The news may have hit on April 1, but it’s no joke. Under the proposals — which have yet to be formally published — the British intelligence agency GCHQ, the local equivalent of the NSA, would be able to access data about these communications as they wished.

It’s unsurprisingly caused a great deal of concern and outrage — particularly since the parties who currently make up the U.K’s coalition government fiercely opposed a similar bill that was put forward a few years ago when they were in opposition.

Here’s what the web is saying about the proposals.

The Sunday Times led the pack with its report suggesting that the legislative proposals could be get put forward next month, and pointing out that ISPs had been given some details last month:

A senior industry official said: “It’s mass surveillance. The idea is that the network operator should effectively intercept the communications between, say, Google and some third party. The network operators are going to be asked to put probes in the network and they are upset about the idea . . .

It’s expensive, it’s intrusive to your own customers, it’s very difficult to see it’s going to work properly and it’s going to be a nightmare to run legally.”

Meanwhile the Daily Mail, which now boasts the world’s biggest newspaper website, pointed out that the content of these activities will be captured, too — and will be available with a court order.

Internet service providers will be asked to keep records of all emails, messages on social networking sites and conversations over Skype.

The content of the calls or messages will be recorded, but the authorities will have to obtain a court order if they want to listen to or read the content.
However, the police and security services will be able to demand details of who the communication is between and what time it is taking place without a court order.

But it was ordinary users, too, who stood up to have their say. Twitter users started to flood the official channel for Prime Minister David Cameron with messages about their anger — or protesting simply by copying him in to mundane notes on everything they were doing that day.

Meanwhile another Twitter user, Ross Lawson, made the point that transparency is not two-way — particularly apposite, given recent scandals surrounding the government’s cash-for-access scheme and its relationship with those questioned over phone hacking:

I have no problem with the government reading all my emails, just so long as we get to read all of theirs.#telldaveeverything @Number10gov

— Ross Lawson (@Ross_Lawson) April 2, 2012

And some pointed out that we’ve been here before. Security blogger Rik Ferguson of Trend Micro said news of this legislative agenda had appeared several months ago — something at the time seemed like a significant invasion of privacy:

If your national or local postal service were to open and check every letter you sent in order to keep a record of whom you correspond with, would you not be outraged? What if the postal service then made all this information available to over 600 public bodies such  as local councils and police forces on request?
 
The Home Office insist that this information is vital for fighting crime and terrorism; but is this legislation really going to be effective against the people at whom it is supposedly aimed?

The Guardian, meanwhile, makes the point about the previous attempt to legislate for this capability — saying that “Labour tried to introduce a similar system using a central database tracking all phone, text, email and internet use but that was dropped in 2009″ amid concerns from civil liberties campaigners, ISPs and mobile phone operators.

The last word, however, should go to @davidcameroon, a Twitter spoof of Prime Minister David Cameron — who came up with a proposal that could prove a lot cheaper and easier than trying to pass a new law:

Government Announcement: To save time, please CC every one of your emails and texts to GCHQ. Thank you. /via @carlmaxim

— David Cameroon (@davecameroon) April 1, 2012

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Big banks, big data

One of the biggest converts (not surprisingly) is the financial services industry. According to Bryan Clark, CEO of Scotland-based systems-analytics provider Sumerian, his company’s roster of high-end banking clients want to analyze the data coming from their expansive computing infrastructures for two major reasons. One is to tune their electronic-trading systems for maximum performance, and the other is to adapt their infrastructure to the large-scale business-model changes the banks themselves are undergoing as they adapt to a new economic climate.

The Sumerian platform

Those two reasons actually converge, he said, in the form of community cloud computing platforms. As more banks co-locate their trading systems on shared platforms with shared data sets — an attempt to minimize latency between themselves and trading centers without building their own data centers nearby — they need to make sure everything is running optimally. Clark said that means helping customers architect their cloud-based systems, then monitoring them after deployment with specialized algorithms to ensure that nothing — including another tenant’s system — is messing with their trading applications.

Banks are notoriously skilled in the IT department, but even they’re running up against tough obstacles with today’s new deployment models. “Systems are so complex these days that you can’t just do it by thinking about it,” Clark said. “You really do need to do some deep analysis.”

Cloud infrastructure is complex

Especially when it comes to the cloud, Sumerian isn’t alone in trying to help companies get insight into how what’s happening inside their server and switches affects their prized applications. I recently spoke with Vikas Aggarwal, CEO of Zyrion, about his company’s new predictive analytics module that’s designed specifically for monitoring and analyzing cloud-computing and other next-generation infrastructure. Essentially, he said, it’s a matter of being able to assure application performance through network intelligence.

With Zyrion’s software, he explained, companies can learn how their systems behave over the course of weeks, days or hours and plan resource allocation accordingly. If behavior varies too greatly from the expected norm, the software will send an alert or, if permitted, automatically adjust resources as necessary. Over time, companies can track how their infrastructure usage and the behavior of the components has changed, and can better plan for future deployments.

Elsewhere, software vendors service providers such as Virtela are pushing predictive analytics products for customer data centers, and cloud startups such as New Relic and Boundary Networks are also helping customers make the connection between application behavior and infrastructure-level problems. Using its own service to analyze its own system, New Relic was able to create a time-series graph for disk utilization and spot performance trouble spots that needed attention.

Build your own with Hadoop

Some systems-savvy companies — including the aforementioned Facebook and Google — as well as smaller sites — are building their own tools for collecting and analyzing system data. Unstructured data platform Hadoop is proving particularly useful in these efforts. Even Splunk, the software vendor riding its ability to analyze machine data toward an IPO, has built an integration with Hadoop to let users take their analytics efforts to the next level. E-commerce marketplace Etsy, for example, uses both Hadoop and Splunk to help it keep track of what’s going on across its infrastructure in the face of more than a billion page views a month. (I’ll be speaking on stage with Splunk Founder and CTO Erik Swan at our Structure: Data conference this week in New York on the topic of mining machine data.)

But don’t let all this talk about trading platforms, cloud computing and massive-scale web sites fool you into thinking systems analytics is only for the big guys. Sumerian’s Clark says it’s the natural evolution as companies of all types look to get more from their management software and operate more efficiently because of it. Even if you have a monitoring system showing CPU utilization, he asked, “How does that relate to people being able to enter timesheets on a Friday afternoon?”

Feature image courtesy of Switch Communications.

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If you’re concerned about the rise of the “surveillance society,” in which the authorities use cameras and other means to snoop on your activities, the past week or so has probably added even more fuel to that fire. The British intelligence service is doing its best to crack encrypted BlackBerry instant messages  to identify rioters — and the police are using facial recognition to do the same — while some departments are setting up social-media observation units to track Twitter and Facebook, and others are using algorithms to try to predict where crimes will occur. In a world where our online activities are increasingly public, the bottom line is that governments have even more ability to observe our behavior, whether we like it or not.

Crawling through Facebook pages and Twitter feeds looking for dissidents is something that we’ve come to associate with repressive and totalitarian regimes like Egypt’s former dictatorship or the Chinese government, both of which have reportedly used Facebook’s “real name” policy — along with other methods such as geo-targeting — to identify disruptive elements via social media. Western governments have also proven to be interested in these kinds of technologies, however, particularly in the wake of events such as the recent riots in London, which have led the British prime minister to discuss potentially banning certain people from using social networks.

As I noted in a recent post, it’s not just Britain’s PM who is interested in taking these kinds of steps. A prominent British MP said shutting down social networks would be no different than closing a road during an emergency, and the Bay Area Rapid Transit authority actually shut down cellular networks in some of its stations in advance of a protest because it was afraid demonstrators would use cellphones to organize — a controversial move that the FCC is reportedly looking into.

Block them, or use them for surveillance?

But shutting down or blocking access to social media and social networks is one thing; the flip side of that is using these networks and tools to snoop on users who the police or other agencies believe need to be surveilled. There are brute-force attempts such as MI5′s plan to try to crack the encryption used by Research In Motion’s BlackBerry Messenger service, which was allegedly used by some London rioters to coordinate their activities, and then there are the various attempts at using facial-recognition software to identify rioters who posted photos to Facebook or elsewhere.

Interestingly enough, a civilian volunteer effort to do something similar using publicly available software and a Facebook app was recently abandoned, because the founders said the software’s ability to identify people was simply not good enough — raising the prospect of potential “false positives,” which could lead to innocent people being targeted by the authorities. And a number of observers have noted that even London’s much-criticized network of closed-circuit security cameras, which led some to call Britain the first modern “surveillance society,” didn’t have much effect on stopping or even quelling the recent riots.

Meanwhile, the New York Police Department has launched an official social-media monitoring branch, whose job it will be to track Twitter and Facebook for information that might lead to charges involving everything from disturbing the peace to gang violence (hopefully this will result in more serious charges than the recent arrest by British police of a man who planned a water-pistol fight using Facebook).

Could social media be used to predict crime?

In another recent effort that reminded some of the movie Minority Report, the Santa Cruz police department is experimenting with an algorithm-driven program that tries to identify where crimes might occur based on patterns from past arrests in the city. While the software doesn’t take into account posts from Twitter or Facebook, it’s easy to see how it could — in the same way that some people are trying to predict the movement of stocks and markets based on what people are posting to Twitter.

Although some (including me) have argued that the crackdown on social media being considered by Britain is as wrongheaded as a shutdown of communications services such as cellphones, there is one big difference between telephone conversations and Twitter or Facebook: namely, that one is private and the others are effectively public. That means while the police or the federal authorities would — in most cases, at least — have to get a warrant of some kind to tap your phone or eavesdrop on your computer, they can follow you on Twitter whenever they wish, and create profiles based on your Facebook activity or any other social-networking platform.

Doing this may well be beyond the abilities of most police forces, who are already stretched in dealing with the existing crimes they already know about — but it is certainly not beyond the abilities of MI5 or Scotland Yard or other Western intelligence services, many of whom are already using sophisticated data-collection methods to track suspicious activity on a number of communications networks including the Internet. How long until social media becomes part of that, if it isn’t already?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Jim Sher and Jennie Moo

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ServerDensity Founder David Mytton told me the company’s user base is growing fast, including among large companies such as Intel, Motorola and the New York Times, and it’s difficult to keep up with all the customer requests while still focusing on improving the core product and user interface. This results in many users developing their own plugins to address their own unique issues, and Mytton hopes they’ll contribute them to the new app store and improve the collective capabilities of ServerDensity entire user base.

In order to spur contributions, ServerDensity will let developers charge for their plugins. Although Mytton acknowledges that the income potential is limited because there aren’t hundreds of millions of potential users as with the Apple App Store or the Android Marketplace, he thinks the possibility of making some money from work they’ve already done will inspire enthusiasm among developers. Additionally, he hopes that putting their names and price tags on plugins will make contributors want to put in the extra effort to polish them and make them work as well as possible for purchasers. ServerDensity also will offer some free plugins that it developed itself.

ServerDensity is hosted on the Terremark Enterprise Cloud and comes in both free and paid versions. The paid version includes support more servers and a variety of alerts, as well as both iPhone and Android apps so systems administrators can monitor servers on the go. ServerDensity also monitors performance of MongoDB database deployments.

Its competition in the cloud-based server monitoring space includes startups such as Scout and Cloudkick (which is now part of Rackspace), as well as products such as VMware’s Hyperic, CA’s  Nimsoft and Amazon Web Services’ CloudWatch. Mytton said ServerDensity has plans to evolve the product to better meet the needs of larger customers and might get into server management, which would make it more directly competitive with the latter group in the long run.

ServerDensity is just one example of how pretty much every IT process is now available as a cloud service, a topic that will underpin almost every discussion at our upcoming Structure 2011 conference. What began as cloud-based servers and storage has expanded to include application platforms, runtimes and just about every application of which one could think, and the trend shows no signs of slowing down.

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Probably the most-important thing about this round of updates is that most of them involve the service actually taking action: the type of automation for which cloud computing has come to be known. Policies for stopping, starting and scaling new instances based on performance metrics takes CloudWatch a step beyond what many monitoring services currently offer, especially for cloud-based resources. Most services, such as Cloudkick or Nimsoft, can provide detailed monitoring and visualizations of numerous cloud platforms, but they can’t automatically act on what they discover.

Actually, the Basic Monitoring feature, which produces performance metrics at five-minute intervals, isn’t an automation feature at all, but it is free. When added to the existing suite of free or reduced-price AWS services, it creates an even fuller experience for developers testing out the cloud or running minimally important applications. Although there are plenty of free cloud-monitoring products, such as Cloudkick’s basic service and Hyperic’s CloudStatus, there’s something to be said about the simplicity of a one-stop shop during the learning phase.

As with most AWS features, the new CloudWatch capabilities take the commodity out of cloud computing, to a degree, and truly differentiate the AWS offering. A developer choosing between cloud providers might lean toward AWS because it doesn’t require going to a third party for advanced monitoring features. In fact, CloludWatch now offers automation capabilities beyond what most third parties offer.

Of course, CloudWatch also doesn’t tie into on-premise systems the way that many of the third-party, cloud-monitoring tools do, nor does it provide granular performance metrics and visualizations. CloudWatch certainly doesn’t monitor other public clouds. There’s a reason why CA paid $350 million for Nimsoft, VMware is pushing Hyperic, and Cloudkick has raised a few million: They’re betting businesses won’t be content running everything in the cloud, or even with a single provider. It seems only likely that as cloud-capable monitoring services and systems-management software integrate within large vendors, AWS-style automation could be possible across a variety of cloud platforms.  That means there’s plenty of money to be made, and AWS can’t have all of it.

Heart monitor photo courtesy of Flickr user brykmantra.

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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?

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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?

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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

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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.

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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?

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