Above and Beyond KM

What’s a tweetup? According to the Urban Dictionary, there are at least a couple of definitions:

An organized or impromptu gathering of people that use Twitter. (A meet up of people that ‘tweet’ using Twitter.)

A gathering of nerds attempting social contact, likely for the first time. Usually disintegrates into everyone running to the nearest computer to type to one another.

Regardless of which definition you prefer, I’m here to attest to the fun and function of tweetups. If you’ve spent even a short time with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or any of the other popular social networking platforms, you’ll appreciate the amazing networks that can develop online. But even the best virtual relationships can benefit from a little face to face time. The organizers of ILTA’s 2010 Conference understand this and are, therefore, hosting a tweetup for all attendees involved in social media.

If you’d like to meet old friends or make “real” friends of virtual ones, please join us (IRL)* on Sunday, August 22, at 4:00pm in the Bluethorn 5 meeting room. ILTA will provide the venue and light refreshments. We’re hoping that you will provide the good cheer and energy that make tweetups a highlight of social networking.

I look forward to seeing you there!

*IRL means “in real life” as opposed to “in virtual life.”

If you’ve been curious about social media and how to use these tools in your law firm or law department, the ILTA 2010 Conference has several sessions that will help you. In particular, ILTA is offering a full day of sessions on Wednesday, August 25,that will lead you through some inspirational and intensely pragmatic aspects of Enterprise 2.0 deployments (i.e., deployments of social media tools behind the firewall).  We begin the day by introducing you to Freshfields and the Intel law department.  Both of these organizations are on their way to achieving information transparency through the use of traditional knowledge management and new E2.0 tools.  They’ll provide a road map for what they’ve done and, hopefully, inspire you to develop a road map of your own.

Next,  representatives from Bryan Cave, the US Army’s JAG Corps and WilmerHale will lead a session on the critical importance of experiment and failure in E2.0 deployments.  Lawyers hate to think about (or be involved with failure).  This denies the basic truth that much of what we learn in life is through trial and error.  Further, failure is an inevitable part of experimentation, which in turn is the best way to achieve any innovation, including a  successful E2.0 deployment.  Come to this session to learn more about how to present and organize your work so as to use failure for good.

The next session of the day focuses on re-imaging law firm life:  What could we do if we were starting a new firm from scratch?  Earlier this year I challenged colleagues from Integreon, Mallesons and O”Melveny with this question.  Rather than developing the expected laundry list of tools and business practices, we soon discovered that we needed to spend time thinking about the nature of our hypothetical firm’s practices and what flowed naturally from that.  This led us to the kind of intensely strategic discussion that every firm and law department should engage in when thinking about how to organize itself rationally using the best of what we know about technology and efficient business practices.

The last session of the day is on the very practical question of Metrics.  This is something of a dirty topic in knowledge management and E2.0 circles, but that needs to change.  Carefully selected and honestly reported metrics can be enormously useful in understanding what your KM or E2.0 program is achieving and where it needs additional attention.  Further, as long as the decision makers in your organization need metrics to make funding decisions that affect your programs, you owe it to yourself and your colleagues to do the best job possible of gathering and reporting metrics about the things that matter.  Come to this session led by representatives of Orrick and the US Army JAG Corps to get a fresh and practical perspective on doing metrics right.

In addition to this day focused on Enterprise 2.0 and law firm life, we’re offering two other sessions that involve social media.  The first is on Monday, August 23, when experts from Arent Fox and the Practical Law Company will lead us through the best of current thinking on how to craft a pragmatic social media policy for your firm and for your company.  We’ll discuss the main hot button issues and help you identify the areas that you and your colleagues need to focus on.  Come prepared to participate in a discussion, rather than to listen to a lecture.

Finally, some social media experts from Bricker & Eckler and Vinson & Elkins will be offering a session of interest to everyone who has ever experienced information overload.  In a hands on “ILTA U” learning session, attendance will sit at computer terminals and be able to actually work along with the instructors to create a more efficient (and hopefully less painful) system for themselves for gathering, understanding and sharing what’s useful in the flood of information we receive daily.

As you may be able to tell from my enthusiasm, I’ve very much enjoyed getting to know and work with the panelists in all these sessions.  In the process, I’ve received what feels like a graduate education in social media and law firm life.  Please join us for these sessions to learn from their experiences.  To help you, here’s a list of the sessions:

• Social Media Policy Development: A Hands-on Planning Session
• Managing Information Overload Through Personal Knowledge Management
• Improve Information Flow with Enterprise 2.0
• Failure Leads to Success in Enterprise 2.0 Adoption
• A New View of the Automated Law Firm
• Meaningful Metrics to Quantify ROI for KM and Enterprise 2.0 Deployments

Morrison & Foerster recently published its inaugural issue of Socially Aware: The Social Media Law Update, an electronic newsletter “devoted to the law and business of social media.” In explaining why they’ve launched this new venture, MoFo wrote:

Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites are transforming not only the daily lives of consumers,  but also how companies interact with consumers.  Indeed, even the largest, most conservative blue-chip corporations have begun to embrace social media; one recent study showed that, of the Fortune Global 100, 65% had Twitter accounts; 54% had a presence on Facebook; and 50% had a channel on YouTube.

It’s not surprising that the Fortune Global 100 and some large law firms are paying more attention to social media.  After all, that’s where the audience increasingly is.  According to reports of a recent Nielsen study, “on average, about 23 percent of our online time is spent on social networking sites, versus 8.3 percent on email.” The study tracked the online activity of 200,000 people in the US between June 2009 and June 2010.  During that period, use of social media grew by nearly 50%.  PCWorld reports that the study also contained some interesting demographic information:

Social networkers aren’t just teenyboppers anymore, either. Nielsen discovered that twice as many Americans over 50 visited social networks than kids under 18. That means your mom and dad aren’t the only “hip” parents out there with Facebook pages.

This demographic information also suggests that a key target group for law firm marketing is online and engaged in social media.  However, until now social media use by the AmLaw 100 firms has not been extensive.  It will be interesting to see how the AmLaw 100 firms decide to respond to these growing trends.

Related Reading:

• Social media spending continues to accelerate. Will law firms keep up?
• Twittering Classes: Lessons for and from the AmLaw 100

An Enterprise 2.0 project is sufficiently different from a traditional knowledge management or IT project that it can be a little disconcerting at first. Some experts recommend what seems like a 1960s free love approach — anything goes and, by the way, I’m ok and you’re ok. At the other extreme are the traditionalists who believe that introducing any innovation within an organization requires lots of constraints to ensure safety.

If you’re starting a new E2.0 project, which approach do you take?   Neither.

I’d like to commend to you the “stag party” approach described by Ron Donaldson in his post Lines in the Sand.  He starts with the following statement:

A complex system requires boundary conditions, not too tight that they constrain and not too loose as they allow unacceptable behaviours.

He then goes on to list the rules his son’s friends agreed on to govern their stag weekend.  You should read these rules.  They are both funny and intensely pragmatic. Ron Donaldson called them “[b]rilliant, self organising, self regulating and in everyone’s best interests.”

Coming back to your E2.0 deployment, can you reduce your concerns  to a small handful of rules? What minimums does Mum (or, as is most likely in your case, senior management) require?  Do these rules protect the most vulnerable and valuable while still permitting sufficient flexibility for learning, growth and enjoyment?

From his postmortem of the stag weekend, it’s clear that the rules worked.  Everyone behaved appropriately for the context and, while there were some perfectly predictably after-effects, everyone survived and even enjoyed the experience.

It seems to me that if we can ensure that with our E2.0 deployments, we’ll have done pretty well.  What do you think?

[Photo Credit: Jack Spellingbacon]

As Enterprise 2.0 tools gain acceptance within organizations around the world, we are finding new ways to unearth and connect useful information. For some organizations, a key to this has been to create mash-ups between existing collections of data. The magic of mash-ups is quite wonderful — by joining two known things you can create a splendid something new.

I haven’t thought hard enough about what the equivalent within the enterprise might be, but I wanted to share with you a new mash-up I discovered courtesy of Curt Hopkins at ReadWriteWeb. In his post, Mash Letter to the Past, he reports on several terrific mash-ups that marry mapping, photos, street views, video and documentary photographs from different times.  The results are marvelous.  For example,  take a look at this excerpt from There and Then, which shows New York City’s famous Flatiron building in 2010 and 1903.

Now, here’s my manual mash-up starting with a brief clip of “What Happened on 23rd Street” in 1901:

And here’s Google’s 2010 street view of 23rd street.

As you probably can tell, I’ve had lots of fun playing with these before and after views of New York City.  Admittedly, I haven’t yet found a knowledge management angle on this, but give me time!  The most important thing I’m learning is that marrying information from different sources can provide an appreciation and more nuanced understanding of our present day reality.  Perhaps that, in and of itself, makes the mash-up effort worthwhile.

“It’s only a teaspoonful,” I overheard the six-year old girl say in all seriousness as she explained to a boy in her class the nature of the contribution the male of the species makes to procreation. The look of horror on the boy’s face was positively comical as he reacted viscerally with the expression “TMI! TMI!”

For those of you who haven’t heard it before, TMI is the acronym for “too much information.” It’s often used when people disclose private details that one would really rather not know about in the ordinary course.  I found myself saying “TMI” when I first read a terrific set of posts by Jim McGee, John Tropea and Jack Vinson regarding the benefits of information transparency among knowledge workers and the importance of making knowledge work more visible. Granted, I was “catastrophizing” as I imagined a workplace where every thought was expressed in writing before it could be edited for appropriateness or sense. I imagined my daily e-mail deluge multiplied many times over once I moved from messages directed at me to a stream messages directed to the entire firm.  I imagined a tsunami of triviality swamping me daily as I struggled to be productive. I imagined having to hide myself in a technology free cave in order to get any work done.

I will confess that I love Twitter and use it daily.  In learning to love it, I’ve come to understand that I cannot and should not try to read everything.   Rather, I dip my toe in and out of the stream when I can.  An important part of this behavior is learning to let go of the need to read it all, and trust instead that the important things will rise to the surface repeatedly and capture my attention in due course.  That’s easier to do in your leisure life than at the office, where I (at least) feel obliged to read everything that my colleagues send me.  What happens when I start receiving a general flow of information rather than the current more limited (albeit sometimes overwhelming) targeted flow of e-mail information?  How do I protect myself from missing the important stuff while suffocating under the irrelevant?

What’s your experience with activity streams work at work?  If you’re using them at your workplace, what can you tell us about how they improve or clog the arteries along which your information flows?  How do you find the important amongst the trivial?

[Photo Credit: Fredshome]

After four days at the 2010 Enterprise 2.0 Conference, I’m feeling my age.  It’s not just that the days were intense with tons of new ideas and useful information to absorb.  It’s also that I felt a bit too much at home.  What do I mean?  If you listen to some pundits, E2.0 is the province of the young and the hip.  As a Gen Xer, I assumed I was going to be among the older folks attending.  To my surprise, I wasn’t.  With few exceptions, most of the folks I met were older than 30 (and some were considerably north of 30).  The gap between perception and reality  became even more apparent when one of the LaunchPad finalists — a chipper 20-something — declared to the audience that he was there to prove that there were in fact some Millennials involved in E2.0.

So what’s going on? Are the E2.0 conference attendee demographics an anomaly or should we just face facts that this is a technology — even a way of life — that now spans generational boundaries?  If it’s the latter, then I’m very optimistic about our ability to embed social tools in the enterprise. If you think we’re dealing with an anomaly, please do let me know what you think is really going on.

[Photo Credit: xflickrx]

Dear Steve:

Let me begin by thanking you and your team for organizing the 2010 Enterprise 2.0 Conference.  Others told me time and time again that the E2.0 Conference was something I had to attend, and now I understand why.  As a first-time participant, I was delighted to find in one place so many leading thinkers and practitioners of the art of E2.0.   By the end of the conference, I felt as if I had been immersed in a rich, interactive educational experience, and for that I am very grateful.

My background is in knowledge management, which includes in its arsenal a key technique for knowledge sharing and education called the after action review.  (The purpose of the after action review is to examine an event while it is fresh in our minds so that we see what lessons can be learned.)  In that spirit, I offer the following:

What worked well:

• The people this conference attracts are phenomenal.  One of the greatest benefits of the conference is being able to hear first-hand from the leading thinkers and doers in this field.
• The WIFI!!!!!  Thank you so much for taking the request for Wifi seriously.  It made a world of difference to those of us who were tweeting and live blogging the sessions.
• The facilities accommodated the formal sessions well.  Better still, the scattered lounge areas ensured that the all-important hallway conference could take place in comfort.
• Most of the sessions I attended were very good.  In particular, I’d mention the 2.0 Adoption Council’s pre-conference workshop, which was terrific for its focus on the challenges of E2.0 adoption. (For more information, see my notes from the various 2.0 Adoption Council sessions I attended.)
• There was a good range of sessions that covered a wide variety of interests and concerns.
• Overall, the conference was very well organized.  I was unaware of any technical or scheduling glitches.
• Thanks for making so many sessions free and open to all. The conference performs an important education and networking function, so it’s good to make its benefits available to as many as possible.

What could be done better:

• Please return to the true meaning of a “keynote” address: something notable, exciting, memorable.  JP Rangaswami delivered a phenomenal, thought-provoking talk that I’m still pondering.  That’s exactly what I come to a conference like this to hear.  Unfortunately, not all of the keynote addresses were notable.  Even though some were mercifully quickly forgotten, I couldn’t help thinking that it was a terrible waste of the time and energy of some of the most interesting people in social media.  On top of that, there is something troubling about asking people to pay for the privilege of listening to substandard talks and sales pitches.  Time and attention are finite resources that shouldn’t be wasted this way.
  • Update:  A reader pointed out via Twitter that the keynotes were sponsor presentations because sponsors had paid for the privilege.  That’s very true, but that leads to my question: did the sponsors get their money’s worth when so many people checked out, tuned out or stepped out during their presentations? If sponsors really want that limelight, then they should deliver thought-provoking, crowd-rousing talks. I assure them that this approach will keep them (and, incidentally, their products) in the forefront of our minds in the best possible way. A case in point? While I was initially skeptical when I heard that Microsoft had a keynote spot,  I’ve found myself thinking and telling others about Christian Finn’s demonstration of the power of simple tools (e.g,, flip cameras) and viral internal marketing to build an impressive knowledge base and connect colleagues.  That’s front and center in Enterprise 2.0 and his presentation provided a great case study without any sales pitch regarding Microsoft products.  Nice. And, effective.
• A little more breathing time between sessions would be wonderful.  All moderators I saw did a superb job of keeping the trains on schedule, but there was inevitably insufficient time to follow-up with a speaker or another member of the audience before racing off to the next session.
• Given the richness of the sessions and the limited time available, I felt under pressure to choose sessions carefully.  Unfortunately, I didn’t always choose correctly because I didn’t have the necessary information beforehand.  It would be great if the program could be more like a college course catalog, with information regarding the expected experience level of the target audience of each session and the level of complexity of the planned discussion.
• Consider offering different tracks for different audiences: those still learning about E2.0, those in the throes of implementation and early adoption, those who have mature efforts that they want to kick up into a higher gear, those in small and medium enterprises, those in the non-profit or governmental sectors, etc.  Each of these groups has  different experience levels and concerns. Each deserves sessions explicitly dedicated to their needs.
• There were liberal helpings of “E2.0 kool-aid” offered (e.g., build it and they will come, you can’t measure the value of being social, forget the bean counters and focus on the little people, etc.).  It would be good to offset this with even more hard-hitting critical thinking that arms conference attendees so that they can go back to their organizations and make arguments in favor of E2.0 that are more effective because they encompass both the quantitative and the qualitative.

Once again, thank you for a terrific conference.  The high caliber of the people who participated is a testament to the great reputation this conference has earned.  I now understand perfectly why Thomas Vander Wal said  “It is one of the few conference I still won’t miss.”

Best,
Mary

[Photo Credit: LarimdaME]

Members of The 2.0 Adoption Council will discuss a host of issues from culture shock to data privacy.  This session will draw questions from the audience to drive relevant topics that may not have been addressed in previous conference sessions.

What this panel promises to cover: Today’s interaction models with customers are largely transactive in nature and typically begin and end with an individual promotion and sale. Enterprise 2.0 concepts offer the ability to build longer term relationships that can outlast each transaction and keep customers engaged over longer periods of times. This session will feature customers that have made the successful transition from a transactive model to a customer network approach and the benefits they see in the form of tangible revenue, cost reduction and overall customer satisfaction.