Creative Class

Does Twitter improve workplace productivity, or on balance does it distract employees and detract from their overall performance?

Globe and Mail writer Tavia Grant wrote about this very subject this week. Here’s a summary of the pros and cons of Twitter from her article:

The proponents

Jen Evans, president of Toronto-based Sequentia Communications, has 1,649 followers and tracks the musings of 1,283 others. She is a huge Twitter fan – for herself and her staff of 16.

Her business involves connecting businesses with clients, and she’s found Twitter invaluable for recruiting, drumming up business and building her brand.

Having staff on Twitter can be a “visibility enhancer,” she says.

Larger companies, too, are jumping on board.

Telus Corp. allows Twitter time at work. “You have to trust employees,” says spokesman Shawn Hall, who personally uses it “all the time” to stay connected to journalists, public relations groups and the telecommunications community.

The opponents

Employers are still wrestling with policies on Facebook and other more established social networking sites, never mind Twitter. But some, including several government departments, such as those for the City of Toronto, ban personal use at work.

Murray Key, operations manager of a steel warehousing company in Edmonton, can’t stand to see staff whittle away their work hours on any kind of social networking.

“There is a time and place to be a social butterfly, to play inane games and to waste personal time, but for the vast majority of us, that place is not at work,” he says.

Experiment with it

…Twitter has emerged as a “powerful tool that can speed up the metabolism of an organization, keep everyone better informed and enable greater agility and responsiveness to changing conditions.” [says Don Tapscott].

He encourages people to experiment with it. Managers should try it out – at least to understand how it works – and give employees a chance “to self-organize and collaborate using these tools,” he says.

Given Richard’s announcements that he’s now tweeting on Twitter, I thought I’d ask the CreativeClass.com audience for their thoughts.

So, to Twitter or not to Twitter?

Check moi out over at Twitter. Lots more info, updates, and quick hits there.

On February 25, Richard Florida appeared on BBC World News America, BBC America in the U.S., and BBC World simultaneously around the world. Tied to his recent piece in The Atlantic, this interview looks at the subjects of job loss and creation as well as gender equality.

Your thoughts?

Open-source problem-solving has become a fringe sensation in the corporate world – but one that will likely become more mainstream, with implications for the workplace.

The computer operating system LINUX is perhaps the most famous example of a small company building an innovative product through inviting any programmer to contribute.

But other companies have also found ways to build innovation and increase productivity through sharing the company’s previously proprietary information and inviting ideas from outsiders. Red Lake Mine is a good example. As detailed in Don Tapscott’s book Wikinomics and summarized by Preston Manning in an intriguing Globe and Mail article this week:

Mr. McEwen [Owner of Red Lake] offered $575,000 in prize money to participants with the best proposals for developing his mining property. To the horror of his company’s old guard, he posted all the proprietary geological data on the Red Lake property on the Internet, inviting analysis from geologists and other experts all over the world. Responses flooded in identifying target sites for development, only half of which had been identified by the company. To make a long story short, the open-source collaborative process aided Red Lake in finding and extracting more than eight million ounces of gold and in re-establishing the mine on a more prosperous footing than it had ever enjoyed before.

What interests me is how open-sourced problem-solving – or the wiki approach – might change some workplaces. Here are three ideas, please add more.

1. Some roles will involve building and reinforcing global “virtual” networks of key potential contributors.

2.  Corporations will have to be less secretive; more employees will be involved in sharing the company’s story as well as day-to-day activities with customers, clients, and potential contributors.

3.  Therefore, for an individual to succeed in a wiki-corporation or wiki-organization it will increasingly require being more than an engineer, programmer, economist, or accountant. It will also require the “soft skills” to do media relations or “wiki” relations, interacting daily with a range of customers and outside contributors, as well as collaborating with others in the company.

What else will change, or is changing, for workplaces in a wiki world?

How do you watch TV? If you’re over 30, it may go something like this:

It’s Thursday night, and your favorite show is on at 9:00 p.m.

8:55 PM: You open your fridge, grab a beer. Open the cupboard, grab a bag of chips. (For the “creative” among you: Open your wine fridge, pull out a bottle of cabernet sauvignon, and grab some organic crackers from your pantry.)

8:57 PM: Yay! Only three minutes. Turn on your TV, watch the credits from the last show. Check your watch… only two more minutes. Watch promotions for the new upcoming “cop drama.” You would flick to something else, but you wouldn’t want to miss those crucial first few minutes of your show.

9:00 PM: Your show starts. You’re happy. Take a sip of wine, eat some cheese.

9:12 PM: Damn! Commercials. OK, well if you’re between 30 and 50, you probably flip aimlessly through other channels. Or if you’re super-savvy you pause your Tivo and grab a refill. If you’re over 50, you sit patiently and watch commercials.

9:16 PM: OK, back in business. Boy, that cliffhanger kept me guessing.

9:23 PM: Commercials again. Repeat routine.

9:30 PM: That was fun. Steve Carrell is so talented. I wonder what’s going to happen next week. Guess I’ll have to wait until then!

Sound familiar? It should. OK, well here is how people under the age of 30 watch TV. Now, some of them tune in like you do every Wednesday night because they just can’t wait another minute to see who’s next to get utterly humiliated on Project Runway/Biggest Loser (take your pick). Most, however, choose to tailor their TV schedule around their lives, not the other way around. That means using the Internet. Sites like Hulu.com and NBC.com actually allow you to watch many of your favorite shows on demand, for free, legally, with the blessing of the networks that air the shows in primetime.

This method has its drawbacks, most obviously that many of these online video options are unavailable outside of the U.S. I went to school in the States and was shocked to discover, upon my return to Toronto, that I was blocked from viewing my favorite shows (the Canadian distributors of American shows are none too keen to have their ad revenues siphoned off by the internet). There are, and have been for years, unauthorized ways to watch your favorite TV online – but they’re dubious at best, unreliable in quality, and are ultimately destined for obsolescence once TV goes online legitimately.

There are obviously still bumps in the road.  As Caroline McCarthy writes on “The Social”:

If the content providers finally work things out with the set-top box makers and Web video hubs, it could be terrific for me and other people who’ve gotten totally fed up with Stone Age TV offerings. For now, however, it’s just a dramatic mess and recent signs are indicating that it (the debate) is taking steps backward as opposed to forward.

There really is no technical barrier preventing anyone, anywhere with a broadband connection from viewing ALL their favorite shows on demand – regardless of jurisdiction. It’s just the leaders of the old paradigm are fighting the currents of the new – it’s the cable vs. online slug-fest. This won’t last forever – the method for distributing content will move, more and more, onto the Internet, and it will be driven by the Net generation and the unassailable appeal of customizing TV.

So, is the old model dead? Will TV go online on for good? I welcome responses.

Hot on the heels of his Talk of the Nation interview this past Tuesday, Richard Florida will appear on the NPR Weekend Edition with Scott Simon.

Tune in at 1pm EST, Saturday, February 21! Listen to the broadcast here.

Richard Florida will be on NPR’s Talk of the Nation today, February 18, from 3-3:45pm EST:

On the next Talk of the Nation: To Richard Florida, this recession follows the first rule of real estate: location, location, location. When the economy turns around, where you live might be more important than what you do.

Listen to the full broadcast here and share your thoughts with us.

Seventy-five percent of Fortune 1000 companies have a social media strategy. Fifty percent will fail. This is according to Lois Kelly of social media researchers Beeline Labs. Failure often because the strategy doesn’t match the medium and tries to be “top down” and linear rather than multi-vocal.

In a presentation she gave to the Conference Board last year, Kelly described many of these Fortune 1000 social media strategies as focused on connecting with customers. But some are oriented toward engaging employees and changing the workplaces.

Here are some reasons employee-focused social media strategies in today’s workplaces might succeed or fail (inspired by her article “10 Ways to Make Social Media Matter to Skeptical CEOs“).

1. Innovation and productivity today often comes from listening to both employees and customers. Social media is about conversations. Attempting to use social media to control a message from the top, rather than listening to those who work with the corporation’s products and services every day is not what it is for. Moreover, if employees don’t believe that their opinion is valued, they won’t participate so it will fail.

2. Employees or customers want to hear a CEO’s point of view (or that of a senior manager) – not just data about the latest product, new acquisition, etc. They want to know what he or she thinks about economic challenges; new developments in the industry; or even the local sports team. And, they want to be able to enter into a dialog on these issues.

3. Success of a social media strategy should be measured by involvement, engagement – the numbers actively participating in a dialog (not just how many clicks a message receives). In fact, involving employees in a good internal social media community sounds like a great retention strategy.

4. Corporate social media strategies often involve a leap of faith – or courage, as Kelly calls it – when the c-suite gives up full control of the message.  As she ends the essay:

One last point that resonated at that skeptical CEO meeting, I played the new Paul McCartney
song, ”Fine Line,” whose lyrics are “there’s a fine line between recklessness and courage.” Not
… letting go of some control is reckless because it puts a barrier up between you and your customers [or employees], I reminded the execs. Change that makes a big difference, however, requires just a small bit of courage.

So, does anyone have any good stories about social media strategies that have succeeded or failed?

Not quite new news, as noted by Fred Wilson, but the Twitter blog has announced that Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners have invested $35 million in the microblogging service. A Twitter holdout? Two interesting articles, one by David Pogue of the New York Times and the other by Will Leitch in New York Magazine provide some insight into what all the fuss is about. However, skepticism abounds as to how the company is going to turn a 140-character status message into cash.

Our own prodigious updater notwithstanding (aside: when I visit the Martin Prosperity Institute I am going to search for an army of ghost-writing typists in some back room) and the occasional interesting opportunities for micro-reportage, what’s next?

Thoughts?

The 100 Best Business Books of All Time was released this week. Included on that list is Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, categorized as a “Big Idea”… where the future of business books lie.

Click here to read the 100 recognized books.