It’s been awhile since I posted here. I have been focused on my Forbes column and writing a new book so I’ve had little time to write.  But I did want to post 5 of my most popular articles over the last 6 months. Let me know if you like them:

1. Microsoft’s View of the Future Workplace is Brilliant, Here’s Why

I’ve spent the last two months traveling around the U.S. and Europe visiting Fortune 500 executives and Microsoft Technology Centers (MTCs) and the journey has left me feeling both energized and alarmed. Energized because I am seeing a dramatic rise in the attention given to social business and the foundation for it is being laid by social CIOs. These CIOs and their executive counterparts understand how the social and mobile transformations are changing the game. Never has business…

2. The 25 Highest Rated CEOs that are Hiring Now (CHART)

If you’ve ever worked for an extraordinary CEO you may have described the situation in nostalgic, harmonious tones. Like your first year of College where everything is new and exciting, and the possibilities are endless.

3. IBM Study: If You Don’t Have a Social CEO, You’re Going to be Less Competitive

The list of the world’s CEOs regularly includes celebrities, billionaires, big egos, risk takers, and failures. What it does not include are social media experts; but that’s about to change. When IBM(NYSE: IBM) conducted its study of 1709 CEOs around the world, they found only 16% of them participating in social media. But their analysis shows that the percentage will likely grow to 57% within 5 years.

4. What Apple and Google are not Telling you About Mobile Device Security (infographic)

With 6 billion global mobile subscribers and over 35 billion apps downloaded to those devices, one begins to wonder how secure this situation is for businesses. In fact it’s not. The situation can best be described as turning an organization’s network security into Swiss cheese, where holes are opening up from devices everywhere.

5. Why Atlassian is to Software as Apple is to Design

There are only 3 enterprise-gradetechnology products I’ve ever seen that sell themselves. Two of them are from Apple; the other is from Atlassian. How many Apple salespeople have ever called you to sell you the iPhone, or iPad?  Zero. How many Atlassian salespeople have called  to sell you Confluence? You guessed it – zero.

For big brands acquiring  customers it used to be a simple formula. 

Create a great ad + advertise in media with a large audience of potential customers + have a call to action = sales.

Brands that follow the old formula can still advertise to millions of people and have plenty of traditional brand impressions. Some still call this success.

But given the new tools for monitoring engagement, it’s now much easier to determine if those “impressions” are worth the millions spent on them.

Today the success formula is becoming increasingly complex and will forever remain so.  Case and point the Superbowl and Academy Awards. 

The Social Business experts from the Dachis Group monitored over 30,000 brands before, during, and after the Academy Awards and the Super Bowl by tracking the brand’s every social action, their 100 million social accounts, their 2 billion aggregate social followers, and those followers’ 10 billion social behaviors on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. They monitored audience growth, brand sentiment and brand/audience engagement.

For Dachis, the goal was not only to measure brand impressions, but to understand how the ad impacted the audience at each of these events.  Erik Huddleston, Chief Technology Officer at Dachis Group explains: “We genuinely believe that just because you can afford to advertise in both the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards doesn’t mean you should do so. When a brand spends anywhere from 1.7 to 3.5 million dollars for 30 seconds of time, that brand needs to be able to know if the ad "worked." And when we say "worked" we don’t mean "are people talking about our ad?" We mean "did our ad change the way people feel about our brand? Did it inspire people to tell their friends and subscribers about our brand?"

For today’s brands, the metrics are getting better and the ROI clearer. But that also means the Marketing department will be held more accountable for real results.  Marketing will need to experiment with new formulas in order to find the right one for their target audience. It’s not going to be easy, and it’s going to require a lot of trial and error, but solutions from companies like Dachis will make it easier.

<Click here to see the infographic>

Our minds are strongly biased towards causal explanations and they do not deal well with statistics.

How else can you explain why mobile game developers continue to create games for an App Store market with 100,000 games already flooding it? Incredibly, there are 104 games per day that are being released into Apple’s App Store with no signs of slow down.

The cause seems to be the digital bait sold in digital App Stores temptingly promoted by Apple, Google and Amazon. Judging by the headlines, one could easily conclude that vast vistas of new commerce for hundreds of thousands (eventually millions) of independent game and application developers have opened up with un-ending wealth creation opportunities for all the players in this new commercial eco-system.

But are mobile game developers making any money off of their games? The dirty little secret is, in fact, they are not. “Profitability is elusive for the vast majority of developers. Unless you are part of the anointed few that Apple selects to push heavily in the App Store, revenue is hard to come by,” Jason Seldon of Eye Interactive and P4RC (pronounced ‘Park’) points out.

(Click to enlarge the Venn Diagram on Google, Amazon and Apple)

A few like Rovio are of course making money. But as Don Dodge explains, even fewer people know that Rovio had to fail 51 times before their “overnight success” in Angry Birds. That’s a lot of money lost before finally finding a profitable winner.

So why are mobile game developers continuing to make mobile games?

Because the irrational tail is wagging the emotional dog. In other words, developers are ignoring the statistics while being caught up in the emotional frenzy and madness of the game developer crowd.

The ability of our minds to deal with the immense amount of positive information around mobile game revenue is hard to ignore. But game developers are imagining the numerator – the untold riches and fame, and not thinking about the denominator – the large number of games they are competing against.

And this is only part of the problem.

Jas Dhillon of Pivotal Ventures and an investor in P4RC put it to me this way, “The paid download model is on its way to oblivion. Apps sold for anything more than $0.99 are often deemed over-priced and the consumer willingness to pay even $0.99 is becoming questionable. Other than those select few games pushed heavily by Apple, paid games receive very few downloads relative to free games with most paid games receiving well below 100 downloads per day.”

This has led to the growth of freemium games with in-app purchases, which allows developers to generate a much larger number of free downloads with an expectation that some relatively small percentage of these downloads will result in a purchase. While some developers have been very successful with the in-app purchase model, such success stories seem to be the exception to the norm. Getting the game balance just right to maximize in-app purchases is no easy feat for any developer.

But even for the successful developers, the backlash against in-app purchases is growing. As one reads the user reviews for freemium games with in-app purchases, there is a consistent theme of user dissatisfaction when confronted with in-app purchases.

Confirming this trend, Mark Beccue, ABI Research senior analyst predicts: “As a revenue model, in-app purchase is very limited today. The vast majority of current in-app revenue is being generated by a tiny percentage of people who are highly-committed mobile game players. We don’t believe the percentage of mobile game players making in-app purchases will grow significantly.”

So the consumer mindset has moved to one of entitlement and anger with the belief that games and anything in them should be free.

The Six Things Mobile Game Developers (MGDs) Must Do to Survive

There’s a reason why consumers feel both entitled and upset. Imagine watching a TV show where you had to buy credits for better voice quality, use a credit card to unlock supporting actors or change the channel to see the ending. Would this imaginary situation be tenable in anyone’s living room today? Never, because people have been trained to accept passive commercial interruptions but not accept obtrusive requests.

For developers, the situation is increasingly dire because the amount of games vying for consumer attention is escalating at an alarming rate. But there are some options left. Options that people have accepted for several decades.

Here are six specific actions that mobile game developers must do to stay viable:

1. Deliver Relevant Advertising: While in-app purchases and paying for games is on the decline, advertising is a tried and true model. MGDs need to deliver relevant and targeted advertising to the consumer playing their games in order to maximize the return to the Brand Advertiser.

2. Increase the Ad-Impressions Delivered: MGDs need to maximize the number of display impressions without adversely impacting the quality of the game experience. This requires both analytics and A/B testing, but if done correctly will significantly increase the MGD’s revenue yield.

3. Maximizing Time Spent Viewing Advertisements: Since the mobile game revenue business model is going to move more towards advertising, MGDs need to develop strategies to maximize the time spent by consumers in viewing displayed advertisements while maintaining a positive game experience. I cover this specific strategy below.

4. Improve Consumer Time Spent In-Game: MGDs must maximize the time consumers spend playing a game and do it on a consistent basis. When designing the mobile game of the future, the primary goal for MGDs must be to increase the time consumers spend in-game.

5. Increasing Repeat Play: The buy-it-once, play-it-once model is dead. MGDs must develop games that get consumers to return to play over and over again. Again this is about maximizing the time spent in-game, but do it by creating reasons to return the game over time.

6. Ensuring a Positive Game Experience while Minimizing Disruptions: MGDs must invent new, non-intrusive methods for inserting in-game advertising in such a way that it does not interrupt the gaming experience. Not finding the right balance will trigger consumers to quickly leave the game and to warn their social network of their negative experience.

As advertising becomes the dominant model, the way games are made will need to evolve. Currently, the average iPhone user spends 14.7 hours per month playing games. So there is a lot of time available to serve ads. The key is keeping the gamers in your game for longer instead of letting them move on to someone else’s game.

How do MGDs increase the time consumers spend in-game?

One option is from a company called P4RC.

P4RC is a social engagement platform that rewards players with real world prizes for playing mobile games. This is done with a point system that awards points to players based on their gaming skill, and then they can spend these points in an in-app marketplace. Think of it as adding a skee-ball ticket system into mobile games.

According to Seldon, “Since winning a prize generally takes about 90 minutes of gameplay, P4RC can create a 3x increase in gaming duration vs. the 30 minute daily average time spent gaming by the average iPhone owner. So in a world in which mobile advertising is the key to success, P4RC could essentially triple a developer’s revenue.”

And since points can be earned across any games in the P4RC rewards network, developers that include P4RC in their games may benefit from incremental downloads as consumers seek to discover new games with the P4RC system inside. Best of all according to Seldon, “Listing your game in P4RC’s game discovery module is free for developers that put P4RC in their games.”

Another option is a soon to be released solution from Session M.  CEO Lars Albright won’t elaborate, but the company appears to building a solution that simultaneously creates more customer loyalty while keeping consumers engaged in-app for longer. Session M is founded by a team of ex-apple employees.

To Summarize

Until the mobile game frenzy returns to a more rational situation, it won’t provide what the MGDs need to be profitable. So it’s really an adapt or die situation for MGDs and the smart ones will learn how to thrive by innovating around the trends in consumer behavior.

Another alternative is for the App-Store platform providers to become more responsible for MGD profitability by sharing in the risk. Yet to them, MGDs are just sources of unwanted babble, noise, and grievances, with the occasional Rovio cowbell in the background. But while the App Stores are demanding more cowbell, they are ignoring the rest of the group.

That’s not a sustainable plan for anyone.

As always, please read through my disclosures

I want to highlight a few of last week’s articles that I find particularly engaging and thought provoking.

An often overlooked aspect of social business is the immense amount of data that can be derived from social interactions. This data will not only improve our own productivity, but increase the effectiveness of tomorrow’s corporations. 

Related to that are how future organizations will embed social interactions into their processes in order to make projects more effective.  Yet as Yaacov Cohen points out, this requires an evolutionary approach, not an revolutionary approach.

Kare Anderson explains why smart people can act stupid which may shed some light on why more businesses are not making the social business transition sooner.  Finally, Cheryl Burgess explains why Social Business will be far more important than Facebook, LinkedIn,Google + or Twitter. She’s right of course, and read the article to find out why. 

1. Searching and Filtering Big Data: The 2 Sides of the “Relevance” Coin

BY Michael Wu, Ph.D.

Wu discusses how to make Big Data useful. He simplifies it so that the rest of us can understand it. 

“Search is arguably the most efficient way for data reduction, but the caveat is that we must know what data we are looking for a priori. Due to its efficiency, search engines can be applied at the web scale to find and retrieve the data we need. This is why Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, etc. are able to make a business out of their search technology.”

2. Modeling Enterprise Social Business Processes

BY Rawn Shah

“It has been said many times, that for social business to succeed to create the evolution towards Enterprise 2.0, we need to put this social activity directly into the flow of how people work.”

Rawn gives us a glimpse into the future of how projects become socialized by embedding social elements into the process. 

3. Why Jive Software Isn’t LinkedIn to Social Business

BY Yaacov Cohen

Cohen delivers a convincing argument that Evolution not Revolution is the proper path for businesses to take in becoming a social business. 

“Jive’s tagline boasts that its software is ‘the new way to business’. At first,  their argument sounds convincing. But is Jive really leading the next revolution – the enterprise spring – delivering a fresh start for the Facebook generation entering the corporate world and expecting Facebook-like tools? Not necessarily.”

4. Since Smart People Sometimes Act Stupid….

BY Kare Anderson

“Intelligence by itself doesn’t make you rational. Thinking rationally demands mental skills that some of us don’t have and many of us don’t use,” suggests Kurt Kleiner. And context has considerable influence on what we see, feel, think and do.”

A thought provoking article on mental traps and how even the most intelligent are subject to them. Food for thought for those facing an intelligent executive suite that just doesn’t understand the need for a social business.

5. The Rise of Social Business – Broader than Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ Combined

BY Cheryl Burgess

“Businesses are in the midst of fundamental changes that will neither reverse for stragglers nor offer them mulligans. Innovative leaders must rethink their social strategies and move beyond the linear, process-driven approach to dynamic, collaborative, networked organizations. Executing these changes may prove difficult, but it’s imperative for forward-looking organizations to be competitive in the global bazaar of the digitally powered landscape.”

Burgess explains why social business is about getting personal and why it’s imperative that large and small businesses take the journey.

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.

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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?