adoption curve dot net

They don’t come much more old-economy than General Motors – if you asked for a large American corporation from Central Casting, GM is who they’d send you. But surprising things are happening at GM – they’re getting into blogging in a big way.

GMBlogs is where you’ll find Vice Chairmen, Group Vice Presidents and other assorted individuals with the keys to the executive washroom posting on topics as varied as branding, fuel economy and auto design. And it’s not just a token gesture from a marcomms function – these are real people, there are real comments and trackbacks, and if you browse through the comments, you’ll find real debate.

There are several things which I think are worthy of note here:

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the problems of introducing social software that we regularly come across with our clients is making it self-sustaining. There’s often an example of a previous project – usually involving forums of some sort – that has been introduced in the past with a great fanfare, but now lies abandoned and gathering digital tumbleweed.

Why does this happen? Part of the reason is that there’s a vicious circle at work. If you have a tool that needs wide participation to work well, without that wide participation it won’t – which reduces the incentive for wide participation, and so the cycle goes on.

To get social software to a point where it’s self-sustaining, it needs to be set off with a kick. Here are three things you can do to give it that kick, based on some of the things we’ve seen in practice.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a good definition of how social software can be used as a knowledge base:

Rather than a content management system which requires layers of approval, give people a tool that enables them to write and modify the pieces of knowledge that are important to them.  And the social aspect lets that knowledge grow and change over time, as the group learns more about that topic.

(via Jack Vinson)

It seems there aren’t too many tears being shed for Carly Fiorina’s enforced departure (eased by the $21.1m settlement) from HP, and there are numerous reports about her downfall being hastened by a – how do we put this without getting sued? – robust personality.

Debbie Weil asked asked an interesting question on her site: would it have made any difference if Carly had an internal blog, directed at HP employees? Debbie thinks yes – I think no. Here’s three (not entirely serious) reasons why:

It wouldn’t have been pretty

From what we know of her personality if media reports are anything to go by, then the end results probably wouldn’t have been pretty. Blogging would have given her the opportunity to upset a wider audience.

It wouldn’t have been insightful

Sarbanes-Oxley and an increasing trend towards scrutiny mean that every utterance of a CEO is likely to be dissected, analysed and eventually used as the basis for a lawsuit. This would mean than no self-respecting CEO would dare blog anything without a lawyer present, which would eliminate the posts of anything more insightful than “good morning”.

It wouldn’t have been internal

Internal communications stay internal for about a nanosecond after they’re published. How long would it have taken before every word she posted was reposted on F****d Company? End result – see above.

Normally our web server sits in the background serving, and is reliability itself. I say normally, because last night it decided that the day after launching a new site was the perfect time to throw a wobbly. So although the web server came back up automatically as it should, the database server didn’t, and spent the night refusing to play.

Ahem. Reprogramming it with a big stick has now resumed normal service. Apologies for the outage.