 Okay, we're back here live at IBM Information on Demand. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the advanced, extract the signal from the noise. This is Silicon Angle and Wikibon's production exclusive coverage of Information on Demand. We have a crowd chat going on right now. Go to crowdchat.net slash IBM IOD. This is a chat web app, mobile version coming. So I saw the complaints earlier. Be part of the conversation, log in and share your opinion with us. Ask questions. A lot of folks on there right now. Great engagement to all the comments. Go to the public timeline of LinkedIn or Twitter, whatever you sign in on to the hashtag IBM IOD. We'll be watching that. I'm John Furrier, join with my co-host, Dave Vellante. And we have Marcia Conoran, who's the principal of Sensify Group. She's also an author and she writes about the topic. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, glad to be here. So what is social business? I mean, we love talking about social business, but it's kind of like, you had this term web 2.0, which is everyone argued about. You had big data, which everyone kind of argued about, which actually is real. It's a real market. Social business, which is kind of an elusive term. What the hell does that mean? Is it Twitter? Is it Facebook? Is it social media consultants? Is the real value there? So this is the kind of question that everyone's talking about and we're talking about. So what's your take on that? My take is very simple. For way too many years, decades, when people go to work, they have to leave their personality, their heart, their cares, their relationships in the car or in the subway or however they got to work that day. And social business is really the first opportunity we have to be human beings at work. We're allowed to actually talk about the things we care about, to be able to bring our interests and our passions into the conversation, to be real trustworthy people. And what happens as a result of that is that for the first time ever, there is an acceleration in the workplace because people can actually be their full selves. It seems so simple, only because the backlash or the way that we have worked for so long has been so strong and so overpowering that we almost equate not being human with what business is. So the idea of social and business being together seems a little off because we assume that business is human, is inhuman. But the idea of bringing them together is a huge step in the right direction and it opens up the possibility of actually doing great things. Jeff Schick just said, maybe there should be some anti-social software in a comment about, it's almost too social right now. People need to kind of bring that personality to work. So it's very interesting. What's your take on this? I mean, you're an analyst, you look at the market. Is social business real? I mean, what's your take on that? Yeah, I think it's totally right. I mean, to me, it's just, it's second nature, right? I mean, I remember the conversations not that long ago. It was probably 2006, 2007 is, what's the ROI on social media and do we really want to apply it to business? And then so what happened was people just did it, right? And when they did it, they said, wow, this really works. And we're getting productivity gains and people are happier and it's just a sort of a natural progression of what we're doing in our everyday lives. So I just think to me, the real opportunity is now, okay, what's the future? What can you do with all this data we're collecting? And how can you actually affect, changes within organizations and feedback to people and power them in different ways? So that's kind of what I think about it. I mean, does that make sense to you? It does. Actually, I take the almost opposite view, though. It's not that they're fighting with one another, but the idea is that we need to figure out what we need to remove, not add. So it's not that we have all this new data and we can actually be doing more stuff, but the question that comes for me in the organizations that I work with is, what can we remove? What are the policies, the nonsense that happens in work every single day that shouldn't be there? It's only there because we don't have a better way, a more trustworthy, a more human way of actually working together. So it's incredibly liberating or incredibly open from our perspective simply because it's less. So you're saying the business processes have an evolve to adopt to the permeation of social networking within organizations. Now that's not true for all organizations, right? I mean, when they're starting with a green field, the business processes are very social, right? Yeah, you get about 70 people, though, and all of a sudden somebody says, we need an HR department. We need to be able to help these rules. Is that the number we're 50? Okay. Yeah, it's about 70, actually. Well, especially for organizations that have aspirations of growing very, very large. And they get to this point where they believe that they have to put these things in place because there's this expectation that business means heavy process, organized, codified. And I'm not saying that there aren't some benefits of actually having some order amid the chaos. There is absolutely benefit there. But we need to be thinking about what is needed at human scale versus what is the building or the organization itself need to be maintained to keep going on. So you're saying they take a small startup, very social, they've got social tools in place. As they grow, you're saying they muck it up. Just a little bit. Is that what you're saying? That is what I'm saying. One of my clients a number of years ago pulled me, well, actually I overheard this and then I had a conversation with him offline. He pulled me aside and he said, you know what you really do is you make work not suck. And he said it so candidly and is a leader in a very large corporation. And I thought to myself, wait a minute, I hadn't ever really thought about it that way. But for the large part, that's what people in the organizations feel like. The amount of time that each of us spend on actually just maintaining the organization is time that we could be using for far better things. And so if we can start moving away from that maintaining of the organizational rigor, we can actually start using those ingenious skills back to what we're doing. So the example I was using about sort of the startup of the clean sheet of paper, the better example is the big company that you're sort of overlaying these social processes on top of how are you helping them sort of break the old habits? Maybe talk about what they should be doing. Yeah, well, the most specific thing I do is I very rigorously scalpel-like actually, organizations tell me of going in and identify what are the things keeping people from being able to do work that they were hired to do. I mean, when's the last time you hired an idiot? When I asked that question, actually. I want to answer that question. We were just talking about that last night. I asked that question actually very often and sometimes you're actually just speaking to a very large group and somebody always raises their hands or is telling the story and that's a little uncomfortable at times. But the reality is we hire the best and brightest people that we know. We try to find great people, but something happens about two and a half weeks in. All of a sudden they just get stupid, right? All of a sudden they can't do whatever it is they're hired to do. First of all, they don't blame themselves. It's always someone else. I didn't approve that guy. But let's talk about it. Well, there's a story here because you're basically saying we inject stupidity into the system, right? It's not only, yes, we inject the stupidity in but we put them in cages. In large part we ask people to, say, leave a large part of who they are, what they're capable of doing, somewhere else. And so what happens is the longer you've worked for an organization, the more likely you are to be incredibly invested in your community. You either work with the Boy Scouts or you lead a program inside of your community to do better food services. What we find consistently is the more you feel like you've been stuffed into a desk drawer, the more likely you are to still bring those capabilities to some other part of your life. That's just ridiculous. Don't get me wrong. I'm a big fan of people doing great things in their communities but it's really sad to me to understand that we can't bring those same capabilities, that same ingenuity into the workplace where people are hired to actually share those gifts. Okay, so you're going with the scalpel, right? Oh, let me tell you, policy manuals. How do you not cut to the bone? Sometimes you do, absolutely. How do you not cut into muscle? Well, so maybe you could go through an example, maybe that would help us. But most organizations have no idea where that muscle and that bone is. I mean, that's actually a great question. So at a more abstract level, let me just say that there's, I have been handed paper-based red notebooks from some of the world's largest organizations where you are going page by page by page of the policies, the procedures. And sometimes those are handed out in the new employee orientation. Other times that they're just assumed where people have to actually start learning from the, you know, social learning from the people around them as to what's the appropriate thing or what's the inappropriate thing to be doing. And if you start actually looking at those, you discover time and again that those policies, those guidelines, what is establishing the culture are largely based on one person doing something really stupid. And that person probably, especially given a social business world, probably wouldn't have done it a second time in this new environment. But in this particular case, they did that and all of a sudden we had to actually, like in a community, you have to erect now a stop sign or you have to, you know, put up a light because you hate to have the lawyers be involved in this. And so they, there's an incredibly, yeah, covering your ass, you're overreacting simply because we haven't had better processes in the past. One of the things we know, for example, with social tools is that when somebody says something stupid, their coworkers almost always rise up and say, that's not right anymore. That's incorrect or here's a better way to do it. The only thing worse than people saying dumb things at work is people believing dumb things at work. And with these tools, we all of a sudden have the opportunity to correct those things and for people to do smart things again. So from a Skelpa-like perspective, it's looking at what are the underpinnings of our work? What are the things that are controlling how we work? Not only just the processes, but the behaviors that are there. And to actually look through them systematically and to remove everything that's there. Then the next step is really talking with people and being able to prove to them that when they work in different sorts of ways, that they will be treated in different sorts of ways. And frankly, that becomes a harder exercise, the larger the corporation is. So question from our crowd chat from Grant Case. How does an organization start that journey, especially in a firm like financial services where that might already be part of the culture? Well, it's almost always part of the culture, not just in financial services. I work with a very large business to business insurer, for example. And what we found is that when they start introducing social tools into the workplace, they weren't so worried that people were gonna say dumb things. They were more worried that their employees were like cats under the stairs. That nobody would say anything because they were so terrified of what would happen as a result of them saying that. And so we had to do is start introducing into the culture of that organization processes that would say, we care about what you think. We had a woman, for example, say that when we went to her and we'd been told that she would not participate in something like this. And when we went to her, she said, I've been putting in my desk drawers literally for over 20 years all the cool things I've wanted to do in this organization. And you're telling me I can now blog about those things or I can actually put them in a micro messages. And we said, yes. And she says, well, I really don't believe you. So it wasn't even a matter of saying we can do it. Well, I get in trouble. Well, I get in trouble. And well, I not even get troubled by the big police, but just, well, I get looks from my peers. And so we actually started giving her examples of some of her peers and some of her colleagues who were doing different sorts of things and her being able to build trust that this was a workable system. Does crowdsourcing, does Twitter, does a success of Facebook and LinkedIn, the social networks, and obviously the rise of the hashtag, which has become a great way for people to dial into folksonomies of groups or active conversations. Does that change and give people more of a, remove some dissonance, if you will, about, okay, it's okay to be public? Does that change the game a little bit on social software? Does that validate it? Or does it scare people further into their caves? Yeah, I'm only. No, we see on CrowdChat, there's more anonymous viewers than people who actually sign in. It has become kind of like an arena. We mentioned sometimes it's like Gladiator, the thought leaders battling it out for, you know, we've seen this on forums, right? Like Gladiator. On IRC chat rooms, you know. People just want to watch. Yeah, so what you've done, though, is reduce this down to one personality type. And the reality is that we have have extroverts and introverts in our workplace. We have people who are comfortable talking in public and those who aren't. And so the simple introduction of online tools brings to our workplaces a way for people who are uncomfortable sharing to do that with a little bit more anonymity and to have a lot more comfort in being able to do that. They may not want to actually look people in the eye when they say these things, but it doesn't mean they don't have valuable things to say. I was asked by a journalist a number of years ago if I believe that the introduction of social tools would all of a sudden mean the end of meetings in the workplace. And I said, absolutely not. But what you're now gonna hear is the voice of people who never spoke up at meetings. And to actually have a well-rounded workforce, you need to have the voice of all those brilliant people you hired. And give that opportunity. Yesterday the guy said, oh, the forecast for cars was limited because then people didn't get enough chauffeurs to drive them, you know? Nobody'll buy these, no one's gonna buy these. Big barrier. Small market. There's not enough chauffeurs to drive us around. Yeah. But if we can actually provide a venue for everybody to be able to contribute at work, one that's either in person or online, we're just opening up the possibility of who could participate and who doesn't. Okay, so what's the craziest thing you've seen both on two spectrums with social business? Successful crazy and crazy good, meaning kind of like in a Steve Jobs craziness way, to a crazy fail. You have to name names. You just can talk about the use cases. Or you can talk about the names if you wanna point people out. Crazy good, wow. They really levered all the aspects of the data. They were innovative, just or lucky or two. They put a lot of money into it and it could fail miserably. Yeah, okay. I think I can come up with two. I'm not so sure in the crazy like in woohoo we're in Vegas kind of crazy example give me a few minutes and I'll come up with that one. Though I will say that in a large financial services organization that the vice president of human resources I actually have photos of her going around to every single cube on her floor and taking photos of each employee for their personal profiles. Because people were so terrified of actually even doing taking that step that she walked around the floor of her building and took pictures of every single person. And that may not sound crazy in Las Vegas sense but it was pretty radical for her to be doing that but it showed her commitment to be able to do this. So let me give you a different example. So a large global electronics firm we're going through, I'm not gonna name names but you can probably actually make some guesses. We're going through some horrible financial problems and it was just right around the time they introduced social business tools into their workforce and when they did that the pretty much the person who was supporting that initiative would send out emails to move people toward working in a social way. He would send out emails that would be fairly scandalous actually and they would say things like it's about to get on the press that we're about to lose, dot, dot, dot. That's all his email would say and then there was a link that they had to actually go into the social system to be able to learn the rest of the things. He not only had a blast actually creating- He was link baiting the whole- He was link baiting the entire over a hundred thousand person workforce. That's good page views. There's some Twitter slash mobbing going on too. Within a matter of days they had pretty much converted the entire organization to be using these tools and as a result of that they believed that they actually didn't have all the problems they would have had had they not done this because for the first time ever people weren't just sitting behind their desks and being terrified for their lives. Going back to your crowdsource point they were there together and they actually could talk about what was going on. They created what we call rumor central which is a practice that I bring into many organizations. They actually had a group within the organization that anybody could ask anything. They could actually ask the question what is the rumor? They could say here's the rumor I've heard how accurate is it? And then somebody in the organization would actually be there to answer that and be able to correct that and be able to fix that. And it was a beautiful example of how that worked. We had a question coming from the crowd chat along the line of question we just had around the people the extroverts and introverts. So the question is what is the value of a lurker in social business? Is there one? Well, if it's a person kind of hanging around. What was that? That's a great question. I thought you're muttering under your breath like a lurker is what most people do. It's the problem with lurkers. She's yelling in the cheap seats. What we know about lurkers is that traditionally they are people who wouldn't raise their voice in a meeting that they are also somebody who is just going to sit and listen. But what happens is that person then goes to the restroom or goes to the cafeteria or actually even on the bus that night or in their community and they talk about what they've learned. So the idea of measuring people as lurkers or participants is a very shallow way of looking at it because it only means that the value is in the conversation that they're having at that time or that they didn't comment or they didn't contribute that that is what provides value. It's a skewed perspective on engagement. It's a skewed perspective of what brings value to the organization. If they can be listening which is truly an untapped skill in most of our workforces that they can be listening and then they can actually be thinking also a crazy idea and actually then be able to figure out what they are doing and then be able to do that all the value there. But I actually am a little bit weary sometimes when I see the people who are commenting all the time. It's like lurkers. So in social context if you can see the participation if someone's just online with an online button you don't even know if they're listening. So I think that's the key point. If they're listening and they're active that's an interesting data point. So like one of the things that Dave and I look at in lurkers is are they in context of the conversation and are they active? So getting that active data is interesting in context to what's being measured. So if we look at a cluster of a crowd like a crowdsourced crowd chat hey if someone's actively talking they're in context. I still think that's a an extroverted way of looking at it. I still think it's a way of saying that that engagement is only by hearing or seeing their voice. So let me give you the example. So I work with a large an organization in the intelligence community. I'll leave it at that. And one of the things that they track is where people actually look online. And as a result of that they're actually able to follow the thread from the first thing that they looked at what do they look at next? And they have and are able to establish breadcrumbs as to what someone looked at first and then what they looked at next and then what they did after that. And what happens is along that whole continuum somebody eventually at some point in time will do sort of the equivalent of a like or they'll add a comment somewhere along that path. But then if you go in and you were looking at that first document and you then get to see sort of like Amazon recommends other books you can then say other people who looked at this document looked at these things next. Now that first person may have not commented for a very long time if ever but the value to the other people in that organization by understanding the other amazing and wonderful and helpful or not helpful things they saw afterwards brought incredible value to the organization. And that was a passive way of actually sharing and helping and narrowing down and helping people make better decisions. But it was by no means the level of active engagements that so often we are looking at as the only measure of value in the organization. Marsha, we got to get on time here our next guest, but amazing conversation. Folks, go see her blog. That's awesome. Thanks for the comment. We go another hour. But I'll give you the final word. Just share with the folks out there your view of the future next couple of years. What's gonna come around the corner? Connect the dots. What do you see happening? Is it gonna be an implosion? Is it gonna be more growth? What's gonna happen? What do you think is gonna, how is this industry gonna shape? How is social business gonna shape up? Well, if we're talking about the next few years I think that we're all in for a big wake up call. Not only are we starting to see the structures and the systems around us failing from a government and an economy all sorts of different ways of perspective. If we look at epochs of history this happens consistently. And we're about the end of this particular epoch. And I say that not as a doom and glimmer at all but to say that I believe for the first time we have the tools and technologies to be able to do something significant to be actually be able to rewrite how organizations work. What work means. How human beings get to interact to be able to make change in the world. That has been cordoned off for way too long. And so as the systems that aren't working start falling away we have the opportunity to actually be able to lean in to be able to live in and to be able to say I wanna be a human being 24 hours a day I don't wanna be a number or a chess pawn any longer and I am going to actually make a difference in the work I do and I'm gonna do that throughout my day every day. So I'm incredibly excited about the prospect of what we can do. It requires us all to actually look inside figure out who we are, figure out what we want to do and actually be able to go do that. The humanization of the crowd and social destruction of old with new waves of innovations. We always say Dave if you don't get out in front of it you become Driftwood and there will be some destruction in business models. We love it. This is social business. This is theCUBE exclusive coverage from information on demand IBM's conference here in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest. Great. Thank you.