SMUG Social Media University Global

“Free” and Higher Education = SMUG

Two recent blog posts that are required reading for SMUG students come from Chris Anderson and Jeff Jarvis. They explain why an institution like Social Media University, Global can exist (and much of what makes the rest of the Web work.)

Anderson (Editor-in-Chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail) has a link to his cover story in the current issue of the magazine. It’s called “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business” and here’s an excerpt:

What does this mean for the notion of free? Well, just take one example. Last year, Yahoo announced that Yahoo Mail, its free webmail service, would provide unlimited storage. Just in case that wasn’t totally clear, that’s “unlimited” as in “infinite.” So the market price of online storage, at least for email, has now fallen to zero (see “Webmail Windfall”). And the stunning thing is that nobody was surprised; many had assumed infinite free storage was already the case.
For good reason: It’s now clear that practically everything Web technology touches starts down the path to gratis, at least as far as we consumers are concerned. Storage now joins bandwidth (YouTube: free) and processing power (Google: free) in the race to the bottom. Basic economics tells us that in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost. There’s never been a more competitive market than the Internet, and every day the marginal cost of digital information comes closer to nothing.

Anderson’s article explains the proliferation of blogging tools like WordPress.com offering 3 gigabytes of storage, and unlimited bandwidth, for $0.00. As technology prices fall, the marginal cost of adding another user to the server farm becomes so close to zero as to become negligible.

From the consumer’s perspective, though, there is a huge difference between cheap and free. Give a product away and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you’re in an entirely different business, one of clawing and scratching for every customer. The psychology of “free” is powerful indeed, as any marketer will tell you.

I’ve definitely found that to be the case as I talk to people about blogging, or joining Facebook or trying other social media tools. When I can tell them they can do anything they see on my blog without spending a penny, it takes away their excuses for inaction.

I can’t wait to get Anderson’s book when it’s published next year. I understand he’s working with the publisher on a method to make it available at no charge.

In his post from this afternoon, Google U, Jarvis explains the essence of Social Media University, Global:

Once you put all this together, students can self-organize with teachers and fellow students to learn what they want how and where they want. My hope is that this could finally lead to the lifelong education we keep nattering about but do little to actually support. And why don’t we? Because it doesn’t fit into the degree structure. And because self-organizing classes and education could cut academic institutions out of the their exclusive role in education.

So what if the degree structure is outmoded? What does a bachelor’s of arts really say you’re ready to do? Once you get a medical degree, if you practice, you’re required to take refreshers as the science changes. Shouldn’t we be offering journalists updates as new tools and opportunities emerge in their craft? (Short answer: yes.) And while on the example of journalists, what if it were easy for them to take a course in, say, accounting when they get assigned to the business section, or science when given the environmental beat? So rather than signing on for a one-time degree, what if I subscribe to education for life? Or what if the culture simply expects me to bone up because it’s so damned easy to (and I don’t have to go through tests and admissions and all that)?

This sounds a lot like what I said in my Message from the Chancellor. Credentialed learning certainly has its place. But SMUG is an institution for lifelong learners to get this refresher education Jarvis describes. He is focused on journalism, but I believe this kind of training being available on-line is absolutely essential for professionals working in communications, PR or marketing to keep their skills relevant.

As Anderson says, what makes this all possible is that the marginal cost for each additional user (or student) is practically zero. We’re up to 50 SMUG students now; if you’re interested in hands-on, practical training in social media, why not audit a few classes?

Truth Hardware’s Lean Journey

The second speaker at the Lean seminar I described here was Jim Wheeler from Truth Hardware, a company with 1,000 employees in Owatonna, Minn. They make parts for window manufacurers like Andersen, Marvin and others.

They didn’t think Lean could work for them because they have 10,000 saleable part numbers, adding 10 new ones each day. How could they possibly do just-in-time manufacturing with that many unique part numbers?

Jim says Lean is not a cost-cutting strategy … it’s a growth strategy. In the current housing downturn, the productivity gains they have made have enabled Truth to maintain and even grow market share, even against competitors that have moved their manufacturing to China. When the housing market comes back, Truth will be poised for significant growth. And because they have eliminated waste, they will be able to add capacity without huge investments in additional facilities or equipment.

Truth holds one week-long Kaizen event per month. Instead of analyzing to death, they say getting things 60 percent right is good enough. They develop prototypes, then make the changes and continually iterate. Jim says “Don’t just think about it, do it and then find out what the problems are, so you can fix them.”

My kind of guy.

Jim also described a literal breakthrough Truth achieved through one of its Kaizen events. I may be getting some of the details wrong, but in essence they had one big piece of equipment that was used for metal fabrication, and after that step the parts would be loaded into bins and put on a fork lift to be hauled through the plant to the painting and finishing area. As they looked at the process, they realized that the finishing area was just on the other side of the wall from the fabrication equipment…so they cut a hole in the wall to enable the parts to flow through to be painted.

This saved hours from the start-to-finish process, and also eliminated the need for storage bins to hold the half-done parts waiting to be painted.

Through Jim’s presentation, I learned something else about system engineering that I thought was really interesting: in the airplane cockpit all of the instruments are arranged so that if all of the indicators point straight up, it’s normal. Then you can tell at a glance when something is wrong, because the abnormal readings really stand out.

Jim Wheeler is a Lean evangelist in much the same way as I’m a social media evangelist. Here was his list of recommended reading:

If you want to reach Jim, based on what I heard in this seminar, I’m sure he’d be glad to share his experience.

How about you? Have you looked at your work to see what delays are introduced into your processes, that don’t add value from your customers’ perspectives? What prototypes can you develop easily (perhaps using free social media tools) to eliminate both wasted effort and wasted time?

Finding Profit through Lean

A couple of weeks ago I took several members of my work team to a seminar, which was sponsored by Minnesota Technology, called Finding Profit through Lean Enterprise. Social Media University, Global students may not find this post intuitively relevant, but Lean is about rethinking processes to provide great value to customers at the lowest cost. And social media may be among the tools that can help make that happen.

So please bear with me. I may have another couple of Lean posts, but we’ll be back into the regular SMUG curriculum soon.

Here are the five essential principles of Lean (you’ll also find this history helpful):

Specify the value desired by the customer
Identify the value stream for each product providing that value and challenge all of the wasted steps (generally nine out of ten) currently necessary to provide it
Make the product flow continuously through the remaining, value-added steps
Introduce pull between all steps where continuous flow is possible
Manage toward perfection so that the number of steps and the amount of time and information needed to serve the customer continually falls

One of the interesting commonalities among the three presenters we heard at the seminar was that they all had gone into Lean with serious doubts about whether it could really apply to their business. Likewise, those of us working in communications or public affairs may wonder whether Lean, which is normally considered a manufacturing concept, is applicable for services like PR or corporate communications.

But even though we’re not cranking out widgets, I firmly believe Lean can help us identify steps in our processes that don’t add value for our customers (however we define them), and that by finding new methods and tools (some of which may involve harnessing social media) we can create new value streams.

The morning’s first presentation was from Denny Dotson, President of Dotson Iron Castings, a foundry in Mankato, Minn. Among the lessons his company learned in its Lean journey:

Culture change is everything – you need to become comfortable with being uncomfortable in an uncomfortable environment.
Getting buy-in from the whole team has made the decisions take longer, but the implementation moves much faster.
Give users the tools. For example, they gave shop floor people Photoshop and ability to create their own parts catalogue/user manual. They had it completed within days, and in a way that was most useful to them. Think how much easier it would have been if they had been given a really great tool like an internal blog?
Dotson uses touch-screen kiosks on the shop floor for communicating with employees, and one of the interesting elements is an opportunity for employees to upload personal and family pictures. This is sort of like Facebook without a computer, and it shows the value of enabling employees to get to know each other as whole people instead of just as what they do.
More than half of their shop-floor employees went to visit customers in the last year, so they could see first-hand what the customer needs are. Interestingly, the biggest concerns about this originally came from sales staff, who didn’t want others “interfering” in their client relationships. But the customers loved it.
Continual education is crucial. Dotson will pay half of any continuing education for its employees, up to $1,500 per year. (And if they enroll in SMUG, Dotson can pay 100 percent of the costs!)
When you’re forming a project team to consider Lean improvement projects, don’t staff the team with cost accountants, and ignore the “tool conversion” costs for new technology. (Again, a non-manufacturing business actually has an advantage in making a Lean transition if it can use social media tools, because the costs for those tools often approximate zero.)

Mr. Dotson recommended a book by Dean Spitzer called Transforming Performance Measurement. I recommend another book, The Toyota Way, which was what got me interested in having my work team attend this seminar in the first place. Meanwhile, if you want to read further about Lean but don’t want to wait to get the book, you can start with the Wikipedia article.

I see Lean as a way to free up capacity that is being wasted by inefficiently providing current products and services, so that energy can be released to explore creation of new offerings. And if social media tools can be used creatively to meet business needs, which is one of the major premises behind SMUG, using those tools in conjunction with Lean thinking can be even more powerful.

In my next post (or two) I will share some additional highlights from that Lean seminar. I hope it will help you think creatively about applying lessons from the manufacturing world (and the company that is on the verge of becoming the top automaker in the world, in terms of sales) to improve the way you and your company work.

SMUG Week in Review 2-24-08

It was a full week for Social Media University, Global (SMUG) students, of whom there are now 49 (up from 34 just a week ago!)

The Facebook Hacker Challenge was updated and expanded. Then a commenter raised the issue of whether encouraging someone to try to hack the group would constitute a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Service. Your Chancellor decided it may be worth up to $200 to find out how secure Facebook’s secret groups are, but it’s not worth getting his Facebook account suspended, so I brought the challenge to an end.

Which is, I guess, a way of saying Facebook (even though it’s free), is worth more than $200 to me. That got me thinking that maybe a $15 billion valuation for Facebook isn’t all that outlandish; if you multiply 65 million active users by $200 each, that’s $13 billion. I may not be typical; there may be lots of users who would walk away from Facebook forever if you offered them five bucks. But I suspect many others wouldn’t trade their access to Facebook for $500 or even $1,000.

In one way, this back-of-the-envelope calculation doesn’t mean much. The fact that I perceive Facebook as being worth more than $200 to me doesn’t directly put money in Mark Zuckerberg’s pockets. But it does suggest that there will be a reasonable tolerance for Facebook trying to monetize its service, even if it means some minor annoyances, because users find Facebook so personally valuable anyway. Of course, the best scenario is one in which the targeting of relevant advertising actually enhances Facebook’s perceived value to users.

In other developments this week, SMUG got a great new URL: social-media-university-global.org. This is part of growing up from a blog that started on a whim about 19 months ago to an on-line higher education institution (even if it’s not accredited). The process was pretty painless on my end, and the total cost was $19 (although I did spend another $10 for the .com version of the domain, too.) I hope it’s not too painful for those who had subscribed to the original feed from leeaase.wordpress.com, or the one that had been burned through Feedburner. I would appreciate any feedback from anyone for whom this has caused a problem (but then, if it has cut off their feed they wouldn’t know about this request, would they?)

We also added two new courses, for which there are homework assignments:

Remember, SMUG is built on the principle of self-paced, hands-on learning. Don’t worry if you get behind. The Curriculum section will always have an up-to-date listing of available courses in sequential order. Complete the coursework as you have the time and inclination.

Unlike traditional colleges and universities that offer degree completion through cohort programs, you don’t have to work at the same pace as everyone else. The SMUG cohort is always growing and accepting new students (15 in the last week alone). So you can’t get behind, because there’s no pace you’re expected to match.

Of course the other major difference between SMUG and other universities is they actually give you a real, accredited degree. And even the cheapest public universities charge tens of thousands of dollars for it.

At SMUG, the B.S. degree you earn has a double meaning. But since it’s free, and since you’ll be gaining a lot of practical knowledge and experience through the process, I’m confident you will find it an exceptional value.

Happy studies!

Blogging 102: Blog Search Engines

Blogs are great tools for news and conversations. So how do you find out what people are saying in blogs, so you can join the discussion?

If you want to monitor blog mentions of a topic (or your company’s name), you have numerous paid options. But I recommend that you start with the free ones, such as:

Technorati,
BlogPulse, and
IceRocket
And of course you also can sign up for Google News alerts, too.

For any of these, it’s easy to get automatic, up-to-date alerts via RSS feeds or e-mail, so you can be aware of what is being said about topics that matter to you. Here are the steps, using Technorati as an example:

Go to Technorati.com and enter your term of interest into the search box. In my case, I’m interested in health policy reform, so I entered health reform in the search box.

You can narrow the scope by taking advantage of what Technorati has defined as “authority.” In essence, this is a count of how many other blogs have linked to a given blog in the last six months. This tells you that some other people have found the information useful or interesting. The next two graphics show what happens when you search for posts with “some authority” or “a lot of authority” (and in the latter the search term was put in quotes, “health reform” to narrow further.)

Another way to narrow the scope is to search for posts that are tagged as being about your topic. (For background about tagging, read this post.) Here are the results for posts tagged “health reform”:

Your next step should be to sign up for automatic alerts from Technorati about new posts that fit your search term or that are tagged with your term. Click this button…

…and (provided you have completed Social Media 102: Intro to RSS or its equivalent) you will be taken to your RSS aggregator or feed reader, where you will have an opportunity to suscribe to a feed of this search.

After you’ve subscribed to the Technorati feed, your next step should be to visit some of the blogs that came up with “some authority” or “a lot of authority” in your original search. These blogs may write about your topic regularly. If so, you will want to become a regular reader. But instead of having to visit them each day, you can just subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed.

Also, in Technorati, you can search for blogs that are tagged as being about your topic, not just that have some posts relating to it. Here are the results for blogs about health reform:

After you’re done with your Technorati search, you can follow much of the same process with BlogPulse and IceRocket.

Homework Assignments:

Go to Technorati and search for key words that are of interest to you, such as your company name. Subscribe to the feeds for those terms.
Find at least five blogs that are “about” your key terms, and subscribe to those blogs’ feeds in your RSS feed reader.
Repeat the process using at least two other search engines, choosing from BlogPulse, IceRocket and Google News.

This post is part of the Blogging curriculum for Social Media University, Global (SMUG). For information about enrolling in SMUG, click here.