The social networking capabilities of Web 2.0 technologies provide numerous opportunities for product and service providers to engage customers. Two interesting examples of companies reaching out to engage their customers come from the footwear industry, specifically Nike and adidas. Some of you may already know about these two examples. However, the difference in social networking strategy between the two is worth thinking about.
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Is a Social Network on Your Foot?
August 7, 2008
6 Comments | 
Brands, Customer Communities, Customer Experience, Experience Design, Social Media, Social Networks, v-Tags, Web 2.0 | Tagged: adidas, customer community, nike, social networking, visual tags, Web 2.0 | 
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Posted by Larry Irons
Mobile Learning and Visual Tags
August 4, 2008
eLearning Guild QR Visual Tag
We first discussed visual tags a couple of years ago as Web 2.0 technology initially emerged in mobile devices such as cell phones. Referring to two visual tagging techniques available at the time, we noted:
Shotcode and Semacode make mobile information seeking over the web work like scanning a bar code to determine the price of an item. They make offline media interactive. It is pure pull, unless you consider the offline advertising “pushy”. The metadata necessary for accessing relevant information is largely in the context, the embodied situation of the user.
Take a look at the following video for an overview of how visual tagging works, in this example it is for advertising services.
So, how does this relate to mobile learning, or m-Learning as the eLearning Guild refers to the practice? Read the rest of this entry »
2 Comments | e-Learning 2.0, v-Tags, Web 2.0 | Tagged: Collaboration/Learning, e-Learning 2.0, elearning 2.0, folksonomy, m-learning, mlearning, mobile learning, performance support, Social Media, visual tags, Web 2.0 | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
The Community Gap
July 27, 2008Rachel Happe, over at The Social Organization, recently posted an entry titled Social Media is not Community, outlining the broad differences between what distinguishes community from the conversations characterizing social media. Rachel’s general point is that even though social media can support community development, several key traits of communities make them distinct.
They are continuous, not temporal – this is not to say that people don’t drop in and out but there is a core membership that interacts together over a long period of time.
Communities gather around a concept or common goal not around a collection of content (although content does plays a major role, it is not the impetus for the community).
Communities take on various conversations and activities, led by different members over time – it is not one conversation but many.
People within communities get to know each other and interact regularly without centralized facilitation and not necessarily in the context of what the community is discussing as a whole.
Community leaders emerge over time as they continue to take proactive roles in the community and rally other members to their causes. These leaders are community members and they self-select because of their interests – not because they are told to do so…although they can be encouraged to do so.
Rachel adds that enterprises can take advantage of two opportunities relative to social media and community. The enterprise can use social media to start conversations among their stakeholders around content, initiatives, and goals. Or, enterprises can develop communities and sustain them over time in order to impact business processes. She believes enterprises don’t yet understand what is entailed in developing communities.
The points offered in Rachel’s post are provided empirical support in the recent 2008 Tribalization of Business Studysponsored by Beeline Labs, Deloitte and the Society for New Communications Research. Read the rest of this entry »
6 Comments | Customer Communities, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 | Tagged: community, Social Media, tribalization study, Web 2.0 | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Innovation Process?
July 23, 2008I ran across the following video illustration of the design process from Johnnie Moore’s blog. It points to several issues in the creative and research side of design and innovation with a humorous touch. Enjoy…
Although the video makes its points through a degree of exaggeration, the history of the stop sign in the United States does reflect some of the uncertainties depicted.
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Leave a Comment » | Experience Design, Innovation, User Experience | Tagged: design process, Innovation | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Empathic Research Methods and Design Strategy
July 20, 2008Adam Silver, a Strategist at Frog Design, recently wrote an insightful article, “Calculated Design”, in the company’s online magazine — design mind. I want to discuss the article because it touches on several key issues relating to innovation and designing products and services for the experience of users/customers. Adam notes that as globalization and digitalization emerged in the 1990s the trend resulted in product and service interfaces with more culturally diverse and geographically distributed audiences and a fragmented market. The combination of these forces led designers to search for new methods to augment artistic intuition. Considerations of form and function also required attention to feel, features, and interactivity attuned to the needs, wants, and beliefs of specific users/customers.
As Adam observes, ethnography was one of the first new methods incorporated by design research to meet these challenges in the market. However, he thinks ethnography is, on its own, unable to provide the kind of information needed to validate product and service ideas across wide audiences. Read the rest of this entry »
12 Comments | Customer Experience, Experience Design, Innovation, User Experience | Tagged: empathic research, empathic research methods, empathic research strategy, empathy with customers, Ethnography, Experience Design, Innovation | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Invitations to the Flowgram Beta Available
July 17, 2008I’ve noticed a few people coming to Skilful Minds after searching for access to the Flowgram Beta program. I have been given ten invitations for the Flowgram Beta program if anyone who reads the blog is interested in testing Flowgram yourself. I’ll forward the invites to the first ten people who request one by leaving a name and email address using the Contact form.
I provided an overview of Flowgram previously, and did a demonstration here.
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Leave a Comment » | Blogflows | Tagged: flowgram | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
futuremelbourne: Wikis in City Planning
July 16, 2008Howard Rheingold provides an interesting video podcast of an interview with Mark Elliott regarding the use of wikis in city planning, particularly in Melbourne. The Melbourne wiki uses the tagline, “the city plan that anyone can edit.” Mark indicates there were 500 registered users and 7,000 visitors to futuremelbourne.
I’m not convinced by Mark’s concept of stigmergy, analogizing patterns of insect behavior — specifically ants — to the activity of participants in a wiki. However, his overall point about the benefits of using wikis for collaboration between public officials and the community in civic projects, such as the New Zealand police act wiki, is persuasive.
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2 Comments | Collaboration, Web 2.0 | Tagged: Collaboration, wiki | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
A Skilful Minds Blogflow — Collaboration
July 15, 2008As I noted previously, I applied to join the beta testing for Flowgram. I’m happy to report that I was provided with access yesterday. So, I decided to give it a try. Overall I’m pretty impressed.
I decided to use Flowgram to provide a new feature on Skilful Minds which, for lack of a better term, I’m calling a blogflow and making it a category to organize future blogflows.
The blogflow I created with Flowgram reviews several posts available to this date that cover the topic of collaboration. This was a first pass effort. However, I’d be interested in what anyone who takes the time to review it thinks of the concept as a media resource for blogs.
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1 Comment | Blogflows | Tagged: Blogflows, flowgram | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Innovation and Co-Creation at Nokia Beta Labs
July 14, 2008At least since publication of the Cluetrain Manifesto, with its basic point that markets are conversations, the importance of customers, online and off — but especially those online, to innovation gained widespread recognition. Pointing out the importance of customer communities to sustaining innovation is not exactly a new insight. In recent years the term co-creation emerged to describe the process, whether applied to established companies or start-ups. However, understanding what leads customers to engage in co-creation is important. A story at Nokia Conversations points to a recent study sponsored by Nokia Beta Labs that offers a profile of the customers active in their community, framing the relationship as follows:
While on one side it seems cheap to release unfinished goods and ask for help. But at the same time, it’s amazing to involve eager customers who not only make the product even better than if we did it alone, but are all lined up to take the product they helped make… Read the rest of this entry »
1 Comment | Collaboration, Customer Communities, Innovation | Tagged: co-creation, Customer Communities, Innovation | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Flowgrams: A New Way to Screencast
July 8, 2008Screencasts are effective ways to share ideas, images, concepts, experiences, and a range of information for a variety of purposes including eLearning, collaborative problem solving, or just fun. I just ran across a new technique for doing screencasts called a Flowgram. Eric Schonfeld over at TechCrunch describes it as,
…a full-screen player with what appears to be a screencast with a voiceover. Except that you can control the pages by scrolling up and down, watching any videos that might be on the page, or clicking on the live links (which takes you out of the Flowgram to that Website, but if you hit the back button it picks up where it left off). You can also add comments and share the Flowgram via a widget…It’s an interactive screencast, a way to synthesize the Web by pulling different pieces together The voiceover acts as the glue. It can be used for slide shows, travel guides, tutorials, sales pitches, or just to explain something to a friend.
I’ve signed up for the private beta access program so I can build a few Flowgrams of my own to get a better sense of how this tool compares to applications like Captivate or Camtasia. After briefly interacting with several of the Flowgrams available it looks quite promising. I like the ability to scroll pages as well as play videos embedded in pages presented in the Flowgram. I’m not sure why the developers decided to navigate out of the Flowgram when you click on a link that takes you to a page outside the Flowgram, rather than opening a window to view it, but when you click the back arrow the flow of the Flowgram seems to pick back up where you left it. Take a look at Flowgram for an overview.
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4 Comments | Collaboration, Cool Entries, e-Learning 2.0, Innovation, Web 2.0 | Tagged: Collaboration, flowgram, Web 2.0 | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Who’s on Your Team? Enterprise 2.0 and Team Boundaries
July 7, 2008Do you know who is on your team? It seems like an easy question for people who work in large corporations to answer. Reviewing Socialtext People recently led me to remember an interesting study I read a few years ago that reported rather surprising findings with significance for Enterprise 2.0, and to the lead-in question above. The study, largely ignored in the social networking literature, pointed to a clear limitation to collaboration in national and global corporations that organize teams geographically distributed.
Mark Mortensen and Pamela Hinds published a chapter titled, “Fuzzy Teams: Disagreement in Distributed and Collocated Teams”, in an edited collection called Distributed Work way back in 2002. The book itself contains an interesting range of studies on the challenges involved in organizing work across members of geographically distributed teams. However, it seems to me that Fuzzy Teams offers a key insight into the way Enterprise 2.0 applications, especially wikis, help to meet challenges in organizing distributed work that are often overlooked. Read the rest of this entry »
5 Comments | Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Web 2.0 | Tagged: boundary spanning, distributed work, Enterprise 2.0, wikis | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Demographics, Innovation, and Enterprise 2.0
June 30, 2008As a member of the boomer generation, a recent post by Stewart Mader on the use of Enterprise 2.0 at Wachovia caught my attention because it relates to a range of ongoing discussions on the relationship of age and innovative uses of technology in supporting collaboration.
Stewart points approvingly to a recent InformationWeek article on Wachovia’s use of wikis, blogs, and social networking to develop mutual mentoring between younger workers and senior staffers. Wachovia is assigning younger staffers to mentor senior staffers about the benefits of using collaborative networks. However, Stewart goes on to qualify the point of such mentoring with the following insight:
We often talk about how the millennial generation has an advanced grasp of these social and collaborative tools, but just half of the story in my opinion. I see enterprise 2.0 tools not as the exclusive domain of youth, but as a better connector for multiple generations, so that wisdom, tacit knowledge, and business know-how from the experienced can be shared with younger workers.
The point is bolstered by recent research, though with a couple of crucial caveats. Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Web 2.0 | Tagged: digital divide, Enterprise 2.0, Millenials, Web 2.0, wiki | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Visual Wikis: Forbes’ Corporate Org Chart Wiki
June 28, 2008Wikis are largely about creating, organizing, and sharing knowledge. Most people think of textual and static graphic information created, organized, and maintained by groups of people when they consider what makes up a wiki. The integration of visualization tools is one of the more interesting developments in wikis recently though. As an example, the Thinkbase tool provides an ability to visually navigate and explore Freebase, an open, shared database of the world’s knowledge. The Thinkbase Blog is a good resource for learning about Thinkbase.
In fact, John Hosking recently provided an overview of how to use visual wikis. Read the rest of this entry »
7 Comments | Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Web 2.0 | Tagged: Enterprise 2.0, visual wiki, Web 2.0 | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
E-Learning 2.0 and Learning Management Systems (LMS)
May 19, 2008Back in the late 1980s, I worked in the telecommunications industry as a methods analyst, a euphemism for a technical communication staff member who primarily analyzes business processes. One of my assignments involved work on the design team for a records management system. The company served a regulated industry with regular audits from both federal and state agencies. It, therefore, needed to make sure it retained all paper records only as long as regulations required, and no longer. In other words, records management was essentially a risk management function. Well, you may ask, how does this relate to e-Learning 2.0 and LMS?
Before getting to that discussion, we need to clarify the terminology used here. The term e-Learning 2.0 refers to implementations of Web 2.0/social networking technologies to complement traditional learning processes managed by the training or human resource functions in organizations. Blogs, wikis, and other social software are useful in nurturing e-Learning communities of practice and enabling knowledge sharing in new ways. The eLearning Guild’s recent 360˚ Report on Learning Management Systems 2008 offers a few unique insights into the relationship between e-Learning 2.0 and LMS. Read the rest of this entry »
2 Comments | e-Learning 2.0, Learning Experience | Tagged: e-Learning 2.0, LMS, social capital, Web 2.0 | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
How Not to Build a Customer Community
May 15, 2008I’ve discussed the importance of customer communities to innovation, customer experience, and customer dialogue as an antidote to self-orientation by companies. David Weinberger recently posted about the Community 2.0 conference, pointing out the Starbucks suggestion box as a good example of customer community. David also pointed approvingly to the arms-length participation of Tivo in the independent forum, TivoCommunity.com, speaking to the point that communities of customers often form on their own.
Coincidentally, I received an email recently soliciting me to join a community of Best Buy customers. I’m not an especially enthusiastic customer of Best Buy, but since CompUSA closed its doors in St. Louis, most of my electronic purchases are at Best Buy. The first thing I took note of in the invitation was its blatant point that Best Buy is selecting members for its community. The email stated:
If you are selected to join the online community, you will discuss and share opinions on a variety of topics, react to questions posed by Best Buy and provide insight into your lifestyle. In addition, you will build rewarding friendships with other members, and receive periodic rewards in exchange for your participation. This is a unique opportunity for you to share your thoughts and ideas with Best Buy – only about three hundred people will be chosen.
To see if you qualify, please click on the link below to complete a 10-minute questionnaire.
The email solicitation sparked my curiosity and I clicked on the links to check out the survey it requires you to complete before learning whether you qualify. At the end of a lengthy sequence of questions, I learned that I just don’t fit into their community plans. Probably because I didn’t answer all the questions, such as what is your family income and other fairly personal items. It seems obvious to me that Best Buy doesn’t really want a community. Rather, they are selecting people for the equivalent of an online focus group representing one marketing segment. I’d suggest Best Buy rethink its strategy.
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1 Comment | Community 2.0, Customer Communities | Tagged: Best Buy, Community 2.0, customer community | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Collective Tags, Collaborative Tags, the Long Tail, and Enterprise 2.0
April 30, 2008Thomas Vander Wal recently offered an interesting discussion of how collective understanding and collaborative understanding differ, and why those differences are significant to social software, specifically in relation to folksonomy. Thomas’ concern is that many observers, and he points to the Wikipedia entry for folksonomy specifically, conflate collective understanding and collaborative understanding when considering folksonomy. He notes that, even though the two terms are similar, their differences manifest as distinct capabilities in social software.
…the term folksonomy was coined to separate tagging done in a collective manner (each individual’s contribution is held separate and collected or aggregated to build a fuller understanding, as the tagging is done by and from the individual reading the media for their own retrieval and is also share out with others). Collaborative tagging does take place and there is a need for it in certain situations, but it is not folksonomy.
First, Thomas makes a key point that remains unspoken when many people write about social software. Read the rest of this entry »
2 Comments | Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Social Networks, Web 2.0 | Tagged: Collaborative Tags, Collective Tags, Enterprise 2.0, The Long Tail | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Onboarding, Social Capital, and Wikis
April 16, 2008All organizations face a similar challenge when new employees come onboard. The new employee needs to learn the ins and outs of the organization. HR typically provides them an orientation packet and a point of contact for information. Their team, or department, management gives them an overview of their job and, if they are lucky, walks them around to introduce them to their co-workers and provides any virtual introductions, i.e. email announcements, needed to other members of the organization. However, providing new employees with access to the information needed to understand how to do their work is always a daunting challenge. Referring them to policies and procedures, whether manuals or online, remains the most common first step. Sometimes the new employee even receives on-the-job-training for a few days.
Making the first few days of a new employee’s orientation smoother and making the curve of their time to performance steeper are challenges requiring ongoing innovation in the management of human capital, but also social capital. Read the rest of this entry »
2 Comments | Change Management, Web 2.0 | Tagged: Change Management, onboarding, social capital, Web 2.0, wiki | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
ISO and User Experience
April 13, 2008Tom Stewart indicates that the International Standards Organization (ISO) recently “decided to use the term user experience in the new version of ISO 13407 (which will be called ISO 9241-210 to bring it into line with other usability standards).” He is in a position to know, since Tom serves as Chair of the sub-committee of ISO responsible for the revision of ISO 13407 – the International Standard for Human Centred Design. The change might not seem significant at first glance, but its importance is easy to miss. Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | User Experience | Tagged: ISO, user experience | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Leading the Business-Centered Learning Experience
April 13, 2008Claire Schooley of Forrester authored a report this month, Learning Director: Are You Ready for your New Role?, that merits attention by everyone interested in how to manage the learning experience in any organization, but especially in corporate organizations selling products and services. Schooley’s major point leverages a key issue in the measurement of the learning experience’s effectiveness in organizations. She contends that the most significant challenge to current learning leadership in organizations is for the learning executive to take a holistic approach to employee training, rather than a course-centric approach. Read the rest of this entry »
1 Comment | Learning Experience | Tagged: Kirkpatrick, learning | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Collaborating with Twitter: More than social networking?
March 30, 2008I’ve started using Twitter lately. Not because I just learned about it. I’ve known about it for some time, but didn’t need the added social networking juice it provides. For those of you who don’t know about Twitter though, you can see a good overview in Lee Lefever’s “Twitter in Plain English” (Thanks to SoulSoup2.0 for pointing out the video.)
Nancy White’s Twitter Collaboration Stories blog offers a range of possibilities for Twitter collaboration. However, the development of WordPress’s Prologue makes it increasingly possible that corporate enterprises can implement twitterlike collaboration behind the firewall. The implications for project management and performance improvement through dynamic eLearning are very promising.
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1 Comment | Collaboration, Social Networks, Web 2.0 | Tagged: Collaboration, twitter | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Skilful Minds 