Slides from my MBA mini-lecture, 5 things you can do with your customers online, are here as promised. Offered as part of our USF MBA Kickoff week.
My advice for MBAs starting with social media? Try these simple tasks first:
- Set a google alert for a topic you care about (LISTENING)
- Comment on a corporate blog (CONVERSATION)
- Send a product evangelist email (EVANGELISM)
- Answer a question on an online forum (SELF-SUPPORT)
- Vote for a product idea online (CO-CREATION)
While WordCamp 2008 attendees were likely impressed with the huge number of page views (6.5 billion per year - roughly one for every person on the planet) and monthly unique visitors (up to 160 million per month) being racked up by wordpress.com, I was focused on a different number.
2,604,288. That’s the number of people running WordPress blogging software on their own websites, with their own web hosting. You’d think that only a hard-core techie fringe would choose to pay for their own web hosting, and deal with the geekiness of it all, when they can get WordPress for free on wordpress.com. But, as of this morning, 3,870,299 blogs were running on wordpress.com. That’s a close race.
In other words, the do-it-yourself web crowd is looking mainstream, not fringe.
The one-click install revolution on web hosts has made this possible. The amount of software/web services power at your disposal with today’s inexpensive web hosting is ridiculous. Take a look at a typical menu of open source software choices (this one is from Simple Scripts). Blogs, wikis, forums, serious content management, e-commerce, CRM…often the best software in its category. We know people are using install scripts, because of the growing number of blogs that are launching with slightly out-of-date versions of WordPress. (Script services are often behind the latest version, one of the downsides of using one-click installs vs. slapping it together by hand.)
Not all is perfect in one-click install land. Upgrades and backups are nowhere near as painless as getting started. But it’s been good enough to compete with free, and it keeps hope alive for a more open web future: not everything has to happen through Google, Yahoo!, MSN or even wordpress.com.
I’ve developed a teaching module that helps students start to create a simple business web site using WordPress. The students launch a new site on a web host via an install script, come up with a simple category structure, and download/upload a new theme.
As an example of a business WordPress site, I use nextbusnews.com. NextBus is the groovy technology that tells me real-time how late my next MUNI bus will be (more details on how NextBus uses WordPress as a simple content management system here).
It amazes me that only 36% of US small businesses with net access have a web site (as reported in the Wall St. Journal last week). This is 2008, not 1998!
Is there an opportunity for WordPress to become a kind of generic small business solution? Business sites can be done now, of course, with some tweaking and geeking. But, following the analogy from Stephen O’Grady’s talk at WordCamp on Saturday, perhaps someone needs to build a company on top of WordPress, in the same way that Google builds its services on top of open source software. A small business website service built with WordPress, but where 99% of the users don’t even know what WordPress is? Edublogs for small business, but maybe without even using the term ‘blog’? Is this a good idea? Is somebody doing this? In the meantime, we think there are lots of good reasons to teach students about open source business platforms and basic content management via WordPress.
(I’m going to wait on an official release of this teaching module until after I hear from reviewers at the WITS 2008 Technology Instruction in Business Curriculum Competition.)
Tech is back, people. Two huge reasons:
- Tech is still innovating big-time. Thanks to innovation, tech-centric industries (software, networks, online, services), and closely related industries (electronics, telcos, digital media, entertainment, gaming, tech consulting), are going strong in tough economic times. We’re the ‘real’ economy now!
- Hardcore tech is easier to access than ever. It’s never been easier to move beyond being just a ‘user’ by actually customizing, assembling, and developing your very own apps and services.
In an effort to capture the excitement of this new era, we have launched the non-award-winning “You belong in tech” ad campaign to get students fired up. The campaign only consists of an eight slide presentation, but each slide is extremely high impact.
We have also launched the Campaign for Real Tech (CRT), which consists entirely of this blog post. CRT believes that a business school education in San Francisco deserves serious tech coverage. Students, if you want to learn more about any of these topics, leave a comment on this page, or grab your nearest b-school administrator:
social media, social technologies, online communities, tech product management, tech marketing and sales, web 2.0, open source, open innovation, enterprise architectures, web analytics, web apps, e-commerce (yes, it’s back), content management, customer relationship management, APIs and platforms, search engine placement, online ads, online experience management, usability, virtual worlds, mobility, location-based services, sensor tech, or enterprise 2.0
If you want to change the world, this is the time.
I created this 10-minute introduction to Virtual Worlds (think Second Life, but also online games like World of Warcraft and social networks with ‘rooms’ like Cyworld) for the panel on “Legal Developments in Virtual Reality” at the American Bar Association’s Second Annual National Institute on CyberLaw. I shared the limelight with gaming lawyer Sean Kane, IBM’s legal strategist for virtual worlds Steve Mortinger, and Mark Rasch, with Andy Grosso moderating.
In my remarks, I advise folks to keep an eye out for these Virtual World trends: open source to create your own worlds, public grids, virtual workspaces, serious gaming, casual gaming, and the return of virtual reality technologies (now that we have more interesting places to visit, maybe it’s time to start digging those gloves and goggles out of the closet).
The legal types seem to be most interested in virtual property rights and regulating money transactions, but we had time to talk about fun stuff like the virtual ’strike’ against IBM in Second Life. A continuing point of controversy: the terms of service for most virtual worlds give users little recourse if a company decides to suspend or delete their account. But what if I built and furnished my whole mansion online?
Fresh from the IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS 08), slides from my talk on “How Web 2.0 Communities Solve the Knowledge Sharing Problem.” (Thanks to Andrew Clement for checking during the talk and seeing the slides weren’t there as promised! Caught again.)
The main addition to the original paper are thoughts about where we might apply knowledge sharing techniques from Web 2.0 communities. First, by bringing these knowledge sharing tools and practices into businesses as they are organized today (Enterprise 2.0). Second, and more profoundly, by helping to create a ‘business commons’ that shares practices and knowledge normally kept (and constantly reinvented) within specific organizations.
The only other addition is data on how the web itself has changed. Web pages are no longer just hypertext, but serve more as an interface to other resources (on average, there are 50 links to outside objects per page) and an environment for running programs (on average, 7 scripts per page, plus code on the server side). Web 2.0 is not just a business concept—it is also grounded in changes to the web itself.
While prepping for the Virtual Worlds panel at American Bar Association National Institute on Cyberlaw, I kept running into papers from a great journal called CyberPsychology & Behavior.
Here’s a taste of their research results since 2007:
College students
- More internet use by college students leads to more school life satisfaction.
- Time spent playing video games has a negative correlation with college GPA.
- More time IMing at college is associated with greater difficulty in concentrating on academic tasks. More time reading books leads to less ‘academic distractability’.
- College students with a ‘high sexual disposition’ (erotophilic) on the Sexual Opinion Survey are more likely to click on a link to unsolicited internet pornography. Antisocial students are even more likely to click.
Gaming/MMOs
- MMO players spend an average of 22 hours per week online.
- A great college student experiment: students are randomly assigned to play arcade games, console games, solo fantasy/adventure games, or MMOs for a month (minimum one hour per week). MMO players reported significantly more hours played, worse overall health, worse sleep quality, but also greater enjoyment in the game, greater desire to continue playing, and more online friendships. MMO players reported more interference with real-world socializing and schoolwork.
- About 75% of MMO players have made ‘a good friend’ online. 55% of female players have met an online friend in real life, 37% of males. 43% of females have been ‘attracted to’ another player. 15% of females date other players. 39% said they would discuss sensitive issues with online friends that they wouldn’t discuss with their real life friends.
- 21% of MMO players prefer socializing online to offline. 57% of gamers had engaged in gender swapping.
- Warcraft players rate their characters more favorably than they rate themselves.
- 18% of online poker players are problem gamblers (according to DSM-IV criteria). Problem gambling is best predicted by negative mood states after playing, and by gender swapping during play.
- Super Monkey Ball 2 players experience brain wave (EEG) changes when they pick up bananas (consistent with increased cortical activation and arousal), fall off the edge of the game board (consistent with motor functions), and reach a game goal (consistent with relaxation).
- For Taiwanese students, online game players are more extroverted and more open (creative, curious, open-minded) than non-players.
- Teams that wear red in first person shooter games are significantly more likely to win than teams that wear blue. Players also perform better in warm (reddish) lighting than cool (bluish) lighting.
- People with a more physically aggressive personality play violence-oriented video games in a more aggressive way.
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I’m tired of out of date, expensive textbooks.
I’m tired of fighting copyright fair use battles.
I’m tired of students being trapped in my class, when other students and teachers around the world are grappling with exactly the same issues.
I want easier ways to share the useful parts of my classes with the world.
So I’ve signed the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education. By signing it, I’ve promised to use and improve openly available education resources. I have to release my own teaching materials openly. And I have to encourage USF to adopt policies encouraging open education.
I believe that university teaching is ripe for change. There haven’t yet been any great successes (that I know of) among the projects to create wikipedia-like textbook replacements. It will take a robust online community to make it happen. But once a successful model appears that shows the benefits of a common, open education resource for academic area X, other areas will quickly follow.
I look forward to the day where everything in my class - readings, students assignments, discussions, and projects - is a URL pointing to an open resource.
More on the Open Education movement:
SF Chronicle Editorial - Bringing open resources to textbooks and teaching.
OpEd on Open Content from the ISKME foundation.
Open Education Resources: OERCommons.
Connexions Repository (Business).
At USF, we’ve been using great open source software platforms like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla!, and phpBB in the classroom for some time. What’s really interesting about these open source platforms is that you can start using them with almost zero technology experience. They provide all the basic functions of a website, a starting point from which even non-technical students can add content, customize the look and feel, and add functionality.
The project website for our most recent Internet Applications course is now available at spring08.jpedia.org. Check out the projects, the course content, and the philosophy of technology immersion behind the course.
I believe that a lot of our technology teaching is done the way I had to learn a foreign language in school: years and years learning grammar, but never learning how to actually speak to someone. Instead of assuming that students build technology from a blank page, open source platforms allow students to start delivering functional sites ‘out of the box’. Soon, they’re hearing from their users, and their requests naturally motivate students to learn and do more with the technology.
We’ve had some success with this model over the past three years, so now we’re making an effort to spread the word to other schools and compare notes. We think that teaching with open source platforms can motivate students in ways traditional IT teaching might not. This is important, given recent studies suggesting that business students aren’t interested in IT not because of job concerns and outsourcing, but simply because they don’t find traditional IT topics interesting (Walstrom et al, Journal of Information Systems Education, Spring 2008).
The rest of the economy may be going to hell, but American tech companies are still going strong. Last week’s article in Network World featured some of my thoughts on why tech is holding up, and whether we’re headed for a repeat of the early 2000’s recesssion that started the dot.com crash.
Why might this downturn different from the dot.com days? From the article:
“Back then, company value was based on the stock price and now it’s based on revenues,” Allen says. “We used to talk about the New Economy. Now it’s the Real Economy. . . . You see over and over again that the financial results in the tech industry are based in reality. They’re not based on speculation about share prices or hopes that you can monetize visitors to your Web site.”
I go on to talk about how Enterprise 2.0 and analytics are hot areas for investment growth, how the U.S. IT labor force is larger than its ever been in history (including during the dot.com days), and how there’s real money behind these trends. It sounds like the happy days might be here again. Or maybe today’s days are even better, because they’re no longer based on fantasy (except for the multi-billion dollar online role-playing games industry, of course…).
Network World 4/25/08: “No slowdown for U.S. tech industry”. Also published on CIO.com.
J.P. Allen is an Associate Professor of Information Technology at the School of Business and Management, University of San Francisco. 