Social tools help improve business communications, increase collaboration and nurture innovation, but what do you do if people won't use them? And how do you grow from a pilot to company-wide use?
The Email Problem and How To Solve It
3 Sept 08
Email is becoming a problem, with people sending and receiving hundreds each day. 'No Email Days' don't help, nor do inbox size limits. So just how do you reduce email and improve people's relationship with their inbox?
Suw Charman-Anderson is a social software consultant and writer who specialises in the use of blogs and wikis behind the firewall. With a background in journalism, publishing and web design, Suw is now one of the UK's best known bloggers, frequently speaking at conferences and seminars.
She recently launched Kits and Mortar, a blog about planning a green, cat-friendly self-built home. Her personal blog is Chocolate and Vodka, and yes, she's married to Kevin.
Kevin Anderson has been an online journalist since 1996, designing, editing and writing websites for both broadcast and print media. In 1998, he joined the BBC and became their first online journalist based outside of the UK, covering the US for its award winning news website. After coming to the UK in 2005, he developed a blogging strategy for BBC news, helped launch a programme on the BBC's 5Live covering weblogs and podcasts and was on the team that launched the interactive radio programme World Have Your Say on the BBC World Service.
Kevin is now the Blogs Editor for The Guardian, where he is responsible for management, strategy and 'leading by doing' for Guardian Unlimited blogs.
I just read an essay by Clay Shirky, Gin, Television and Social Surplus, about how the industrial revolution has resulted, after a brief period of societal gin-soaking, in a surplus of time and productive capacity which has been mopped up by TV sitcoms. Now, however, this social surplus is being put to use in things like Wikipedia, World of Warcraft and blogging. People are taking their spare time and energy and they're doing something with it.
It's a great essay, and I strongly recommend that you pop over and read it, right now, all the way through, because it articulates something that many of us know is happening, but which a particularly large chunk of the media hasn't cottoned on to yet. It's not the content of Clay's essay that I want to further discuss, but one little line that has much broader ramifications:
The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out.
Every now and again I'll be talking to a client or a journalist or some random person at a conference, and they'll ask me if I think that social software is a fad. Invariably they'll have anecdotal evidence of some company, somewhere, who tried to start up blogs or a wiki inside their business, and it failed. That, they say, is proof that social software has nothing to offer business, and that if we give it a few more years it will just go away. Quod erat demonstrandum.
The problem with this interpretation is that these failures - which are common, but largely unexamined and unpublished because no one likes to admit they failed - are part and parcel of the process of negotiating how we can use these new tools in business. They are inevitable and, were they discussed in public, I'd even call them necessary as they would allow us to learn what does and doesn't work. Sadly, we don't often get a glimpse inside failed projects so we end up making the same mistakes over and over until someone, somewhere sees enough bits of the jigsaw to start putting them together.
There is a lot of failure in the use of social software in business, on the web, in civic society, but we need to see this as a part of the cycle, a step along on the learning curve. We can't afford to stop experimenting, just because something failed once, or because it didn't work out for someone else. And we can't afford to take part in the Great Race To Be Second, either, because if you're waiting to see how other businesses succeed (or fail) before you leave the starting line, you're not going to be second, you're going to be last.
From a business point of view, the nice thing about social software is that a lot of is is free or ridiculously cheap, so the monetary cost of failure is low and made up mainly of the cost of people's time. There is no need to judge a social software project based on the same criteria as, say, a massive software deployment from a megacorp vendor that cost millions and took three years, yet these are the terms by which many businesses are judging their blog, wiki, or social networking experiments. And because the tech is so cheap, businesses can afford to run many small experiments to find out what works before they deploy tools more widely; indeed, they cannot afford not to.
But we also need to recognise that the biggest speed bump in social software projects is invariably going to be the social, not the software. The technology is improving every month, mainly because it's being developed by small, nimble vendors who use the software they create and want it to be the very best it can be. But the tech is only a fraction of the battle. The rest, like Soylent Green, is made of people.
And this is where the problem with failure comes in. Generally speaking, people don't much like change. They don't even like choice all that much, although they'll tell you that they do. They certainly don't like failure, or anything that looks even remotely like it. (Especially in the UK, although I think that the US is a bit more tolerant.) And they don't like trying again when things do go a bit wobbly.
Failure, real or perceived, is inextricably entwined with status and, frequently, if a project looks like it's about to go bottom up, instead of figuring out how to save it, people figure out how to distance themselves enough to save face. In a business culture where rewards and punishments are focused on the individual, the teamwork and collaboration required to make a social software project a success can become too much of a risk. But if you've got the right skills and personality, you can turn that around.
To be successful at social software implementations in business you need firstly to have a solid understanding of how people work and relate to computers, tools, and each other. You need to understand how to introduce tools in a way that is non-threatening and which emphasises utility and benefits. You need to understand the political climate within your business, and know how to route around anyone who's threatening to be obstructive.
Secondly, you need to be really pigheaded. If one team doesn't take to a wiki, try working with another. If one blog fails, try to figure out why and then start another. Iterate. Change things. Experiment. Try again. After all, it's only failure if you give up.
Assia Graziloi-Venier, head of Ministry of Sount TV (London) and flypaper.tv
I'm going to blog a little differently during these sessions. I'm going to seize upon a few things that the speakers say and talk about this.
In looking forward to this year, Assia talked about the difficult of brands letting go of the power as they try to encourage consumers to become brand evangelists. One thing she said was that spam was dead. That's not a revolutionary idea. (In some places, not only is spam dead, but it's actually illegal.) But let me take that one step further. As I said during my presentation, many of mass media's mistakes in a social media era are down to the industrial, mass media model being shoe-horned into the social media world. Isn't spam just a low-yield broadcast message? It's antithetical to social media.
No one likes spam, but to be a little provocative, if you take that idea of spam as a generalised, unfocused and unwanted advertising message, could one not also argue that TV and radio ads are generalised, unfocused and often unwanted advertising messages? Isn't that why people are not only time-shifting with TiVo but also cuting out the commercials? What about people who surf with display ad blockers?
I'm not anti-advertising. I'm actually not calling or predicting of all advertising, just questioning the over-reliance on relatively dumb, untargeted advertising.
Kevin and I are back from our honeymoon - we had a fabulous time in Barbados - and raring to go once again. I’m looking forward to reclaiming my evenings and weekends, after months and months of focusing on nothing but organising our wedding. I’m pleased that we chose to do so much ourselves, as the big day was just wonderful, but it really did take up time! Kev will attest to how many hours I spent beading fabric and making things!
Now that I’m back, and easing myself into my work again, I’ve made a pretty fundamental decision which will affect - and hopefully improve - the way that I work. I’ve long been an admirer of Ryan Carson and the gang at Carsonified who work a four day week, closing the office on Fridays. I saw Ryan talk about this at EuroFOO in 2006, and promised myself that I would work towards a four day week over the coming months.
For the self-employed, a four day week is both incredibly easy and astonishingly difficult to achieve. As I run my own business, I have total sovereignty over my time, something which is deeply important to me and the reason why I always turn down job offers, no matter how juicy. I’ve been a freelance for ten years, and adjusting to having to ask for holiday or leave early, and having to go to the same place every day would pretty much send me fruit loopy. I like my independence, and I like making my own decisions about how I spend my time, and on what.
The irony of freelancing, though, is that you end up working really, really hard, not taking holidays or finishing early, and working in the same place every day, even if it is just from your couch. I think my first first holiday with Kevin in 2006 was the first proper holiday I’d had since going freelance, or possibly even since leaving university. So whilst it’s easy for the freelance to decide to work a four-day week, it’s a lot harder to actually execute that decision.
In January 2007, I started marking out Fridays as busy in my calendar, blocking the time out as ‘Free Fridays’, with the intention of spending that time doing stuff that was fun or interesting. Sort of like my very own Google 20% Time. As a tactic for getting me to work a four-day week, it was a total failure as I almost immediately had to book a meeting on a Friday, and within a month, Fridays were just like any other day.
Ryan, on the other hand, has the advantage of running a company which employs people, so once company policy is made to shut the office on a Friday, it’s easy to stick to it. Everyone’s paid a full wage and they work 9am - 6pm Mon - Thurs, which is a 32 hour week, and plenty of time to get stuff done. A set-up like that is pretty easy to maintain because it’s embedded in company culture.
So, now’s the time to try again in a more formal, structured way. Rather than designate Fridays as ‘free’, I’m going to designate them as Reading and Research Day. I have a number of books on my bookshelf that are crying out to be read or, in some cases, re-read and there are even more that I want to get hold of. Plus there are various things that I want to research, whether it’s technology, applications, site, or something more academic.
I’m particularly interested in expanding my knowledge of ethnography, psychology, human behaviour, and usability testing methodologies. So much of what I do now is really about people, about understanding how people behave, how they view themselves and their jobs, how they relate to technology, how they use software, how they interact with each other, how they engage politically with their peers, superiors and subordinates.
The more time I spend working with people who are trying to foster social media adoption in their company, the more I see how much of the project’s success is down to the people, rather than the technology. You can make the best technology decision possible, but if you don’t make the right people decisions, your project will founder. This is something that few companies seem to realise, and frequently resist admitting because it complicate things quite significantly. People are, after all, complicated and you do have to take that into account when planning a social media project - you can come up with some lovely, slick ideas about how people “are going to use the software”, but without a solid grounding in reality, you can find that people aren’t doing what you expected them to do.
[E]thnography can be a great day job, the thing you do to earn enough money to do something else. This might be filmmaking, poetry, fine art collecting. In my case, I do it to fund my anthropology.
And, as I have argued here before, it consulting serves in a couple of ways. It pays me well enough to free up chunks of the year for research. But it also gives me data and understandings that work their way into my research.
I have to be careful not to violate my confidentiality agreements and I take these seriously. The moment the corporation believes you are “reselling” its data, that’s the end of your career as a consultant. The corporation is right to be vigilant on this point, but it is smart enough to see that I represent a peculiar bargain. Because I spend half the year doing my own anthropology they actually get two days for the price of one, the day they pay for, and the day I have spend working on my own. That anthropological research is frequently the source of the insight they most prize. Two-for-one, it’s a bargain. And it is a distinctly better deal than hiring a consultant who does not ever engage in intellectual development but instead exhausts his or her resources by taking on too much work.
I think this is a really important point. It’s not enough to just consult all the time. It’s not enough to be abreast of technology. Yes, I learn a lot every time I work with a company - the use of social media is a really new field and every consulting gig is an opportunity to understand more about how it all works - but if one is not careful, one can get caught up in one’s own assumptions of how things should work, rather than observing how they do work. This is why I feel the need to spread my net a little further and explore other people’s work in complementary disciplines.
The downside of this is that it does reduce the amount of time I have to work on client projects, and the number of clients I can take on simultaneously. As a freelance, that’s clearly something I have to take seriously, but I think in the end, it’ll be well worth it. Clients will get better work from me, and I will stay on top of my game.
There’s no time like the present, so this Friday I shall go to the Social Media Cafe Prototype meeting, and thence to the QR Code meeting (conveniently in the same place), and will be taking a book, and a notebook, with me. I shall, of course, report back.
On Wednesday, I spotted a post from Michael O'Connor Clarke about Jeff Gerstmann, a games reviewer and Editorial Director at CNET's Gamespot, who appeared to have been fired for giving a bad review to Kane & Lynch. The game's publishers, Eidos Interactive, had just bought hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of advertising on the site and the rumour was that they used the weight of that contract to force CNET to fire Gerstmann. It seems the news was broken in this Penny Arcade strip.
The implications of this rumour are clear: If CNET is bowing to pressure from advertisers to ensure that their own games are favourable reviewed, then CNET's games coverage becomes not worth the electricity that lights its pixels. Indeed, the suspicion that CNET can be bought immediately devalues all its reviews, across all sectors. If the PR, advertising and editorial departments submit to bullying from one vendor, then there's no reason why they aren't doing the same for other vendors. This is potentially very damaging for CNET as it destroys readers' confidence that what they are getting is honest, unbiased opinion.
As our tipster points out, if the rumor is true, it could point to a distressing precedent at Gamespot and parent company CNet. "As writers of what is supposed to be objective content, this is our worst nightmare coming to life," wrote the tipster.
Our efforts to confirm the story with Gamespot haven't proved successful. Our current requests with PR, Gerstmann and other CNet contacts have either gone unanswered or yielded a "no comment."
CNET allowed hours to pass by as people continued to spread word of the firings, creating incensed users everywhere. They issued no formal statement and made no attempt to defuse the situation. Eventually, they came out with what I refer to as a "non-denial denial," in which they made no reference to the controversial situation, resorting to generalized statements about how CNET is a bastion of "unbiased reviews."
Due to legal constraints and the company policy of GameSpot parent CNET Networks, details of Gerstmann's departure cannot be disclosed publicly. However, contrary to widespread and unproven reports, his exit was not a result of pressure from an advertiser.
"Neither CNET Networks nor GameSpot has ever allowed its advertising business to affect its editorial content," said Greg Brannan, CNET Networks Entertainment's vice president of programming. "The accusations in the media that it has done so are unsubstantiated and untrue. Jeff's departure stemmed from internal reasons unrelated to any buyer of advertising on GameSpot."
"Though he will be missed by his colleagues, Jeff's leaving does not affect GameSpot's core mission of delivering the most timely news, video content, in-depth previews, and unbiased reviews in games journalism," said Ryan MacDonald, executive producer of GameSpot Live. "GameSpot is an institution, and its code of ethics and duty to its users remains unchanged."
Despite that, public opinion in the gaming world swung against CNET, despite the hints that Gerstmann's firing may be nothing to do with Kane & Lynch, and more to do disagreements with (new) senior manager Josh Larson. If I may quote liberally from Kotaku:
Speaking with a Gamespot employee yesterday who asked not to be named for this story, we've learned that, despite the neutral nature of the Gamespot news item on the matter, the editorial staff is said to be "devastated, gutted and demoralized" over the removal of former editorial director Jeff Gerstmann. While the termination of Gerstmann, a respected fixture at Gamespot, was pitched to his remaining colleagues by management as a "mutual decision", it was anything but, we're told.
The confusion over the reasons for Gerstmann's termination, compounded with a lack of transparency from management has created a feeling of "irreconcilable despair" that may eventually lead to an exodus of Gamespot editorial staffers. "Our credibility," said the source, "is in ruins." Over the course of the previous days, a "large number of Gamespot editors" have expressed their intentions to leave. Tales of emotionally deflated peers, with no will to remain at the site, were numerous.
Unless cooler heads prevail or concerns are addressed, Gamespot could see "mass resignations", our source revealed.
Rank and file employees of the Gamespot organization are unaware of the real reasons behind Gerstmann's termination. Our source admitted that Eidos was less than pleased with the review scores for Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, but the team has "dealt with plenty of unhappy publishers before." Our contact stressed that "Money has never played a role in reviews before" and that "[Gamespot] has never altered a score." No pressure from management or sales has been exercised to remove or alter content, the source reiterated.
However, the source did speculate that disagreements between Gertsmann and VP of games Josh Larson may have been the root cause of the former being terminated. Larson, successor to former editor in chief Greg Kasavin, was described as out of touch with the employees who report to him. The VP is the one allegedly responsible for telling Gamespot editorial staff that it was Gerstmann's "tone" that was at the heart of his dismissal.
No one wants to be named because no one wants to get fucking fired! This management team has shown what they're willing to do. Jeff had ten years in and was fucking locked out of his office and told to leave the building.
What you might not be aware of is that GS is well known for appealing mostly to hardcore gamers. The mucky-mucks have been doing a lot of "brand research" over the last year or so and indicating that they want to reach out to more casual gamers. Our last executive editor, Greg Kasavin, left to go to EA, and he was replaced by a suit, Josh Larson, who had no editorial experience and was only involved on the business side of things. Over the last year there has been an increasing amount of pressure to allow the advertising teams to have more of a say in the editorial process; we've started having to give our sales team heads-ups when a game is getting a low score, for instance, so that they can let the advertisers know that before a review goes up. Other publishers have started giving us notes involving when our reviews can go up; if a game's getting a 9 or above, it can go up early; if not, it'll have to wait until after the game is on the shelves.
I was in the meeting where Josh Larson was trying to explain this firing and the guy had absolutely no response to any of the criticisms we were sending his way. He kept dodging the question, saying that there were "multiple instances of tone" in the reviews that he hadn't been happy about, but that wasn't Jeff's problem since we all vet every review. He also implied that "AAA" titles deserved more attention when they were being reviewed, which sounded to all of us that he was implying that they should get higher scores, especially since those titles are usually more highly advertised on our site.
Gamespot insiders were clearlyunhappy with what has happened.
Eventually, Gamespot management did address the issue, although they maintain they are legally unable to discuss why Gerstmann was fired, the categorically deny that it was because of pressure from Eidos.
Q: Was Jeff fired?
A: Jeff was terminated on November 28, 2007, following an internal review process by the managerial team to which he reported.
Q: Why was Jeff fired?
A: Legally, the exact reasons behind his dismissal cannot be revealed. However, they stemmed from issues unrelated to any publisher or advertiser; his departure was due purely for internal reasons.
[...]
Q: Was Eidos Interactive upset by the game's review?
A: It has been confirmed that Eidos representatives expressed their displeasure to their appropriate contacts at GameSpot, but not to editorial directly. It was not the first time a publisher has voiced disappointment with a game review, and it won't be the last. However, it is strict GameSpot policy never to let any such feelings result in a review score to be altered or a video review to be pulled.
Q: Did Eidos' disappointment cause Jeff to be terminated?
A: Absolutely not.
Q: Did Eidos' disappointment cause the alteration of the review text?
A: Absolutely not.
Q: Did Eidos' disappointment lead to the video review being pulled down?
A: Absolutely not.
[...]
Q: Why didn't GameSpot write about Jeff's departure sooner?
A: Due to HR procedures and legal considerations, unauthorized CNET Networks and GameSpot employees are forbidden from commenting on the employment status of current and former employees. This practice has been in effect for years, and the CNET public-relations department stuck to that in the days following Jeff's termination. However, the company is now making an exception due to the widespread misinformation that has spread since Jeff's departure.
[...]
Q: GameSpot's credibility has been called into question as a result of this incident. What is being done to repair and rebuild it?
A: This article is one of the first steps toward restoring users' faith in GameSpot, and an internal review of the incident and controversy is under way. However, at no point in its history has GameSpot ever deviated from its review guidelines, which are publicly listed on the site. Great pains are taken to keep sales and editorial separated to prevent any impression of impropriety.
For years, GameSpot has been known for maintaining the highest ethical standards and having the most reliable and informative game reviews, previews, and news on the Web. The colleagues and friends that Jeff leaves behind here at GameSpot intend to keep it that way.
The problem is, the damage has been done. Whatever the reason for Gerstmann's dismissal, the appalling way that CNET handled the crisis means that a lot of people now believe that the Chinese wall that separates advertising and editorial has been permanently damaged. That in and of itself means that both Gamespot's and CNET's credibility has been severely dented and if there's one thing that a publisher cannot afford to do, it's to appear even for a moment to be in the pockets of its advertisers. Readers want impartiality, honesty, transparency, and if they sniff a rat they'll leave in droves.
CNET should never have fired Gerstmann without thoroughly thinking through the implications of such a precipitate dismissal. Doing so without a strategy in place for addressing the inevitable rumour that would follow was stupid and short-sighted. In any company, that sort of "marching off the premises" style of dismissal is bound to cause a rumpus, especially when the person being fired, as Gerstmann appears to have been, is much loved by their colleagues and readers, and has been there for so long. It shouldn't have taken a genius to realise that there'd be a pretty strong reaction against it, and that some sort of thought should be given to how to address the rumours early on.
Whether Gerstmann was fired because of Larson, or Eidos, or something else, is almost irrelevant now. The conclusions one can draw are that either CNET's in bed with its advertisers, or it's being managed incompetently by someone prone to throwing hissy fits and firing people on the spot. If one were being generous, one might just put this down to an HR/PR fuck-up, but there is a valuable lesson to be learnt by every publisher and every company with externally-facing bloggers: Look before you fire.
As part of the Creative Business in the Digital Era project, I'm doing some thinking and learning about business models and microeconomics. This post is originally from the CBDE blog.
After my post the other day about business model archetypes, I had a very interesting conversation with friend and ORG Advisory Council member, Kevin Marks, who pointed me in the direction of an article by Joel Spolsky - Strategy Letter V. In this post, Joel talks about the microeconomics he studied at university, stuff like "if you have a competitor who lowers their prices, the demand for your product will go down unless you match them." The main body of his post discusses substitutes and complements, and for someone like me who has learnt about business the hard way (by doing it), it's like a little light bulb illuminating.
Like most creative people, I've never studied business, and for years I fell in to the same trap that I later saw many of the musicians I used to work with fall into: I didn't want to learn about business because I didn't think I needed to. All I wanted to do was write, maybe make a bit of music, but in any case, just do my own thing. Then my career took an unexpected turn, I started my own business, and I was on the lower slopes of the steepest learning curve of my life. Perhaps if I'd known about blogs like Joel's in 2000, I would have had a better time of it! Anyway, I digress.
A substitute is an item that can replace another item, so I can buy a PC from IBM or Dell, it doesn't really matter - PCs are substitutable. A complement is an item that, you guessed it, complements another item, so if I buy an iPod, then there are a range of accessories that act as complements, such as iPod socks or remote controls or armband iPod holders for the keen jogger. Joel talks a lot about complements and focuses mainly on the computer industry.
A complement is a product that you usually buy together with another product. Gas and cars are complements. Computer hardware is a classic complement of computer operating systems. And babysitters are a complement of dinner at fine restaurants. In a small town, when the local five star restaurant has a two-for-one Valentine's day special, the local babysitters double their rates. (Actually, the nine-year-olds get roped into early service.)
How does this apply to, say, the music industry? Well, let's say that you are in a band. Your main product is music, which you sell in the form of a CD. The complements to your CD are things like gig tickets, tour programs, T-shirts, DVDs. People buy these other products together with your CD, and are very unlikely to buy them if they aren't also interested in buying your CD.
Joel then goes on to say:
All else being equal, demand for a product increases when the prices of its complements decrease.
Let me repeat that because you might have dozed off, and it's important. Demand for a product increases when the prices of its complements decrease. For example, if flights to Miami become cheaper, demand for hotel rooms in Miami goes up -- because more people are flying to Miami and need a room. When computers become cheaper, more people buy them, and they all need operating systems, so demand for operating systems goes up, which means the price of operating systems can go up.
OK, let's just swap things about a bit. Your products are CDs, gig tickets, tour programs, T-shirt and DVDs. The complement to that is the music itself. (Note that we're used to thinking the other way round, labelling the music as the product and the merchandise as the complement, because the music comes first and the merch has to come second. But when you view the saleable items as the products and the music as the complement, this all makes much more sense.) Demand for your products increases when the price of its complement - the music - decreases. If the price of your music is zero, i.e. you are giving it away for free online, economic theory has it that the demand for your products increases.
Joel generally talks about companies that are producing complements to someone else's products, and discusses how important lowering the price of those complements is:
Once again: demand for a product increases when the price of its complements decreases. In general, a company's strategic interest is going to be to get the price of their complements as low as possible. The lowest theoretically sustainable price would be the "commodity price" -- the price that arises when you have a bunch of competitors offering indistinguishable goods. So:
Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements.
If you can do this, demand for your product will increase and you will be able to charge more and make more.
In the music industry the separation between product and complement is more perceived than real - whilst the record company controls the complement - music - the rights required to create products is often licensed out to third parties, such as merchandising specialists, who have to conform to the record company's terms. From what Joel's saying, it would be in the interests of the third parties, e.g. the merchandising companies, to lower the price of the music to increase demand for their product - the more people can access the music of MyWonderfulBand, the more fans there are, the more demand for T-shirts. In practice, though, that's impossible as the merchandising companies have no leverage to achieve such a goal.
But if the same people - the band - are in control of both products and complements, they can create an end-to-end business model that sees them giving away the product and earning off its complements. I'd argue that people like Ani DiFranco have been doing this for years, encouraging people to make copies of her music and then selling merchandise and touring frequently. For a musician, this is a self-reinforcing feedback loop. The more you tour, the more merchandise you sell, the more you bring your music to the attention of people who may want to buy tickets for your next gig or buy a T-shirt or CD. By taking the risk of commoditising your music, you can potentially drive up the demand for the complements substantially, if you can get over the icky feeling of commoditising the very thing you feel most passionate about.
Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
So how about the other creative industries? Well, in the publishing industry, the product is the book contents, the complement the book itself, so giving away ebooks should drive demand for paper books. Authors don't seem to do much in the way of merchandising - perhaps that should change, especially with services like Spreadshirt or Cafepress. Films are rather the same - the moving image is the product, the DVD the complement. Photography - the image is the product, the print or the book the complement...
Now, I did warn you that I am thinking out loud here, and I see a problem with all this, and it has to do with substitutes. Remember, a complement is "a product that you usually buy together with another product". But for many of the products that come out of the creative industries, the physical incarnation is not a complement to the digital version of the creative work, but a substitute. Joel defines a substitute like this:
A substitute is another product you might buy if the first product is too expensive. Chicken is a substitute for beef. If you're a chicken farmer and the price of beef goes up, the people will want more chicken, and you will sell more.
If the digital creative work is a substitute for the physical instantiation of the work, the whole complement theory falls over. Computers and operating systems are complements of each other because one without the other is sort of pointless - you want the one if you have the other. But with no CD, my MP3 is still listenable; with no DVD, my MPEG is still watchable; with no print, my JPG is still viewable. This is why the RIAA and its ilk have being getting so much in a tizz about the downloading of unauthorised files - they see the digital as directly substitutable for the physical. And if something is substitutable, it can't be complementary. Can it?
This is, I think, where the lines get a little fuzzy. Technically, an MP3 is a perfect substitute for a CD - you can do pretty much everything with an MP3 that you can do with a CD. (Indeed, the chance are you'll turn your CD into MP3s as soon as you get it). But I'm not sure that its substitutability is so perfect and I wonder if, as more people experience total music data loss when their MP3 player or computer hard drive craps out, its perceived substitutability will actually decline. It took the loss of 40gb of digital music carefully collected over years and years for me to learn that backing up my music is really important. As the MP3 player market matures, we will see more people loose data when their devices perish or when they try to swap between silo'd devices that do not play nicely together, e.g. trying to play proprietary format music on a non-compatible device. At that point, substitutability will decline slightly and complementariness will increase slightly, although it will be individual context that will define whether a given MP3/CD is a complement or a substitute.
It is an irony that the industry that has been so worried about substitutability also has some of the best complements to it's main creative output. Bands aren't reliant on just CDs for income: gigs and merchandise play a significant part in the successful band's income, and it's possible to imagine that percentage could increase as income from CDs decreases. Other creative industries, though, are going to need to find some complements, and quickly. The digitisation of creative works is neither slowing down nor going away; and the commoditisation of those works is both inevitable and uncontrollable, driven as it is by the consumer rather than the rights owners. The only way to deal with the commoditisation of your past cash cow is to sell complements to it.
Earlier in the week, the BBC ran a package on its Breakfast programme about how Intel has become "the latest in an increasingly long line of companies to launch a so-called 'no e-mail day'."
On Fridays, 150 of its engineers revert to more old-fashioned means of communication.
In actual fact e-mail isn't strictly forbidden but engineers are encouraged to talk to each other face to face or pick up the phone rather than rely on e-mail.
In Intel's case the push to look again at the culture of e-mail followed a comment from chief executive Paul Otellini criticising engineers "who sit two cubicles apart sending an e-mail rather than get up and talk".
As the BBC says, this isn't new - other companies have been doing this for some time. But I don't think that Intel's initiative is going to have that much of an impact, and I don't think that 'no email days' are going to help.
For starters, Intel's initiative is only aimed at 150 engineers so it's no more than a tiny pilot affecting only 0.16% of its total staff of over 94,000. Engineers are not a representative sample, either, even for an organisation as tech-oriented as Intel. And in my experience, initiatives that start in engineering or IT do not naturally spread through the rest of the company. Programmers speak a different language to, say, sales or HR, and there aren't natural migration pathways for viral behaviours to spread from one set of employees to the other.
That's assuming, of course, that turning off email for a day is the sort of behaviour that goes viral. I'm pretty sure it's not - it's actually harder to not look at email than it is to check it compulsively all day. Email overuse works on the same principle as slot machines: repetitive behaviour that results in intermittent rewards is creates the perfect conditions for dependence. As Mindhacks says:
[I]f you want to train an animal to do something, consistently rewarding that behaviour isn't the best way. The most effective training regime is one where you give the animal a reward only sometimes, and then only at random intervals. Animals trained like this, with what's called a 'variable interval reinforcement schedule', work harder for their rewards, and take longer to give up once all rewards for the behaviour is removed.
[...] Checking email is a behaviour that has variable interval reinforcement. Sometimes, but not everytime, the behaviour produces a reward. Everyone loves to get an email from a friend, or some good news, or even an amusing web link. Sometimes checking your email will get you one of these rewards. And because you can never tell which time you check will produce the reward, checking all the time is reinforced, even if most of the time checking your email turns out to have been pointless. You still check because you never know when the reward will come.
Email overuse (I'm trying to steer clear of the word "addiction" because it's just too loaded) is not a simple behaviour, and simple solutions such as telling people to turn it off for a day will not work in the long term. Attempting to change people's behaviour - getting them to check email less often, or turning email off for a day - is likely to be futile, even if you understand the psychology of it, because behavioural change very difficult to achieve. Frequently, those who use email in a sub-optimal manner are entirely unaware that they have a problem and see no reason why they should put any effort into changing.
Another reason why days off won't work is because the main problem with email, apart from the obsessive checking, is overload. Turning it off for a day doesn't significantly change the amount of email that you actually receive, it just means that it piles up in your inbox whilst you're off doing other things. If your whole team turns email off for a day, then some communications that may have happened by email will instead be carried out by phone or in person, whilst others issues will remain mentally queued for sending when email is allowed again. Communications from people who aren't turning email off will continue to come in and, not only will they be waiting for you when you finally do turn email back on, you'll know that they are there, lurking. This is why it's hard to turn email off: it's too trivial to turn it back on again just in case something fun/important has arrived.
A more effective way to tackle business email is to look for specific tasks that are being done on a regular basis and move them to another, more suitable tool. Collaborating on documents, for example, is a really bad use of email. Creating a spreadsheet, Word document or Powerpoint slide deck and then emailing it round to people for comment is a very clumsy process. Not only do you have to collate and hand-merge the comments from the various people involved, you are also duplicating the files in multiple inboxes and (possibly) hard drives across the network, clogging up the infrastructure with unnecessary data. And, of course, one go round is never enough - these emails can fly back and forth and back again for days or even weeks.
Instead, using a wiki or something like Google Documents to collaborate on a document is a simpler and much more efficient way to work. Everyone can see everyone else's changes, so there's no duplication of effort; discussions don't get split across inboxes; sign-off is easily co-ordinated; and you can see who has edited and (depending on software) who has viewed the pages so can nag anyone who needs to be involved but who isn't. Collaboration done in collaborative tools is significantly easier than doing it over email. And "collaboration" doesn't have to mean something big - it can be as trivial as asking someone to proof read an email.
Equally, moving regular newsletters that are being sent out by email - and I don't believe there can be a single big organisation that doesn't regularly send out newsletters, updates, and other gubbins to everyone by email - onto a blog and letting people receive them via RSS reduces the occupational spam load by allowing people to subscribe to to just those feed that are interesting or pertinent.
The problem is, of course, that it's easy to proclaim a No Email Day and look like you're doing something big and important. It's harder to actually look at what your employees are doing on a day to day basis and figure out how you can help them permanently reduce their email output whilst simultaneously allowing them to do their work more efficiently. That's not a simple nor quick solution, because the use case differs from group to group, or even person to person, but it's one that works.
Of course, most companies have no idea how their employees are really using email, and most employees aren't concerned about how to improve the way they use it. One client of mine did some work to find out how people used their computers, and the results would make your toes curl. People using email as a 'to do' list manager, sending themselves emails with the to do item in the subject line; people with 50,000 unread emails in their inboxes; people using their email drafts folder as a file repository by attaching files to emails and saving them as drafts... the list went on.
If Intel really wants to reduce email load, it's going to have to do a lot more than just ask 150 engineers to turn it off on Fridays. I wonder if it has the smarts - or the guts - to go for a real email reduction strategy.
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