Social Media

Asda’s Green Room

I’d heard great things about Asda’s Green Room, an online portal where Asda staff can get together to find out what’s happening around the company as well as share their own stories, pictures and videos. What excited me most about it was that anyone can join in. The whole shebang is exposed to Asda customers, shareholders, media – anyone with a passing interest in Asda can and is encouraged to take a look around.

Given that I’m hugely interested in what I see as the inevitable convergence of internal and external communications, driven primarily by growth of social media, I had huge expectations when I paid my first visit. First impressions were mint. It looks great and sounds great. So I scratched beneath the surface a little. I have to say, by the time I left I was feeling pretty disappointed.

OK, so it has only been going for about 5 months. Actually 5 months in social media is probably the equivalent in several years in real-time. There are some signs of genuine interaction with ‘colleagues’ (that’s what Asda call their staff) and customers who have commented on the stories posted by the Green Room team. However, many stories have attracted no comments at all.

When you consider that Asda employs over 150,000 people in the UK, 90,000 of whom who are part time (and therefore presumably have a bit more time for social networking) this does not feel like success.

Lifting the bonnet slightly, I then saw that the Green Room’s own Facebook site has only 200 fans and despite almost daily updates, 2 ‘like its’ were the only sign of interaction going back to November 2009. I didn’t see a single comment on any of the wall posts during this time. The Green Room’s Twitter channel only has 51 followers (52 now – hi Steve!).

Please don’t get me wrong. I absolutely love what Asda have done here, it is ground breaking stuff – truly. I’m just a tad disappointed that Asda colleagues do not appear to have embraced the portal with as much enthusiasm as the very capable Green Room Team clearly have.

Watch this space – I intend to find out why.

Participation inequality

So we are using Yammer where I work. I like Yammer a lot. Mainly because the basic functionality is free and therefore gives me the chance to experiment without spending a bean. The technology is fine and it sure beats email as a way of threading conversations across the company and in work groups.

We never officially launched Yammer, and yet around 15% of the company (244 people) have found their way to the site and registered in a matter of months. I was initially disappointed that despite going to the effort of joining the network, most people do not appear to use it. Analysis of the contributions to date reveal that 5% of the users (12 people) are responsible for just under 60% of the content and 50% of the content is generated by just 6 people.

Then I discovered Jakob Nielson’s theory of Participation Inequality.  In short, Nielsen’s theory, otherwise known as the 90-9-1 theory, is that in most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all of the action.  On this basis, our Yammer figures look quite respectable.

So I took a quick look at Wikipedia, and discovered from their latest figures that that a mere 0.13% of users (85,000 people) are active contributors against 64m unique users. And I took a quick look at Twitter, where recent figures suggest that 5% of users account for 75% of all activity.

I feel much better now! The next step is to try and work out whether the lurkers are deriving any benefit….

From mass communications to masses of communicators

When it comes to social media, IBM, the self proclaimed most forward looking company in the world have led the way for many years. In 1997 they were encouraging their staff to get out there and mix it on the world wide web when many companies were doing their damnest to restrict their employees access.

Seven years later their blogging policy was being held up as an example to us all at a time when many of us thought a blog was some kind of nasty medical condition.

I’ve been reading their current Social Computing Guidelines and I see no reason not to think they continue to lead the way. The guidelines themselves are pretty standard; no doubt due to bulk plagiarism across the globe for many years. No – what made them stand out to me was the following line in the preamble:

“IBM is increasingly exploring how online discourse through social computing can empower IBMers as global professionals, innovators and citizens. These individual interactions represent a new model: not mass communications, but masses of communicators.”

It’s a phenomena that the PR and Corporate Communications industry has been debating for a while. Some see it as a threat to their profession, others as an opportunity and some as a passing irrelevance.

Personally, I think IBM are spot on and I intend to spend some time over the next few months taking a closer look at what I see as the inevitable convergence between external and internal communications as the new masses of communicators model forces the old mass communications model to either adapt or die.