Ben Martin on social media use in organizations:

Here’s the dire assessment: Your association is becoming more irrelevant by the moment if it isn’t participating in the conversation made possible by social media. Signs of the paradigm shift are all around us and quite obvious. Association leaders who don’t recognize the signs are either uninformed or unconscious.

Whenever Apple unveils a new product, Steve Jobs often mentions “Apple Design” alongside all the other new features. And for good reason – the company takes design very seriously – so seriously that it’s a major selling point and the company has won numerous design awards including eight just this month alone.

Michael Lopp, senior engineering manager at Apple and author of Rands in Repose and the best-selling Managing Humans, shared some insights into Apple’s approach to design as a panelist at this year’s SXSW conference.

Pixel Perfect Mockups

From Businessweek’s Helen Walters:

This, Lopp admitted, causes a huge amount of work and takes an enormous amount of time. But, he added, “it removes all ambiguity.” That might add time up front, but it removes the need to correct mistakes later on.

10 to 3 to 1

Apple designers come up with 10 entirely different mock ups of any new feature. Not, Lopp said, “seven in order to make three look good”, which seems to be a fairly standard practice elsewhere.

Designers have complete creative freedom with those initial 10 designs, then choose to three to refine further until they reach the ultimate design.

Paired Design Meetings

Designers have two regular meetings a week. In the first, they explore any idea without constraints – it’s a chance to push their creativity as far as they can – and then some.

In the second, they try to work out all the details for a crazy idea and see how viable it is in reality.

This process and organization continues throughout the development of any app, though of course the balance shifts as the app progresses. But keeping an option for creative thought even at a late stage is really smart.

Too often, organizations constrain themselves by what they think they can get done, and don’t explore seemingly harebrained ideas. Apple does, and in an ingenious way that transforms what could be boundaries into opportunities that result in the unequaled products they seem to produce with amazing consistency.

The paired meetings, Lopp said, give designers a variety of ideas to present to senior management. Designers:

…take the best ideas from the paired design meetings and present those to leadership, who might just decide that some of those ideas are, in fact, their longed-for ponies. In this way, the ponies morph into deliverables. And the C-suite, who are quite reasonable in wanting to know what designers are up to, and absolutely entitled to want to have a say in what’s going on, are involved and included. And that helps to ensure that there are no nasty mistakes down the line.

It’s amazing to see an organization that’s truly postmodern in its ability to transcend ageless stereotypes. Apple’s designers and management seem to recognize that, above all else, both have value in designing, producing, and selling a smash-hit product – not just once, but with consistency. Isn’t that the secret to success?

(via Infinite Loop)

John Tropea says people need to understand why they should use Web 2.0 tools in organizations, not just “because everyone else is doing it so I need to as well, and I’ll just use this recipe approach.”

His comments are in reaction to an article in Australian IT – Business yet to harness Web 2.0 – that claims businesses are trying Web 2.0 tools but don’t really understand them or see their value.

The Australian IT article offers little if any substantive information that might help readers better understand why blogs, wikis, social networks, and RSS are so powerful, but Tropea nails it with this one quote: [Read more]

Mark Ghosh of Weblog Tools Collection has a good post on peoples’ motivation for commenting on blogs. It got me thinking about the conversation here:

Have you commented recently? Not commented yet? What usually motivates you to post a comment here? I really enjoy reading and responding to the comments you all post, so please keep ‘em coming!

Mike Kavis writes an excellent blog on his efforts to bring enterprise 2.0 into his organization:

I have been blogging about my Web 2.0 experiments at work and recommended that we should just do Web 2.0 instead of trying to justify it.

With so many open source solutions available for wikis and blogs, the best way to get traction with Web 2.0 technologies is to casually bring it in house, plant the seeds, and let it grow like weeds.

You can have a large amount of people using these tools quicker then you can try to sell the value to an older generation of decision makers who are not familiar enough with the tools to understand the value. [Read more]

Josh Catone writes on Read Write Web that the Obama campaign is using a wiki to organize precinct captains and volunteers for today’s crucial primary-caucus in Texas:

That the Obama campaign is so tech savvy and so open to using social software is unsurprising. They have run one of the most comprehensive online campaigns in recent memory — perhaps ever — generally outperforming opponents on nearly every social network or social media site, and according to a recent post from Ning’s Marc Andreesen, Obama has long been very interested in social networking and how it can affect politics.

The specific appeal of Central Desktop’s wiki-based approach is that allows volunteers to shape the messaging and quickly collaborate with each other without the need to go through a webmaster. The Texas effort, some of which was cloned over from the previous California site, was literally launched a couple of weeks ago in mid-February.

Dennis McDonald explores this question in two posts. The first focuses on the external: customer communities, marketing and communication.

The second looks at how social media can be used on the inside – to communicate more frequently, quell potential misunderstandings, and minimize fear and uncertainty.

…thinking of social media strictly as harmony-inducing “tools” run out of corporate HR to help calm employee fears would severely underestimate the role that social media might play.

Sandy Kemsley summarizes Andrew McAfee’s and Don Tapscott’s presentations at the FASTForward ’08 conference earlier this week. McAfee, who coined the term “Enterprise 2.0” and is therefore eligible to use it , looked at the state of tools and technologies, how to foster adoption, and cultural necessities for success. Here are a few selected points, with my comments in italics:

1. Tools are intuitive and easy to use — a key to acceptance of the technology, but something that’s also difficult to achieve. Building a quality tool isn’t easy, but it is worth it. Truly good tools will stand the test of time and be flexible enough to adapt to changing needs.
2. Tools are egalitarian and freeform, Freeform is critical. Specific workflows and procedures inherently limit the range of uses of a tool, and the wider the range of uses, the more people will use it.
3. Borders seem appropriate to users, so that it’s obvious how far specific information should be shared, and how easy it is to find other people and information. Whenever you add something new to your wiki, think about whether it needs to be secured or can be shared. You’ll give others a wealth of information about what you do that will help build interaction and cut down on low-level work, like responding to emails requesting information.
4. Patient and dedicated evangelists exist: those spending their time popularizing the tools and techniques because they believe that they can make a difference. Hear, hear. In every organization I’ve worked for, I have done this. I know you are too, and your work is critical to the future of your organization.
5. Effort has official and unofficial support from the top: both funding and blessings from senior levels to allow evangelists and others to work their magic, but also a mindset that that enterprise is serious about being engaged in the initiatives, such as executive-level blogging. This is the essential balance that supports growth of wikis. Day to day growth needs to be pushed by grassroots buzz, and long term acceptance comes from the confidence of knowing that people in senior leadership are being shown the value and encouraging growth.
6. Slack exists in the workweek; recognizing this gives people the latitude to blog or create wiki content within the organization rather than appear to be busy when they’re not. Do you have slack in your workweek? Well, there you go – perfect time to work on next week’s meeting agenda on the wiki, or help edit and refine project documents with someone else on your team.
7. Top management accepts lateralization, which facilitates public content being created by any level within an organization as well as its customers and partners, not just through a sanitized corporate communications process. It’s like a Niagara Falls of free, high-quality, high-value PR. Who wouldn’t want that?
8. There are lots of young people. This one isn’t so much an indictment of older people, but an indication of how well an organization is doing with its use of social media. People my age are going to work for the organizations that demonstrate they get it, so if an organization has a lot of young people, it must be doing something right.

You can still start or grow a wiki in your organization.

Gartner has published a press release advising businesses to start planning for cost cutting and prepare two budgets: one that takes into account the current economic situation, and one that identifies potential further cost cuts should the need arise.

This is where the low-cost, resource-conscious, simplicity, and freeform nature of Enterprise 2.0 tools like wikis and blogs really shines.

Large, traditional enteprise software projects with six- or seven-figure budgets are often the ones that run into trouble during an economic downturn.

But you can spend in the neighborhood of $5,000 on a wiki (pocket change, even in an uncertain economy), run a pilot, and help groups get started and find the best uses for their needs.

Do this now, stick with it, and by the time the economy is roaring again, you’ll be running an efficient, agile organization that can take advantage of that strength to surge ahead.

James Dellow asks this question in his review of the Wikipatterns book. Based on his experience, he suggests that the patterns can indeed be applied to other collaborative tools beyond wikis:

The book is structured well and steps naturally from explaining the value and use cases of wikis into the adoption process. In terms of adoption, Mader offers 11 steps to a successful wiki pilot… that’s right, these are tips just to get the pilot right! In fact, its refreshing to find someone suggesting that adopting a wiki in an organisation can take a lot more effort than simply plugging a wiki into your corporate LAN.

…my recommendation is that Wiki Patterns is worth a look regardless of the collaborative technologies you are using… there are a set of “patterns” in well written format here that can be applied to a variety of collaborative technologies. Overall, Wikipatterns get a thumbs up from me for anyone involved with collaboration technologies, not just wikis.