Socialtext

I'm really pleased to be able to welcome Julie to Socialtext's board of directors.  All the usual details are in the press release at http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/05-15-2008/0004814208&EDATE= but there's a lot more to this than what you can fit into a news release.

Julie and I have been swimming in parallel lanes of the same swimming pools for, it seems, our entire careers.  We've both been through the email, collaboration software, and enterprise business models routines, and we both still share a passion for how tremendous customer value and businesses can be built by enabling companies to harness their greatest assets - their people.

We reconnected after I joined Socialtext and I was struck by her breadth of experience, the wisdom and learnings she's gleaned through several different career moves, and the depth of her thinking and pattern-matching that is so important to real-world problem solving.  She's already added significant value through her insights, recommendations, and most importantly her probing "have you thought about..." questions that help us as a team stay on our toes.

I also wanted to state that I had explictly wanted to add a woman to our board - not for PR reasons - but rather because I believe that diversity benefits decision-making.  I've always believed that it's the best idea that should win, and that the best ideas usually emerge from a diverse range of inputs, models, experiences, and perspectives.  We're proud to be able to add someone like Julie to our team.

Julie was honored last week as the Alumni of the Year at her alma mater, and she was the distinguished speaker at the U of Alabama commencement.  Apparently she rocked the house down!

Welcome to the Socialtext team Julie!

-- Eugene Lee

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Yesterday I gave a keynote at Van Web 2.0 naar Enterprise 2.0 in the Netherlands.  My slides are here:

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Tonight our London office is co-hosting a social software dinner with Headshift.  If you are there, I hope you can join us.

-- Ross Mayfield

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Website redesigns are always a lot of work, but in this case we had a lot more moving parts than usual.  We upgraded our underlying content management system, integrated our trial signup process with our new salesforce.com implementation, and transitioned over to a new blogging platform.

 

We are trying to apply our core agile engineering principles to our website work as well - in other words we are now in position to update and respond to suggestions and feedback on a more iterative basis - so we welcome your feedback.

 

Our recent new product launches (Socialtext 3.0, Socialtext People, Socialtext Dashboard) have been received enthusiastically, and our 4 Solutions are now now front and center on our web presence.  We'll be talking more about these more frequently, especially now that we've upgraded all of our machinery.

 

Feedback and suggestions on the new web site layout welcomed.

-- Eugene Lee

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Socialtext is partnering with a variety of firms that provide Enterprise 2.0 and business transformation consulting services. Through these partners, and our own Professional Services group, we have long concentrated on delivering solutions, not just software, to our customers. Socialtext's four core Solution Areas announced last week evolved from this work and, now, they enable our partners to focus and expand the value they are providing to their clients. And, in addition to delivering these solutions to our customers, we use these same solutions to manage our relationship with prospective, new and established partners. We set up a wiki with each new partner that provides efficient and organized access to the Socialtext information needed to be successful. It really accelerates the productivity of new partners to have a central location for information and interactions with us, rather than a series of disconnected emails. Now, with the introduction of the Socialtext Dashboard, partners will be able to personalize the presentation and navigation of this information to best suit their business needs. One of the greatest benefits of these solutions is the direct and open feedback channel we get with partners. Participation is not limited to Socialtext channel management; participants include product development, marketing, customer support and others that benefit from the current information provided by the field and the sharing and communication in both directions that result. We add further immediacy to this channel by providing our partners with a number of NFR licenses that they can use, in turn, to collaborate with their clients. Last, but not least, I am really excited about the introduction of Socialtext People. The rapid expansion of our global partner ecosystem means that we can't meet face to face with our partners as often as we would like. Socialtext People provides another great tool to enable our partners to get to know us better and for us to better understand their strengths and be able to search for particular expertise needed by our customers.

-- Paul Wescott

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One of the four newly announced Socialtext Use Cases is particularly close to my heart, Collaborative Intelligence. We have a sales and services organization with more than 20 heads located in North America (centered in Palo Alto and New York), as well we have recently opened a sales office in London.

Our distributed nature and high growth over the last 12 months means it is critically important to (1) ramp up new hires quickly, (2) continue to develop our staff with learnings and best practices happening in the field, and (3) share these learnings from the field back to corporate to influence marketing, product, and sales strategies.

In our sales wiki today, we capture all prospect discovery calls (using a template that already contains the questions we use for discovery). Each rep has a dashboard that displays all of their quarterly discoveries and territory plans. These dashboards also display all their existing customers, and allow them to pivot to all the unstructured data related to that account like account plans, org charts, all the stuff you never end up putting in Salesforce.com. Our service team uses the wiki to manage the entire post-sales process for implementation, documenting ongoing account reviews, customer feedback, and more.

We track all our activity metrics in the wiki like appointments, qualification calls, WebEx and onsite meetings by team and by rep. We organize all our sales tools in our Sales Library section of the wiki containing discovery letter templates, customized PowerPoint presentations, close plans, vertical knowledge, use case expertise, etc. We publish our victories in the wiki and focus on why we won, not just the deal size. To top things off, we have integrated our wiki with Salesforce.com so that you can quickly jump to the structured data that we use for pipeline management, like close date, deal size, etc.

The new capabilities being announced with Socialtext 3.0 are also really exciting, and play directly into this use case. The Socialtext Dashboard enables customizing information flow for sales people dependent on their role and interests, along with even tighter integration with 3rd party widgets like Salesforce.com, Newgator, Google Alerts, and other tools we use on a daily basis. Socialtext People let us identify expertise, rapidly form solutions-oriented teams for team selling, and overall bring the team more closely together.

At prior sales management jobs, we didn't have tools that helped the team stay organized, share cross-functionally, discover serendipitous opportunities, reduce noise for the team, have a team culture of sharing and engagement, and really focus on sales productivity. In addition, we get the added benefits of tighter alignment with our marketing and product teams.

People keep talking about the "R" word (okay I'll say it, Recession) and how it is going to impact sales this year. My feeling is that companies need to get back to basics in these times, and focusing on practices that drive overall effectiveness like this use case will actually get a few other "R" words going -- like Results and Revenue.

-- Kris Duggan

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Socialtext announced two major product announcements today: Socialtext People and Socialtext Dashboard.  I'm excited about Dashboard, but People really rocks my world.

A lot of the coverage of People is calling it "Facebook for the enterprise". That's a fair description, but it misses what it is to me the coolest thing about People: Its in-the-flow-ness.

I love the way Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networking sites organize content around people and relationships. What I don't love is how very above-the-flow they are. Facebook and LinkedIn are places where you go to "network". Unless you're under 25 (which, for better or worse, I'm not), they're detached from the rest of your daily activity. A person's activities or experiences show up on Facebook or LinkedIn only when somebody makes a special effort to put them there. As a result, most of a person's activities don't ever show up. (For instance: I've run dozens of user feedback surveys, but you wouldn't know it from my LinkedIn profile.)

A few years ago, Lee Kempler and I wrote in the McKinsey Quarterly that companies need better ways to connect employees to each other based on their interests and expertise. Our core insight was that what matters most is not what people say about themselves, but what people's experience says about them. In other words, it is what people do in-the-flow not what they do above-the-flow that makes them interesting to connect and network with. The missing ingredient of social networking is connecting to in-the-flow activity that makes a person's profile and relationships meaningful.

Enter Socialtext People. Socialtext People isn't just an inside-the-firewall social networking tool. It's a networking tool that integrates with Socialtext wikis where people are doing their in-the-flow work: posting messages, drafting meeting agendas, taking notes, documenting processes, spec'ing products, and so on. You can see what people are actually doing, not just what they say they're doing. You can also see who they're doing it with.

That makes for an incredibly rich, detailed, nuanced view of a person's interests, activities, and expertise. It makes Socialtext a platform for a whole bunch of new and powerful activities:

• Identify true experts across the organization on even the most minute topics
• Find and connect with colleagues across the organization working on similar topics
• Conduct due diligence on internal "hires" for internal transfer or short-term projects
• Monitor employee or colleague activity
• Identify key influencers in the organization for change communications and post-merger management

You won't find that on Facebook or LinkedIn.

-- Michael Idinopulos

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Earlier this week, Socialtext hosted a webinar with Forrester Research analyst Rob Koplowitz discussing enterprise Web 2.0. Unfortunately Socialtext experienced some technical difficulties with its web conferencing provider, so many folks were unable to join the live event. The good news is that the webinar was recorded and an on-demand archived version is available. If you are interested in viewing the event, click here. Or if you would just like to download a copy of the slides that were presented - including some great market research and insights from Forrester - you can download them here.

-- Jeff Brainard

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Our announcements today are the fruits of a lot of hard work and, more importantly, some deep thinking based on deep customer engagements. On the surface it's about "putting people in the wiki" and "giving people their own customizable dashboards", but it's more profound than that.

What's fascinating about wikis in corporate environments is watching how quickly people not only put content in, but start having conversations. These often start as "email in public" kinds of dialogs, but over time evolve into a rich web of interpersonal and group dynamics that include co-editing, linking, and tagging. As this rich web of content grows, the knowledge, expertise, and relationships (OK, social networks) of the people contributing to this web becomes apparent through their contributions and interactions.

This is really powerful because the emergence of implicit knowledge, expertise, and relationships is much more relevant and useful than explicitly declared things like "expertise fields" in a profile or "these are my friends" declarations in a typical social networking tool. "What I do says more about me than what I say about me" and "what others say about me is more valuable than what I declare about me" are good ways to think about this (many thanks to David Weinberger's "Everything is Miscellaneous" for guiding this thinking).

So when I come across a theme or meme in a string of wiki content, Socialtext People now allows me to explore more about the people behind those posts. In large organizations, pivoting between pages, people profiles, and how they and others have "tagged" that person add a lot of rich context around the textual representation of those peoples' "above the flow" knowledge and expertise, as well as their "in the flow" context of what they're working on and with whom.

As these wikis grow and companies create more and more workspaces, we've found that folks really want to integrate the content and conversations that they are engaging in with the rest of what they are working on. Socialtext Dashboard addresses this by giving each person a place where they can create a personalized view of everything that's going on - with the wikis they're involved in, the people they're working with, and with other company-oriented intranet tools as well as extranet or public Internet tools. Socialtext Dashboard incorporates Socialtext-specific widgets such as "Recent changes in all my workspaces" as well as any standard Open Social gadget.

I'll be blogging in a lot more detail about these new product modules as well as the 4 Solutions that we launched today. Meanwhile I look forward to questions, comments, and dialog.

-- Eugene Lee

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In advance of next week's Web 2.0 Expo, Socialtext today announced that it has built upon its wiki foundation to launch a broad set of Business Social Software solutions. Two significant product innovations -- Socialtext Dashboard and Socialtext People -- extend the wiki platform for people to gain additional insight by managing their information, conversations and connections. Socialtext also launched four core Solution Areas: Business Social Networks, Collaborative Intelligence, Flexible Client Collaboration and Participatory Knowledgebase. The business social software launch heralds a new direction for the company, in the works since CEO Eugene Lee took the helm five months ago. Click here to read the full press release or visit the pressroom to view screenshots of the new functionality. Already Socialtext has received strong coverage of its announcement, including articles on Techcrunch, Mashable and Webware. If you are interested in learning more about this announcement or seeing a live demo, contact Socialtext sales.

-- Jeff Brainard

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Today Socialtext launched Socialtext People and Socialtext Dashboard, significant enhancements that make people a first class object in the wiki platform and give them greater control over their internal and external information.  We also launched Four Solution areas that turn features that demo well into strategic implementations.

For now, let me link elsewhere:

• TechCrunch: SocialText Putting A Little Social Into...Enterprise Wikis
• Mashable: Socialtext Makes Wikis Social; Announces People and Dashboard
• Webware: Socialtext enterprise wiki getting social network features
• Scott Schnaars: Socialtext is Made of People

• Social Web Strategies: New Socialtext innovations

• Press Release

For a personal demo, Contact Sales

-- Ross Mayfield

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