Although enterprise microblogging has emerged as a key technology to enable better collaboration between employees, it holds the greatest business value when it's integrated with other bits of social and enterprise software. That's the overall theme in an article today by Clint Boulton of eWeek. Detailing a recent Gartner report, Boulton writes that "while more than 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging by 2012, stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration."

The predictions reflect what we've experienced in the market with customers. One of the reasons our customers have derived business value from Socialtext Signals (our microblogging tool) rests in the fact that it integrates well with social tools in our platform. For example, when saving a workspace page, Socialtext can automatically post a link to the page in Signals, making it simple for your colleagues to discover and access the updated content.

In the article, Garner also predicts that "70 percent of IT-led social projects will fail." This bolsters our contention that line of business (LOB) people make the best champions for social software because they feel the pain points in their daily processes very tangibly. This is not to say IT won't play an important role. In allowing enterprise social software to integrate with other enterprise systems in a secure environment, IT is a critical player and needs to work closely with LOB champions and vendors to provide this integrated experience.

A significant downside to standalone enterprise microblogging tools, which isn't cited in the article, concerns security and control. As some of these free, niche tools crop up organically within companies -- and employees begin to share private, proprietary information over them -- an IT administrator must pay the vendor providing the service just to get control of logins, passwords and the domain the employees set up to host the information. This isn't a true freemium model; it's an extortionist sales model.

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Enterprise 2.0 champions aren't where you think they are.

Many managers these days are trying to identify members of their organization who will embrace social media tools and practices within their organization. That's a healthy development for Enterprise 2.0. It reflects a shift in thinking from the preliminary questions of Why and Whether to the intermediate question: How?

Unfortunately, many of the folks I meet don't know where to look for their Enterprise 2.0 champions. A  lot of managers find themselves walking the halls to find colleagues who "get it". They're not sure exactly what "it" is, but like Simon Cowell on American Idol, they're out searching the organization for fresh, undiscovered talent that have "it". There isn't universal consensus on the criteria for "it-ness", but here are some of the things I've heard managers say they're looking for:

• The Young and Hip: "Jimmy's only 28. He grew up on Facebook!"
• The Tech-Savvy: "Mary's always got the latest gadget. She's a natural for this!"
• The Connectors: "Martin knows everybody. He's the ideal social networker!"
• The Visionaries: "Isabel is so visionary. She'll totally get what we're trying to do!"

These assumptions don't lead to effective rollout strategies. There are three reasons for this:

1. These broad psychological categories don't accurately predict Enterprise 2.0 adoption. I've seen far too many examples of people embracing Enterprise 2.0 long after their crystals would have stopped glowing on Logan's Run. (If you're reading this blog and you get that reference, you're probably in that category yourself.)
2. They're not actionable, at least not at any scale. If you're trying to roll out across an organization of 5,000 or 10,000 employees, how are you supposed to know who the connectors are? Who's tech-savvy? Who's a visionary?
3. They don't transmit. We've all seen the lonely social media evangelist, howling in the corporate wilderness about the fact that no one else "gets it." Sooner or later that champion gives up, moves on, or simply trudges on in noble obscurity. The energy and enthusiasm of evangelists translates into organizational change only when the enthusiasm transfers. If that enthusiasm stems from the evangelist's personal quirks, it won't transfer.

The problem with these psychological approaches is that they focus on the traits of individuals, in the absence of any business context. They presuppose that it is something about an individual's personality, experience, psychology, or talents that determines whether that individual will be a valuable contributor to your social media rollout. What it misses is the central importance of organizational role. Recruiting social media champions based on personal criteria is like recruiting for a football team on raw talent, when you haven't thought at all about who is going to play which positions. If you just pick players based on their individual characteristics (speed, strength, agility, etc.), then you end up with a bunch of fast, strong, agile guys who are collectively unable to move the ball down the field.

There's a better way to do this.

In my experience, the most reliable way to generate sustained Enterprise 2.0 adoption is to target business functions and activities that are structurally motivated to improve collaboration. In other words, look for individuals whose professional success in their role depends on the things that Enterprise 2.0 will help them do.

In her memoir, "Madame Secretary", Madeline Albright tells a revealing story. Shortly after transferring from one agency of government to another, she found herself in the Kafkaesque position of writing a formal rebuttal to a position paper she herself had written. "You stand where you sit," Albright notes wryly. In other words, your actions are guided by your organizational role, not by your personal beliefs or psychology. Or as they say in the Godfather, "It's not personal. It's just business."

The same principle applies to social media. I haven't seen strong correlations between enterprise social media adoption and age, gender, tech-savviness, political affiliation, sexual orientation, toothpaste preference, or any other identifiable psychological characteristics. What I do see are strong correlations to role. When it comes to using social media, you stand where you sit.

Here's an example. Several months ago, we implemented Socialtext for a major global media company. Adoption ballooned month over month until it included thousands of users, with more joining every week. A little social network analysis revealed that most members of the community were invited, through one or two degrees of separation, by a single marketing manager. She wasn't particularly senior, and she wasn't based in corporate Headquarters. And yet she was transforming the way her company works.

We contacted the marketing manager to learn what it was about her that inspired her to invite so many colleagues into Socialtext. It wasn't her age, her love of technology, or her gregariousness at cocktail parties. It was the fact the she works in Marketing. "I'm responsible for marketing a new product line that's very different from what we've sold in the past," she told us. "Our sales force is still struggling to understand how to talk about it with customers and prospects. Hundreds of people email me with questions. I'm trying to make it really easy for them by creating a single place where they can find the current marketing materials, get their questions answered, and surface issues with our approach. Socialtext was the best way I could find to do that."

Like Madeline Albright, she stood where she sat. The demands of her Marketing role, not her personal passion for social media, made her an effective social media champion.

This isn't an isolated example. In most companies we work with, Marketing "gets it" ahead of their colleagues. They're eager to jump on board, and to invite their colleagues in Sales, Product Development, Customer Support, and other functions. That's because their organizational role requires them to do many of the things that social media helps companies do:

• Continuously maintain rapidly changing information
• Answer questions and gather feedback from their internal customers (primarily Sales and Business Development)
• Convene conversations about customer needs (across Sales, Marketing, Product Development, and Customer Support)
• Elicit feedback on the accuracy of public messaging (primarily from Product Development)
• Identify resources to help with "corner cases" (e.g., non-standard uses of the product, unusual sales pitches)

Because the Marketing Manager's commitment to social media wasn't a personal thing, it transferred quickly to other parts of the business. Other Marketing groups got wind of the project, and started posting their own content, creating their own workspaces, starting their own conversations. Then it started to spread beyond Marketing, to Sales and Product groups that had initially participated as consumers of Marketing content. Marketing's cross-silo reach positioned them to involve different parts of the organization, which then went on to do their own thing. That would not have happened if Marketing's success had been a function of one person's passion.

Marketing isn't the only function that works this way. Within every organization, there are multiple functions that are structurally motivated to drive social media adoption. Here's a pretty good starter list:

• Research (especially demand-driven research in professional services firms, e.g., consulting, accounting, legal, financial services)
• Product Development (especially consumer, pharmaceuticals, financial services, technology)
• Marketing
• Project Management (especially where teams aren't co-located)
• Human Resources
• IT (for Helpdesk-related issues and for internal discussions about what IT business needs and wants)
• Corporate Communications

So if you're looking for Enterprise 2.0 adoption within your organization, here's my advice: Pro-actively target the individuals and functions where professional success depends on exchanging knowledge, information, and ideas across large parts of the organization. That's where the real champions sit--whether they know it or not.

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One of the coolest parts about working at Socialtext is to see the diversity of our clients and the types of businesses they run. Today, I'm happy to announce one of our newest customers, Industrial Mold & Machine. Industrial Mold is one of those companies that works quietly in the background of American business, yet whose work touches the lives of millions of consumers each day. As the name might suggest, the company makes metal moldings for a variety of manufactured products, helping shape things like plastic cups, playhouses, sleds, milk jugs or kitchen utensils (to name just a few).

According to Larry Housel, Knowledge and Information Manager of the Twinsburg, Ohio-based company, Industrial Mold needed enterprise social software to serve its customers faster and better. With employees residing both in the offices and the shop floor, Larry and his team wanted a central, searchable place to store meeting notes and customer information. He also wanted to improve internal processes and workflow by providing tools that enable the company's employees to share information with each other openly. So Industrial Mold turned to our enterprise social software platform, and is now using secure enterprise microblogging (Socialtext Signals) and wiki workspaces.

Because Socialtext is as software as a service (SaaS) product, it's easy for people on the shop floor to access our applications via a web browser. In addition, Larry installed Socialtext Desktop, our Adobe AIR client that runs locally on people's machines and provides an elegant and fast way to consume Signals, Activity Streams and other areas of our platform.



"We want to appear as one unit in everything we do," Larry told me this week. "To do that, we want process improvement. We have a lot of people thinking about how we can improve our daily workflow and serve customers better, and I want to capture that information. For instance, how do we accept a piece of material? Who needs to be notified? Who needs to be here for things coming in? These ideas will now go into a Socialtext for us to figure out, discuss, and act on."

For the back and forth conversations that occur between employees during the day, Larry says Industrial Mold employees will update their colleagues using Socialtext Signals, our private, Twitter-like tool that enables people to share short messages with each other in real time. Industrial Mold wants more of its communication to happen openly, opposed to being locked away in e-mail boxes or people's brains. "Signals allows all that communication to be searchable and discoverable later," Larry says. "The more stuff we've normally done in e-mail that we can pull into a Signals is a victory as far I'm concerned."

So why did Larry and Industrial Mold choose us? He told me he likes the fact that the social features in our product mirror those that employees use at home, such as Facebook and Twitter. In addition, he appreciates how each social feature ties in nicely with another. For example, when you edit a wiki page in our platform, you can choose to Signal that action to your colleagues so it appears in their microblogging stream, where they can click on the link to view the changes made to the page.

We'll be tracking Larry and Industrial Mold's progress, and we're happy to welcome them to the Socialtext family.

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The serendipitous nature of enterprise social networks continues to amaze me. Take what happened here last week here at Socialtext over our microblogging platform, Socialtext Signals.

One of the reps on my sales team Signaled that she just gave a demo to a prospective customer at a very large company. Less than 5 minutes later, our director of marketing responded (via another Signal) that his brother is CIO at that company, and how can he help? An offline conversation ensued, an introduction was made, and now we are having conversations at a level we would have had to work 10 times as hard to get.

People in your own company probably have a closer level of connection to your customers -- and potential customers -- than you might think. To make sure those connections happen, you need an open environment where you can ask questions, find the right people, and get answers. That discovery process is much harder without a tool like Signals. In e-mail, information becomes locked away. If our director of marketing, for example, hadn't been CCed on an e-mail message about that potential client, we never would have found out that he had a connection there that could help.

My guess is that a simple message -- such as "I'm trying to get in to BigCo, can anyone help?" -- to a company of 1,000 people will initiate responses from 5 - 6 people who at least might know someone. From relatives to close family friends to old acquaintances from past lives, they might have an in. In most cases, they will be stronger introductions than anything you'll get from LinkedIn or any public social network.

Selling is hard work. You need to have a lot of different moving parts all line up in order to get a signed contract. One of those things is getting all of the right people on board. This requires a lot of skill, planning, presentation and sometimes, a little bit of serendipity.

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Are you ready to become a collaboration super hero? Your training is just a click away.

As companies recognize the benefits of social software at work, products such as wikis, profiles, and microblogging are quickly becoming standard tools within enterprises.

To help ensure that you get the most out of Socialtext, each month we offer a series of free webcasts designed to help you learn to use these new tools as effectively as possible.



There are three classes:
1. Getting Started With Socialtext - A Platform Overview
2. Collaborate Effectively With Shared Workspaces
3. The Benefits of Enterprise Microblogging and Online Spreadsheets

These classes will show you how to move beyond the world of email and file attachments, and teach you how to create information that can be contributed to, and consumed by everyone in your company.  You'll learn how to get answers faster than a speeding bullet, break down the knowledge barriers between departments, and easily discover the colleagues that can help you get your job done.

Are you ready to begin you training?  Click here to register today.

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Momentum fueled by doubling of user base, record quarter-over-quarter bookings growth.

PALO ALTO, Calif., Jan. 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Socialtext enjoyed a record-breaking year in 2009, setting its highest quarter-over-quarter bookings growth in the company's history. Businesses are turning to Socialtext's social software platform to gain higher levels of employee engagement, commitment and performance not achievable in the past. As the leading enterprise social software company moves into 2010, it expects continued growth in new bookings and renewals, and another record year in overall bookings and revenue.

"In 2009, there was a collective awakening about the value of greatly improved knowledge flows among a company's greatest asset, its people," says Eugene Lee, Socialtext's CEO. "In 2010, social software will become a staple for enterprises looking to improve the way their employees communicate and get work done."

Large and midsized enterprises across many industries -- including media, health care, manufacturing, and technology -- have deployed Socialtext so their employees can collaborate more easily and tap each other's expertise, enabling them to stay connected, aligned and informed. With greatly improved knowledge flow and teamwork, these companies can now respond faster to changing market conditions and new revenue opportunities. In doing so, they better meet the needs of their customers.

              "Socialtext got all my smart people pulling in the same
              direction."
             Don Smith, Vice President of Customer Service, OSIsoft

              "People call it the single most useful tool that Davies has
              introduced to staff, period."
             Brandon Edwards, President & COO, Davies

To meet customer demand for its enterprise social software platform, Socialtext is expanding, hiring across multiple departments in 2010. While Socialtext is looking forward to the coming year, highlights from 2009 include:

• From Q1 to Q4, the company grew bookings by more than 200 percent.
• The company grew its customer base to 6,500, while active users doubled.
• Each quarter, the company beat its record for renewal bookings.
• Bookings growth from customer expansions nearly tripled, in large part due to organic adoption of Socialtext's fully integrated social software platform inside companies.

              "Once people saw what they could do with Socialtext, each
              business unit started their own social software revolution."
              Steve Brewer, Customer Connection Mgr. & Systems Integration,
              FONA International

• Socialtext released its Microblogging appliance, allowing companies to deploy secure, private microblogging enterprise-wide very quickly, and then expand into other uses of the Socialtext social software platform later, such as deploying a social intranet, a social corporate directory, and letting the activity streams and other automated mechanisms do the work of keeping the organization informed.

      "With microblogging from Socialtext, people understand each other
      more, and they know what others are doing. This lets us respond
      more quickly to new opportunities."
     Tim Eby, General Manager, St. Louis Public Radio.

• Socialtext shipped SocialCalc, the first and only social spreadsheet integrated with a social software platform, developed with VisiCalc creator Dan Bricklin. SocialCalc has allowed companies to stay in touch with the state of the business.

              "With SocialCalc, I can go in at one point in the day and see
              what's going on in all our active campaigns right now. It helps
              us distribute information and knowledge faster, so we can react
              more quickly."
              Dave Ball, Vice President of Consumer Marketing, Meredith
              Corporation.

• Socialtext Desktop allows people to access the Socialtext platform via a fast Adobe AIR app, providing a real-time experience for Activity Streams and Signals.
• The new Socialtext Mobile brought the enterprise social software platform to employees on-the-go.
• The company's new service partners program complements their in-house professional services organization and ensures customers get the fastest adoption and path to strategic business results.
• The company launched a "freemium" package that allows companies to get up and running with secure microblogging in minutes, providing a replacement for microblogging networks that have cropped up organically among employees, and that are neither secure or IT-friendly.

About Socialtext:

As the enterprise social software leader, Socialtext applies Web 2.0 technologies such as microblogging, social networking and wikis to the critical challenges facing large and mid-market businesses. Socialtext's enterprise social software platform allows employees to share expertise, speed workflows and get their jobs done faster. Socialtext provides hosted and appliance-based solutions to more than 6,500 customers world-wide, including EgonZehnder, Epitaph Records, Mayo Clinic, McGraw-Hill, OSIsoft, Symantec and The Washington Post. Learn more about Socialtext at www.socialtext.com.

SOURCE Socialtext

RELATED LINKS
http://www.socialtext.com

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Do you want to improve the impact of your workspace pages?

Well if a picture tells a thousand words, then how many does an embedded video, slide presentation, or map replace?

With Socialtext it is easy to embed almost any type of web based content onto your workspace pages, here's how:
You can view more How-To videos on the Socialtext Customer Exchange.

Don't forget to subscribe to the Socialtext Youtube Channel to keep up with all the great videos.

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Wondering what the value of enterprise microblogging could be for your company? Since we launched our microblogging tool, Socialtext Signals, we've been gratified to see how our customers have used it to free the flow of work inside their organizations and derive incredible business value and improved collaboration among employees.

Take our latest case study of an organization using Signals: St. Louis Public Radio. The station, which has been around for nearly forty years, possessed some classic communication and collaboration challenges. As we highlight, SLPR's internal communication mechanisms (mostly e-mail and phone) were causing overloaded e-mail inboxes and slowing the time it takes to serve the station's members. People used e-mail as a crutch when they couldn't find the right people and information to solve their business challenges. Now, with Signals, everyone at SLPR can ask questions openly without interupting people, and get answers that remain searchable for the future.

What separates Signals from other standalone enterprise microblogging tools is that it's integrated with other pieces of social software, such as our Wiki Workspaces, Activity Streams, and Socialtext People, our social networking profiles that allow workers to share their expertise with each other.

As CIO.com highlighted in its article about SLPR's use of Signals recently, the examples of how enterprise microblogging has improved the station's internal processes have been clear to see:

For example, SLPR's receptionist received a call from a listener who heard an announcement on the radio about an event at a local high school and wanted to know more about it. Instead of sending an e-mail blast to all staff members, the receptionist used Socialtext's app to poll the staff, and received an answer in less than five minutes.

As we wrote in our latest business value whitepaper, when utilizing social software, organizations of all shapes and sizes can improve both their formal and informal processes to serve customers faster, react to change, and ultimately beat out competitors. SLPR has been a great example of how an organization can harness the power of Enterprise 2.0 technologies like Socialtext, and we look forward to sharing more of our customers' experiences with you.

-Chris Lynch (@cglynch)

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Last week I had the pleasure moderating a session at the Web 2.0 Expo with two of our customers, The Washington Post and McGraw-Hill. Our session, Web 2.0 Goes to Work: How Two Media Companies Implemented Business Social Software got high marks for sharing practical insights.

Below are their presentations, we will share an audio recording when available.


More Socialtext customer stories can be found here.

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While doing product demos on the tradeshow floor of Web 2.0 Expo, we witnessed an interesting phenomenon.  As soon as one person started to watch a demo, a few more people would join in. Then a few more.  After a few seconds, we'd have a crowd.

Why does this happen?  Because people are interested in what other people are interested in.  The same affect can be witnessed as long lines form to get into the hottest new club, or as you look in the window of a crowded restaurant and decide you want to eat there.

This "crowdification" also happens with social software tools, where as more people become active in a system, the more value the system has.



Kick Start The Process

At our demo booth, when we had a few quiet minutes, we would have one of our staff pose as an interested party whom I would demo to, and inevitably a crowd would form.  So how do you get this type of traction for your company's internal social software tools, such as blogs, wikis, microblogging, groups, etc?  You do the same thing.  Find a few key people who have an interest in seeding the conversations/content.  They are often called Champions or Evangelists.  Have them start to participate, and make sure their contributions provide value to their colleagues.  Those people will then respond, either by adding to the existing content (edits/comments/links), or even better adding new information of their own.   One person will turn into 3 or 4, which will then turn into 10 or 12, and then the crowd will form.

So don't simply roll out new tools, make sure you have the leaders in place that will encourage others to follow.  This will help a crowd form, and make your new social software platform the hottest club inside your company.

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