Socialtext

We've had a lot of demand for our solutions-oriented approach to Web/Enterprise 2.0 with the announcement of our core solution areas at the beginning of the year.

What makes these real solutions for our clients is the combination of capabilities, templates, integrations, and services best practices to ensure 100% business process alignment, real adoption, and actual business results. The Sales and Marketing solution area is one that is obviously close to my line of work.

Today, our marketing team published a "sandbox" environment where you can see some of the things that make it into our actual customer deployments, like examples of the homepage look and feel template, how our environment can be skinned, the templates and workflows that you might support there (like proposal generation, sales library, feedback from the field in a blog/discussion format, and real-time marketing communication). Clearly the underlying technology is a wiki, however its how you "bend" the wiki that makes this so much more, i.e. integrations into Salesforce.com, WebEx, ticketing systems, and the information structure that supports your team's communication and collaboration needs.

You can imagine that every sales and marketing professional will have access to an environment like this in their day to day operations, and whereas Salesforce.com helps organize the structured lead and pipeline data, this workspace approach to all the other non-pipeline related information helps consolidate, standardize, and drive sales and marketing efficiency.

The purpose of the sandbox is go in there, play around with it, and brainstorm on things you would like to see in your own sales and marketing teams' workspace environments. And you are always welcome to sign up for your own 14-day trial of our service or speak with one of our sales or service personnel to take your brainstorms further.

Click to visit the sandbox here!

One of the questions I get most frequently is: "If anyone can edit a wiki, how do you protect the organization from misinformation or, worse yet, from vandalism." So I was really happy to see the following paragraph in yesterday's New York Times article on Diplopedia, the State Department wiki for the diplomacy community:

What if someone creates disinformation or vandalism? Mr. Johnson was asked in Egypt -- a not-infrequent question when the topic of wikis comes up. He pointed out that unlike Wikipedia, Diplopedia does not allow anonymous contributors, so bad actors could be tracked down. He then observed, "There are plenty of ways to commit career suicide; wikis are just the newest one." (my emphasis)

Give that man a cigar! (That man is Eric M. Johnson from the State Department's eDiplomacy group.) Vandalism and misinformation may be legitimate concerns on public sites like Wikipedia, especially after high-profile missteps like the infamous Siegenthaler incident. Inside the firewall, however, it's a complete non-issue.

The difference is that inside the firewall, every comment, edit, blog post, and personal profile are automatically attributed by to the author by name--by real name, the name on your door plate, your email, your desk stationary, and your pay stub.

We all have many opportunities every day to flame each other, vandalize each other's work, and spread faulty or under-scrutinized information around the workplace. I could fire off a few choice emails or leave some nasty voicemails right now that would really upset some folks. Why don't I do it? Human decency, professional courtesy and, yes, a desire not to get fired, all have something to do with it. But it's not because I can't.

Until just a few years ago, most workers did not have access to tools which would allow them to mass-publish content to their peers. We now have that access in the form of blogs, wikis, discussion boards, personal profiles, and other collaborative tools. That's a big change. But it doesn't mean that basic standards and behavioral norms will suddenly fly out the window. I'm happy to see the State Department call that out for the myth that it is.

Tomorrow the Marketing & Sales 2.0 Webinar series continues with presentations by Dave Keller, NewsGator, Enterprise GM and myself on Improving Sales and Marketing Effectiveness with Social Software. Learn how business social software is being used by sales and marketing to:

• Ensure messaging and sales tools are informed by field insights
• Deliver timely and relevant information to marketing and sales employees via the location of their choice including web, mobile, desktop, and portal
• Improve market and competitive intelligence Increase knowledge sharing, feedback loops and expertise

Please join us at either 3pm GMT or 11am PDT on August 6th.