I had very interesting conversations and strategy sessions with my clients lately, and noticed peculiar things in the market as well — all of them around the same issue: Platforms.

No, I am not talking about the shoes of the 1970s we loved so much, I am talking about the intermediate layer of the cloud model – Platforms used to deploy applications.

I wrote about Chatter back in November, and Genesys couple of weeks ago — and in both I expressed my firm belief that Platforms are going to be the issue that defines the cloud in the next few years.  I also wrote about the cloud as being more than simply SaaS (Software as a Service) applications in my 2010 “predictions”.  I truly believe this is going to be the issue that will define the next generation of enterprise applications (this whole SCRM v CRM v Enterprise 2.0 v Social Business has limited future — and even If I am wrong, they still need a platform to run on, right?).

Here is where I stand on this, an unedited version of my brain right now (careful, may scare you).

There are three layers to the cloud: IaaS (infrastructure), PaaS (platform), and SaaS (applications).  They all ride on a universally known and publicly available network — they need it to exist (note: thus the impossibility of the “private cloud” — sorry, pet peeve).  This network is controlled by — well, let’s face it Cisco and a couple of others that have some products here and there.  OK, mostly Cisco.  This “Mostly Cisco Network” supports the infrastructure layer which essentially handles the communications between the network and the platform, while providing some services (authentication, security, encryption, integration and links to database and legacy systems, and common protocols among others).

Right on top of the infrastructure is where the platforms live also interacting with the layer above: the applications.  The platform is the management layer that connects the infrastructure with the logic and presentation layers provided by the applications.  Here is where something like a community, a knowledge-base, and a rules engine (as examples) would exist in a cloud environment.  Platforms provide an answer to the application on whatever information they needed, with the infrastructure and network supporting them.

Finally, the applications – the stuff that truly, honestly is the easiest of the three (complexity decreases as you climb the three layers of the cloud – or the seven layers of the OSI model in which it is modeled).  As I used to say about survey software, anyone with a garage and a couple of weekends can build a cloud applications (as long as they have the platform and the infrastructure in place — otherwise is not a “cloud application”).  Maybe more than a couple of weekends, but you get the idea..

This brings me back to my original point that platform solutions seem are emerging.  A platform is what would make a call center (OK, contact center and we can accommodate several channels) flexible, dynamic, and able to add a new channel (say, like Social Channels) with relative ease.  The social networks we talk about so much are all platforms (yes, Twitter, Facebook, Communities, etc.).

Why am I bringing this up?

I am sensing a rising problem: interconnecting the platforms.  While ideally and in theory this would be handled by the cloud as long as the platforms support an underlying infrastructure, this is not the driving force for the design of new platforms.  I am seeing platforms that MAY be open and easy to leverage and integrate, but with zero effort spent in trying to figure out how these platforms can and should work with each other.  I am seeing half-baked efforts at platforms that don’t consider integration with infrastructure and other platforms as vital. This is not only bad, it makes the platforms not cloud-compliant and thus not very useful in the long-run.

I am trying to make sure that the new platforms are indeed open, integration-ready, and cloud-compliant.  I want to raise the flag early on so we can actually leverage them, and make application development easier while making the problems they solve more complex.  I want to make sure that this time around the cloud actually has staying power since my poor heart cannot take another CORBA-style disappointment.

Got it?

What do you think?  Am I asking too much? Is the cloud even possible? Are platforms going to be the big thing for 2010?  Would love to hear your thoughts on this…

I write two posts a month exclusively on TheSocialCustomer.com, which I do think is a very interesting community to share all things related to Social Businesses and Social CRM.

When I told you what I was going to focus on for this year I said I wanted to look at the evolving business functions in a social business.  I am going to use that platform for that exploration — but will also announce it here in case you just get the feed for this blog (yeah, I am that smart and figured that out last night…).

First post looked at the role of Customer Service as the new Marketing (conclusion, no).

Today’s post looks at the role of Sales in a Social Business.

Enjoy, and feel free to drop your comments there — as the content won’t be republished anywhere else…

If I mention Genesys to ten analysts in the customer service or CRM space nine of them will tell me they are a telephony company, and one probably won’t know who I am talking about.  I was one of the nine when I first started with Gartner: to me Genesys was the software arm of Alcatel, and you could not have one without the other.  In other words, Alcatel led with voice and telephony products, and if the client wanted a software product, they would offer the eService Suite from Genesys.

Somewhere in the mid-2000s this began to shift.  I remember in 2004 when I was doing the research for the ERMS (email response management system – email automation tools for Customer Service) Marketscope I was very pleasantly surprised to see their offering was actually — good.  Not market leader at the time, but good.  It continued to get better and better over time, and the other components of the eService Suite were also getting better.  In 2007, the last year I conducted the research for the eService Magic Quadrant, they had actually qualified for inclusion and were rated fairly well (unfortunately, the report was never published — but that is a long story and requires time and drinks).

After that debacle, I lost track of them and recently regained contact when I was invited to their Analyst day, which was last week in Palo Alto.  Here is where I need to insert a short note to congratulate Joe Heinen, Rob Hilsen and the Genesys AR team for a wonderful and amazing event.  Lots of great information, good pace, and good interaction — incredible how well they pulled off a very hard thing to do: keeping a squad of analysts interested and engaged.  Joe Heinen had an interactive voting session that inspired me to write this post, and to jokingly post the following on Twitter:

Alas, all joking aside, the intent for this post if not to show my screen-scrapping skills but to share something very interesting I spotted at the event.  Genesys, the little telephony company that could do better in software — has done better.  The new vision and architecture introduced (parts available today, the rest coming out with the next release – version 8 – in Q1 of 2010) was significant for three reasons:

1. It was re-architected to work with a SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) server in addition to switches and cards — making it easier to tie telephony with other channels, which leads to

2. They are using a framework called iWD (intelligent Workload Distribution) – a follow-up to an Universal Queue that leverages the concepts I laid out in the Customer Interaction Hub (CIH) while at Gartner making it not only a multi-channel management unit, but also an universal interaction resolution framework.  Very powerful indeed as we move to a tight integration of the three layers of the cloud, which in turn leads to

3. They have the only working model (being implemented right now at a client that shall remain nameless under NDA laws) I know of a truly cloud-centric (not hosted applications or on-demand solutions) customer service solution.  This is the biggest thing I took away from the event.

Unfortunately, this is only a summary of the event and the very-cool stuff I saw while there.  I don’t have time (but do have the slides, email me if you are interested and I will share what I can with Genesys permission) to describe in details how the product works and how it does what it does (parts of it are still under NDA).  But let me tell you this:  as we evolve into a cloud-centric world, being able to work in all three layers (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) is what distinguishes the vendors who get it from those that just try to pass hosted applications as cloud-applications.  Salesforce gets it now, as they’ve shown when they released Chatter as part of the PaaS and linked to Service Cloud 2 and other Force.com applications.  And Genesys not only gets it – but can operate at any (or all) of the three layers.  This is a very big step forward.

Now, wiping the drool and going back to being an analyst — will it work and stick and change the industry?  Don’t know, too early to tell.  It is going to be very hard to convince contact centers to replace their telephony hardware solutions with a SIP-based solution, and tie that into Genesys components that will also replace existing solutions.  Technology refreshes that would address these issues happen every five-to-seven years at contact centers, so we are just beginning to see what could be a very large trend to come in the next few years.  One point in their favor: lots of organizations have already committed VoIP (and by association SIP) as a core component of their next technology refresh.  This is a good-news / bad-news item though, as Genesys has time to continue to improve and perfect the offering (yes, it is a version 1.0 right now, and with very limited distribution), but they may have to wait longer than they want to see adoption of the model.

One thing does remain in my mind: this is a good first step towards a true cloud-centric deployment of a Customer Service architecture.  I am looking forward to seeing how it progresses in the next few months and years.

Am I seeing something that won’t happen?  Is then cloud just vapor (not literally, of course)?

On Tuesday January 12th we had discussion on the convergence between SCRM and Enterprise 2.0.

My introduction to the topic summarized what I see as the main issue: SCRM and Enterprise 2.0 are heading in the same direction (customer-centricity), talking about the same issues (engagement), using the same technologies (collaboration), and solving similar problems (culture, politics, adoption) — yet, we pretend we are talking about two very separate, different things. Not only are they very similar, but whether you are collaborating internally among users, or externally with clients, without reaching out to the other constituency it won’t work.  Clients and users are closely tied in a Social world.

The most surprising thing was the answer to a simple question: who among the SCRM practitioners and implementers in the panel and the audience had enabled internal collaboration to support the SCRM changes they had adopted? Among 35-40 people, only one hand went up.  This was reinforced by the avoidance of the concept as I tried to ask more direct questions to that effect – when I asked what should an organization do to support the changes brought on by Social Media adoption and by SCRM implementations, the answer went back to implementing SCRM and the changes it brought to customers.  Although the audience was mostly SCRM, I am sure if I were to ask the E2.0 crowd what  changes they made to their customer-facing processes to reflect the internal changes I would get a similar answer (crickets).

Seriously? No changes necessary?

If this the current state of the convergence, we got lots of work to do to make it happen.  My prediction for 2010 as the year it begins the liftoff may have been a bit ahead of its time (a comment someone in the audience made following the event).

There is no way that either one of the two movements will succeed without the other.  You cannnot have meaningful change in processes dealing with customers (providing better experiences, increasing loyalty) if you don’t alter the way you work.  And altering the way you work without having a significant impact in how you deliver to the client makes almost as much sense (improved collaboration with no effect on delivery).

It is simple, the two shall meet and move forward together for organizations to embrace being social.  No other way around it.

I was searching for an analogy to conceptualize where we are.  I thought of two trains running on the same track, facing each other, full speed ahead.  We see them going to crash — yet we cannot warn them, or alter their course, or avoid the crash.

As I was thinking more and more about it I realized that it is a poor, albeit sensationalist, representation of what the convergence can bring.  Sure, both camps would prefer to have this representation of independence and momentum and a separate end goal.

But it is not like that at all.  The Convergence is more like building the Chunnel.

The underground tunnel between UK and France was built simultaneously digging from both sides.  Each one of them had similar problems to solve, and unique problems to solve.  They both did the best they could to keep the common goal in mind: meeting in the middle.  Now, if we can make two tunnels starting from opposite ends about 50 kilometers apart meet in a specific point in the middle — I am sure we can make two strategic solutions meet halfway and deliver an engaged, customer-centric organization – right?

The Convergence - If it happened once, it can happen again...

I am planning a series of weekly posts for February 2010 that will explore in more detail how to make it happen.  Let me know if you want to chat, converse, or collaborate on that.

What do you think? Possible? Plausible? Doable?  Would love to hear your thoughts…

I am a glutton for punishment, apparently.  Not only I have not learned from diving into Social CRM early on, but I am trying the same fate now with Enterprise 2.0.

Why? Convergence.

If you remember, this is one of my key topics for 2010.  No, we will not witness convergence between Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 in 2010.  However, the smart organizations will start their move towards it in 2010.  And they will make inroads.  This is a three-to-five year trend that will gain momentum between now and 2012.  The road is long, and lots of changes await.  The most traditional path to convergence is a two-to-three year phase just to lay the groundwork and the foundation for it.

How do I know?

Because we did it before — and we will do it again.  Each time we have two “revolutionary” strategies deployed in the enterprise, seemingly in a collision course, they end up working together.  Recent examples are knowledge management and content management, bricks-and-mortar commerce and ecommerce, and accounting systems and ERP.  I am sure you can think of other examples from your organization.

Convergence is their future.  I highlighted it in my Roadmap to SCRM series, and talked about it since then in other posts.

What is my entry into the world of Enterprise 2.0? Two events:

1. I am doing a panel on Convergence of  SCRM and Enteprise 2.0 this coming Tuesday at 6:30 PM in Mountain View.  I will have some great panelists on stage, but people like Susan Scrupski, Nenshad Bardoliwalla (added 01/11/2010),  and Sameer Patel thought-leaders for enterprise applications  and members of the Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Council will be in the audience as well.  An excellent opportunity to chat and interact with the top minds in SCRM and Enterprise 2.0 live.  If you are in the area, just come on by!
2. I submitted a proposal for a session on convergence for the Enterprise 2.0 in Boston in June.  I am going to lay out the idea of convergence, a roadmap, and the issues to consider while en-route.  I am collaborating with Mark Tamis who has a great deal of experience in Enterprise 2.0 topics and will keep me honest.  I have a favor (well, shameless plug actually) to ask you.  Yes, your vote (please vote) will count for sure (please vote) and I will appreciate it (please vote) — but beyond that, could you please let me know via the comments section in that site what your thoughts are?  (please vote) What should we cover? What should we leave out? Are we on the right track?  (please vote) Are we way off?

The next post here will be on Wednesday, following the panel, with my impressions and notes from the event.  I want to use this platform to start the discussion on Convergence and get a sense of where to go next. Does it make sense?

Where should we head next to cover Convergence? I’d love your opinions and comments…

It seems that 2010 is the year where Social Media really takes off; everybody is writing about how in 2010:

• You will definitely be able to get an ROI from your Social Media investment
• Social Media is going to take off
• You can craft your Social Media strategy and make it stick
• Your Senior Management will finally recognize the value of Social Media
• Social Media will change your organization/change your business functions/make you money/save you money

I am not linking to any of them because they are all so horribly wrong on their assertions that Social Media is what matters that I don’t want their authors to think I am singling them out.  This is an industry-wide problem.

Let’s get it straight:

Social Media is about tools and tactics, you can never set a strategy for it, and it has very short term life and results.

Social CRM is about strategically setting long-term goals for working better with your clients, and improving your organization in the process.

Social Business is the long-term, strategic process of reinventing your organization to collaborate with employees, partners, and customers.

I have been accused of spending too much time on definitions and splitting hairs on terms.  Why do I insist?  Let me explain with an example.

Let’s say you propose to use Social Media (tools and tactics, Twitter for example) for Customer Service.

You do an ROI calculation that says you should be able to recover your expenses within three-to-four months by reducing the number of calls into your call center; you are going to answer X percentage of them via Twitter.  You get approval from your management and you implement it.  You equip four-or-five agents with Twitter accounts, deploy software for social media monitoring, Twitter management tools, and create social media governance policies.

Slowly you begin to listen to the streams; you engage and interact with customers.  You have become social — or have you?

Within six-to-nine months you solve some of the inquiries and problems that come in via Twitter, but slowly begin to notice that for most of them there is more than Twitter can provide (it is still 140 characters and limited patience from customers – right?).  You create a process to escalate the large number of interactions back to the call center (or contact center, or online).

Wasn’t that what you were supposed to eliminate or reduce?

You are effectively doing two things: upsetting your customers by not solving their problems via their chosen channel and overwhelming your established systems with more interactions than before (it is called hidden demand, customers that would have ignored their issues but are coming through now because of the channel selection – in this case Twitter).

Your ROI is slowly eroding, your simple solution is getting complex, and your Social Media “strategy” is going down the drain.  If you did a good job, you have metrics you established before you started that are showing you this.  Otherwise, it will take you longer to notice the failure.

What happened?

You confused Social Media (channels) with Social CRM (business strategy).

This is what caused the precipitous failure of multi-channel CRM when we first started with it.

I wrote this as a comment to a post I read earlier this week and I think it is valid at this point in the discussion.

Social Media (used to engage customers and to listen to them, maybe even act without impacting the biz operations).

Social CRM (using the feedback to improve operations, impact the business, change the relationship).

The relationship between these two and loyalty is also telling.

Social media can, and usually does, affects short-term, rational loyalty. It does not, however, have much impact in long-term loyalty and it does not do much for the biz (other than good PR). It does set a precedent, so the biz has to be constantly on its toes to perform similarly across the interactions. As you can see, if the biz was not changed to accommodate the necessary changes to process, it may (and probably will) falter at a later time — which will destroy the rational loyalty.

Social CRM, on the other hand, impacts the long-term loyalty. You are making changes to your processes, to your business, and creating  historical-based two-way conversation with your customers. These are the basic elements of building a long-term loyalty with them. (text removed that pointed to specifics of post, not relevant to our discussion)

Social CRM is a long-term strategy that while it leverages Social Media does not depend on it. It is more closely tied to a Social Business strategy and the impact on the business goes beyond 2010 — even 2012 probably. Sure, you can adopt the idea and begin the planning and deployment this year, but the truth value of the implementation won’t show for a couple of iterations (similar to what we experienced with regular CRM). It could be shorter – if you leverage you existing CRM investment… but that is another discussion.

Enough preaching — where am I going with this?

You have to understand the relationships between Social Media, Social CRM, and Social Business and focus your efforts where it matters.

Let’s use another example.  You are losing customers because you did not adopt a Social Media “strategy” yet.  This is a rather massive and fast loss, comparable to an arterial bleed.  Gross, but please follow along…

Social Media is nothing more than a band-aid, similar to doing customer service via email or adding ecommerce without really thinking it through.  Sure, you get something quickly done and out of the way, but if you are bleeding out of an artery a band-aid won’t stop the bleeding — or save your life.

Social CRM is a strategy, but specific to a particular area (working with customers).  It forgets the rest of the organization – but more importantly also the role of the customer beyond the front-office functions.  It does serve a mid-term purpose – but is the equivalent of putting some gauze and pressure to the arterial bleed — you can stop the bleeding, but the artery still needs repair.

Social Business is the vascular surgery that will repair the arterial walls, ensure that circulation is working properly, and there is no loss of function.  This is your goal: to stop and repair the arterial bleed – rather the profuse loss of customers and do it in way that there is not further loss.

You may not like the example (hey, the wife is a doctor – what can I say) but the concept is well explained that way.  You cannot put a band-aid on a life-threatening problem and expect it to work.

What do you think?  Am I too focused on definitions? What would you change to my proposed model (other than using a not-so-gory example)?

Back when I lived in Los Angeles I used to take one week at the end of the year to recover from the past and prepare for the new one.

I would drive into the dessert (Las Vegas) embracing all it had to offer (mostly CHP officers pulling me over).  I would stay in a clean and modest hotel (hotels in the strip where cheap and decent then), and spend a few days pondering (playing blackjack and craps) on the fate (I almost always lost) of the year to come. It allowed me to plan better (how long to eat mac & cheese and ramen dinners) and to set my goals (ask for a raise at work).

As I got older, more serious (married and with kids) the process changed slightly.  Alas, since I live in the dessert now (for lack of better publishable words to describe Reno), the process is similar but I spend more time thinking about next year (married, two kids = no money, small town = nothing to do — might as well think).

This past week was my think week for 2009, and I am using the takeaways to frame my research the next 12-18 months.

Four strategies are going to be critical for businesses to address starting in 2010; use this list to plan where to spend your hard-earned strategic budget dollars:

Business Functions. How much has the customer changed in the last two years and how much will it change in the next two? We are not talking about customers any more (at least not as before).  Then, why would you continue to use same business functions as two, five – even ten years ago?  You have to embrace a new model, and you need new business functions for that.

Communities. The most critical element in dealing with “customers” (yes, in quotation marks) in 2010.  As the roles of business functions shift, they are finding communities to be the precipitant (I refuse to say catalyst) for those changes.  You will have to re-learn what you are thinking about communities, and how to interact with them.  You will no longer build communities to control, you will participate in ad-hoc and impromptu communities.

Experience.  If you solely focus on delivering the best experiences during customer interactions (as you have done until now), you will miss out on the best savings and innovation.  Disney plans and executes flawless experiences from the moment you plan your vacation through the post-vacation memories.  Are you approaching experiences the same way? Or are you trying to do the “online experience” or the “brick-and-mortar experience”?  The disconnect is what’s causing you to fail.

Convergence. You will need to converge your Enterprise 2.0 (internal) and Social CRM (external) strategies (first), initiatives (second), and implementations (third).  This is THE sine-qua-non condition for your organization to succeed and become a Social Business.  If you cannot get your organization to collaborate internally and externally at the same time, you will be left behind by the competition — and that means in the next 6-12 months, not years.

The biggest problem organizations are going to face is not going to be strategy.  That is easy (well, not so complicated) to tackle.  The biggest problem is the technical architecture underlying these changes.  There is really only one technology focus area for organizations going forward:

The Cloud. I promise not to say private cloud anymore.  In reality the cloud is not even started yet (although clues are beginning to pop up here and there).  I am planning a series of posts through the year to explore the issues and items you must consider from the business side as you dive deeper into this vaporware (not metaphorically speaking anymore – yeah, bad joke).  If you have any doubts that the cloud will change your business in the next five to ten years, you won’t by the time we are done dissecting it.

I did say before that analytics was a critical component of 2010 – and I still believe it.  I am trying to fit it within the bigger picture and will bring it out as needed (my wild card for 2010).

This wraps up 2009 blogging.  I want to write a short sentence to say thanks for your support and commentary.

Thanks.

I was thinking of doing a predictions post, really, but then Paul Greenberg came along and wrote up all my predictions and added some better ones.  So, instead of filling up the streams with more of the same, I thought of a twist to predictions: I won’t tell you what I think it will happen,  I am going to tell you what I hope won’t hear anymore in 2010.

Ready? There are five things I don’t want to hear anymore in2010 (and the reasons why):

Private Cloud – Do you realize that the mere definition of a cloud forbids the existence of a private cloud? A cloud is there to interconnect two or more public applications or networks.  The concept of building a private cloud is a way for IT managers to say they are ahead of the curve, knowledgeable about what is going on, and to make their infrastructure sound hip and advanced.  In reality, anytime they say they have a private cloud they look like a fully dressed clown at a funeral: I am sure the intention is there, but the actions don’t reflect that.  Say you have an open architecture, a services-oriented infrastructure, or a dynamic API-driven platform if you want.  Just don’t call it a private cloud.

Death of Anything – According to my earlier readings today only, 2010 is the year we kill Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, CRM, ERP, Email, Enterprise 2.0, SCRM, databases, relational databases, and  I am certain I am missing some other ailing technology patients.  This is not to mention how vendor #1 will be “dead” before the year end, while the other vendor they back is pretty much alive and kicking.  Why do we need to kill things? Why does everything in this world need to replaced every single time something new comes about?  The shiny new object approach of new always being better and killing old one has never proven successful.  Let’s spend the time we dedicate to “killing” stuff to building better models of what we have.  No one is dying in 2010 — at least not in Enterprise Applications.

CRM Failure Rate – Yes, we know.  CRM used to fail at rates up to 70%. Shocking.  Alas, that was 8-10 years ago.  I want to think we already figured what we were doing wrong, how to fix it, and how to turn that failure rate into a same-number-different-metric success rate.  If we did not, as Paul Greenberg likes to point out, we would not have grown it into a 13 Billion Dollars industry.  So, let’s say the following from now on: CRM has failure rates that are comparable to any other large enterprise-wide application implementation — but we have great knowledge how to make it better and to make it successful.  Yesteryear failure rates don’t play no more.  I am sure that learning to drive resulted in high-failure rates among teenagers, but most of them managed to figure out and are doing fine. Right?

Social Anything – No, not saying that Social is dead (that would contradict myself – right?). I am saying that making special considerations for Social is so — well, 2009.  Social is no longer a new, shiny object — it is part of the fabric of the organization (like DNA better? fine, the DNA of the organization).  You had some couple of years to get surprised and amazed by the social evolution; now is time to take a deep breath, and start building the Social Business.  Darn, this one is going to be harder to do — how about if use either Aligned Enterprise, or we just call it Business?  After all, it is just another evolution of business like the coming of the PC, the Internet, and the industrial revolution before.  Did we change the name of business each time there was an innovation?

You Have to Start in Customer Service – As much as I was one of the earlier proponents of this mantra (been saying that CRM starts in Customer Service since the mid-1990s), it is time to put it to rest.  This was all fine and dandy (wow, my use of metaphors is really going south) back when our business processes and functions were differentiated — not so much as we move to use end-to-end processes.  So, no – you don’t have to start with Customer Service. You have to start where your needs are.  Don’t know where they are?  Lucky for you you became an Aligned Enterprise, and you can use your newfangled, shiny feedback mechanisms to find out.  Then, you will see how you don’t have to start in Customer Service — unless you completely lack imagination and cannot figure out how this whole thing works.  Then, sure start in Customer Service; at least you will be doing something.

Any terms you would like to see move on in 2010?  Pet Peeves?  Let me know in the comments and we can work towards making them go away…

Last Friday @VenessaMiemis and I had the following exchange in Twitter:

We exchanged a few DMs offline to discuss a potential way to do it, and then she twitted out to the world.

I then created the #MonTwit hashtag, advertised it a few times, “counseled” (coerced would probably be a better term) a few people to write about it — and the result was, well almost overwhelming for what I was expecting and for only a day or two advertise the experiment and get the word out.

First, some stats — as the writing of this blog there were 86 contributors (people using the hashtag) 164 times.  Twenty blog posts, and 14 opinions expressed via Twitter.  Check out the rest of the stats at WhatTheHashtag, or get a transcript if you prefer from there.

Some people (14 – list below) just tweeted their discoveries (yes, Twitter is a microblog – so perfectly acceptable).  Some others (10 – list also below) wrote posts or posterous or similar entries on their lessons learned and discoveries.

I read them all, as long as they were properly hashed and I could find them, commented on a few of them, and learned a lot of very interesting things in the process.  Here is my summary of lessons learned on the fist iteration of the MonTwit (Monday Twitter).

Will there be more?  Conversations are underway to try to produce it better, spread the word farther, and looking for better focused and more concrete topics.  Short answer? more than likely.  Stay tuned.

Lesson #1 – Tribal Knowledge Rocks — On Demand.  Asking people to talk about something they know, at a certain time and with proper structure brings you a lot of different views.  This is good.  One of the largest problems with crowdsourcing or wisdom of the crowds is that the largest voices influence the smaller voices (or more powerful or more influential - pick your word to use).  Setting a specific timeframe for the answers takes away the “bully” effect inherent to wisdom of the crowds.  You will notice if you read through the entries the influence that early ones begin to have on latter ones.  Setting a specific time takes away a lot of this and provides very interesting, different perspectives.

Lesson #2 – Twitter is About People, not Technology or Content.  Yep, virtually everyone wrote about the contact with people they did not know before, or met via Twitter, as the most critical part of what they discovered about it.  Twitter is a community, as I always said, and the knowledge sharing is inherent to the model of community. People want to connect to people, and what is what Twitter offers — the largest “brain phone book” in the world to find the people you want, to tap into brains and knowledge that you think must exist but are not sure how or where to find.  See @WimRampen’s entry for more on this, as his was the most RT one during this experiment (barely edging Venessa in reach and reads).

Lesson #3 – Know Your Purpose.  Twitter can suck the life out of you… yes, it is that addictive.  Close to 100 million people talking about — well, just about anything can really cause you to lose track of time even worse that spending time on YouTube.  Why are you on Twitter is the first and last question you should always ask yourself.  Sure, it works great as a time-killer, but even better as a community – and communities are about sharing knowledge.  What are you trying to learn today?

Lesson #4 – I Still Know Little.  I realized what I know and what I am still to learn.  I like to say that I am constantly evolving and learning and did confirm some of my suspicions and best practices by reading the blogs today, but I also realized that there are so many aspects of any issue I am not considering, or discarding too quickly.  Twitter is a great mind-expansion tool and you should always, always look at if for that: an unfiltered window into the tribal knowledge of the world.

Now, it is your turn.  Did you read them all? some? most? What did you learn? What is new or different that you picked up from today’s experiment? Do you have any ideas on how to do it better?  woudl love to hear your thoughts…

Update (12/23/2009): The #MonTwit hashtag will be revived in 2010 for more like experiments.  If you are interested, keep a search column in your favorite client to stay updated.  Thanks for the persistent asking everyone.

Late Update (01/02/2010): David Carr (@carr2n) wrote a compelling #MonTwit entry — without hashtag.

I have been on Twitter since 2007 — well, almost.  I signed up with a bogus account in May 2007 to see what the buzz was about (there were so few people really doing it back then, it almost sounded like a porn place — was not going to use my real name for that… there was also some privacy fears).  Used it for 4 days — but not sure the word used is the proper one to describe my behavior.  Posted some breakfast and lunch things, exchanged a few messages with some people I never knew – but most of the talk at that time was not about technology or business, rather between friends and with some little professional chatter mixed in.  Left it behind, thinking it was interesting, but was not sure how it would actually make it to the next step.

Then in 2008 the noise was too high to stay out and jumped in.  Still, I was clueless as to what it was (I think it was in May of 2008).  I read about it and learned as much as I could: you have to follow to be followed, you have to listen before engaging, you have to put interesting stuff out, you have to build you presence… you read all the advice.  I turned into a generic Twitter user: no purpose, no reason, just follow the “basic rules” that everyone was touting.

I could not see the value of being another voice in an ocean of millions — I started to experiment with it.

Follow people who are different, with lots of followers but that have something interesting to say, participate of events, follow links, RT different things to see the reaction, and many other things.  A picture began to emerge of what Twitter was, what it can do for me, and how to use it better.  Slowly started to change my follower/following ratio, using searches more and more to find the right people and the right content.  Began integrating Twitter with other social networks, with blogs and other places.  Started to admit I was a Twitter user at meetings, explaining to people what it does and watching their reactions.  It was all data that contributed to my learning about Twitter.  To understanding what it was, how to use it, what it does.  It was the preamble to these three key things i discovered about Twitter:

1. Twitter is what you make of it. Twitter has no life, nor purpose, no direction, and no idea of who you are.  Sorry, hate to break the news like that to you – but that is it.  It is a platform that just sits there and waits for you to do something with it.  Approaching 100 million people quickly, it is a very large platform actually.  True, there may be 20-25 million active users — but that is still something.  However, it won’t wait for you or guide you to accomplish something. If you know how to get value out of communities, then you are going to enjoy Twitter.  If you enjoy listening to people talk about — well anything, you are going to get value.  If you know what you want to do in Twitter, you can get it.  Twitter has nothing prepared for anyone, it is what you want to make of it.

2. Twitter is a community.  Shocking, I know.  There are no forums or ideas or structure (well, you could try hashtags — it worked very well for the #SCRM Accidental Community), but it is a community.  I wrote about this a couple of times.  The main difference, and the great part about it, is that each person gets to build and mold their own community – and change it at the drop of a hat if you want.  You can create and follow lists, groups, searches, hashtags, and people for The Red Hat Society today, and for Punk Rock tonight – without much effort.  You can create several IDs and follow people in different ways, have several personas here and still be you.  It is a great build-it-yourself, shape-it-as-you-go community.  Just be yourself in as many ways as you want.

3. No one is ever wrong about Twitter. There is no right and no wrong way to do Twitter, since it is what you make of it and what you build around it.  So, don’t tell anyone how to do it right, or wrong, or better or worse.  What works for you, or your organization, may (probably won’t) not work for someone else.  Share your experiences and lessons, but make sure that you understand that it is just that  - yours.  As with any communities, the ideal outcome is gained knowledge from tribal sharing, or gained power from aggregation.  The way you go about doing that is going to be different, so don’t expect other people to do it same as you.  Share your knowledge in your community, learn from them, and always look for new ways to use it and get value out of it — then you’ll be right about it.

What do you think? What have you learned or discovered about Twitter? How was your experience different from mine?  Would love to hear your thoughts…