Social Software Discussions

Twitter Tips: How to Catch Up After a Few Days Away - Still struggling with Twitter? I am, I noted Noah has 2000 followers and I have uhm... fewer. This is a pretty good tip guide for Twitter rookies like me. I need to learn how to use Twitter as a tool for something other than links and 'less than witty' comments. Any tip guides for that are appreciated in the comments. At least I'm using Tweetdeck now... Progress!

Why Washington doesn’t get new media? - There is an idea here that the author clearly understands, and I agree mostly with.

Those who think new media is about technology fail to grasp the significance of what is happening in today’s media environment.

Those who don’t get it will continue to assign new media to the IT division.

Those who partially get it will continue to appoint “directors of new media” — as if they had directors of television media and directors of print media and directors of radio media in their cramped communications offices. But none of them, in the end, will “control the message,” that rusted Holy Grail of a rapidly fading era.

But the author should never, ever underestimate what IT does as a value added capability to social social software. IT is the operational environment of social software, and is used to develop tactics.

Bringing Social Networking To Iraq? Could Work: In Context of Iraqi Culture, Not Ours - I am very much enjoying AFPADudes blog. Everyone in CHINFO should bookmark. This is where the ideas of STRATCOM meet public affairs and creative friction is born into ideas.

Dr. Rodriguez places a high importance on the need to understand Intercultural Communication and rightly so. Her thought is tied to the concept of the global village (which I believe social networking has a key stake in), she says;

“Never before did our world resemble so closely what Marshall McLuhan called ‘the global village.’ The economic functions around transnational corporations and international markets; peoples from different parts of the world migrate — for different reasons — to other parts of the world; the work-force has become diverse in many different ways: people of different ages, genders, ethnicity, race, religions, languages, have to live and work together. All this means that never before has good intercultural communication been so valuable.”

The whole post is a good read.

Social Networking and National Security: How to Harness Web 2.0 to Protect the Country - James Jay Carafano, Ph.D. is discussing social software and national security at Heritage. I disagree with the title, it implies a solution is contained within when in fact the article leaves the reader with many questions. This part stood out though.

Some argue that the benefits that result from the enormous number and diversity of individuals that can engage in global listening far exceeds the risks. Michael Tanji, a proponent of adapting Web 2.0 to national security decision making, argues that "in terms of intellectual capital, a virtual think tank can be at least an order of magnitude larger than any current think tank 1.0 in existence today.... [T]he more minds working on a given problem the better the solution. It is unlikely that a policymaker would care one way or another if a good idea was generated by an individual or a group, but as a friend who was an early adopter of the 2.0 approach explains: 'None of us is as smart as all of us.'"

Research suggests that Tanji's observation is overly simplistic. Who interacts and how they interact can have a significant impact on the character of the ideas created. For example, Ronald Burt, a researcher at the University of Chicago, studied an online social network set up for participants in the supply chain of a major electronics manufacturer. Burt found that managers who had a broader perspective, who worked with and interacted with employees and individuals outside their department, provided better recommendations on how to improve business practices. He called this "bridging structural holes." Thus, in terms of using social networking to improve national security policy and programs, Government 2.0 needs to do more than simply "tweeting" (the action of sending a message using Twitter) in broadcast mode or trying to solicit millions of opinions. Social networking structures need to be designed and implemented to achieve specific measurable outcomes based on knowledge about how networks actually work.

I have never met Dr. Carafano, but I have read a lot of his work (including his knol, a good read on the same subject) and I think he is astute observer and researcher.

In the national security debate, the voices that matter in the decision process are the managers who have a broader perspective, but the voices that matter in the development of the decision process are most often not those managers, rather those in the field. In other words, one has to target where to get inputs and where to put outputs, which is why who interacts and how they interact can have a significant impact on the character of the ideas created as Dr. Carafano states.

But that idea is not mutually exclusive of what Michael Tanji is saying when he suggests None of us is as smart as all of us. I can honestly say I have never had useful inputs from anyone at the flag rank or higher of the military services, most of the inputs come directly from those in the field, the working class uniform and civilian Navy. On the other hand, the outputs are usually directed specifically to the think tank class, the political class, the General and Flag officer class, and the academic community who themselves utilize those inputs I pass on so that they can develop outputs for their content. The social network does not hold a uniform pattern, thus I see the blog not as a node, but as a switch on the network collecting inputs from nodes - delivering outputs to nodes.

That is where Dr. Drapeau's paper (PDF) is useful, as it describes the inward/inbound/outward/outbound nature of information leveraging the medium of social software. In my experience though, because the social network is fundamentally human and not technology, effectively developing specific measurable outcomes requires complementary tools and efforts. One point on this though, social networks leveraging social software allows for specific measurable outcomes to be achieved with a much lower requirement for coordination and cooperation. As I have noted many times, Andrew Exum and Tom Ricks do this better than anyone, because they act as the coordinator of information on the behalf of inputs they create on other mediums as well as inputs from others via any medium who may or may not have intended the information to be used in the way it is ultimately used. Inputs via email is no different than an input via a comment or tweet, and for the record, an output via a direct email can be just as important as a blog post, Listserv, Tweet, Facebook entry, or phone call if the desired outcome is produced.

In a nutshell, those CNAS guys take inputs from everywhere and control the presentation through virtually every form of output, and do so in a form folks in the military would call a shaping operation. Shaping the message may or may not be spin as Dr. Carafano suggests, because to the intellectually astute audience involved in the national security debate the output better be both interesting and intelligent to be relevant.