Here’s a short video overview of the service in action:

Managers can setup teams, invite members and assign privileges to allow team members to view each others’ screens. Users can then “clock-in” to activate the monitoring and screen capture service,  and “clock-out” at any time to pause it.

Personally, I’m uncomfortable with the premise of Peerdrum; the need to resort to this type of tool strikes me as illustrating a failure of management and a breakdown of the trust between employers and workers. Peerdrum appears to be based on a corrective philosophy; it assumes that workers left to their own devices will drift from their objectives.

Most information workers multitask and flit from project to project, and creative disciplines often require a level of play and exploration that is not well represented by a series of screenshots — if anything it could distort and damage perceptions.

Fundamentally, if the output of a worker is sound, is this type of tracking really necessary? Rather than a slideshow of screenshots, I think perhaps an open multi-person video channel could help to keep a team pulling together much more comfortably. Experiencing a coworker’s body language, demeanor and conversation will reveal much more than the visible content of their desktop.

Last year, we published a guest post covering some best practices for remote monitoring of workers by the CEO of RescueTime, which emphasized using monitoring tools to enhance productivity, rather than for employee surveillance; Peerdrum appears to be primarily a surveillance tool.

If you’re interested in the topic of how to manage remote workers effectively, it’s something we’ll be exploring in depth  at our Net:Work conference, coming to San Francisco in December.

Do you think surveillance tools like Peerdrum are necessary in modern workplaces?

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
• Social Media in the Enterprise

Work As Normal. Then Do a Cost-benefit Analysis

It’s possible that once, long ago, you were so serious about your time that you took pains to account for it to spur yourself onward. If you’ve been a web worker for as long as I have, those spurs are dull and rusted from disuse, and the horse’s hide has grown thick and calloused.

Over time, your impression of how much work you’re actually doing will fall out of sync with reality. The solution? A reality check. I’m not talking about filling out time sheets, I just want you to write out, on paper, your average day and look at where you’re actually working and where you aren’t. Now highlight in red marker those huge chunks of time with no definable benefit. Chances are, an hourly breakdown of your day will look at least as horrifying as the shirt Freddy wears in Nightmare on Elm Street.

Don’t do this every day. Just take the one you made, and post it up next to your monitor and/or below the clock in your work space. Much more effective than a “Hang In There!” motivational poster, let me tell you.

It’s Not a Question of Being Stressed, But What Kind of Stress

Stress can be unpleasant, but any truly productive person knows that there’s good stress and bad stress. Good stress keeps things moving forward, and is the natural byproduct of doing a job well. Bad stress has much more to do with not doing work than with getting things done.

Negative work-related stress will probably leaving you feeling like you have too much going on; more than you can handle. That may be the case, but more often than not, it’s just your brain trying to trick you into procrastinating and not being productive. Combat the feeling by listing and analyzing all the tasks that are supposedly in conflict for your attention. Be honest and dispassionate, and you’ll probably find that half those tasks are either insignificant or easily handled while tackling bigger things.

If It’s Not Work, It’s Not In Your Default Browser

I’m not going to tell you to stay off Facebook. Instructions like that don’t work in a traditional workplace, and they certainly doesn’t work for most at-home workers. Go ahead and indulge, but just as you wouldn’t go to an arcade to finish writing a report, you shouldn’t try to do work in a software environment generally reserved for play.

That’s why the easiest way to monitor and control your productivity over the course of the work day is to keep separate software for work and for play. A browser is probably the most important example of this type of system for most. I keep Firefox for work and use Chrome for all other endeavors. That way, I have to actually switch between apps in order to screw around. It makes me much more aware of how much time I’m spending on non-productive tasks, and that much more likely to forgo a YouTube session.

Writers and bloggers can do this, too. I use WriteRoom for personal projects, and Word for Mac for most other offline word processing professional tasks. Likewise, I do my personal blogging using an iPad app, and any professional blogging in the web-based editor.

“Fine” Is Not a Good Answer to “How Was Your Day?”

You’re not a hormonal 12-year old, so don’t talk about your day like you are. Hopefully you have a spouse, partner or friend who you can discuss your day with following business end. For me, it’s my girlfriend, who pointed out recently that my stoic reluctance to talk in detail about my day’s activities isn’t really beneficial to anyone.

Obviously I’m not recommending you bore anyone with an exhaustive account of the minutiae of your day’s activity, but give them a general idea of what you feel you’ve accomplished. You’ll probably be more honest to another person than you’d be to yourself, and since having to say “nothing” isn’t really an attractive proposition, you’ll soon find your post-day conversation will motivate you to get more done.

It’s not an automated time tracking system or a URL blocker, but my system for policing my own productivity has definitely done the job. And it doesn’t have the same morale-dampening effects that either of those methods an produce, either.

How do you monitor your own productivity? Do you find it harder or easier to be productive working remotely?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

We recently made a couple of announcements about an upcoming event called Ignite Portland, so I decided to use it as my test case for these monitoring solutions. It’s a good test case because we’ve been doing the event for a couple of years, so it has plenty of history and the recent announcement generated some buzz this week, but the volume is fairly manageable.

twazzup

This service is yet another Twitter monitoring solution. While twazzup shows the obvious information (tweets mentioning your search terms), it also has sections on the page for most popular links, contributors, a tag cloud and suggested users. I found the results to be very accurate and relevant, but it’s the little touches that make this site so interesting. You can mouse over avatars and links to get more relevant information. For example, if you mouse over a user link, it gives you a list of tweets about your topic from that user, along with number of followers, location, bio and other information, as well as a “follow” button in case you want to follow that user. If you mouse over a link, it shows you a list of users who posted the link to Twitter.

The downside is that the Twitter search results are currently limited to around nine days, so it is great for monitoring recent information, but it would not be a good solution for low-volume searches or for looking over longer periods of time. However, this is a limitation of Twitter itself, which services like this one have to live with.

Social Mention

Social Mention is a more comprehensive search that looks across blogs, Twitter, images, video, and more. Pay special attention to the links right above the search box on your results page. By default, searches return results from blogs, but you can also hit the links to return results from microblogs (Twitter, etc.), images, etc. Data junkies like me will probably want to select the “all” link. The best thing about Social Mention is all of the analysis that it provides about the data. You can see sentiment (positive, neutral, negative), top keywords, top users, top hashtags and more. Even better than just being able to see the information on the web site is that they give you several cuts of the data as CSV download files that you can save for later.

The biggest downside to Social Mention is that it still has a few issues to iron out with how some search engines handle special operators, like “OR”. While my OR search worked fine in certain parts of the site, it resulted in a large number of false positives in other areas. If you spend a few minutes tweaking your search and are careful not to use any complex searches, you should be able to work around these types of issues. It also appears have the same Twitter limitations as twazzup, and I noticed some other intermittent flakiness, but was willing to live with it, since the results were so interesting.

What are your favorite monitoring solutions?

Photo credit: stock.xcnhg user hamma

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• A 2011 Connected Consumer Forecast
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

A few weeks ago I read this very interesting piece on WebWorkerDaily about the impact of corporate blocking policies on web working employees. The gist of the article was that blocking tends to throw away a lot of the good with the bad and, increasingly, the things that managers think of as “bad” (Twitter, Facebook, IM, etc.) are actually an important part of folks’ communication toolbox.

I’d like to pile on with more evidence that wholesale blocking is bad. The University of Melbourne found that workers who are allowed to surf the web for fun at work were actually nine percent more productive than those who weren’t. So what about monitoring? Well, it turns out that monitoring your employees (the way most employers do it) is similarly detrimental to productivity. It also tends to make life more stressful for employees.

At RescueTime, we are constantly thinking about the ethics and efficacy of blocking and monitoring for teams and individuals — it’s our mission to actually build software that does this in a way that increases productivity and isn’t evil. A huge, and sometimes daunting, part of our job as product developers is to educate employers on what works, what’s ethical and what kind of expectations are reasonable for web workers. Here’s some of what we’ve learned.

Blocking and Monitoring is Everywhere

As obvious as the faults of blocking and monitoring are, employers still do both. You can see why a manager might do it — excessive leisure surfing can have a huge cost, and abusive workers are exceptional at camouflaging their activities. A 2005 survey by the American Management Associated found that 75 percent of employers monitor their employees’ web site visits to prevent inappropriate usage, while 65 percent of them use software to block web sites entirely. The good news is that 80 percent of employers actually tell their employees about their monitoring practices.

How to Do Blocking Right (If You Care About Productivity)

Just because wholesale blocking of web sites can be evil and ineffective at improving productivity doesn’t mean that blocking should be kicked to the curb. Below are three guidelines for effective blocking:

1. Your goal should be to block excessive or abusive Internet usage, not block everything. Block using allowances. Decide as a team what an appropriate amount of leisure time is for a work day (or work week). Stop the “binge” leisure surfing and you’ve solved 95 percent of your productivity problem.
2. “Nudge” before you block. If you’ve set a limit of no more than eight hours a week of leisure surfing, alert the user when they are trending towards exceeding that. Blocking is a painful and limiting experience; a nudge may be all you need to avoid the excess.  If at all possible, give them some social context. Receiving a message that says, “Hey, you’re at 7 hours of leisure surfing so far this week, and 8 hours is the maximum. Your average teammate is at 3h and 21m” can be way more motivating.
3. Give as much control to your team as you can. The more top-down the solution is, the less effective it is.

How to Do Monitoring Right (If You Care About Productivity)

Monitoring can provide a business with critical data. Which applications are actually getting used? How does the new development methodology effect how people spend their time? How good is the new manager at making sure that people have enough work to do? How people spend their time is a leading indicator for business health and team engagement/morale, but it’s uncomfortable to introduce it to a team, even when done correctly. Below are some guidelines for effective — and minimally evil — monitoring:

1. Set reasonable expectations. Knowledge workers don’t work solidly for eight hours a day (in fact, if you’re doing productive computer work for five hours a day, you’re in the top 1 percent of our userbase!) Suggesting that they should is a disaster. Also, it should be clear to everyone involved that day-to-day scrutiny will not happen. A leisure-heavy day is not a problem. A leisure-heavy month might indicate that someone is undertasked or undermotivated. It’s also important for everyone to be aware that how you spend your time does not equal productivity.
2. If productivity matters, only monitor high-end teams. I’m not kidding. A study at Rutgers showed that monitoring high-ability individuals resulted in better performance. Monitoring lower-ability individuals actually lowered their performance.
3. Give your team the ability to control the monitoring process. Giving them a “pause” button gives them control over the process and actually results in increased task performance (source: University of Conneticut Study).
4. Monitor as little as you need to. If productivity is your goal, you don’t need to read people’s IM conversations — you just want to understand how they spend their time. Ideally, this should be no different (and no more evil!) than a timesheet, except that it’s more accurate and less effort-intensive.
5. Monitor everyone (managers included!). We all have the same fear. We know we only really work for a few hours per day  We also all have the same delusion– that somehow we’re more efficient than our peers and that’s how we manage to do eight hours of work in two or three hours. In reality, we’re all pretty similar.  The Rutgers study mentioned above also found that monitoring group-wide offered protection against the stress associated with the monitoring.
6. Show people their own data. If you’re chasing productivity, showing people how they spend their time can be very motivating, especially if you compare them to their average peer. If you wanted to have each department to be more disciplined about spending money, you wouldn’t monitor their spending in secret and then pounce on them when they spent money irresponsibly. Take the same attitude with time and get your team involved and interested.

What do you think of these guidelines? As a member of a team, what sort of blocking and monitoring rules do you think would actually help you be more productive without feeling too “overlordy”?

Image by stock,xchng user marcos1981.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

Photo by Flickr User Orange_Beard under Creative Commons

Josh Bernoff wrote about the modern listening problem and compares it to those speaker phones where you can’t talk and listen at the same time. On those not-full-duplex speaker phones, you are either talking or listening, but not doing both at the same time. In the social media age, we need to be both listening and talking, but many people are only doing one or the other. On Twitter and other social web sites, we talk about what we are doing and listen to other people talk, and we do it simultaneously.

Listening

I tend to automate as much of my listening as I can using various monitoring tools. These are two of my favorite ways to monitor and listen to what people are saying, and we’ve covered both of them in more depth in previous blog posts.

• TweetDeck: I have several different searches that are set up in TweetDeck, and I get real-time notifications when someone mentions my name or several of the projects that I’m involved in.
• Yahoo Pipes: More sophisticated monitoring with Yahoo Pipes looks for mentions of a list of keywords across many different social media sites, blogs, Twitter and more.

Responding

Now that you can find the conversations and have started listening, the hard part begins: finding the time to respond. Depending on the volume, this could be a small task or a huge effort. I do a pretty good job of finding and listening to feedback, but when I get busy, I sometimes find it difficult to carve out the time to respond. If I respond right away, I won’t forget to respond, but responding immediately can really disrupt my work flow. If I put the responses off and do them in batches, I am probably more productive, but I run the risk of missing opportunities or forgetting to respond. The key for me is finding the right balance to respond quickly, but without disrupting my ability to be productive and efficient in my other work.

How well do you listen and respond?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Big Data Marketplaces Put a Price on Finding Patterns
• In Q3, NewNet Focus Turns to Business Models and Search
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

Don’t Underestimate Twitter Search

For simple monitoring, this is the way to go. If you only want to monitor a single keyword or a small number of keywords, you can easily use the built-in Twitter search in your web browser. You can even use a fairly complex set of search operators to construct great searches. It updates frequently and lets you know how many new items have arrived since your last refresh. It also displays the number of new items right in the browser tab to make it easy to notice without paying much attention to the page.  Sometimes you just can’t beat simple and unobtrusive.

My Favorite Real-time Twitter Monitoring Tool: TweetDeck

TweetDeck runs as a desktop application with Growl notifications that alert me when something important happens. You set up columns with all of your followers, groups of followers, @replies, direct messages, custom searches, trending topics and more. I have my TweetDeck set up with several custom searches that look for my name and organizations or projects with which I’m involved. These searches generate alerts whenever someone posts something new on Twitter that matches my search criteria. The searches are similar to what you would find on Twitter search, and you can use Twitter’s advanced search operators for more complex searches. The biggest limitation is that TweetDeck can only use 10 columns, so I occasionally find myself bumping up against the limit when I try to add another search column for a new project.

Browser-based Twitter Monitoring: Monitter

Monitter certainly looks better than many of the similar browser-based online monitoring applications for Twitter (TweetGrid, for example). It works much like Tweetdeck. You add a column for every search and can add complex searches using the Twitter advanced search operators. Monitter can also use more than 10 columns. I haven’t bumped up against the limit, but there might be an upper limit to the number of columns. The downside is that it seems to be a little slow to update, and at times I’ve had it freeze up, leaving me waiting for new information.

Regardless of which tool you select, make sure to take advantage of the advanced search operators that Twitter supports. There are some cool options, including negative/positive attitudes, posts with links, posts asking a question, and much more.

What are your favorite real-time monitoring tools for Twitter?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why Google Should Fear the Social Web
• In Q3, NewNet Focus Turns to Business Models and Search
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

When I talk about monitoring “dashboards,” I use the term very loosely. In some cases, I set clients up with RSS readers that have a typical dashboard look and feel for monitoring feeds, while in other cases the “dashboard” is really a monitoring section in an existing RSS reader with the feeds delivered as an OPML file.

In my experience, people who are new to RSS readers tend to do better with a reader that looks more like a dashboard than the a tree or folder structure. This is particularly true for monitoring because a dashboard lets you see more information at a glance. Netvibes and iGoogle are both good choices for new users. However, I think that the Netvibes layout tends to work slightly better for this purpose. Here’s an example of a monitoring dashboard built using Netvibes:

However, I personally use NetNewsWire for my RSS reader. I have my monitoring dashboards set up in folders that don’t in any way resemble a typical dashboard. Try out a few different readers to find the one that works best for your style and usage. The tool that you select isn’t the critical element. The real magic is in the content that you are monitoring.

I monitor three primary types of content in my dashboards: vanity mentions, competition and industry analysis.

Vanity mentions are the conversations that people are having about you, your company, your products and your employees. Keep a close eye on these mentions so you can respond quickly to questions and concerns. A proactive approach to monitoring and responding to discussions can help you avoid potential issues before they get out of hand and can show people that you are responsive to your customers. I track vanity mentions for companies that I am involved with across Twitter, blog searches, Flickr, various video sites, FriendFeed and more.

You can get interesting insights about your competition and their activities by proactively monitoring their communications and what other people say about them online. I often monitor competitors blogs, press releases, support forums, job postings and personal blogs or social media accounts of key employees, in addition to monitoring mentions of the competition on various sources.

Industry analysis should also be part of your monitoring dashboard. Monitor blogs written by thought leaders within your industry along with tracking for mentions of keywords that are important to your organization or your interests. I often use this section of the monitoring dashboard as a way to find content for blog posts. It can be a great way to see what other people are talking about in your industry and give you an opportunity to respond to, disagree with or build on interesting ideas from other people.

In addition to the dashboard technology, I use tools like Yahoo Pipes and PostRank to help me find relevant content and filter it down to the pieces that are the most important for my purposes. If you have never used Yahoo Pipes, I have several two-minute Yahoo Pipes video demos that can help you learn what you need to get started.

How do you monitor online conversations? What kind of monitoring dashboards do you use?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Big Data Marketplaces Put a Price on Finding Patterns
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

Interesting conversations are happening all over the web, on blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed and many other sites. People are talking about you, your company and your industry, and revealing many tips and tricks that you should know. I am a self-confessed data junkie, so I have a few tips to help you make sense of the massive amounts of data available and to focus on monitoring just what really matters.

Use a Dashboard

An RSS-based monitoring dashboard is a great way to collect everything you’re monitoring into one place. I’ve set these up for clients in a number of different ways depending on the preference of the person responsible for monitoring. For people new to RSS, I generally encourage them to use something like Netvibes, which has a visual layout with multiple tabs and columns where you can see several key conversations at a glance. I have a couple of sections in my RSS reader where I keep everything that I’m monitoring, and I make sure that they are the first things I read.

Filter Your Feeds

Filtering RSS feeds through Yahoo Pipes or other tools is a good way to make sure that your monitoring dashboard contains relevant content and not just a list of blogs to read. I use Yahoo Pipes to filter for mentions of my name, my company and efforts that I am involved with across various sites (Twitter, FriendFeed, blogs, Flickr, video sites, etc.) Yahoo Pipes can also be used to combine many feeds and filter those high-volume RSS feeds for only relevant content that you need to know. Tools like PostRank are a good way to find the posts within a feed that are generating the most buzz.

Choose the Right Twitter Client

Use a smart Twitter client that lets you group the important people that you want to monitor and provides a way to get real-time notifications for mentions of certain keywords. TweetDeck is a good choice. I have a couple of different groups set up to help make sure that I see the posts from people who have important ideas and who provide me with the greatest value. I also have keyword searches in TweetDeck for companies or events that I am involved with to make sure that I don’t miss any important conversations about these efforts on Twitter.

Find Hot Topics With FriendFeed

FriendFeed is a great way to find the hot topics of the day, to make sure that you’re keeping up with industry trends and new tools or techniques that you can apply to your work. I like to group people by topic, like community management, and use the “best of” feature to find the best posts of the day, week or month from those subgroups of people. The example below shows the best post of the month from my “News Makers” group. It’s an easy way for me to filter the flood of content in FriendFeed down to something much more manageable.

FriendFeed Best of Month

While monitoring is important, you should also be responding to these conversations. People are more likely to engage with you in future if they get a response back, rather than feeling like their feedback went into a black hole. Respond to as many @replies on Twitter as you can, and also use your blog for longer responses or to post reactions to relevant conversations that are happening across the web.

What are your tips and tricks for monitoring online conversations?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Big Data Marketplaces Put a Price on Finding Patterns