Professional Social Networking : six expert uses of social media

Last summer at Swisscom User Observatory we conducted an ethnographic research on professional social networking with brilliant folks from Dundee University. These last years and months, social media invaded our private lifes and we wondered whether they could have an impact on the ways we communicate, collaborate at work or the ways we conduct our business. We also wondered who the professional users of social media were, what they really did with them, why and how they used them, and whether private practices and expectations towards social media would influence the professional world.

What did we do ?

We interviewed (and observed when possible, at least we observed the online activity) 45 expert users in 3 places : London, Berlin, Switzerland.

These experts were chosen according to a set of criteria : we recruited people active on more than one social media platform, and having more than 400 contacts on LinkedIn or Xing.

By analyzing how these few individuals deal professionally with social media, we hoped to derive potential benefits for more mainstream companies (including ours). The idea is not to gather user needs or opinions or a representative picture of the Swiss market, but to understand their goals, the measurable objectives they hope to achieve with professional social networking, and the strategies they carefully tuned through time for that.

Providing inspiration

Our expert users turned out to be mostly independant workers, found of cheap, creative solutions to achieve their business objectives, quite innovative in their business use cases of these public technologies. Moreover, they can be described as trend-setters as they are highly influential in the professional communities they animate. Therefore, reflecting in this research on their objectives, strategies, and common use cases, provides an important inspiration to evaluate potentially relevant uses of social media in bigger companies.


Six main use cases

After many analyzes of the data, we restricted the whole practices observed to a set of six main use cases, which are :

1. Business Promotion
From SME which sell directly on Facebook, to consultants who promote their services via Twitter, social media offer new ways not only to inform your customers abou your products but to engage them in your business. The traditional one-way model is substituted by a more participative model where part of the marketing is delegated to key customers.

2. Business Intelligence
Social media represent a huge data bank which can be structured, analyzed and exploited. One of our users for example extracted more than 600 profiles from LinkedIn, did some cross analysis on excell, drew graphs and presented the results to his management to convince them that there was a new market which was worth a few explorations.

3. Establishing a reputation
This use case is about managing your own image online. Social media mostly enable individuals to establish themselves as interesting, reliable, witty, well-informed, connected, activ, creative people in a professional community. Producing, commenting and exchanging information is the cornerstone of this self-promotion strategy. As it is now, corporate or product branding is more difficult to perform via social media.

4. Testing ideas
This iterative prototyping is one of the most interesting use cases we encountered. Social media enable to get immediate feedback on ideas or prototypes. One of our users published all his new projects on his professional blog, collected feedbacks and comments and improved them accordingly.

5. People Sensemaking
Social media were used massively for people sensemaking, i.e. checking the online identity of your colleagues, partners, funders, speakers, customers... before you meet them - or after. This is supposed to provide fuel for chitchat (breaking the ice, finding common interests). But it is also precious to identify the key players in your activity : who are they, what are they interested in, etc. Professional social networks enable to get a kind of dynamic business card - but private social networks (like Facebook) or mix social media (like Twitter) are also used to make sense of people.They are said to provide a picture which is a lot more useful because it is less "polished", more faithful. For different reasons : Facebook because of its audience (you talk to friends so you share your life interests), Twitter because of frequency (you can not lie in constant stream).

6. Daily collaboration
Social media help solve some collaboration problems in speedy projects, distributed teams, or for Digital Nomads. Facebook may give a sense of being together although the team is geographically spread. Twitter is used by some innovative users as a project management tool to keep the whole team informed real time of the latest news and trigger discussion.

We learned much more, that I am not here fully authorized to share. Thanks again to our Dundee students for this nice ethnographic partnership !

Gardener or ethnographer ?

Invited post, by Valerie Bauwens, Human Centricity
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A couple of days ago, the radio was playing in background, when my attention suddenly  got caught by what the gardener of the castle of Prangins was saying talking about the fruits and vegetable in his garden: "créer une biodiversité orientée", probably badly translated… "Create an oriented biodiversity" . Intriguing. These could have been the words of an ethnographer. No, it was the gardener who was explaining why the different varieties of fruits and vegetables happened to have grown in the garden of the castle over the last centuries. Next to the climate constraints, he pointed out that the medical needs of people at that time were one important factor that shaped the biodiversity of the garden. People at that time had "des humeurs" to be healed (don’t ask me which kinds of illnesses these were exactly). One way to be cured from these "humeurs" was to "drain" the body. Subsequently, fruits and vegetables to "drain" the body were planted. It would be definitely worth it to pay a visit to the "jardinier" and ask for further details on what plants were used at that time for that function.

http://www.museenational.ch/f/prangins/chateau_jardins/jardin_potager.php

Keeping in mind that the aim of the gardener is to maintain the castle garden as it was 200 years ago, another point occurred to me. It is much easier too clearly pinpoint how particular social beliefs clearly influenced work practices when you can look back 200 years ago. Just one thought that made me feel more indulgent about ourselves as ethnographers, when we struggle identifying all the links between trends, daily habits, etc. Well, we might sometimes need just a little more time and distance to do so, time to look back.

The main impact of technology may be on power balance : some words to be continued on the Scollon's perspective

The main impact of communication technologies may be to change the power balances : two recent examples

Yesterday at Rezonance, Yves Cretigny explained how social media substantially transforms an event like Lift by the virtue of creating a community : this Lift-community of around 7000 people (compared to the 1000 people physically present for example at the last Geneva Lift event) influences the topics, program and logistics before the event ; during the event, it also influences what the speakers say because the speakers know that the community will have access to the Internet and check and comment real time the content of the talks ; the questions and comments of the community (via Twitter walls, or blogs for example) also add value to the global content ; after the event, the video recordings allow a lot of people to access to enriched contents (talks plus discussions) and to comment and prepare the next event. Alltogether, social media change the power balance between the scene and the audience. 
Similarly we mentioned in the same meeting the case of Jule, a honey producer, who works and lives in Berlin. Jule adopted a social media strategy to sell her honey and this strategy may well change the way honey is produced and distributed in Berlin area in the near future. Jule uses social media to identify key players in her business in Berlin, in particular famous cooks. She then contacts them to discuss new recipes with honey. In parallel she checks the online identity of her best customers and if she founds one with an important online presence, she keeps contact with them. Her idea is to create a data base of supporters to whom she can partly delegate the marketing and sales of her products. Being aware of the latest online discussions between opinion leaders in the food industry enables her to identify trends and opportunities to improve her products. Therefore her R&D is partly done thanks to social media, all the more as she can test very quickly her ideas and get feedback and support. Her objective is also to engage other local honey producers in this dynamic. If Jule manages to build and manage this "Berlin honey" community, which will not be a restricted group of either producers or customers but include producers, key customers, key restaurants, journalists... acting and interacting together, it may well change the way honey is produced and distributed in this area - this means, her social media strategy may change fully the future power balance between producers and distributors in the local honey business.

Back to the 80' : Ron and Suzie Scollon's experiments on social tech and power 

In January 1981 Ron and Suzie Scollon began to experiment with email conferencing on the ARPANET structure to teach to students distributed in whole Alaska. They reported their pioneer experiment and formulated an innovative theory on ethnography, social action and discourse analysis in books and papers, like Nexus Analysis.

   

 

In the first chapter of Nexus Analysis, they reported three cases where "a form of social interaction - a business meeting, a university seminar, and a legislative hearing with regular and well-understood  and well-habituated practices - was restructured through good intentions and for good purposes by using the very new technologies of the video conference, email, and the audio conference. In each case the social relationships, forms of power, and accessibility of some individuals was significantly altered in relationship to others within the same situation." (Ron & Suzie Scollon, 2004, p.2). They concluded that "discourse (understood in a broad sense of the use of language in social interaction) and technology are intimately related to each other". They highlighted that all forms of discourse (even face-to-face interaction) are supported by specific technologies, for example the regular conversational practices (for the exchange of turns, introduction of new topics, repair of misunderstandings, speech acts, etc.) or the structure of the physical and symbolic environment : 
"Why is it difficult to hold a clinical consultation in a classroom ? Why is it a problem to hold a business meeting in an airport lounge ?" Specific genres of discourse are best supported by generic or specific technologies.
Let's conclude shortly this entry, which I will develop later by presenting R. and S. Scollon's theoretical and methodological model : In their pioneering work, R. and S. Scollon showed that analyzing technology or discourse means conducting a nexus analysis in which power relationships can not be ignored - and in which the ethnographer himself is fully integrated by the virtue of his analysis work. Ron and Suzie Scollon thus remind us that ethnography, as well as discourse analysis, are fully linked to social action and transformation.

Being an internal researcher - reporting results 2 : no surprise it does not work, or multifunctional field data

Last year was full of experimentations at the Business User Observatory on the ways we report our research. With some colleagues we tried various new forms to report the results of our field research. Remember that as an internal researcher, shipping is a feature and that shipment is usually expected through the delivery of a Powerpoint presentation (see my former blog entry called “from pres to workshops”). Our experimentations included for example photonovellas, Indesign reports, short “hot” reports on our field observations, and various kinds of movies, including Dogma 95 shaking journeys with a hand camera into the days of our users, or filming the researcher presenting her presentation. We recently got a chance to discuss their impact and relevance for different audiences. Here are my conclusions.

What is the aim of user research presentations ?
Firstly, what is the aim of user research presentations ? It is tightly correlated to the audience. Presentations can be designed for internal workshops. In that case, their aim will be to share field data to make sense of them / to build interpretations / to discuss one point of the study (for example, the methodology) / to derive conclusions. For these purposes we may share selected raw data. In that case, we may even be interested in discussing what really happened during the field, selecting real narratives. However, as soon as the presentation is addressed to internal or external partners, for example designers or managers, the purpose changes. The narrative must be carefully packaged. These audiences are mostly not interested in the details of field research but in its potential impact for their work, project or company. If we present field data, we must pilot them through them. In that context, we may help people dive into our data to make them feel - and not only understand - what is happening around, but we can not expect them to dive into them “randomly”, for free, or graciously. Selecting and organizing data, we highlight some interesting points. We help them see what is to be seen according to us and therefore direct what they look at.

Our data are collected for analysis purposes and then requested also for demonstration

Secondly, the purposes are very different, from analyzing to convincing, inspiring or triggering actions. However we re-use the same data in all these contexts. Our data collection is primarily designed to support our analysis of the topic at stake, to help us understand and maybe describe the observed behaviours and their meanings, and not with a demonstrative idea in mind. We collect a whole bunch of interviews, audio records, pictures, video sequences… to work on and when the analysis is done, we may appeal to some of them to help us illustrate the results we get. No surprise that more than often we do not get the right material to make our point clear. Is it possible then to keep in mind from the first data collection phase on the field that some data should be collected for demonstrative purposes ? Or should we even consider producing “fake”, efficient field films to specially illustrate our point, once we know our main messages ?

The impact of visual presentations

Thirdly, increasing the readibility of our presentations hugely increases its impact. The same content presented in a Word document or in a Indesign report will have a different effect. Corporate people do not read, we were told. So we tried to design reports they would wish to read. We chose to write thick reports full of field details, but balanced by careful lay out, navigation conventions, graphics and pictures. The aim was to produce a 60 pages scientific report that could be read in the train almost as a magazine. Check the difference :

simple word report, not read

final report

Temporary conclusions

1. Doing the work is just half of the effort, reporting it just takes as much time. However putting your work into form to present it contributes to the data analysis process by helping you to get a point of view on your data.
2. Reporting is always a dialogue, data presentation being tailored according to what you expect your audience to do after having listened to you.
3. Try to engage your audience as early as possible in your research process, so that they get accustomed and even curious about field data.
4. Attention is rare – increasing the visual quality of your presentation has a strong effect on its impact. Commented pictures or very short video sequences help direct convey your message. 
5. Direct attention : do not expect your audience to see spontaneously in your data what you see after hours of careful screaning and thinking.
6. Make them feel, and not only understand. Nobody acts according only to its rational representations of a problem. Motivational aspects are far more important and “raw” field data (seeing the people in context) helps to build this motivation. 
7. Field data for presentations are not standing alone : they are efficient in supporting intermediary (or mediationnal) conceptual tools, like a notion, a matrix, a set of profiles, a list of use cases or an opportunity map for example, which are other ways to report how you make sense of your data.