The change in the American workforce has been evolving slowly over the past century. Over this time, the dominant jobs have shifted from materials extraction and processing to information processing. The trend was constant and consistent over the century for the primary and tertiary sectors. The secondary sector actually peaked at 50% in 1960 and then trended back down to end the century where it started. The following chart is from PBS The First Measured Century (a fun book and website).

At first glance, these statistics would seem to imply that knowledge workers make up 58% of the total workforce. It is true that workers in the tertiary sector deal primarily with knowledge. But these labels do not capture the breadth of the trend. So please do not look at these statistics, decide that your workers do not fit the definition of knowledge workers, and think that you can stop reading this book. In our experience, it is not that simple. The use of computers in the workplace is turning almost every worker into a knowledge worker. Work of all kinds is becoming more data driven. And business challenges require more on-the-job thinking and learning.

The classic example of how factory workers can become knowledge workers has for many years been Toyota. Toyota taught the business world many lessons on how to empower workers to adapt the way they work every day. One of our favorite stories was the employees at a Toyota plant who were concerned with the potential for error in an installation process that had 12 possible configurations for sun visors and nine configurations for seat belts. Picking the right parts when it came time to install them was a distraction. So the team went down the street to Wal-Mart and bought plastic totes that could be pre-packed with the right combination of parts. Would you call these workers knowledge workers? We would. Of course, Toyota is also an example of what happens when the empowerment and communication stops before it gets to the top of the company. That’s a topic for another day.

For now, we encourage you to look at all your workers as knowledge workers and how that changes your job as a manager. More coming on this thought…

Adapted from Intangible Capital: Putting Knowledge to Work in the 21st Century Organization by Mary Adams and Michael Oleksak.

Social Capitalism can be summed up as Classical Capitalism except with the factors of production swapped from “Land, Labor, Financial Capital” to “Social Capital, Creative Capital, and Intellectual Capital”.

This video introduces a new way of looking at social media valuation. It should be obvious by now that people create value in social media – otherwise they would not do it. The monetization paradox is stuck on “how can this value expressed as a financial instrument”?

If you engage your clients in the same currency that they are trading among themselves, the greater the likelihood you will realize the value of the new media phenomenon.

A week ago, we launched a community forum for Alfred and I couldn’t be happier to have done so.

This series of post covers why we chose to start a forum, as well as some tips for setting up and running your own successful community forum.

Part I: Why and when should I start my own community forum?
Part II: Setting up your forum: Top tips for using Get Satisfaction
Part III: Making the most of user feedback

Don’t forget to sign up to the RSS feed if you don’t want to miss the rest of the series!

Why choose a forum

When we launched Alfred, our main means of support for users was Twitter. When we needed more than 140 characters, we’d swap over to email.

As our community grew, once we found ourselves with a few thousand users reading our tweets (gasp!), yet many asked the same question frequently (eg. Will you be adding x feature?) because they hadn’t seen the older answer to it.

Let’s face it: Twitter is today’s news but tomorrow’s virtual chip paper. It was time to look for a new way to provide answers. That isn’t to say we’ve entirely dropped email; on the contrary, we’re now able to focus email responses on those who really need one-on-one answers.

We chose a forum because it allowed us to answer publicly, leaving longer-lasting, more valuable answers which could be revisited the product evolved. So is a forum right for everyone?

Red Light: Not Now

There are a few key pieces of the puzzle needed to start a forum on the right foot. Here are a few hints that the time might not be quite right.

1. It’s quiet in here!

Too few active users in your forum give newcomers the impression that nobody uses the app and that it might not be actively developed. One-on-one emails with users or a private beta testers’ space can help you get more in-depth feedback, allowing you to improve quickly until you have enough buzz to warrant a public forum.

2. Starting in a time of crisis

If your users are up in arms about something that’s wrong or bad with your product, it may be challenging to change the tone of the forum once the problem is resolved. Try to start your forum in a time of peace and positivity so that the first few exchanges set the tone for constructive, helpful communication.

3. Changing behaviour

If you’ve encouraged the same behaviour for a long time – for example, emailing you for support – you’ll need to signpost your forum well to direct users to the new home for discussions. This isn’t so much a problem as a change of routine, both for yourself and for users who’ve gotten used to emailing you at their every whim.

Green Light: Let’s Go!

On the other hand, what are the hints that it’s time to stop, collaborate and listen and change the way you interact with your users.

1. You’ve answered the same question more than three times

Sounds familiar? If you’ve had to email users back with the same answer a few times, your product is probably ripe for a forum environment or, at the very least, a clear FAQ.

Tip: For common answers or short snippets you find yourself typing often, consider a tool like TextExpander to save your fingers and your sanity.

2. You must make time

Can you afford a few minutes a day to review the comments you’ve received and respond to them? Usually, that’s all it takes; a quick sweep of the latest questions, a few replies and thank you’s. It’s easy to forget or let it get deprioritised but you should do it as regularly as brushing your teeth – twice a day.

When releasing new features, for example, you need to plan to spend a bit longer listening and answering as you’ll get a burst of interest.

3. Your users can help

In every community, there are a few super-helpful users. Talk to them and see how you can turn them into customer champions. Encourage them to answer questions and thank them profusely and publicly. Sometimes, that’s all the recognition they need!

4. You can take action on feedback

By this, I don’t mean that you’ll take every suggestion and implement it right away. (In fact, we’ll look in Part III at why this is a bad idea!) You simply need to be able to show users that bug fixes are taken seriously and that at least some of the sensible and suitable feature requests are considered.

Get started now

That said, it’s never too early to talk to your users. While a forum may not be right for your product yet, even the smallest seedling of a community should be nurtured.

I’ll never forget the first handful of Alfred users who bravely downloaded an app no one had ever heard of, the first donators or the bloggers who first took the time to write about us. Without these early adopters, a product goes nowhere. Thank these people often and be genuine about it.

Think you’re ready to launch your own forum? In the next post, we’ll talk about choosing the right forum and why we decided to adopt Get Satisfaction. I’ll also share the tips and tricks I’ve discovered since we launched our own.

Need help getting in touch with your community and finding the right communication channels for your product or service?

Pepsmedia, the company I co-founded, offers these services. We can help you build better relationships with your users and discover who your own fans are, so get in touch!

[Photo credit: Sierra Romeo on Flickr]

Here in the United States, there has been 15-year trend to so-called business casual clothing in the workplace.

My first job, in New York in the 1980s, required me to wear a suit and tie with polished shoes every day. At that time, “casual” (for men) meant that after 5:00 you could loosen your tie. When I lived in Japan in the late 80s and early 90s things were even more formal (you could only loosen your tie while drinking beer late night).

Casual Fridays started as a parallel to the dot-com boom on both coasts in the 1990s, quickly became casual every day and spread to the rest of the U.S. partly led by Dockers, a clothing company.

Business Casual Video

My friend Cliff Pollan, CEO of VisibleGains has started talking about what he calls business casual video. I love this description! I’ve shared the idea at meetings recently and the idea really resonates with people.

The concept is simple. For decades, corporate videos have been stiff and formal. They cost tens of thousands of dollars and take months to produce.

Some classics of the formal video genre include:

- Product manager explaining her amazing new offering example

When the subject of video is discussed at companies, people immediately think EXPENSIVE and DIFFICULT because they are thinking formal.

But if you think business casual video, all of a sudden videos can be low or no cost and can be completed in a day or even in an hour.

I am a big fan of something you can film yourself with an easy-to-use Flip or a Kodak camera. Anyone can post to a video sharing site and then embed the resulting video into your site.

As easy as putting on a pair of khakis.

Here are a few styles of business casual video:

Interview. When you’re on the road, you can film an interview with someone interesting such as this one I conducted with Allan Schoenberg, Director of Corporate Communications for the CME Group about the use of Twitter, real-time news and how he works with the media. Yes, Allan is wearing a coat and tie. What makes this a “business casual video” is that I filmed it myself (for free) in HD quality using a camera that costs less than $200.

Answer a question. Film a bunch of short interviews at a conference and have them professionally edited like What makes you a true geek? from Dice.com, a job search site for technology professionals.

Mini-documentary. I filmed about two hours of video over about a week during my recent book tour. I then developed an idea for a story I wanted to tell with the video and had an editor put it together for me.

Video doesn’t have to cost tens of thousands of dollars. You can do something yourself for free or for very low cost. But like that transition from wearing formal clothes to work to putting on a polo shirt, it might feel sort of “not professional” at first.

This Shirt is Business Casual by Attaboy Designs on café press.

Disclosure: I am on the advisory board of VisibleGains

When I was in Music School, I learned some very important things about Time.

As a drummer / percussionist the mastery of time is more important than even the instrument itself. My instructor would place a metronome in front of me and ask me to clap my hands to the beep. If he could hear any part of the beep through my clap, I failed.

The expectation was that I must mask every beep entirely at any tempo – indefinitely and seemingly without effort. The truism is that if the instructor could not hear the beep, then neither could I. True mastery of time means that the metronome must become irrelevant.

I struggled with this challenge for an incredible amount of hours over many many months practicing this seemingly simple exercise. One day, my instructor said “it’s not about knowing where the beep is, it is about creating the space where the beep is not”. In other words: understand the space between the beeps – the emptiness, the void, the silence – and let that become the basis of your musical expression.

From then on – I could nail the beep.

When we listen to music, we derive value from the transformation of one beat to the next and the transformation of one bar to the next, one phrase to the next, and one section to the next, etc. Value is what gets created between our actions – but without actions, there is nothing to contain that value.

Social currencies resemble this dynamic in many ways. While money marks the metronome’s beep, the creative expression happens somewhere between the money – the emptiness, the void, the silence. Let this become the basis of human economic expression, not the beep itself. Value is what gets created between our actions – let’s capture it there. The true mastery of time means that the metronome must become irrelevant.

In the tangible economy, mechanization and mass production drove huge productivity gains as manufactured goods replaced those made by hand. These efficiencies came through strict discipline. Managers could describe to their employees in great detail the smartest way to accomplish their work: “Take Part A, attach these two screws then join Part A to Part B.” Through time and motion studies, the fastest and most efficient way to do things could be identified. To achieve these results, employees had to adhere to strict guidelines. In such an organization, decision-making was an activity that resided with management. Like military commanders, the word of managers was the guide for corporate action. This was a classic command and control model.

But in today’s world, your company is really a series of networks. These networks include both internal and external players. Knowledge is dispersed throughout the network—it is not concentrated in the managerial class. And the organization needs that knowledge to succeed. This means that a traditional hierarchical approach where knowledge and power flow from the top down will not get you the results you need.

To describe this model, we borrow the image of orchestration from Peter Drucker.

Drucker used the metaphor of the orchestra conductor over and over again to describe the challenge of management in the knowledge era. He explained that an orchestra conductor does not know how to play each of the instruments of an orchestra. Yet, the conductor clearly is the leader and manager of the team making up the orchestra. In his or her work, the conductor cannot and should not get too deeply into the technical details of each individual instrument and musician. Rather, the conductor chooses the music, sets the pace, and ensures that all the musicians are playing together. “A great orchestra,” he asserted, “is not composed of great instrumentalists but of adequate ones who produce at their peak.”

Sound easy? Of course not. But it captures the essence of the challenge of management in the knowledge era. And makes it clear that a new management model is needed because workers underneath a manager have special talents and skills that the manager does not possess. This approach contrasts sharply with the widely understood dynamic in the industrial model. Industrial workers were expected to do as they were told. They were not valued for their knowledge or creativity. While this is an overly simplistic statement, it is more true than most people would care to admit, even today. Because the majority of organizations are still set up as if they were running factories where workers are interchangeable and dispensable—rather than businesses dependent on knowledge workers to create and preserve competitive advantage.

Adapted from Intangible Capital: Putting Knowledge to Work in the 21st Century Organization by Mary Adams and Michael Oleksak.

Land, labor, and capital are no longer effective proxies for human productivity, creativity and intellect – end of story. We need to stop talking about social media as if Monetization is some kind of mystery.

The road to monetization is not paved upon on the roadmap of the industrial revolution. Something new needs to happen, we’ve got to move on:

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Interviews/Google-will-focus-on-creating-wow-consumer-moments/articleshow/5687937.cms

Nikesh Arora, President, Google’s global sales says: The good news is that we don’t have five-year plan. We don’t even have a three-year plan because we don’t know how the world is going to look like in three years. We plan for about a year and we have reasonably good visibility for the year from a revenue perspective. This is about creating ‘wow consumer moments’, we want to create cool products — that’s Google, I really like it! And then, we plan about whatever can be sold. We have a good team of product people on the monetisation side. It’s hard to plan, but that’s why it’s fun.

Because of your reach, whatever innovation you create lasts for long. What goes behind monetising these efforts?

The model we follow is 70:20:10. The main task is 70% of efforts, 20% is on related tasks and many of our innovations, such as Gmail, have come from it. The remaining 10% can be about anything. During first four years, we did not have any revenues. Today we have around $20 billion in revenues and 22,000 employees. There’s been a stress on the system because if you look at it, no other company in the history of business has grown so fast.

If you think about Google, we have consumer properties and we sell advertising. Here’s our search property and we sell advertising against it. We have operations in over 40 countries across the world and we serve over a million advertisers who advertise on our search products. Then we go to other people who offer search and tell them why don’t you let us advertise for you because we can figure out a way to bring a million people who want to spend money. If you look at our numbers, roughly 50% is made from our own properties and the rest from others properties, which we help advertise. These guys are not going to get a million advertisers on their own, and they have a lot of content. Even if they can sell 30% of their content themselves, they can’t reach out to million advertisers. We are serving over a billion searches everyday.

We have been building our Maps product for five years and now believe it has become successful. Now, we are thinking of advertising. Trials are running in two US cities. If you’re on the map, we will enhance the listing for $25 a month. We are trailing that and we’ll see where it goes. We will wait for a robust consumer success before we trail monetisation.

There’s a saying, “technology changes, people don’t.” Yet, when we consider the impact of technology on our daily lives, some very interesting observations surface…

A pen now feels awkward to hold and as such, our penmanship is deteriorating

It’s now common to sit at a dinner table with family and friends where some are actively communicating with others, listening to music or gaming via mobile devices

We are redefining the perception, boundaries and thresholds for privacy as we once knew it.

The future of the art of long form writing is at risk of becoming shrtr and less formal #forrealz.

For some, technology encourages immersion and introverted experiences in public settings, reducing the natural human dynamics of engagement. To counter, coffee shops and cafes are becoming “laptop and WIFI free.”

For others, social networking online is converting introverts into digital extroverts, rewarding participation with confidence boosting actions such as responses, “likes,” friend requests, shares, etc.

To connect with other human beings now in the future is not only changing, it’s evoking a sense of Digital Darwinism.  The mantra of “Engage or Die!” was born to make the point that what was, what is, and what will be are no longer linked to all we know and instead, demand an expanded perspective.

Social networking is pervading led by the clicking, connecting, and sharing of hundreds of millions of Internet denizens around the world. While Facebook is the digital equivalent to your online residence, Twitter is reflective of the “me” in social media. Twitter is not a social network, it is a series of disparately connected personalities linked through friendship, admiration, education, and context. How we embrace and invest our persona in this paradigm says more about the future of digital culture and ourselves than we might imagine.

With the introduction of Apple’s new pseudo social network “Ping,” conversations lit up Twitter ultimately sparking a trending topic, “we don’t need another social network.” Indeed, there is a prevailing sense of social media fatigue (aka social network fatigue (SNF). But as good friend Sarah Lacy recently said, “If You’ve Got Social Media Fatigue, UR DOIN IT WRONG.”

At a recent Girls in Tech event hosted at KickLabs in San Francisco, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams inferred that Twitter is actually a “cure” for information overload. Williams likens Twitter to a recipient-driven medium where people who have something to say can now find and reach the right audience, “That’s a much better situation for both the publisher of the information and the consumer of it. So recipient-based media can scale better “in a world of infinite information.”

@Ev also discussed the future of relevance and how Tweets will adapt to your interests. He compared the experience to Google, “Google is very good at ‘I need to solve a problem, I need to buy something, I need an answer. Twitter is more ‘I’m interested in many things, I don’t know what I need to know.’ What we need to get much better at is scaling that system so you don’t have to pay attention to everything, but you don’t miss the stuff you care about.”

The State of the Evolving Egosystem

Over the years, measuring the impact of Twitter as a medium, proved difficult and elusive as details and numbers did not emanate from Twitter itself. Third-parties using APIs helped us paint the landscape to visualize the tremendous proliferation of what started as a microblog and later evolved into an intricate system for sharing, discovering, and voicing our inner monologue.  To help, Williams posted details, stats, and direction to the Twitter blog. As a result, some very interesting usage patterns and adoption rates were revealed.

First, Twitter boasts over 145 million registered users. In April at its inaugural Chirp conference, Twitter announced 105 million users tweeting upwards of 65 million times a day. The number of active accounts however, remains unknown. As Twitter better explains its mission, purpose, and value system to everyday consumers, the number will only continue to grow.

Evan Williams also shared a glimpse of the Twitter ecosystem and how individuals connect to one another. If the “Web is Dead” Twitter users have yet to hear the news. Twitter.com and m.twitter.com account for 92% of all access and communication.

Social Science Will Reveal the Future of Social Networkings

I believe that in order to truly understand technology, the internet, social media and its impact on society, business, and culture, social science becomes paramount.

Social science is the study of human society and social relationships and its role in the evolution of Twitter, social networking and the future of online societies is paramount. While we focus on the future, we must also look at the past and the present to find meaning, purpose, and insight to steer progress . This rapid evolution requires study in order to navigate change and define a course of action and the passage ways to what lies ahead.

As technology and the internet affect human behavior and culture, understanding how we got here will help us affect where we are going. The future of communication, relationships, and education is in your hands…and your status updates, tweets, “likes” and connections.

Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Facebook
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Please consider reading, Engage!: It will help you find answers to your questions…

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Get Putting the Public Back in Public Relations and The Conversation Prism:

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