but we also look at how many people view other people’s profiles.”

But why? Sandie answers, “So inside EA about 50% have filled in complete profiles. Everyone has a profile by default. A standard profile gets pulled from HR, active directory data. What’s more interesting is something like 85%+ employees look at other people’s profiles regardless if they have a profile themselves. So they obviously want to find other people and find information about them. Yet they might not necessarily have filled in their own profile which is really interesting.”

It turns out completed profiles build deeper relationships. It’s a kind of Match.com for the company’s employees. Looking for an animator, just search the profiles and find your match.

This is the core of creating an effective social platform that supports the social enterprise. Create critical mass on the platform by first persuading people to create profiles and personalized content. Then, persistently encourage employees to contribute work related content. But be careful not to censure employees. In fact, encourage debate as long as it remains civil.

Sandie illustrates a typical situation on EA’s more mature social platform (SharePoint), “So if a team just put out Madden Football, we’ll do a deep dive with the Madden team. We’ll get them to write articles about what they did and the marketing behind it. They’ll explain how they designed certain features, new technical things they used and what cool art techniques they applied. We like to highlight that stuff in order to seed the platform with valuable content.”

EA On Best Practices

Sandie likes to set the bar high. So his best practices may be stretch for some, just right for others. Naturally, it’s wise to decide for your organization the appropriate level. “I know I’m a bit of a perfectionist so I always try to set the gold standard for people to follow. I like to show people the gold standard for how to make a great video, article or illustration. We’ve also built templates for users to add images, diagrams or external content,” Sandie explained.

He also advises employees not to write 25 pages of content. Instead, shorten the article or whitepaper to five to seven pages. “People will read 5-7 pages, add images, show screenshots if you’re trying to show a part of a game or a piece of art or a technique or the tool. Put some links in it to other additional information. Those are all just best practices on how to write a good knowledge article that will help people,” advises Sandie.

In regards to content ratings, Sandie advises you follow Facebook and only use the ‘thumbs up’ button. Sandie emphasizing the point, “Internally you do not want thumbs down. I’ll give you my perfect example why people don’t want thumbs down. A new employee starts in the company – they are junior, maybe a new graduate. They write a really good article for other new grads and for whatever reason some cynical veteran is giving it thumbs down. Will that new graduate ever write an article again?”

Perhaps not, but will that graduate ever receive constructive feedback to improve her skills? According to Sandie, EA has enabled comments for that type of feedback. Sandie is probably banking on EA veterans to be more diplomatic in the comment section.

EA Lessons Learned

When EA first presented what they had done on SharePoint to Microsoft, the reaction was, “you guys built this on SharePoint?” Certainly a surprise since the site lacked any major 3^rd party social apps, Sandie added, “but our goal was not so much about the technology, we cared that it was usable, it was aesthetically pleasing and it was functional. It did all three of those things.”

Sandie then went on to explain why it’s crucial to roll out a social platform in phases, “Even if you have a sophisticated audience, do not roll out the kitchen sink and all the bells and whistles at once. Even a sophisticated audience cannot absorb it all – so hold back stuff. Even when they are saying they desperately want it, they can’t take it all. It’s too big of a change initiative. They’ve got to learn pieces of, introduce pieces of it and then introduce the next piece.”

Of course, like eBay, EA started with an exclusive invitation to participate, “We started with an email that said, ‘Hi, you’ve been selected out of 100 people; you’re the elite squad of people we trust to use these types of tools. We want your feedback. You’ve got one month. We’ll be updating the site every day in real-time with feedback so have patience.”

But once the social business platform is in place, Sandie recommends companies hire a curator to manage content and help make internal communities more active. “You do need a curator. If you don’t have a curator I think you’re going to struggle. People are willing to do it but you still need a curator to go help them,” Sandie emphasized.

To Summarize…

It’s clear EA is leveraging social business principles both internally and externally. They’re also using social methodologies in the products they are shipping to understand how their customers are using their games. While a different approach is needed for all three scenarios, EA is becoming a more effective organization by understanding how to strategically participate in each.

Aptara and Scott Abel (Content Wrangler) have created this interesting infographic on the state of the eBook publishing space.  As more and more content goes digital, it will be crucial to understand how to leverage eBooks and similar forms of digital information. 

Below is a good guide to consider if you’re thinking about creating an eBook. 

eBay’s going social. Its protagonists are building the next generation social platform called the HUB, to increase employee engagement, collaboration and effectiveness. It is instructive to follow the evolution of their strategy in response to the growing chorus of eBay employees who were demanding social tools, or had already snuck them in.

On first impression, Ramin Mobasseri eBay’s Enterprise Portals Solutions Manager and Maarten Sundman a SharePoint Architect and Developer appear to be an unlikely team. Both men speak in different languages: Mobasseri ‘business’ and Sundman ‘tech’. Yet both were equally determined to create a people-centric platform for eBay’s 18,000 employees.

Their approach can best be described as a test-and-learn methodology. Mobasseri explains, “We believe in taking small steps,, [starting] with a proof of concept. It’s easy to learn from 1,000 people. It’s much easier to make mistakes with 1,000 people rather than with thousands people.”

Their goal with employees was to not to force them to drop their existing cloud-based social tools, but to try and integrate them into the collaboration Hub. That way, all of the information centralized rather than trapped in cloud-based silos.

The Playbook Summary

Technology	SharePoint (the Hub), Newsgator, Yammer
Primary Adoption Strategy	Pilot the Hub with a 1,000 Tech Savvy Elite, learn and then roll out to next tier.
Most Important Lesson Learned	Incentivize users to fill out their profiles.
Most Unique Feature	The Hub aggregates and unifies a user’s external social network, then allows the user to cross-post information to social networks with one click.
Benefits	Improved employee retention, collaboration and transparency expected
Social Business Strategy in 5 Words	Test, learn, measure, revamp, repeat

How eBay’s Social Business Program Started

Interestingly, the proliferation of eBay employees using a cloud-based micro-blogging solution from Yammer set off IT alarms and spurred them into action. Employees had brought in Yammer without IT approval or involvement. In this landscape, Mobasseri, Sundman and the rest of IT knew they needed act or risk being viewed as non-strategic. They wanted to support the business units, they wanted to be involved and they were going to do something about it.

In reality however, the team lacked the budget and power to build a social platform to support the company’s move to a more social organization. Not having any official support from the executive team, and only the CIO’s tacit approval, Mobasseri and his team worked around executives who were roadblocks, and went directly to mid-level management to gain their support.

“What we did was go to a number of directors and people who really wanted this social thing and wanted to participate. Some of them even volunteered to pay for the software, partially, which was great. We then developed an internal Stakeholder’s Analysis model. In it, we classified people as being ‘for us,’ ‘against us’ or ‘neutral’ and assigned power scores to each of them. In the end, we were looking for the person who loved our project and had a lot of power. Fortunately, we found him. His name is Alan Marks. The rest was easier,” said Mobasseri.

eBay’s Adoption Strategy

In testing their adoption strategy, Mobasseri explained, “We tested it with 1,000 people from various groups, backgrounds and digital skill sets, and not just the tech savvy elite. They were very, very interested in this tool because they believe in the social learning phenomenon.”

True, a pilot program that focuses on a select group of people is an adoption best practice, but eBay took it a few steps further. “We also ran a campaign called ‘Scrub the Hub’. We gave people incentives, like Xbox’s, just to enrich their profiles. Why? Without a rich profile, what can you get in a social network? Not much,” said Mobasseri.

My Favorite Quote: “What is a trip to Hawaii to a company? For some companies this makes sense.  Why not? You gain a million dollars in productivity for a $10,000 investment.” (Ramin Mobasseri, referring to a practice of incentivizing users to fill out their profiles)

Another way of looking at it is to imagine a Facebook without faces, background info, or personal context. The site becomes useless, like a shadowy Cheers bar filled with anonymous characters ‘who don’t want anyone to know their name’. Without the human element and context, social platforms are unlikely to flourish.

When I asked Mobasseri how the program has worked out, he explained, “The numbers of profiles has quadrupled, but it’s still not where we want it to be. To qualify for an incentive, some people went and just put smiley faces in their profiles. But it’s getting better. There is communication. We have to continue telling people, ‘Go ahead and put things in your profile.’”

Why eBay decided to use SharePoint (The Hub) as its Social Platform

It’s becoming increasingly evident that building a social platform as the hub of all social and document activity is an important step in enabling an organization to go social. But eBay didn’t want just any platform. They wanted a robust, state-of-the-art platform, figuring it would accelerate its usage; thus making the organization more effective.

In describing their decision to use SharePoint and Newsgator, Mobasseri didn’t believe the out-of-the-box SharePoint platform to be sufficient, “So we evaluated some other social networking tools like Jive. We played around with Yammer, as I mentioned. We tried Ning and Chatter as well. But NewsGator just kept rising up to the top of our scoring. So we decided the social networking tool for eBay was going to be NewsGator built on SharePoint.”

According to Sundman, eBay also chose SharePoint because of its ability to easily integrate tools from other vendors (typically through SharePoint web parts). If the tool can’t be integrated, Sundman elaborates, “we then aggregated the content within the Hub. That way, they can see the activity streams from various social networking like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or whatever tool that’s not supported by SharePoint natively.”

Sundman went on to explain how eBay will be the first company to allow its users to post and receive updates from the intranet to multiple internal or external networks at the push of a button.

While a beneficial and significant timesaver, integrating data from people’s external social networks accelerates a discussion about who then owns the employee’s social data? In most US organizations, the company has the rights to all content and messages on an employee’s computer. But I’m not sure this rule holds when an employee’s external social network is being used for business purposes.

Lessons Learned

In any endeavor involving organizational change, opportunities are missed, mistakes are made, and the right decisions only later become obvious. Against this backdrop, I asked Mobasseri what he would have done differently, given the chance.

“We currently don’t have a mobile device management solution, but we’re working on it. We want to see our social sites via the iPhone or the Blackberry, but it’s not going live for a while. We think in 2012, we will actually roll out the mobile piece,” explained Mobasseri.

“The other lesson learned was around the various browsers that were coming up short in SharePoint 2010. Because at eBay and PayPal, we’re very tech savvy, and people use Chrome on the Mac. But SharePoint is a Microsoft product. It doesn’t always work on Chrome. Some of the stuff does and some of the stuff doesn’t. So we built a browser capability matrix. In it, we highlighted what worked, what kind of worked and things that didn’t work at all. Those are the things that we should have known beforehand,” lamented Mobasseri.

Summing it all up…

Yes, it’s true that in our era of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, employees are able to side-step enterprise IT and use cloud-based social tools to get their job done. That’s been a good thing — so far. But ultimately corporations are in business to solve problems for their customers, so employees need to be working from the same playbook.

So whether you are a corporate salesperson, accountant, paralegal, vice-president or IT professional, you can be the next leader who steps up to the plate and creates your company’s social playbook, designs the plays to have impact, and builds a team to deliver it. These people are called visionaries. Visionaries like Mobasseri and Sundman who don’t just dream about creating a social business. They find the means to create one.

Note: eBay went live with the Hub on 11/11/11