I would bet good money that you don’t fancy featuring in the leading story on RollOnFriday, unlike this unfortunate applicant who “hugged” a recruiter using facebook.

While I hate to waggle my finger at anybody for experimenting with technology, social networks can hurt you if you’re not careful.  They can hurt your reputation, your career and the reputation of your employers.

Manager Tools, one of the few podcasts I listen to.  This week, they get strategic about managing your online reputation.  Their cast is worth a listen, and firms would to well to provide this sort of guidance to their employees about social networks.  You can either download their cast via iTunes or just listen on their web page.

Part 1 and Part 2

Now, that being said, I have yet to follow their advice to the letter, but I’m thinking about it.

I was on my morning run this morning, with my brain in la-la land, oddly thinking about Doug Cornelius’ Wiki While you Work article, when I had a brainwave (well I thought it was a brainwave) about what it would take for lawyers to use social software.

“Trust thresholds! It’s not just about trust; it’s also about risk of each task. You need to earn enough trust to overcome the risk. Therefore, wiki use is dependant on how much a user trusts the content.”

Those weren’t the exact words, but close enough. I almost stopped running, and would have but I had a long way to go and once you stop its murder to get started again. I kept running and diverted my brain onto more simple topics like “why do people throw shopping trolleys in the canal?”

What had popped into my brain was the idea that when using a wiki to execute a task which involves risk, the trustworthiness of the wiki needs to exceed the risk of it being wrong.

First, a story.

My first experience of social software & lawyers was unsuccessful. I was looking to put in place a Wikipedia-style resource for my firm, and met with substantial resistance, and downright refusal to use it. Lawyers being lawyers a number of risks were listed. NOT IN MY PRACTICE! Case closed.

Later I found some practices were using the wiki, but for purposes I had not intended. For example, one practice used the wiki to share information about work allocation. Junior lawyers would edit the wiki page indicating how much time they had spare, and the type of work they wanted.

Until today, I didn’t fully understand why, and I hope the following picture helps to illustrate my point.

The “trust threshold” is the point where risk & trust meet.

My initial proposal was that lawyers use the wiki to execute client work. Trust was low while risk was high. No dice.

However, using the wiki to find more work, the risk was low, and trust was “high enough” to have passed the trust threshold.

A couple more key points:
* The “trust curve” I’ve drawn is not prescriptive. Trust can be lost, and once it falls below the trust threshold, the risk becomes too high.
* Trust curves and the level of perceived risk are unique for each person.
* Usefulness is not a factor that can overcome risk.  It might be enough to get a lawyer to experiment with something less risky, which in turn builds trust.

Ways of increasing trust
I do not think you can change the risk associated with lawyers’ tasks, because cost of failure for a lawyer approaches infinity.

I do think you can increase trust, but it will take time, and some people might never make it.

Some suggestions:
* other lawyers have to use the wiki first (i.e. PSLs)
* the system has to signpost security (i.e. no anonymous users)
* show the lawyers how to recover something that was deleted
* talk to the lawyers about the ways incorrect content can be drafted
* PSL / Partner stamp of approval on a particular page / wiki
* Limit access to a set number of users

So what?

What I draw from this is that:
* Big bang wiki deployments are more likely to fail than not
* You will have to start slowly
* You will have to find something safe
* You may well
* Keep the scope of a wiki low (i.e. single topic, experts only) if you need high levels of trust
* You can measure & aggregate trust & risk by asking people. Probably worth establishing where you are on the scale before you try to wikify your firm.

Credit where credit’s due

Before today, I never read about or heard of trust thresholds. However, in checking Mr. Google, somebody has written about them. In his book Trust in the Balance, Robert Shaw defines the term as the point where trust becomes distrust (I can’t get anything more than an Amazon preview unfortunately).

However, I see no pictures or graphs online, so that baby’s mine! ©

Two days ago I wrote about CMS watch missing a trick on best bets. This evening (blogging on a Friday evening is very very sad), I found an article from Toby Ward of the Intranet Blog which describes my thinking more clearly. In it Toby discusses some of the most beautiful intranets an “jumpwords”

One intranet manager, Kurt (I’ll not divulge his full name nor his organization for the sake of fulfilling his confidentially obligations to his organization) informed me that one of the most popular features on his company’s intranet (a financial services organization of more than 10,000 employees) is a ‘jumpword’ application. A jumpword tool is attached to the search engine and allows people to seek out the best results which are manually coded to a specific keyword search.

One of the areas we have issues on is our navigation and providing more service to the employee on our intranet,” says Kurt. “The jumpword application allows people to enter something like “performance” and it takes them to the performance management site, which is highly popular. It’s a good tool but has festered into over 2000 jumpwords which is a heavy indication that the navigation is not helping people get what they need.

The jumpwords application is written in .NET with a backend SQL database. Employees fill out a request form (attached to the online application) requesting their jumpword and the URL they want it directed to. When a user types in the jumpword it does a lookup of the jumpword file and has logic that redirects them to the site associated URL. If there is no jumpword it brings them to the front search page.

The execution isn’t exactly as I would do it, but close enough for you to get the point. I might even do a mockup at some stage so you could see how it might work.

Column Two just linked to a post by the guys at CMS watch discussing “search best bets” which is accurate, but not necessarily relevant for law firms.

For those not familiar with the term, a “best bet” is a recommendation manually added to a search engine. For a very basic example, imagine you typed “senior partner” into your firm’s search engine, a manually created entry would return at the top of the list with a link to a page about your firm’s senior partner instead of having it lost amongst the firmwide communications from or intranet pages where the term “senior partner” can be found.

The premise of the CMS Watch blog is twofold. First, your search engine should be able to give you the relevant result automatically (and if it doesn’t you should consider a new search vendor).

Um, slightly impractical. YOU can try telling your IT Director that.

Second, CMS Watch worries about having thousands of best-bet links. If you’re clever, it need not get that bad, and even several thousand are manageable if you distribute ownership.

Consider the following scenario:

A law firm will typically have a number of must-find terms (like “senior partner”) which should show up. There’s probably 100 terms that are relevant globally (e.g. benefits, executive committee, leave) and maybe another 100 for each office (e.g. taxi, holidays, address, emergency).

The number of these terms is not very high. It might take a day or so to gather the content and input them into the system, especially if you delegate “best bet” ownership to an individual per office.

In terms of maintenance, a biannual process to review and update the entries can be conducted in even less time by the “best bet” owners.

The benefit? Staff in an office can find what they need much more easily. If your search engine can’t deliver office-specific results, writing your own best bets tool is pretty simple.

These sort of brute-force solutions are often discounted by IT professionals. Concerns tend to be based upon possible explosive growth which might someday cause grief for IT, without considering the benefit of helping staff today.

That mentality might be nice were firms quick to execute complex projects (not limited to IT). However, that’s not been my experience. The trade-off of possible increased maintenance for IT versus helping a lawyer book a taxi late at night is one I’d make any day of the week.

Ron Friedman has an insightful little post on Managing the Brand Called You. In it, talks about the “Mom yardstick”. If his mother can be found on google, why can’t you?

He also talks about society having reached the tipping point where the lack of a web presence “suggests a lack of involvement”.

Ron’s bang on. In addition to managing your network (something many professionals are poor at) you’ll now have to manage your online brand, and not just by being on Facebook or MySpace.

One piece of guidance that might be helpful is to consider what your Risk/Compliance department might you about email:

“Imagine any email you write ends up in the hands of the press”

Now, when considering your personal brand that advice might turn into:

“Imagine anything you write on the Internet ends up in the hands of a client or recruiter”

It’s time to be a little more strategic about how we use our web browsers.

If you just can’t wait, http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/ seems to be loading (mozilla.org’s timing out due to the release of Firefox 3).

The good folks over at Headshift have launched a new site which hosts a collection of case studies and use cases for Enterprise2.0 tools, including a special section for legal.

If you’re really keen, you can even track their new case studies and use cases as they add them to delicious.

I came across an interesting post from Microsoft Sharepoint Team Blog today which provides a good example of the power of Sharepoint. The details aren’t very interesting for KM folks, but the outcome is.

NewsGator recently announced their Social Sites product for Sharepoint 2007, which looks to provide an elegant mix of Facebook and Google Reader functionality for the enterprise. It’s well worth a look as the need for RSS is fairly clear, and the Facebook functionality might be used to support communities of practice within your firm.

Watch their video to get a better handle on what they offer (it’s pretty short).

I like to think of myself as being an advocate for change, able to move flexibly, and to adapt to new situatations (especially where technology is involved).

For the most part that’s true.

But today, I came across an example of why change is so difficult for people:

Now, that little picture is not very helpful without any context.

So, a story in three sentences.

While working today, I noticed that something felt wrong, but couldn’t place it. After an hour, I noticed that the Google favicon had changed in Firefox. I knew it didn’t matter, but I really didn’t like it (as I write this it is irritating me, possibly even taunting me).

It used to be , and changing to shouldn’t make a difference, but it’s annoying me.

Why? It’s different, nothing more, nothing less.

Just came across the very handy product compatibility matrix over on SharepointSearch.com. They also have “The BIG SharePoint Resource List” which you might take a look at.

Some useful excerpts.

CRM

InterAction (LexisNexis)

• Handshake Software

Siebel (Oracle)

• BA-Insight
• Vorsite

Document Management

WorkSite

(Interwoven)

• XMLAW
• SHAREPOINTWorks
• Interwoven

Documentum

(EMC Software Solutions)

• Vorsite
• EMC Software Solutions
• Metalogix Software Corp
• CASAHL Technology
• KnowledgeLake
• Tzunami Information Works
• Wingspan Technology Inc

Collaboration

eRoom

(EMC Software Solutions)

• EMC Software Solutions
• Metalogix Software Corp
• Tzunami Information Works

Microsoft Exchange

(Microsoft)

• SHAREPOINTWorks