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.

Enterprise Social Software at the Washington Post

View more documents from Dave Burke.

Web 2.0 Goes to Work at McGraw Hill

View more presentations from ross.

More Socialtext customer stories can be found here.

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.

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 3 /PRNewswire/ — As enterprises purchase social software to improve internal collaboration, Socialtext has launched a new Services Partners Program to increase the business value that customers gain from its platform. The first participants in the program are Future Changes, Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0, SiftGroups, SpanStrategies, The Adoption Council and Winkwaves. These services and consulting firms specialize in different strategic practices for deploying social software in the enterprise, not only ensuring fast adoption by employees, but driving positive business results in the process.

“We’re excited to have a great group of service partners who can help bring depth and value to customers who want Socialtext to free the flow of work at their organizations,” said Eugene Lee, CEO of Socialtext. “For too long, people have missed opportunities because they didn’t know which of their colleagues might have information that could help solve a customer’s problem or adapt to a change in the market. These service partners will help you get up-and-running on our platform in no time, and assist with cultural assessment, project selection and prioritization.”

“We focus on helping organizations tap strategically into the value of social computing and enterprise social media while actively managing the potential risks and concerns,” said Dion Hinchcliffe, President and CTO of Hinchcliffe & Company. “Socialtext is a vital platform for our new agile social business adoption approach known as ‘Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0.’ Socialtext provides a wide range of compelling models for social collaboration between workers, trading partners, and customers that we feel is best-of-breed, mature, and proven in many industries and verticals.”

“Socialtext provides software that helps teams improve knowledge sharing, streamline the input and revision process for key documents, and replace interruption with interaction,” said Stewart Mader, Founder and Senior Consultant at Future Changes. “Future Changes provides guidance, training, and analytics to help your organization embed the software into core business processes and catalyze widespread adoption.”

“Customers expect tangible value from social computing investments, in the context of business process and key performance goals that they work against every day,” said Sameer Patel, Founder of SpanStrategies. “The Span team has over a decade of experience helping leading organizations accelerate performance via the use of communication and collaboration frameworks and technologies in the context of business process. The Socialtext platform has proven experience with supporting key functions in the enterprise. This partnership with Socialtext enables us to help organizations execute their business objectives by surgically injecting the use of social constructs and software where it can truly deliver tangible performance improvement.”

“Socialtext has always been a leader in galvanizing the business community to embrace 2.0 technologies for strategic advantage,” said Susan Scrupski, Founder of The 2.0 Adoption Council. “The 2.0 Adoption Council is delighted to participate in this program, as our members are always eager for new sources of learning and market intelligence.”

“Over the past decade we’ve helped many organisations develop thriving external communities, and we’ve often needed to demonstrate the potential benefits in a controlled, internal way whilst ensuring that our clients are confident of the security and functionality of the application,” said James Skinner, COO of SiftGroups. “Socialtext gives us the ability to roll out a proven set of tools rapidly, allowing our clients to get straight to work and deliver value to their teams whilst simultaneously building stronger cases for investment in wider rollouts of Web 2.0 technology.”

For further information visit: http://socialtext.com/partners/

About Socialtext

As the Enterprise 2.0 leader, Socialtext applies Web 2.0 technologies to the critical challenges facing businesses. Enterprise 2.0 enables the collective intelligence of many, which provides a competitive advantage by increasing innovation, corporate agility, strengthening customer relationships and growing revenue. Socialtext provides hosted and appliance-based solutions to more than 5,000 customers world-wide, including Acumen Fund, BASF, Boston College, Davies Public Affairs, Egon Zehnder International, Emergent Solutions, Epitaph Records, The Hospital for Sick Children, IKEA, MicroStrategy, ‘mktg’, OSIsoft, SAP and Symantec.

People are the Platform. Socialtext Workspace is the first enterprise wiki and includes robust capabilities such as collaborative blogs. Socialtext Signals provides private Twitter-style microblogging. Socialtext People enables enterprise social networking. Socialtext Dashboard provides personalized and customizable widget-based interface for people and teams to manage attention. SocialCalc is the social spreadsheet for distributed teams. Socialtext Desktop brings it all together in a dynamic desktop application. Learn more about Socialtext at www.socialtext.com.

About Hinchcliffe & Company, Inc.

Hinchcliffe & Company is a leading premier consulting firm in the areas of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, social computing, cloud computing, and next-generation SOA. Based in Alexandria, Virginia, Hinchcliffe & Company delivers strategy and implementation services across North America, Europe, and Asia. Specializing in large enterprises, Hinchcliffe & Company’s clients includes some of the largest companies in the world on three continents.

Combining thought leading approaches with agile methods, cutting-edge research and innovative techniques matched with extensive field experience, Hinchcliffe & Company offers one of the most effective and up-to-date approaches for helping businesses transform to newer and more effective models for computing, IT, and business. Hinchcliffe & Company also founded and operates the popular Web 2.0 University, which it uses to drive strategic change in organizations around the world. Learn more about Hinchcliffe & Company at www.hinchcliffeandcompany.com.

About Future Changes

Stewart Mader, Founder and Senior Consultant, has led or advised enterprise-wide wiki deployments in Fortune 500 companies, universities, nonprofits, small and medium size companies. He is the author of two books: Wikipatterns and Using Wiki in Education, and created the widely-used Wikipatterns.com community for sharing enterprise social software adoption strategies. Advisory services include: BarnRaising workshops, Return on Adoption (ROA) measurement, and guidance on Pilot, Policy & Adoption Patterns. His website, Future Changes (futurechanges.org), is a popular source of strategies and guidance on how to improve collaboration and knowledge sharing within teams and organizations. It has been cited by publications including The Guardian (UK), The New Yorker, Fast Company, InfoWorld, and InformationWeek. http://www.futurechanges.org/

About SpanStrategies

SpanStrategies is strategy and execution services firm that brings together leading strategists, designers and technologists to help our clients accelerate business performance. Our team members have led strategic initiatives for leading organizations such as McKesson, Sun Microsystems, W.R.Wrigley & Co., Ingres and The Sabre Group in the areas of workplace collaboration, sales and marketing process efficiency and distribution partner and supplier networks. With strong roots in business process efficiency, we help our clients understand and exploit new performance acceleration opportunities afforded by social computing constructs and technologies to drive revenue and reduce cost.

Span is based in Palo Alto with a network of domain experts across the United States and Canada. More information at http://www.spanstrategies.com

About The 2.0 Adoption Council

The 2.0 Adoption Council is an exclusive community for peer-based, information-sharing on the latest thinking, best practices, case studies, and strategic counsel associated with executing socio-collaborative strategies and projects in the large enterprise. Members include many of the largest market-leading multi-nationals who are currently in some phase of 2.0 adoption. For more information on the Council, visit http://www.20adoptioncouncil.com.

About SiftGroups

We provide social media consultancy services and technologies to enable organisations to develop and sustain rewarding relationships with their audiences. Through working with publishers, membership bodies, charities and the public sector, we understand that a rewarding relationship might mean member retention to one organisation, and outright profit to another.

Our techniques help reveal the potential benefits that can be gained from investment in social media, and set out a strategy for delivering and sustaining those benefits.

We’ve been working with social media for more than a decade. Of course, in the early 1990s the term ‘social media’ hadn’t been coined yet, but communities with common interests were already taking advantage of the web to bring people together to network, discuss and debate. Our home-grown technology platform supported over 100 titles until late-2007 when we made the move to Open Source software, using Drupal to realise the benefits of a huge developer community coming together to deliver advanced functionality and reliability. http://www.sift.com/

About Winkwaves

Winkwaves is the Dutch agency for social media and knowledge management. We advise organizations on the strategic meaning and value of social media. Based on a human and scientific understanding of social behavior and profound knowledge of the latest trends in technology, we design virtual places where people like to meet, feel connected, feel safe en feel challenged to have meaningful conversations. http://winkwaves.com

Next Monday we are hosting a webinar with the Altimeter Group on 6 Ways to Get Business Value with Enterprise 2.0. Presenters include:

• Ray Wang, 2009 Analyst of the Year (IIAR), Partner, Altimeter Group
• Jeremiah Owyang, former Forrester Analyst, Partner, Altimeter Group
• Ross Mayfield, President & Co-founder, Socialtext

There are different ways to achieve success with social software. You can deploy broad, or deep, focus on formal vs. informal processes, etc. Learn the different options, and the risks and rewards of each. Using the right strategy, your company can get transformative value. But without a strategy, your project will flounder. Learn which approach is right for your organization.

In this even you will learn:

• 6 ways social software is successfully rolled out to organizations
• The deployment approach that is right for you
• The business value you can expect to achieve
• How to get the highest business value with the lowest risk

Attendees will receive:

An Assessment Guide to help you determine the strategy that is best fit for your organization
A whitepaper with examples of companies who have used each strategies

Register for the event now.