Amazon reviews are just as likely to give an accurate summary of a book's quality as those of professional newspapers, according to a study from Harvard Business School.

Professor Michael Luca and his co-authors analysed the top 100 reviews from 40 media outlets, including the New York Times, and the Washington Post, between 2004 and 2007 for their paper. The academics used data from reviews aggregator metacritic.com, which summarises professional reviews and then awards ratings, if not given, based on content. They also looked at Amazon reviews for each title.

Although the study points out that there is "virtually no quality assurance" in Amazon's consumer reviews, which can also be "gamed" by publishers or competitors submitting false reviews, they found that, nevertheless, experts and consumers agreed in aggregate about the quality of a book.

Another piece of research looking at the reliability of information shared through social media. Earlier in the year, a report was published of researchers who looked at mining Twitter to predict the success of movies. The study was not so positive in this case:

Overall, the study found no clear evidence that shows a direct link between Twitter hype, ratings and box office sales.
“The most surprising finding was that Twitter data may not be representative enough of the total population, so it is somewhat risky to use the site for forecasting,” Sen said. “More sophisticated techniques may be needed to understand the applicability of such data sets, such as the metrics we developed to understand the extent of the difference between Twitter users and other online rating side users.”

search-volume forecasts will help spot consumer trends of this sort with increased precision. But the improvements they bring will be incremental. Sophisticated methods based on natural-language analysis of tweets, blogs, or Facebook pages, by contrast, hold greater disruptive potential. As users of social media grow accustomed to sharing highly personal information, apparently unfazed by market-research outfits like WiseWindow watching their every step, the feelings and intentions of hundreds of millions of people are there for data-hungry computers to see.

why do we provide our users with out of the box [SharePoint] Team Sites that contain a bunch of senseless containers for information that offer no guidance as to what they should be doing with these things (Shared Documents, Discussions, Tasks, Announcements and so on)? A SharePoint Site is simply a medium with which to accomplish a business goal, outcome or process. You need to provide your users with clear guidance around what function the site will serve. Simply telling them to use a Team Site is not going to provide clear context to users working within.

Further exacerbating this is that now not only do users not have any idea where to store things, they now have little idea about how to store them. With the new capabilities that SharePoint offers beyond that of a simple fileshare users are further confused about what is the best medium for their content. So should be they putting a team meeting in the shared calendar, or should it go in the announcements list or maybe they should email out to everyone and store it in a document library?

The Fix?

The fix is to inject the context that users need into the sites that you create. To accomplish that you need liberal doses of Information Architecture, an understanding of user requirements, an appreciation of the processes they are using all combined with the SharePoint configuration options that leverage this (metadata, content types, document and list naming, navigation and so on).

All sound advice for SharePoint champions from Michal Pisarek, but it also highlights how much reinventing the wheel goes on with collaboration technologies (actually, in the intranet space as a whole).

Obviously the actual configuration options and methods are specific to SharePoint, but the idea applies to all collaboration tools. If you aren't helping users customise their online workspaces then you will make it harder for them to make sense of the underlying tools. This is potentially one important difference between 'community management' on the public Web versus inside organisations, which should include moderation and curation plus workspace design.

Pisarek's post is also a reminder that so far SharePoint really hasn't taken us far beyond the original Lotus Notes collaboration paradigm - we were doing this kind of contextual customisation at E&Y with Notes and Quickplace back in the early 2000s. Take a look at a product like Newsgator to get a sense of where we should be taking users on their SharePoint journey.

Hat tip Alex.

Everyone talks about collaboration in the workplace today but what does it really mean? How do you get from here to there? Every snake oil salesman is selling social something: enterprise social; social learning; social CRM; etc. For me boils down to three principles.

In my post about Designing Social Workplaces, I discussed a model for collaboration built around social networks, observable work, and insights and analysis. However, I quite like the nuance in Harold Jarche's post, Making collaborative work work where he talks about stepping through Narration of Work, then Transparency and finally Shared Power as a basic roadmap for creating a collaborative workplace.

There are strong risks related to delaying or not implementing efforts to embed the use of collaborative technologies within normal flows of work. Competitors moving more quickly towards adopting Social Business ways of working (through the use of collaborative technologies and the accomplishments they generate) will soon have a distinct competitive advantage. Because the benefits of Social Business require a fundamental change in the way employees work, simply installing software will not be enough to realize its value. Unlike the .com boom of the 1990s, companies falling behind or waiting to begin Social Business efforts will not be able to buy their way back in.

Installing collaborative technologies and using them as a "water cooler" application to promote awareness of corporate events doesn't make your company a social business in 2011. The novelty of wikis in the workplace is over. It's now the degree to which your company can move its "work in progress" to transparent, enterprise, participatory, searchable platforms which ultimately reflects the degree to which your company is "social" in the way it executes its business and serves its customers. 

The thrust of this comment, from Susan's post about Lowe's pay off from investing in a social intranet, reminds me very much of what I wrote in my 2004 chapter for Knowledge Management Tools and Techniques. My chapter was titled, Online Collaboration Tools, Knowledge Managers, and a Cooperative Culture. I said then:

Online collaboration is perhaps the most demanding e-business strategy to attempt, but it is also the strategy that is most likely to provide your organisation with a competitive advantage. This is because the development of the capability to collaborate online takes more than just the right technology, and if you make the investment this is not something that can be easily replicated by your competitors.

There is no single cure for email overload and Inbox Zero doesn’t claim to perform miracles. At the end of the day it’s a system, and it’s nothing without your own personal input. It might work for you and it might not. It’s important to remember that productivity systems are subjective beasts and that can be their ultimate downfall or the reason for their success.

What works for you won’t necessarily work for me. And for that reason you can’t say wholeheartedly that Inbox Zero works or it doesn’t. That’s just like saying that having cornflakes for breakfast doesn’t work. It’s simply a matter of personal preference or taste.

I've always been critical about email 'diets', although I view more contemporary efforts by Luis and Geoff to eliminate email with great interest.

Years ago I recommended the following:

• Where possible, eliminate the root cause of the problem. 
• Take control of your own inbox by managing it appropriately. 
• Lead by example and practice better e-mail etiquette and style.

At the root of this advice is that email is a communication tool that is often misappropriated as a collaboration tool. You can keep trying to fix your own inbox, but the problem is actually with everyone else using email.

The good news is that I hear more and more frequently how social business tools in the workplace do help to reduce email overload. We really have moved beyond marketing rhetoric.

I can even see it in my own work practices too - I use a combination of email (yes, its still there!), wiki, microblogging (enterprise microblogging and Twitter) and instant messaging. Of course, its the wiki and microblogging that make the critical difference, as they create a open plan workspace online where everyone can work out loud.

However, the root causes I identified originally still stand. Working out loud works best when:

• Everyone is working out loud (or at least 'in the room'). 
• People know why and understand how to work out loud. 
• Users are able to control how they consume the online open plan space.

Part of the reason for this is that its not simply about shifting communication that takes place in email to other channels. That would simply shift the location of the problem. Instead, we use different tools in the flow to deal with transient, situational and ambient communication and collaboration in different situations. See my Architected for Collaboration presentation for more on this.

Overall, this is a very different approach to the problem from the simplistic 'occupational spam' mentality. We eliminate the root cause of email overload, not the individual messages.

On a strictly personal front, I've noticed that the vast majority of personal email I receive these days comes in the form of notifications from other public social tools, subscriptions and automatic notifications (like my bank). However, the dynamic of personal use is very different from the workplace. In the workplace, we have the advantage of being able to choose the commons spaces where we will work out loud (assuming you are proactive about it).

92% of enterprise organisations using collaboration software use SharePoint and for over three-quarters of organisations (78%) SharePoint is the only collaboration technology that they use. But on average only 60% (3 in 5) of SharePoint sites are active; many organisations are clearly failing to maximise their SharePoint investment.

Research commissioned by Fujitsu. This is just the IT manager's perspective. I wonder what the users think too?

Hat tip to Michael.

What might be a bigger challenge for Australia's retailers is that they generally haven't been able to make the internet work efficiently for themselves yet. Established retailers are fumbling around much like newspaper publishers trying to work out the mix between print and internet. I've just checked the Harvey Norman site – as far as I can work out, I can't buy anything on it. Gerry Harvey tried the web and found it didn't work for him as a direct channel, so the site just exists to try to drive traffic to local stores.

This is from a column in the Sydney Morning Herald, weighing into the debate about demands from large old school retailers in Australia to charge consumers sales tax (GST) on goods bought online from overseas.

In a follow up article, they quote the Australian Retailers Association who say:

many large companies had been slow to embrace the internet. By contrast, small retailers were using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to promote their wares.

''Small retailers are getting very savvy,'' he said. ''Retailers are going to need to look at various forms of retailing to engage with their customers.''

Actually, I think this should be a wake up call for all large companies in all sectors in Australia. Over the last decade they haven't just been slow to adopt online retailing but have been slow to adopt Web technologies for many aspects of how they do business. This includes government and the non-profit sectors too. This failure cuts across how companies deal with their customers to how they enable their own staff to collaborate.

I used to think it was just the Australian pragmatic character that didn't buy into the technology hype in business. Now, I just wonder if its more a mix of arrogance and a lack of imagination that results in this failure to innovate?

It reminds me of a large Australian insurance company I dealt with recently online - when I encountered a bug, they told me that their Website wasn't designed for the latest Web browsers and instead I should have been using Netscape Navigator or IE 5.5. WTF!

Large Australian companies don't just need to start selling online, they have a decade of technology development to catch up on.