Quora‘s beautifully designed, elegantly executed Q&A might be burning up the blogs, but how is the site performing in the real world?
Web analytics firm KISSmetrics has just published an infographic about “The Wonderful World of Quora.” The charts show some interesting details, such as the growth of Quora’s userbase as well as the upward trend of monthly uniques. KISSmetrics also points out the myriad ways to use Quora beyond just asking and answering questions.
The infographic was created with help from Semil Shah, an active Quora user and fan.
What do you think of Quora’s chances of long-term success? Do you use the platform, yourself? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.
HansonMB writes "Facing the likelihood of state budget cuts that would eliminate $15 million for library and reading programs – and, apparently, create a future in which people no longer read things on paper – the city of Newport Beach is considering turning its first library into a community center that would host all the same amenities – except for the books."
The library has been inundated with hate-mail as people around the country have learned of their idea, and they hastened to clarify that no final decision has been made; carting books in as needed from other locations was always part of the plan. Whether or not they go through with it, efforts are underway elsewhere to create a massive, public digital library, spurred in part by the recent ruling against Google Books.
Android: Google Maps rolled out some new features for their location-tracking Latitude app today, letting you view summaries of where you go and spend most of your time. It's pretty cool—so cool, they make us actually want to use Latitude.More »
Definition: “Center of Excellence”
This is a program deployed by companies trending in the advanced levels of social business maturity. The Social Media Center of Excellence (CoE) is a centralized program that provides resources, training, and strategy to a variety of business units that are deploying social media in order to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and provide standardization. This team is often run by the Corporate Social Strategist, who’s the business stakeholder and program champion. To learn more, read the full research report on this role, and a list of these budding professionals.
The Social Media Center of Excellence has Four Major Duties: Planning, Resources, Processes and Vendor Selection and Management
Data: Companies Desire To Organize Social Media
Adoption by corporations only continues to rise. Business units can deploy their own efforts without the permission of corporate, whether they are ready or not.
Staffing for these programs is the top spend against all programs, consuming $278,000 per average corporation is spent, out of the total of over $800k total annual spend.
Business Case for a Center Of Excellence
Corporations realize that social business is a horizontal function spanning all departments from: marketing, support, product, and supply chain, and must develop a centralized resource to serve the corporation, these programs provide the following benefits:
Provide Customers With a Consistent Social Experience. Business units can either be coordinated in their efforts, or fragmented and decentralized, without a common program in place each business unit will develop their own programs resulting in wasted resources and a fragmented experience to customers.
Obtain Efficiency Throughout the Organization. The cost will only increase as more business units develop social efforts on their own without proper “guardrails.” Secondly, this increases time-to-market by enabling various business units to communicate with each other.
Foster Accountability Across Business Units. Corporations are saddled with hundreds of social assets which it is having difficulty tracking, let alone the risk of a single vendor selling multiple instances to various business units. This central group helps to sunset abandoned efforts and increase success of those in motion.
Coordination Among Business Units. Companies needs processes and policies to handle negative situations and mitigate potential PR crises in social. This centralized group can quickly work with various arms of the company in a coordinated way to reduce risk, and increase responses to PR urgencies.
Case Examples
Corporations who are advanced at social business are likely to have a social media group in a centralized location that serves the rest of the corporation. The common name for this team is called Social Media “Center of Excellence” although there are quite a few variations of the theme. No surprise a majority of the examples we’ve found emerge from the first-to-adopt industry the technology space, here’s a few of note:
Intel has one of the first groups to adorn the term Center of Excellence lead by Becky Brown, and serves as a dedicated team to a cross functional stakeholder group even within various Geos. They’ve trained thousands of employees through their program Digital IQ (available on the intranet), and keep teams up to date through an internal newsletter called “The Buzz”
Adobe has launched a Center of Excellence in late 2009 by Maria Poveromo that adopted the Hub and Spoke model and includes cross-functional “social council” for cross functional sharing and support. This program provides governance, policies and guidelines, training, measurement support, and best practices including “guardrails”
Ebay has created a Center of Excellence that provides resources to both business functions like HR, Strategy, Platform, and Corporate Communicaitons, and also to geos and product units. They provide social strategy, alignment of roadmaps and plans, and analytics. They keep teams current through monthly social media council meetings. See this slideshare to learn more.
Matrix: Separation of Duties and Responsibilities:
Center of Excellence “Hub”
Business Units “Spokes”
Description
This centralized group, often a corporate function provides services to business units for standardization, enablement and more.
Spokes are business units that deploy social media on their own, once they’ve been properly trained and provided resources from the central team
Often located in:
The “Center of Excellence” is often located inside of the social media hub, which can also contain executive support. In some cases, the terms “Hub” and “CoE’ are interchangeable
The Business Units are often located in the “spokes” that can include product groups, business departments, and even regional groups. For example, SAP and Intel have social media leads in EMEA for those specific markets.
Primary Duties:
Set guidelines, policies and processes, and hold Spokes accountable. Provide and facilitate learning, education, and research in real time, reducing risk. May own listening tools, and distribute best practices. Report and coordinate with dotted line spokes, e.g. Executives, HR/Associates, Legal
Deploy social media efforts on their own, within established guidelines. Report and coordinate with Spoke on strategy, deployment, and measurements. Share best practices and learning to CoE and other business units
Limited to:
In the advanced corporations should be come an enabler to spokes –as they cannot manage all efforts. Should allow for regional and product level customization for programs
Should not repeat efforts created by CoE, and work with centralized group for common measurements, process, vendors.
Corporations Must Develop a Center of Excellence:
Follow These Three Steps to get your program started:
First, start with anointing your open leader, the Corporate Social Strategist as the leader for this program. Learn more about this role in our research reports.
Secondly, obtain an executive sponsor that will champion, defend, and fund this program as you build our your business case. Use principles from Open Leadership to help them maintain command when they give up control.
Then, roll out the program in the following order to arrive in a Hub and Spoke model: Governance, Process, then an Education program.
Above: Altimeter offers the Social Readiness Roadmap which gets corporations prepared for social business internally by evaluating over 45 criteria. It provides a clear program plan to get ready, as well as recommendations for budgets, org models, headcount, ROI models, based on industry benchmark data.
We’ve written about the younger generation of consumer Web entrepreneurs taking on enterprise software, aiming to make truly usable business software that– to put it bluntly– doesn’t suck. Now, at least one group is aiming to apply all the lessons of the consumer Web and mobile apps to revolutionize another neglected, stodgy industry: Healthcare.
RockHealth, a new incubator for healthcare IT startups, opened its doors for applications on Friday and has already received more than forty submissions. RockHealth’s founder Halle Tecco didn’t want to spill the beans on specific ideas, but examples include home health monitoring apps via the iPhone that can update physicians on chronic conditions or iPad games that can be used as hospital therapy for sick kids.
This isn’t your parent’s healthcare IT movement. The intersection between technology and hugely inefficient health care was talked up in the mid-1990s and again in the early 2000s but hasn’t yet yielded many huge companies. Innovation in the healthcare industry usually comes from inside hospitals and heathcare organizations– not always the best technologists. Meanwhile technologists don’t usually get real problems patients, doctors and hospitals face. “It’s a culture of ‘no’ and a culture of red tape,” says Tecco. “You can’t iterate, and you can’t move fast.”
So why bother? Tecco has had an obsession with applying consumer Web technology to solve healthcare’s problems since she entered Harvard Business School. Her application said she wanted to help bridge the two worlds, and unlike most HBS students, she graduated with the same idea. Her summer internship was even approving healthcare apps for Apple’s app store. She sat next to the woman approving gaming apps, and they had utterly different jobs. “She’d have all these cool things coming in, and I’d be begging for a hospital to just update its logo,” Tecco says.
Sexy or not, Tecco was determined to create a bridge between hot shot Web entrepreneurs who want to build something useful and places like the Mayo Clinic who don’t have a clue how to recruit them but desperately need their skills. She’s raised $500,000 for RockHealth and will be giving up to a dozen selected companies $20,000 grants to build their products, along with contacts at hospitals, healthcare organizations and even the FDA to help remove barriers. The plan is to have all the company selected by RockHealth’s June 16 launch party, and open the doors to the incubator June 20.
The main parameter is that teams can’t have raised venture capital yet, but angel funding or friends and family money is fine. As far as her own funding, Tecco decided to build RockHealth as a nonprofit, so that it could be more mission-than-sheer-returns-oriented. That said, many of her backers are venture capitalists, hoping she’ll spur more innovation for a huge, inefficient and lucrative market that Web 2.0 has mostly ignored. Supporters include Accel Partners, Aberdare Ventures, the California HealthCare Foundation, Microsoft HealthVault, Mohr Davidow Ventures, NEA and Nike; partners include the Mayo Clinic and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.
