Beyond SuperPoke:

Robert Zand | June 2008

A Case Study in Using Social Networks to Build Client Trust

The popularity of social networks is hard to deny. Myspace and Facebook have been in the popular press for quite some time and lately even an obscure, niche service named Friendfeed has surfaced in mainstream media. Each of these services enables photos and videos, bookmarks, messages, location information nearly anything that can be captured digitally to be shared by friends, family, classmates, and many others in one central location.

Problem: Widespread locations with many discreet tasks made re-envisioning a new online experience difficult for a team that included client and service provider members. Solution: Social network software, which provided the team with social as well as work-related information and interaction, oiled the teamwork process.

As their popularity grows, so too does the curiosity of business. Like wikis and blogs before them, the sharing and communication that these services foster tantalizes executives with the hope of increasing collaboration among their workers, Benefit: which leads to a competitive advantage, new ideas, Though much study is still needed, the and additional profits. On my last project, a year team believes that social networking long effort to build a new investment tracking site, helped build client trust and contributed to an ad hoc social network developed between the projects success. various members of Razorfish and the client. In the paragraphs that follow, I describe how the network formed and the activities that took place on it as well as provide observations and recommendations for those considering social networks in their workplace.

Building a Team
Building a social network is a team building story. In our case it was a bottom up effort, a consequence of its members experimenting incessantly to find a better way to communicate ideas. It formed among the individuals responsible for re-envisioning the online experience - 29 of approximately 100 from our client and Razorfish members. The team was spread over two locations, which led to daily commuting rather than overnight stays. The physical campus of the client was widespread, containing a dozen buildings. As such, the team was constantly in transit. They floundered at the beginning. Although the ultimate goal was clear, the small, tactical steps necessary to get achieve the goal were less obvious.

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The requirements gathering process was massive, and team members often worked individually to track down specifics. Early on, almost half of every Friday was dedicated to discussing ideas and critiquing each others work, but either exhaustionor embarrassment at the lack of progressprevented these meetings from being fruitful. On Mondays, a shorter status meeting saw project managers encouraging the troops to update project servers and communicate their revisions through the e-mail distribution lists. The contact list was updated as new people were added to stimulate the effort. Against this backdrop, I began to experiment. The experiment. Three or four days a week I was making a two-hour commute by train. An air card allowed me to connect to the Internet en route. A big reader, Id follow general societal and industrial trends then dive deep into relevant subject matter for project work. My procedure is an ongoing experiment. I prune and add sources constantly from my feed list and try new services frequently. Sharing is a major part of this process. I was involved in online networks outside of work where contributors helped each other find relevant content by voting on the merits of individual articles. I passed on relevant links to coworkers, mostly by e-mail and instant messenger as those were the predominant office tools. But this project challenged passing on information. The e-mail distribution list included team members only from my agency and, mostly, I needed to e-mail the client. The project-wide contact list (a spreadsheet) was long, making updates and synchronization between two phones and three computers timeNoticing that even consuming and difficult. E-mails, painstakingly composed on the train simple profile with a laptop balanced on my knees, too often weren't read because updates captured the recipients' inboxes were overflowing with "higher priority" items. teammates Instant messaging article links weren't viable; too few people were attention, I began available when needed. Even fewer used Del.icio.us, an online sending work bookmarking service that momentarily seemed like an option. items within Facebook. Around this time the project began to settle down. A core of us who had been stationed in a "war room" on the client campus began adding each other to our Facebook profiles. It was an organic process, born partially out of proximity and partially out of a desire to have more "friends" and, therefore, a more robust experience. It wasn't work oriented, it was social. Coincidentally, this is the common perception of social networks. Their stock in trade is the mundane status updates, embarrassing photos, and pop culture references of the nonproductive. They are frivolous. So it seems. Noticing that even simple profile updates captured teammates attention, I began sending work items within Facebook. While it was somewhat difficult to communicate with a group in this manner, the aggregation of work and social objects seemed to guarantee people would read my messages. This was progress. In yet another experiment, I added Twitter (a pure messaging system) and Friendfeed (an aggregator of nearly anything publicly available relative to an individual on the Web), and suddenly the entire "war room" crowd followed. Twitter and Friendfeed are incredibly popular services among Silicon Valley's tech elite. To many in the industry, including me and my teammates, the ability of these networks to serve as qualified, trusted sources of information is invaluable. Suddenly, and quite by accident, we had a dedicated communications channel that would last throughout the remainder of our work.

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Characterizing Network Behavior

What sort of activity took place in this new channel? What information, both work and personal, was revealed? How did members contribute? When did they join, and how often did they participate? What did the network look like? The answers to these questions hint at the potential of social networks in the workplace. For some, they will also reveal its risks. My point here is to honestly discuss the network's usage so that others may decide on and plan for their own implementations. I have analyzed the behavior of the 29 people most involved with the day-today workings of the project. These 29 people were from four different disciplines: user experience, content strategy, design, and management. Some had participated in social networks before the project began, others joined for the first time as a result of the project. Their behavior fell into four categories: active participants, active observers, observers, and nonparticipants. Active participants. Active participants contributed the most work-oriented content to the network. They submitted objects from a variety of locations and from a number of interfaces: Web-based, desktop, and mobile. It was not unusual for submissions to come during commutes or walks between buildings. They seemingly came at any hour of the day and were both workoriented and social. Five individuals, including both leads (agency and client) were in this core group. Examples of the discussion included real-time results from usability testing (for which some members travelled to Florida, while others remained in New York and New Jersey) and discussion of Mint.com's evolution as an online product. Mint, a third-party competitor to our efforts in managing finances, first came to our attention through the "twittering" of the technology community at large, a side benefit of using an open, public network. Long before the mainstream press discovered Mint, we were discussing the decisions they had made the grouping of accounts, the dynamic charts, their use of horizontal space and their implications for our project. Active observers. Active observers were very aware of the goings on within the network, especially of the active participants. They learned by watching. More frequently they discussed the online activity they observed in face to face conversation rather than on the network. Their contributions to the network were mostly social objects and these quickly became topics of conversation during the formerly "awkward silence" of workplace lunches. Musical tastes, family outings, wedding proposals, child births, and lawn care were all discussed. Although these discussions were less pertinent, they were crucial in ongoing trust building. At no time were any members criticized for being "off topic". There were five active observers from three disciplines.
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AmonthofnetworkactivityonTwitter. Messagesweresentbothintheofficeandfromhome,at allhoursoftheday.

Observers. Observers were on the network but not participants in the work discussion there. Some were aware of the network activity of project teammates, others weren't. The active participants and active observers at times discussed observers social activity in face to face conversation, but it was incidental. Despite this, one of the most demonstrative examples of a social networks' power was initiated by a member of the observers. Having already left the project, this individual posed a general question to the community at large regarding a documentation technique. A response came from one of our active participants. A follow-up came from an individual who was only briefly involved in the project at its inception. Yet another came from someone who had never worked on the project but knew the first individual. In all, seven exchanges were made between four individuals, only one of whom was currently on the project. Everyone benefited from the contribution. When evaluating social networks, it is important to realize that although one individual may appear to be less productive as a result of interruptions, an entire network can gain from the activity. A liberal social network policy can assist the enterprise in ways that are not obvious at first and not directly measurable at an individual level. Non-participants. There were six non-participants to the social network. This is neither bad nor unexpected. Numerous models for network activity predict it. Based on our experience, attempts to force activity on the network would be detrimental and disingenuous. Several of the non-participants were from the management ranks. Over time they became quite aware of the networks' existence, yet to their credit, they allowed the behavior to continue unfettered.

An individual posed a general question to the community at large regarding a documentation technique. A response came from one of our active participants. A follow-up came from an individual who was only briefly involved in the project at its inception. Yet another came from someone who had never worked on the project but knew the first individual. In all, seven exchanges were made between four individuals, only one of whom was currently on the project. Everyone benefited from the contribution.

Analyzing the Result

The ad-hoc nature of the social network's construction was one of its strengths. Unfortunately, that also prevents us from being able to definitively characterize and quantify all of its aspects. In conclusion, I want to state what we know for certain and identify items that we can speculate on but need further study to say for sure.

New methods. On one of the project's final days, a non-participating member of management saw my Twitter account. Alarmed by the number of people I was following, he asked his project lead when I had time to work. The lead responded by saying that Twitter was essential to the work we had done on the project. What had started as an experiment had become a crucial source of insight and exchange. I had come to the client to complete a task: to help them build an investment tracking Website for their customers. In the process I had introduced a new way of doing work that continues to this day. While I am no longer on their physical campus, I have been exposed to further user testing results and the progress of features I argued for.

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A common voice. As the project advanced from idea creation to advocating and defending those ideas, social networking activity blossomed. While this may have been coincidence, the trust team members gained in each other helped them to speak in a unified voice when defending ideas with the various parties responsible for completing the project. A project close to implementation. This was not the first time the investment tracking project was undertaken. Our team took this project farther than it had ever gone before. It has momentum and is edging ever close to implementation. While it can't be said that the social network was responsible for this, it also can't be said that it detracted from it.

The most successful collaboration form. Earlier, I mentioned the many traditional forms of collaboration and team building attempted during the project: contact lists, e-mail distribution lists, project servers, a war room, status meetings, showand-tells, and after work events. Without a doubt the social network was the most enjoyable and most sustainable. At the end of the project, team members actively defended the practice to their bosses; one apologized for his lack of participation in the network after hours, as his wife had just given birth. While some of the reasons for this success may be unique to this project and the individuals involved, the enthusiasm for it was palpable. Experimenting was key. The team achieved what it did only because it persisted in its efforts to find a suitable solution. Some pain was involved. Redundant efforts were made. Some efforts didn't bear fruit. Twitter itself experienced performance difficulty under heavy use. Yet none of these flaws were reason not to try. In fact, many insights were gained in this learning process. It is a trade off (productivity for insight) that all involved would make again. On open networks and alternative solutions. What made Facebook, Twitter, and Friendfeed appropriate in our case was familiarity and cost. Free tools were quickly implemented and abandoned. On the downside, we were helpless when service was interrupted. Twitter and Friendfeed are open networks. Functionality has been extended by others through a programming interface the services expose. Statistics and search tools have been built in this fashion. Team members benefit from the community-at-large in open networks through serendipitous discovery of content. This built in advantage will no doubt be seen as a disadvantage by some since in an open network all activity takes place in public. While nothing proprietary was exposed, did discussing usability results and the general progress of the effort reveal to competitors the overall initiative? Does this outweigh the benefits?

Without a doubt the social network was the most enjoyable and most sustainable [of collaborative forms]. At the end of the project, team members actively defended the practice to their bosses; one apologized for his lack of participation in the network after hours, as his wife had just given birth.

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Questions for Further Study

The networks active participants and observers spent more time at the client campus than other project members. Did proximity influence network behavior? The team members that were staffed on the project longest also were most active on the network. Was this a consequence of the network, or did the network form because of the increased exposure to each other and the project? Was there any correlation? Earlier, I stated that as the demands of the project called for team members to speak with a unified voice, network activity increased. Was this a coincidence? What other times in a project might see increased activity? Once these times are known, can they be exploited through strategically timed initiatives? Network participation (the ratio of participants to observers) fell within the norms established by earlier studies of social networks. Can (or should) efforts be made to influence this? While this may appear contradictory to my advocacy of organic network formation, if individuals were placed in closer proximity to each other, or if a team member familiar with the dynamics of social networks was brought in earlier, could these rates be influenced? What affect does discipline and role play on network participation? Both project leads were active participants, but they were not the first to join the network. The person most responsible for the networks formation was an individual tasked with tactical implementation detail. What is the mix of social content to work related content? Does this differ by role? How does this mix affect participation?

What happens to work networks over time? Many participants "friends" were limited to fellow project members. As individuals move on and add others to their network, will the noise increase unbearably? Conversely, does the opportunity for follow up within the network create a living, virtual business card, such that individuals remain more familiar with each other over time? Does this lead to increased business opportunities for an agency (or other service providers) and require less time for a client/consumer to evaluate service providers?

[A]s the demands of the project called for team members to speak with a unified voice, network activity increased. Was this a coincidence?

Conclusion
Using a social network to communicate among team members was an experiment a successful experiment, according to all involved. While we don't have specific answers to the above questions, we are confident in the process that led us to them and that this same process will eventually lead us to answers. And no doubt, new questions. The cycle repeats.

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About the Author Robert joined Razorfishs user experience team in December 2006. He has worked with Ford, Merrill Lynch and Conde Nast. Prior to that, Robert served as lead developer of the client side web team at collegeboard.com. In that role, he advocated and made recommendations for adoption of new technologies. Robert has a diverse background, including a masters degree in Urban Planning. He has written and presented technical white papers, managed client partnerships, and was a programmer at CompuServe during the infancy of the Internets commercial adaptation. About Razorfish Razorfish is one of the largest interactive marketing and technology companies in the world, and also one of the largest buyers of digital advertising space. With a demonstrated commitment to innovation, Razorfish counsels its clients on how to leverage digital channels such as the Web, mobile devices, in-store technologies and other emerging media to engage people, build brand loyalty and provide excellent customer service. The company is increasingly advising marketers on Social Influence Marketing, its approach for employing social media and social influencers to achieve the marketing and business needs of an organization. Its award-winning client teams provide solutions through their strategic counsel, digital advertising and content creation, media buying, analytics, technology and user experience. Razorfish has offices in markets across the United States, and in Australia, China, France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom. Clients--many of them served in multiple markets--include Carnival Cruise Lines, Coors Brewing Company, Levi's, McDonald's and Starwood Hotels. Visit http://www.razorfish.com for more information. Razorfish 821 2nd Avenue, Suite 1800 Seattle, WA 98104 Phone: 206.816.8800 Fax: 206.816.8808

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