Dot Whatever - Some Thoughts on the ICANN Announcement

In what may be the biggest development concerning Internet address spaces to date, this week, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced its plans to approve new top-level domains (TLDs) to expand the current set of domain suffixes like .com, .net, .org, as well as country code suffixes (such as .ca .us .uk). A request can be made for any custom suffix that you desire, and can afford to pay for.

At $185,000 a piece and a 200-page application for approval and $75,000 maintenance fees, there are significant barriers to owning your desired top level domain, but this won’t stop the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Google and Coca Cola to register a multitude of suffixes for their products and services. For these large corporations that already spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on defensive tactics to register domains just to prevent others from using them, we can expect to see a further increase in their spend on TLDs that are closely linked to their market offerings. There will also probably be a surge in registration requests for generic suffixes like .cars and .systems in a bid to command a greater mind share leading to superior brand equity. Unfortunately, such tactics will remain out of reach for the smaller players who won’t have the resources to register the same site for every conceivable TLD.

From an end-user perspective, it will be a difficult and tricky road ahead for ICANN to create awareness around these TLDs. Most businesses and end users still operate in a dot-com-centric environment, and even previous attempts to augment the .com TLD with others like .biz and .info have been rather unsuccessful. Additionally, the introduction of multiple domain suffixes can result in a relatively flat namespace configuration as opposed to the current hierarchical structure of domain names, and this can lead to confusion among end-users. Ultimately, a search engine might be the best bet to get to the end-user’s target website. While this goes somewhat against the TLD expansion philosophy, recent research shows the importance and use of domain names to be already diminishing as larger proportions of end-users use their browser search bars to seek website addresses of their online destinations, either by directly typing in the business name or by conducting a generic term search. So an argument can be made that actual site addresses and domain names are becoming less relevant with our increased dependency on search engines.

Whether the introduction of new TLDs offer people new ways to express themselves and enable higher levels of customization for brand management is something that we’ll have to wait and observe.  What’s clear though is the need for sound governance and careful implementation of new TLDs to facilitate an efficient and equitable Internet experience for all.

The 8Cs of Enterprise 2.0

While business use of social media has flourished over the past few years, there still is a hesitation on the part of many small and medium sized organizations in adopting enterprise 2.0 tools. I usually get asked about my recommendations for such firms who are interested in getting started with enterprise 2.0 but don’t know where to begin. Based on a recent conversation with a CIO of a medium sized enterprise, here are a few suggestions that I provided. While writing this blog post, I’ve tried to categorize my recommendations a little better into what I can refer to as the 8Cs of Enterprise 2.0.


1. Content:

Most people I’ve talked to already know the importance of good content, but it’s always worth repeating and emphasizing again. My own research on social media has shown high quality information to be a very strong predictor of use of these tools. Whether it is structured or unstructured content, it needs to be readily accessible, relevant to the person who needs it, and current and accurate to be of practical value. In the context of collaboration, if your employees trust the information to be relevant and useful for analysis and insights, they are much more likely to use the tools that you provide them to collaborate using these tools.


2. Context:

I’ve seen my fair share of enterprise 2.0 evasion due to a lack of context with the use of technology. Organizations need to train and encourage users to associate as much context as possible with various knowledge resources as they create and use them over time. For example, an up-to-date index of files in a document management system and discussion posts in an online forum tagged with the correct labels can help improve the use of these systems considerably. Similarly, having tools that create visibility into what their colleagues are working on can be beneficial to a workgroup’s collective functioning.


3. Connection: 

Efficient Connection tools are needed by employees to link with others across the organization and leverage the knowledge and expertise of their colleagues. Interactive employee profiles, org charts and company directories are a good starting point for this, but organizations can look at streamlining their knowledge flows by integrating these databases with other applications such as email, messaging services, and approval workflows.


4. Communication:

Suitable Communication tools should be in place to enable employees to send and receive information in a timely fashion. These tools need to go beyond enabling simple consumption of content and allow individuals to create their own content and personalize their preferences for receiving updates from various sources that are relevant to their jobs. In addition to email and messaging applications, tools such as blogs, microblogs, newsfeeds and notification spaces provide a useful starting point for communication functions.


5. Collaboration:


Collaboration tools are required to enhance organizational productivity by providing platforms that enable constructive knowledge sharing and information synthesis. Organizations have experienced success with employing tools such as wikis and community discussion forums, and many have also explored the crowdsourcing applications such as ideation platforms, polling, and surveys that facilitate convergence on strategies and actions (more on this next).


6. Convergence:

In my mind, a major reason why organizations struggle with the use of social media tools is that these tools are primarily used as a medium for divergent conversations around issues and concerns, and settling on specific decisions is often tricky. What needs to be understood is that collaboration is more than discussion. It’s also about converging on actionable conclusions to enhance the decision-making capability of the organization as a whole. Toward this, tools and applications such as polling, surveys and ideation platforms can support and facilitate the collective intelligence of the participants, consequently ensuring greater value from collaborative online interactions.


7. Control:


In addition to building the digital toolbox for social media, organizations also need to develop a governance model that supports their enterprise 2.0 strategy. In the initial stage, organizations can set out guiding principles for the use of social media by communicating their technology use objectives to employees. This may be followed by more formal policy training on issues such as the types of information that may or may not be shared through social media, and policies on the management of  personal data and the organizational brand.

A caveat about controlling the use of social media is to ensure that you don’t go overboard. Certainly, some oversight and policies are needed, but excess regulation can also discourage users from open discussions. The key is to foster organic growth of social media use in the organization while trying to curb the adverse effects associated with the unseemly use of these tools.


8. Culture:

Perhaps, the most difficult issue to address in the effective institutionalization of enterprise 2.0 is the that of fostering an open culture and a collective mindset that is conducive to collaboration. By leading by example, higher management needs to set the tone for experimenting with new tools and ideas and welcoming innovative attitudes. By encouraging information sharing and rewarding group efforts rather than individual problem solving capabilities, organizations can help overcome problems associated with knowledge hoarding. A culture of trust where employees feels secure and encouraged to propose new ideas and take collective ownership of successes and failures can provide an effective scaffold for the adoption of enterprise 2.0.


There probably are a couple of more recommendations that can be listed here... I can probably get up to 10 Cs if I think hard enough... but these were the top of mind during my talk. Please feel free to share your opinions and comments.

Some Twitter Tips to Get you Started

Over the past three months, I’ve started using Twitter a little more regularly than I used to. It’s grown on me and I’ve figured out the use-cases that fit my objectives as an academic. While upping the frequency of my tweets, I’ve also developed some familiarity with the conventions and terminology used on twitter.

In this post, I’m summarizing these conventions and terminology. Hopefully, you’ll find some of these tips useful.

What is Twitter?:

As a user, you will probably ascribe specific characteristics to Twitter based on what you use it for. Here are a couple of ways I think of Twitter:

• Twitter is a social networking platform that provides a microblogging service to its users. It allows users to post status updates called “Tweets” that are limited to 140 characters (including spaces and special characters).
  
  
• While many people would compare its functionality to that of a chat client, Twitter offers an open forum for many-to-many conversations.
  
  
• In addition to public messages, Twitter facilitates private communication among members (through direct messages)

·         For passive users, Twitter is a great monitoring tool to observe conversations among groups and posts regarding specific subjects.

Twitter Interface Basics:

Although Twitter can be used directly through its website interface (www.twitter.com), many people prefer using different clients to Twitter.com. My own favorite is TweetDeck (www.TweetDeck.com) which I use to monitor others tweets as well as to send my own updates.

• Your Twitter “Activity Stream” consists of you own tweets as well as tweets from others who you “Follow”. By following a user on twitter, you are adding that user’s tweets in chronological order to your timeline or activity stream. Following others is useful if you’re interested in the content and updates provided by them, and it’s also a recommended practice to foster reciprocity.
  
  
• It is also important to remember that tweets are public by default unless you restrict messages to specific recipients by including their usernames at the beginning of the tweets.

Essential Tweet Conventions:

Once you start tweeting beyond the basic / simple babble, you’ll start to realize the need for using direct reference to people, websites, and themes. These items constitute the three types of references you can include in your tweets:

• You can provide links to websites: While you can include the full URL of websites (http://...), you should get into the habit of shortening the URL. There are various URL shortening services available. My favorite is bit.ly (http://bit.ly).
  
  
• You can refer to other people of Twitter through a “Mention” by prepending the “@” symbol to their usernames. These mentions typically get reported to the person through an email or an alert within their activity stream.
  
  
• You can highlight specific keywords in your tweets by using the right “Hashtags”. A hashtag is a keyword with a “#” symbol prefixed to it. By utilizing relevant hashtags in your tweets, you can increase the searchability of your tweets by others. The key is to figure out hashtags that are used by others who talk about similar topics and utilize them within your own tweets if and where possible.

In addition to writing your own tweets, from time to time, you might feel the need to “Retweet” someone. By repeating a tweet from another user, you are amplifying their message and distributing it to your own followers. Again, this is a recommended practice to reinforce ties on your social network.  Remember that retweeting someone will make the original tweet appear in the activity stream of those who follow you on Twitter.

• You can retweet a message by clicking on the retweet symbol underneath that message. This is referred to as an automatic retweet.
  
  
• You can also retweet a person by copying the text of that tweet and prepending “RT @username” to identify that it’s a retweet from a specific username. This is referred to as a manual retweet.

Using Twitter as a Monitoring Tool:

• You can optimize your use of Twitter by creating “Lists” of different people you follow. For example, I have a list for my work-colleagues, and multiple lists that include professionals who talk about specific topics and subjects. This feature provides me with the capability to demarcate different social circles and communities of interest that I participate in. In the online Twitter interface, you can click use the drop-down menu underneath a person’s profile description to add them to a list (as shown below).
  
  If you use a client such as TweetDeck, you can display activity streams for your lists in different columns (I find this very useful for monitoring tweets).

• If you wish you use Twitter as a monitoring tool, you can save your searches and access them with greater ease at any time. Through the online Twitter interface, you can perform a keyword search using the search bar on the top of the screen, and click on the “Save this search” button.

This will make this search accessible to you through the “Searches” tab in your Twitter interface. Remember that the search results constitute an activity stream that will be updated as more relevant tweets keep getting posted.

• You can also mark tweets as “Favorites”. This is pretty similar to bookmarking important resources online. By creating your own list of favorites, you are really creating a catalog of tweets that you might want to come back to. The original tweeters receive a notification when you favorite one of their tweets.

Optimizing your Personal Interactions through Tweets:

You’ll probably get familiar with many customs and conventions of tweeting through your use of twitter, but here are a couple of tips to help you use the proper abbreviations and accepted vernacular.

• Use “via” to mention someone who pointed out something on Twitter. For example: “Here is a really great website http://shortURL via @username”
  
  
• Use “MT” to indicate a “modified retweet” when you are selectively quoting from a previous tweet. For example: “MT @informatician …”. While it is acceptable to use MT, it is good practice to ensure that you’re not changing the overall message.
  
  
•  Use a mention at the beginning of a tweet to direct that tweet to a specific person. For example: “@username hello how’s it going?” Referred to as conversational tweets, these messages will only be seen by accounts that follow BOTH your account AND the account you mentioned at beginning of tweet. Remember that if a mention is used elsewhere in your tweet, that tweet will be visible to all your followers.
  
  
• A variant of a conversational tweet is when you want to direct a tweet primarily to a specific person but also want your followers to see it. In such a case, you can prepend a period “.” before the mention. For example “. @username check this out: …”
  
  
• Use “cc” followed by a mention “@username” at the end of a tweet to get the attention of a specific person for whom that tweet may be relevant.
  
  
• While the above tips may be handy for interacting with others through Twitter, remember that you shouldn’t needlessly mention people in your tweets as this is considered a form of spam.

I think that’s about it in terms of a quick and light introduction to the use of Twitter. Like I said, you’ll probably figure out a lot more stuff on your own as you start using Twitter. These are just some tips that I hope you’ll find useful in getting started. Let me know what you think.

Happy Tweeting, and feel free to follow me on Twitter (@Informatician). I’ll certainly reciprocate.