Nokia’s technology isn’t a root cause of its current crisis. Don’t blame its engineers and designers either. The company still knows how to innovate. There’s a simpler and more strategic explanation for why this once-perennial market leader became second-rate.

Nokia ignored America. The company simply refused to compete energetically, ingeniously and respectfully in the U.S. America was treated as an innovation afterthought. Nokia tried to get away with preserving its market dominance in Europe and growing its leadership in Asia. The richest country in the world was, literally and figuratively, a third-class priority for the Finnish giant.

Schrage asserts that ‘you can’t be a genuine global innovator if you’re a loser in America’:

Nokia’s unwillingness or inability to bring its best game to America has undermined its brand as both a technical and market leader. Marginalizing America allowed two of Nokia’s most dangerous competitors to swiftly, safely, and smartly out-innovate it.

Schrage observes that Nokia have belatedly realised this error and that it is ‘not an accident that Nokia’s (relatively) new CIO is a North American’.

Real leaders do well wherever there’s real competition. They don’t de facto abandon the world’s wealthiest markets because they think they can do better elsewhere. Most important, they respect the inarguable reality that, while global innovators can emerge from anywhere, they are still most likely to emerge from the place where Google, Apple, and Facebook began. Techno-entrepreneurs who want to win in the world still need to win in America.

… despite the North American hubris, I think he has a point.

Reference Links:

Micheal Schrage – The Cause of Nokia’s Crisis – 15 February 2011

Harsh, but fair.

Heraclitus of Ephesus (c.535 BC – 475 BC)

This truth of this insight must be searing through the consciousness of Nokia’s management …

[Courtesy of AFP / SMH:]

The worlds top mobile phone maker Nokia is standing on a burning platform surrounded by a blazing fire of competition, new company head Stephen Elop said in a dramatic call for radical change.

How times have changed for Nokia …

The Finnish company was once the industry’s top dog, with a 40 per cent share of the mobile device market as recently as second quarter of 2008 but it has been on the slide ever since, falling to 31 per cent in fourth quarter 2010.

According to a leaked memo, Nokia is beset with the following woes:

non-competitive operating system Symbian, a lack of accountability and leadership, painfully slow product delivery, a lack of internal collaboration and a general series of misses

What I found quite profound about this rapid turn-around in fortunes for Nokia is that the competition didn’t come from ‘a better phone’ – it came from a different type of consumer device, the ‘smart phone’ (and the associated ecosystem), which many commentators claim is ‘an inferior phone’.

I remember when I bought my first iPhone (after years of using Nokia and Windows phones) – I was blown away by the intuitive, ease-of-use features – and the market place of applications.  It was a completely different device! – one that also happened to make phone calls.

I look forward to seeing how Nokia responds – and other business insights from a company that was once the clear market leader.

Cheers,

Carl

Reference links:

Nokia ‘on a burning platform’: new CEO in leaked memo – smh.com.au, 10 February 2011

Decision Making Approach

This process forms the basis of much of the thinking around collaboration.  But is it really the best approach? Are two heads really better than one?

Professor Richard Wiseman in his highly readable book ‘:59 Seconds – think a little change a lot’ provides some interesting insights into the potential pitfalls of group collaboration.

Professor Wiseman provides examples of research which shows that being in a group exaggerates people’s opinions, causing them to make more extreme decisions than they would on their own.  This ‘polarisation’ effect can, depending on the initial inclinations of the individuals in the group, result in the final decision being either extremely risky or extremely conservative.

What causes this strange, but highly consistent, phenomenon?

Teaming up with people who share your attitudes and opinions reinforces your existing beliefs in several ways:

• You hear new arguments, and find yourself openly expressing a position that you may have only vaguely considered before.
• You may have been secretly harbouring thoughts because you believed them to be unusual, extreme or socially unacceptable.
• Surrounded by other like-minded people, these secret thoughts often find a way of bubbling to the surface, which in turn encourages others to share their extreme feelings with you.

Professor Wiseman points out that polarisation is not the only phenomenon of ‘groupthink’ that can adversely influence individuals when they get together.  Studies have shown that, compared to individuals:

• Groups tend to be more dogmatic
• Groups tend to be better able to justify irrational actions
• Groups are more likely to see their actions as highly moral
• Groups have a tendency to form stereotypical views of outsiders
• Strong willed people who lead group discussions can pressure others into conforming, encourage self-censorship and create an illusion of unanimity.

Professor Wiseman cautions that over fifty years of research suggests that irrational thinking can occur when people try to reach decisions in groups, and this can lead to a polarisation of opinions and a highly biased assessment of a situation.

So … are two heads really better than one?  I suspect that, given the above, the answer is ‘not always’.  However, given that group work is unavoidable in modern business, we would all do well to bear in mind the negative groupthink behaviours that may arise during collaboration.

Reference Links:

Amazon: Professor Richard Wiseman’s book ‘:59 Seconds – think a little change a lot’

… all of the content you’ve ever uploaded on Facebook can be used, modified or even sublicensed by Facebook in every possible way – even if you quit the service.

I’m sure that this was a sobering realisation for many users of the services – and for many organisations that are contemplating using social media platforms for business.

I’d like to highlight a few more concerns about SaaS platforms in general that I think are relevant considerations for Enterprise 2.0 adoption:

• closed source software with fused data stores – with many SaaS offerings the service and the data managed by the service is not accessible to other services/applications and/or replicable on another hosting platform.  This obviously leads to the creation of information islands which is something that  we have been trying to avoid with IT for years.
• privacy legislation requirements and data hosted offshore – many organisations address these concerns by getting their users to acknowledge the offshore hosting of their personal data via the terms and agreements which users need to agree to.  However, this does not abrigate the moral responsibility of the service provider to ensure the protection of their customers data – something that is difficult to achieve and verify  when dealing with service providers operating in another culture and time zone.
• terms and agreements which may not provide adequate protection against 3rd parties mining the data for commercial benefit – as evidenced by Schroeder’s blog post, mining of social media data in particular provides many organisations with unforseen commercial benefits.
• ability to erase data when use of the service has stopped – the service provider will in all likelihood retain a copy of the data in some form for an extended period of time after you discontinue use of the service.
• guarantees of service continuity – can the service be stopped at any time? How reliable is the service?  As reported in the media there have been several recent outages to high profile Enterprise 2.0 service providers.

So what can be done about these concerns?

My colleagues at Mach Technology believe that they have the answer – look to leverage the functionality, scalability and cost benefits of open source software solutions by hosting them in a Private Cloud.

There are many examples of open source Enterprise 2.0 solutions currently available including:

• Elgg - an open source social networking platform that could provide organisations with a Facebook-style capability
• Indeti.ca – an open source microblogging tool that is equivalent to Twitter
• Alfresco Share - an open source web-based enterprise content management platform that provides blogging, discussions, document repositories, wikis, RSS, calendars, etc. (see previous blog posts)
• Drupal - an open source content management platform that, with the use of community-developed modules that provide blogging, micro-blogging, disucssions, networking, etc.
• BigBlueButton - an open source web conferencing system aimed at distance education but which could be used for many business functions
• And many more …

Looking to host these open source solutions in a private cloud provides organisations with the following key advantages over SaaS / Public cloud offerings:

• Risk Management – deploying a private cloud in you own data centre or in the data centre of a trusted third party will give you a more complete picture of the risks inherent to cloud computing.
• Location – the geographic location of the servers powering the cloud has direct implications on how it will perform. For example, desktop virtualisation requires low latency which demands geographic proximity. Similarly, most database-driven applications will work only if the application sits really close to the data. Customer data must remain in a customer’s country as stated by law in many countries.
• Portability – applications built on top of public cloud infrastructure (e.g. Force.com) can only run on that public cloud. Applications built to run on common, open standards (e.g. LAMP stack) are portable between private cloud providers.
• Resilience – data loss is a huge concern for consumers and corporate customers (Microsoft/Danger lost all of the data stored by customers on their Sidekick smartphones). Private clouds which implement proper backup and disaster recovery policies significantly reduce the risk of catastrophic loss.
• Security – the security of most public clouds has been successfully breached over the past few years, usually through Denial-of-Service attacks or phishing methods. Additionally, public clouds represent a highly visible, desirable and obvious targets for hackers and organised crime.
• Confidentiality – data confidentiality is one of the most difficult things to guarantee in a cloud computing environment for a number of reasons. As public clouds grow, the number of people working for the cloud provider who have access to customer data grows as well, multiplying the number of potential sources for a confidentiality breach. The needs for elasticity, performance, and fault-tolerance lead to massive data duplication and require aggressive data caching, which again multiplies the vulnerabilities of public cloud infrastructure. End-to-end data encryption is not available within the public cloud (e.g. Encrypted data may be transmitted securely but it must be decrypted on the cloud’s server when being processed for a query or a transaction). Until end-to-end encryption is widely available, data confidentiality will be maximised by using a private cloud managed by a trusted party.
• Service Level Agreements – most public clouds today deliver 99.9% uptime (downtime less than 9 hours per year) – but many customers demand 99.999% uptime (5 minutes and 16 seconds downtime) which requires a technical architecture and a set of procedures significantly different from than most public cloud operators. Another area of concern is data ownership – while some service providers are pretty clear about it, others remain dangerously ambiguous, making their clouds totally unsuitable for a broad range of applications.
• Control – the need for overall control is the main reason for most organisations using a private cloud. While private clouds may not offer the same economics or the same level of elasticity as public clouds, they will always provide the extra level of control that most organisations crave.

For these reasons, I believe that the path to successful adoption of Enterprise 2.0 for many organisations will lead to a proliferation of open source private cloud providers like Mach Technology.

Reference Links:

• Stan Schroeder blog post ‘Facebook: All Your Stuff is Ours, Even if You Quit’
• Elgg
• Indeti.ca
• Alfresco Share
• Drupal
• BigBlueButton
• Mach Technology

Collaborative production, where  people have to coordinate with one another to get anything done, is considerably harder that simple sharing, but the results can be more profound.  New tools allow large groups to collaborate, by taking advantage of nonfinancial motivations and by allowing for wildly differing levels of contribution.
Clay Shirky – Here Comes Everybody: How change happens when people come together

Many organisations today are embracing wikis and other Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 technologies in order to improve collaboration, innovation and knowledge management.  I suspect that many of these organisations are pursuing these technologies with little fundamental understanding of the human dynamics involved with their use.

Clay Shirky in his book Here Comes Everybody: How change happens when people come together provides some compelling insight into the behavioural aspects of wikis.  I have tried to summarise the essence of these insights regarding wikis as follows:

Wikis are user editable websites based on the premise that groups of people who want to collaborate also tend to trust each other.  Consequently, small groups should be able to work on a shared writing effort without needing formal management or process.

Wikis allow readers to add, alter, or delete content on pages.  Whenever a user edits anything on a given webpage, the wiki records the change and saves the previous version.  Every wiki page is therefore the sum total of accumulated changes, with all earlier edits stored as historical documentation.  This simplicity means that not only can new content be quickly added, but existing content can be quickly deleted – or restored.

Clay Shirky uses Wikipedia as a case study for wikis on a global scale as it is perhaps the most famous example of ‘distributed collaboration’ which has become one of the most visited websites in the world.

Wikipedia articles are a process, not a product, and as a result are never truly finished.   Once an article exists, it starts to get readers.  Soon a self-selecting group of those readers decide to become contributors.  Some of them add new text, some edit the existing article, some add references to other articles or external sources, and some fix typos and grammatical errors.  All contributions can be incremental and not all edits are improvements.   For a Wikipedia article to improve, the good edits simply have to outweigh the bad ones.  Wikipedia assumes that new errors will be introduced less frequently than existing ones will be corrected.  This assumption has proven correct; despite occasional vandalism, Wikipedia articles get better, on average, over time.

With wikis, a predictable pattern emerges over time:  readers continue to read, some of them become contributors, the wiki continues to grow, and articles continue to improve.  The process is more like creating a coral reef, the sum of millions of individual actions, than creating a car.  And the key to creating those individual actions is to hand as much freedom as possible to the average user.

Given that everyone now has the tools to contribute equally, you might expect a huge increase in equality of participation – but you would be wrong.  Social media contributions tend to follow a predictable ‘power law’ pattern where the most active participant is generally much more active than the person in the number two slot and far more active than the average.  For example, fewer than 2% of Wikipedia users ever contribute, yet this is enough to create profound value for millions of users.  Consequently, large social systems cannot be understood as a simple aggregation of the behaviour of some nonexistent ‘average’ user.

This power law relationship was first discovered by Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist in the early 1900s who studied the distribution of wealth.  This same power law was the subject of Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail.

In such social systems (as Wikipedia and Flickr) the most active participants tend to be much more active that the median participant, so active in fact that any measure of ‘average’ participation becomes meaningless.  There is a steep decline from a few wildly active participants to a large group of barely active participants, and though the average is easy to calculate, it doesn’t tell you much about any given participant.

Such systems have some surprising characteristics – the first is that, by definition, most participants are ‘below average’ in their contributions/participation.  The second is that as systems get larger, the imbalance between  the few and the many gets larger, not smaller.

Consequently, you cannot understand Wikipedia (or indeed any large social system) by looking at any one user or even a small group and assuming they are representative of the whole.  The most active few users account for a majority of the edits, even though they make up a minority, and often a tiny minority, of contributors.

We typically have a hard time thinking about systems like Wikipedia that exhibit power law distributions – we’re used to being able to extract useful averages from small samples and to reason about the whole system based on those averages.  When you encounter a system like Wikipedia where there is no representative user, the habits of mind that come from thinking about averages are not merely useless, they are harmful.  With a system like Wikipedia, it is important to concentrate not on the individual users, but on the behaviour of the collective.

This obviously has implications for rewarding and recognising contributors to wikis.

Why do people contribute to a wiki in the fist place?  Making a mark on the work is a common human desire.  This desire to make a meaningful contribution where we can is part of what drives Wikipedia’s spontaneous division of labour.

Another motivation is the desire to do a good thing.  The genius of wikis is in part predicated on the ability to make nonfinancial motivations add up to something of global significance.

Wikis reward those who invest in improving them and explains why both experts and amateurs are willing to contribute.

Wikis are a hybrid of tool and community.  Wikipedia, and all wikis, grow if enough people care about them, and they die if they don’t.  This isn’t a result of the software – but part of the community that uses the software.  Within Wikipedia there are many examples of contentious articles on subjects like abortion and Islam where complete deletions of the article’s content have been restored in less than two minutes.

As with every fusion of group and tool, the defence against vandalism is the result of novel technology (all edits and deletes can be quickly and easily reversed) and a novel social strategy.  Wikis provide ways for groups to work together, and to defend the output of that work, but these capabilities are available only when most of the participants are committed to those outcomes.

Wikipedia is a living study in apparent contradictions – a chaotic process, with unpredictable and wildly uneven contributions made by non-expert contributors acting out of variable motivations, has created a global resource of tremendous daily value.

Wikipedia is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.  The articles grow not from harmonious thought but from constant scrutiny and correction.   Wikipedia, unlike a commercial encyclopaedia, does not have to be efficient – it merely has to be effective.  If enough people see an article, the chance that an error will be caught and fixed improves with time.

Thank you Clay for your insight … Wikis are indeed simple but will undoubtedly have a profound affect on how we collaborate and share in future.

One section of the book introduces the “Way of the Goose: Cheering others on”:

I also noticed that from time to time the lead goose would fall back and the V would form up behind a new lead goose.  But again, there didn’t seem to be any connection to the honking.

…

I listened and Andy was right.  They were honking encouragement and cheering each other.  I’d been a cheerleader in high school and I knew a cheer when I heard one.  These were enthusiastic, cheering honks.

…

“Those geese fly thousands of miles every year.  They can move hundreds of miles in a day.  They are truly one of the wonders of our world.  And they do it cheering each other on every step of the way.”

…

“Andy, all the geese honk.  It isn’t just the lead goose honking.  They’re all honking.  It doesn’t just have to be managers cheering the team members does it?  We can get everyone cheering each other.”

[courtesy of http://www.pbase.com/sayer/image/50003092]

This truism struck a chord with me – how could we create a work place where everyone cheers each other on and celebrates the small, every day successes that go largely unnoticed?

The rise of social media platforms may well provide the enabling mechanism.

Most folk these days have heard of Twitter – although I suspect that many people (including myself) are yet to find much value in the service.  I note on the Wikipedia page for Twitter the following quote from Jack Dorsey (credited with creating Twitter):

[W]e came across the word “twitter,” and it was just perfect. The definition was “a short burst of inconsequential information,” and “chirps from birds.” And that’s exactly what the product was.
—Jack Dorsey

For me, the constant stream of ‘short bursts of inconsequential information’ within Twitter is intriguing, but not terribly useful; a concept that still lacks maturity in its useful application.

Yammer is an enterprise micro-blogging service and social media platform that is similar in concept to Twitter but, instead of broadcasting messages to the public, Yammer is used for private communication within organisations and between groups.

Access to a Yammer network is determined by a user’s internet domain, so only those with appropriate email addresses may join their respective networks.  According to the Yammer website, the service is used by some 80,000 organizations:

Yammer enables users to communicate, collaborate, and share more easily and efficiently than ever before. Yammer reduces the need for meetings, increases communication across silos, surfaces pockets of expertise and connects remote workers.

As per the Wikipedia page on Yammer:

If Twitter asks: “What Are You Doing?”, Yammer asks: “What Are You Working On?”

Engineers at Geni created Yammer internally for the company’s own purposes, but Sacks liked it so much he decided to spin it off as its own company.

He explains:  ‘The purpose is to allow co-workers to share status updates. You post updates on what you are working on. You can post news, links, ask questions, and get answers for people in your company. You can see the most prolific people and the most followed people. It is a good way to discover who is the most influential in your company.’

To me, the text-length characteristics of Yammer limits the wide applicability of the service.  However, the high visibility, speed and inherent informality of the service means that it could serve as an effective  collaboration tool alongside other Web 2.0 technologies such as Wikis, Blogs and collaborative work spaces that are far more suited to sharing insight and understanding  around work-related knowledge areas.

How will people come to use Yammer? Hopefully they will learn to emulate the ‘way of the goose’ and cheer each other on and celebrate the small, every day successes that go largely unnoticed in many of today’s work environments.

Reference links:

Amazon.com – Gung Ho!

www.twitter.com

Wikipedia – Twitter

www.yammer.com

Wikipedia – Yammer

What the …?  As a long term (so long I can’t remember) member and advocate of the LinkedIn service,  I’m somewhat shocked to see that it is regarded in the ‘least trusted’ category of brands alongside FHM, casinos and Nutrient Water.

No further explanation or analysis regarding the table was offered – it had been inserted against a loosely related article on tech gadgets.

A quick online scan reveals that the information has been sourced from ‘the latest Brand Asset Valuator (BAV) study’ published by BrandAsset Consulting.  This study reportedly:

… examined 1000 brands covering 120 different categories, with 2000 Australian consumers surveyed online.

Right … An online survey of consumers has been used to rate a list of consumer tech-related brands like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Sony, etc., with online community sites like MySpace and LinkedIn.   The relevance of the survey is starting to elude me …

BAV Research director David Evans states:

“Brands that are seen as betraying consumer’s trust, that don’t deliver on value and customer service, are being punished. Australians don’t trust casinos; men’s magazines or flavoured mineral waters, while Easy Off Bam, Fox Sports and Theo’s Liquor are being trashed because they are seen as customer unfriendly.”

I’ve got to agree with David there – I don’t trust casinos, men’s magazines or flavoured mineral water.  But I am a big fan (and subscriber) of FoxSports – and don’t see them as ‘customer unfriendly’.

Nutrient Water

I started to wonder how many of these ‘consumers’ were actually users of the services provided by LinkedIn – or if they even understood what services were provided by LinkedIn?

According to the ‘What is LinkedIn?’ page ‘over 75 million professionals use LinkedIn to exchange information, ideas and opportunities’ by:

• Staying informed about your contacts and industry
• Finding people & knowledge you need to achieve your goals
• Control of your professional identity online.

I would concur with all of these statements – its why I am a subscriber to LinkedIn.

As an example, the weekly alert email that lists updates to the profiles of my ‘connections’ is a much anticipated and valued read – through this service I see how people that I know are moving and interacting within their professional careers.  No other service offers me this – Facebook certainly doesn’t.

But how would I rate LinkedIn in terms of ‘trust’?  Do I trust the LinkedIn service from a ‘brand perspective’?  I fear that asking this question is to trivialise and probably misinterpret the concept of ‘brand’ and the services provided by a social media platform such as LinkedIn.

The power of LinkedIn comes from the content put into it voluntarily by the users of this service – there is no editorial control over the content that I put in regarding my profile.  As a professional networking tool, users are encouraged to detail their professional experience, roles and education.   Users are also encouraged to connect to other users of the service.

Do I trust the content within LinkedIn?  Yes – more so than I would trust the equivalent content within a resume that was sent to me via email.  Why? Well first of all the content is highly public – anyone can search LinkedIn.  Secondly, through the use of connections it is relatively easy to find someone that you know who knows the person of interest and can therefore offer an opinion on the accuracy of content within that person’s profile on LinkedIn.

[Image courtesy of: http://nowsourcing.com/2009/04/28/social-media-motivators/]

So, how would I rate the ‘brand’ LinkedIn in terms of ‘trust’?  I would probably put it in the top 10 rather than the bottom 10 because I know, understand and value the services provided.

How would I rate LinkedIn against Sony?  I’m not sure I can … They both provide me with very different services that I value, but to compare the two is to compare apples with oranges – or rather product vendor with online community.  It simply doesn’t make sense.

One thing this survey highlights to me is that, particularly in the case of new social media platforms, poorly interpreted survey results plastered on Page 3 of a national paper can hurt a brand – but, more importantly, they devalue the perception of credibility of the survey provider.

Related Links:

The Australian

FHM and Star City named Australia’s least trusted

BrandAsset Consulting

LinkedIn

As reported in the Herald Sun on July 15:

After his third penalty for the season, a frustrated Jackson told his Facebook friends: “Dan Jackson is sick of playing a pussy sport and so is retiring in favour of playing a real man’s sport. Perhaps I’ll be better suited to the NRL?”

This message found its way into the public spotlight after one of Jackson’s “several hundred friends” on Facebook made the comments public.

As Hardwick observed: “Social media these days, with Twitter and all those forms of communication … it can be a dangerous thing.”

Understandably, naive use of social media like this by elite athletes can have significant negative ramifications for sporting organisations.  For Richmond it could easily have lead to the suspension of Jackson for one or more games.  Its not hard to imagine other disgruntled players airing grievances in more colourful language that could have dire implications – including fines and the potential loss of sponsorship.

With the rise and rise of social media, I am sure that more and more professional sporting club media managers and CEO’s are experiencing sleepless nights hoping that their stable of elite athletes are not indulging in ‘harmless pranks’ that can easily get out of hand – as per the infamous North Melbourne chook sex video which appeared on YouTube in 2009.

With these risks, one would expect many a club would be shying away from social media….

However, if developments in North America are anything to go by, just the opposite is likely to happen.

Activ8social.com, an organisation specialising in digital branding and social media network development, observed in May 2010 that:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg put on his company blog: “next version of Facebook Platform puts people at the center of the web. It lets you shape your experiences online and make them more social. “  For the most part, we believe this statement is true at Activ8Social, and we also believe the shift toward a more open, social web is a good change for both the sports brand/team/athlete and the consumer/fan.

Why? Because Facebook now carries the personal identity of over 450 million people around the world enabling sports media outlets and brands that implement Facebook’s Social Plugins to more effectively build relationships with fans and consumers that are mutually desired.   It also gives third-party websites the ability to directly provide relevant and extremely targeted information to your Facebook news feed.

These sentiments are reflected in the North American National Hockey League’s evolving social media strategy. As reported by Greg Wyshynski on Yahoo Sports in October 2009,

The goal is simple: Make it more fun to be an NHL fan, which in turn will make more sports fans want to become one.

“Social networks aren’t about Web sites. They’re about experiences,” said Mike DiLorenzo, director of social media marketing and strategy for the NHL.

The NHL believes that bringing fans together socially online, and bringing fans closer to their favourite teams and players, is a fundamental way to grow the game in a changing media culture.

“Blogs are the original social networking tool. They bring a voice and perspective to the NHL media property that may not currently exist,” he said. “We’re trying to encourage more of our users to write about their favourite team and inspire more dialogue.”

In other words, the NHL wants to activate their fans into content providers and marketing foot soldiers, something evident by the League’s approach to both Twitter and Facebook in recent months. NHL Fans encourages users to bring the NHL to their favourite social media sites and to their personal blogs through widgets.

Other sports within North America, do not seem as keen on embracing social media for other reasons – as highlighted by Reuters.com on October 1, 2009:

The NFL, which zealously protects its on-field product, was the first of North America’s big four professional sports leagues to put a twitter policy in place, banning players from using social media platforms from 90 minutes before kickoff.

While coaches worry reckless tweets may provide inspirational bulletin board material for opposing teams, leagues are working to protect broadcast rights holders from tweeters getting too close to play-by-play.

These concerns from the NFL have not been lost on the NHL, as indicated by Wyshynski in his arcticle:

Twitter is an interesting concept for the NHL. As a League, it’s used the social network well; but it’s still trying to figure out the “proper” way for its teams and players to use it.

What then are the implications for sporting teams in Australia?

As listed by Anthony Alsop on SportsSpeil.com, there are some 47+ AFL players active on Twitter, along with coaches, team and regional leagues.

Alsop, who sees his personal mission as “to raise awareness of the positive impacts social media can have for businesses” and has researched and blogged on many aspects of social media and sport, has identified the following social media best practice for sporting bodies:

Be consistent: Throughout your social media ‘footprint’, consistency is key. If you have uploaded a video, post the link to your Facebook, Twitter and Flickr accounts.. Not all members of each platform are members of the other, so the same message needs to be relayed to all fans – this also applies to direct E-Marketing.

Be yourself: Fans come to your site for transparency, for something unique that they can’t achieve through traditional outlets such as press releases or website news. They want that extra special something that makes them feel like a fly on the wall.

Be active: Online users will often come to your website two or three times a day. If you are not posting news or links on a daily basis your consumers will go elsewhere. You need to stay active to keep the attention of your users even in down times. ‘Content is King’ and one must entertain his subjects.

‘Dialogue not monologue’: Create fan polls, react to comments posted on forums, articles or Tweets, become engaged in what the customer is saying. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations, so allow your consumers plenty of opportunity to place feedback. If a fan has an ‘authentic interaction’ from an athlete or celebrity this is an incredible experience for them and often can strengthen the bond, between brand and consumer, club and fan.

Spread the word: You have an online community or ‘e-tribe’, so use them. Encourage your users to retweet messages, use Digg as a method of spreading the gospel of your website or even give away prizes for fans that use your brand in a Twitter #hashtag or Facebook update. This will ‘activate’ other fans and they too will become part of your community.

Constantly changing technologies: The future of the web is on portable devices such as iPods, smart phones and gaming platforms such as Xbox and Sony Playstation – how can we ensure these platforms achieve equal status to their web counterparts?

Social media has elevated a fan’s experience beyond just wearing their favourite team’s scarf or guernsey to the game. Fans can now carry around their favourite team in their pocket wherever they go. They can now be involved with like-minded fans at anytime of the day, from anywhere in the world

There is no doubt that sporting organisations will need to accept and embrace social media as a way of enhancing the service and experience provided to their customers (i.e. their fans and supporters).  To achieve this, the social media platforms and the content contributors (i.e. the athletes) should be integrated into the business operations of the organisation and appropriately resourced, staffed and supported (i.e. Trained).   Those organisations that fail to address these challenges will have to contend with the well publicised risks – and a lot of sleepless nights for media managers and CEO’s.

One of the stories in the book is particularly enlightening – I had a hunt around and found this online version of ‘Chapter 1: It Takes a Village to Find a Phone’.

The story entails a lost phone and the leveraging of social media ‘to deliver a lesson on the etiquette of returning people’s lost belongings’. This episode graphically illustrates the power of group action – given the right tools – and how people react to, participate in, and even alter the story as it is unfolding.

What is interesting, and more than a little disturbing, is some of the unintended side effects:

• Someone driving by Sasha’s house, videoing the house and posting it on the internet.
• Members of Luis’ military police unit enquiring about allegations of threats to a civilian.
• Online conversations about whether Luis was taking sufficient care of his uniform.
• Public pressure on the NYPD resulting in the tasking of 2 detectives to investigate a minor crime and arrest Sasha.
• Evan’s success in generating media attention leading to freelance work doing PR.
• The New York Times and CNN picking up the story of a stolen phone because it was wrapped up in the larger story of national and international attention – the story ended up in more than 60 newspapers and radio and TV stations and more than 200 web-logs.
• The number of people interested in talking about the stolen phone and the standard anonymity of internet users made conversations effectively impossible to police - Evan’s bulletin board quickly become host to public messages disparaging Sasha, her boyfriend and friends, single mothers, and Puerto Ricans as a group.  One thread involved discussion by male participants as to whether Sasha was attractive enough to sleep with.
• Though Evan was clearly benefiting from having generated the attention, he was not entirely in control of it – the bargain he had crafted with his users had him performing the story they wanted to see.

As Shirky observes:

The story demonstrates how dramatically connected we’ve become to one another.

It demonstrates the ways in which the information we give off about ourselves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinised in public.  It demonstrates that the old limitations of media have been radically reduced, with much of the power accruing to the former audience.  It demonstrates how a story can go from local to global in a heartbeat.  And it demonstrates the ease and speed with which a group can be mobilised for the right kind of cause.  But who defines what kind of cause is right?

This story illustrates the kind of world we now find ourselves in:

Do we want a world in which a well-off grown up can use this kind of leverage to get a teenager arrested, as well as named and shamed on a global platform, for what was a fairly trivial infraction?

Poor people lose phones too, and the loss hits them far harder; why should Evan have been able to browbeat the NYPD into paying attention to this of all lost property?

Policing time is finite, yet the willingness of humans to feel wronged is infinite.  Do we also want a world where, whenever someone with this kind of leverage gets riled up, they can unilaterally reset the priorities of the local police department?

Food for thought…

Cheers,

Carl