Socialtext blog

Using Enterprise Microblogging for Q&A

2010-03-12T19:28:10Z

In Star Trek, the crew of the Enterprise could get an answer to almost any question instantly, simply by asking the Computer out loud. While we're not quite there yet, with countless websites, search engines, and social networks providing access to almost unlimited data, we're pretty damn close.

The problem is that while automated search results are helpful, they often provide more information that you can (or want to) process. So how do we filter through all the results to get the best answers? The solution often involves turning to people. We ask our friends and colleagues for their insight and opinions. For example, on Twitter and Facebook, many people ask questions to the network they've built, rather than "Googling" for the answer. If you need to know who sings a certain song, or where you can get a replacement battery for your Macbook, odds are someone in your community will quickly provide a response. The power of querying your friends led both Google and Microsoft to pay Twitter millions to add public tweets in the results of their massive search engines.

As the use of question-and-answers over social technologies increases, businesses are looking at how they can provide similar services internally. That's where a secure enterprise microblogging solution, such as Socialtext Signals, comes in handy. Signals allows colleagues to conduct Twitter-like Q&A, but do so internally, eliminating any concerns that company confidential information might be discussed in public.

With Signals, you can ask questions openly to your colleagues in a private setting, and get informed answers quickly. This represents a huge departure from past technologies. In the past, if you had an HR-related question, you most likely would have sent an email to someone in the HR department, and that's if you even knew the proper person to contact. Depending on the size of your company, you might spend 20 minutes first, just trying to identify who to reach out to. Microblogging works much differently. If you ask the same question openly via Signals, anyone in HR has the opportunity to respond, or you might even get an answer back from someone in Engineering or Sales, who recently had the same question and now knows the answer. Additionally, that conversation is now discoverable by everyone, rather than locked away in just your individual inbox.

Similar to how social networks provide advantages over Googling, Q&A via Signals also has advantages versus standard intranet searches:

Search indexes don't (yet!) contain the information inside our heads. I can't search the company intranet for "Does anyone have connections with a graphic artist that could help us with our new website?" Being able to access the wealth of tactic knowledge from across the entire organization is incredibly valuable.
Search results don't factor in the human traits like opinion and experience which your colleagues can provide. While automated results are quick and plentiful, they may not always provide the most useful information.
Search is only good when you know what you're looking for. If I want to find "Who is the Sales Exec for the Acme account", an intranet search will probably find that from a page or profile. But an intranet search won't help much with "Does anyone remember the name of the company that launched last week saying their engine is 10% faster than ours?"

As you can see, enterprise microblogging can empower your entire organization to help one another. Questions get answered faster, enabling people to spend more time on business tasks, rather than searching for information.

Dachis Group and Socialtext Partner to Advance Dynamic Signals

2010-03-11T17:28:18Z

I'm in Austin at the Social Business Summit, where we just announced a partnership with the Dachis Group. Our initial focus is with their Dynamic Signals practice, driven by Jevon MacDonald, who blogged:

The new Socialtext 4.0 is a great example of an out of the box Social Business Software that can be deployed quickly to enable signaling and collaboration within an organization. Socialtext's support for Dynamic Signals and the ability to integrate external systems via a rich set of APIs has made Socialtext one of the most powerful and easily deployed solutions available.

We have a long standing relationship with Headshift, the leading social software consultancy in Europe, which was acquired by the Dachis Group last Fall.

"The Socialtext team are true pioneers in social business and E2.0, and their investment in product development means Socialtext has stayed consistently ahead of the curve in adopting new features such as activity streams, micro-blogging and social networking. Without doubt, Socialtext is one of the leading social business platforms available today." - Lee Bryant, Managing Director, Europe

Just as the Portal market drove the consolidation of enterprise search into a single command line, Socialtext and its partners will unify Activity Streams and Microblogging to cross-fertilize application silos. This is more than an IT strategy, and the expertise of the Dachis Group will prove a valuable partner for helping companies optimize their signal flow towards business goals.

Sharing Status Updates Reduces Duplication Of Work

2010-03-09T02:30:00Z

Last week I wrote Using Social Software To Accelerate Business Performance, as the introductory post to a new series where I'm going to discuss how "Enterprise 2.0" tools provide benefits in the business world. I'm going to begin the series today by discussing the internal use of microblogging, which enables people to openly share short messages with their coworkers.

For those of you unfamiliar with microblogging, the most widely known example is Twitter, where you enter "140-character or less" messages, press update, and essentially anyone in the world can read what you have to say. Notice that microblogging differs greatly from email and instant messaging, where the audience is limited, since you specifically choose who the recipients of an email or chat message are. With microblogging, the information is shared openly, enabling more people to read, and thus benefit from what is being shared.

Internal microblogging provides companies similar benefits to services like Twitter, but adds a layer of privacy, by sharing the information only within your company. This enables you to provide status updates internally, which you would not share with the public. For example, you can mention customers, codenames, future projects, and other "internal-only" things.

Socialtext provides internal microblogging via Socialtext Signals. With Signals, when someone posts a message, all their colleagues can read what is being shared. (In a future blog post I'll explain how you can send signals to a subset of people using Groups) It important to point out that the content shared via Signals is searchable, so the information can be discovered by everyone at any time. Compare that to email, where a great deal of valuable knowledge is locked away in individual in-boxes, available only to the people that were listed on the To: and cc: lists.

So let's look at a specific example. This morning I signaled a status update "Generating a list of 2000 fake name, titles, phone numbers, and office locations for our new demo sandboxes." I did not think much of it at the time. I was simply practicing what I preach, and openly sharing with my coworkers what I was doing. Much to my delight, an hour or so later (as seen below) one of my colleagues Graham, read what I wrote and replied with "Once you've got that list, could you send me a copy?"

Now Graham does not work with me in Marketing. He's one of our developers who happens to work on things like directories and LDAP. The 10 seconds it took me to share what I was doing, has now saved Graham hours of time duplicating the work. Multiply the time saving benefits of this one occurrence by the dozens of similar times that this happens each day, and then ask yourself "How can we afford to not be using microblogging inside our company?"

Want more proof, take a moment and read about how St. Louis Public Radio is using Signals to openly share information. As station manager Tim Eby says: "People understand each other more, and they know what others are doing. This lets us respond more quickly to new opportunities."

Next up, I'm going to write about how you can use internal microblogging for questions and answers.

Why Groups Matter

2010-03-04T00:24:56Z

Today Socialtext launched Socialtext 4.0, a significant step forward for our enterprise social software platform. One of the most important new capabilities we've introduced is Collaborative Groups, and I thought I would take a breather from press and analyst briefings to jot some thoughts down on why we think they are important.

Groups in the enterprise are different from groups in public social networks

Keep in mind that our goal is to help organizations become more effective - by releasing trapped knowledge, connecting people, and helping them collaborate to get work done. So our goal with groups is different from how a lot of group-type functionality shows up in places like Facebook or LinkedIn. A few of the key differences are:

Some groups are related to org structure. Many larger organizations have groups that are formed from nodes on their directory tree. Socialtext People can be connected to corporate directories via LDAP or Active Directory, and our new Groups functionality leverages that capability.

There's a wide range of privacy needs for groups at work. There are two dimensions of privacy as they relate to groups in the enterprise - Discoverability and Membership. It's just fine for many groups to be discoverable by any employee in the company - the golf club, a group of people with expertise in a certain discipline, or a task force working on a cross-functional initiative. Some of these may have open membership, while some may need approval. On the other hand, some groups need to not be publicly visible - for example a task force evaluating an acquisition target - in which case it needs to be completely private. We've always worked hard to design privacy into the foundation of our architecture; as a result our new Groups and related functionality preserves and leverages that multidimensional privacy spectrum. And remember that Socialtext has a uniquely flexible deployment option - a SaaS appliance that can be installed behind the firewall.

Groups want to get work done. We're enabling people not only create and form groups, but to provide and "personalize" the full range of Socialtext's collaboration features (Signals, wiki workspaces, Dashboards, etc.) for the specific usage and goals of the group.

Making it easy to form groups, but with appropriate administration

Ross Mayfield wrote a great blog post talking about how "We've made group-forming ridiculously easy". We've incorporated a lot of customer feedback into balancing the needs of IT Administrators to have some control while at the same time removing friction that makes it difficult for business people to create and form groups.

Groups provide context

Ever since we introduced Socialtext Signals, our secure enterprise microblogging capability, the deployment, adoption, and usage of it has grown rapidly. As Signals has been deployed enterprise-wide with great success, we immediately saw the opportunity to deepen the value by provide Signals Channels in conjunction with Groups. This makes it really easy for groups to take their discussions out of the fully public stream through a simple pull-down menu pick - note that people have been hacking this for awhile on Twitter using hashtags - except that everyone still sees them (remember the really annoying tweet flood last year during SXSW - oh no is that coming up again soon?) In Socialtext's Signals Channels, the context is preserved for the people in those channels, and the signal-to-noise ration is improved for those who aren't. Adina Levin wrote a great post expanding on this "The revival of groups in the age of the network".

Groups across the company boundary

We've been supporting customers in B2B secure extranet use cases for years, and as we've added Signals and now Groups we've been thoughtful and careful to deal with the privacy and sharing issues that multiple extranets create. Maximizing sharing and transparency within the company while separating what is visible across and between different business partners is a hard problem, and I'm proud of some of the hard thinking and elegant solutions our team has come up with. If I'm a law firm, I clearly can't have any leakage of information going on between my clients, or between what one team in my firm is doing with Client A and another team is doing with Client B - and moreover I probably don't want either client to know the identity of my other clients. We've tackled some pretty complex situations throughout our company evolution and we're lucky to be able to build on our past experience and the architecture has evolved through that experience. Some highly visible privacy mis-steps by some other vendors recently just highlight the importance and difficulty of these problems.

Groups are all about people

My "Business is Conducted by People, not Users" post described how important People are to our way of thinking. Socialtext 4.0 is just another major step forward in putting people front and center - making it easy for them to find each other, create groups and teams, and then marshall the collaborative resources to help them get stuff done. I'm super proud of the Socialtext team in delivering this milestone, and we're blessed to have great customers who've helped us design, refine, and deliver this major release.

How General Motors Uses Socialtext for Its R&D

2010-03-01T20:35:56Z

General Motors' Research & Development has a global network of research centers and science & technology offices. One of the ways the research staff shares their work with colleagues is through a semi-annual forum. It provides researchers with the opportunity to interact face-to-face or virtually, using audio/web teleconferencing and a file management system. But due to the geographic distribution of GM R&D, it results in some attending the forum early in the morning or late at night.

To address the difficulty in getting researchers to interact with each other at the semi-annual forum, GM turned to Socialtext to provide a central, secure place where this research can be shared openly among the GM research community -- and where it is searchable and discoverable.

"We are building a virtual forum site with Socialtext," John Suh, a Staff Researcher at the GM Advanced Technology Silicon Valley Office, told me recently. "I want our researchers to post abstracts, posters, and a brief audio file into Socialtext. Before, during or after a research event, research staff and management can then ask questions and learn more about a particular area of research, using the 'comment' feature. So if someone in one office or time zone happened to miss out or cannot attend when the event was live, he or she can go into Socialtext and still participate in the conversation. And those that are interested in working together as a research team can use Socialtext Groups."

John envisions this will enhance participation and the formation of collaborative work between the various R&D sites. "It's really great that it'll be easier for both the authors/presenters and the attendees to learn about what's going on and find potential research partners," he says.

Researchers will be encouraged to fill out their People Profiles, a social networking feature that allows them to share expertise and work activities. We think this is a really neat use of Socialtext, and we look forward to watching GM's progress.

Socialtext CEO Eugene Lee to Keynote Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston

2010-02-24T21:57:52Z

I'm thrilled to announce that Socialtext's CEO Eugene Lee will keynote the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston the week of June 14-17. In his talk, Eugene (@eugenelee) plans to focus on how social software provides value to enterprises by transforming key business processes inside their organizations. While many in the world of Enterprise 2.0 seem to concentrate on the issue of adoption, Eugene will make the case that the focus should be helping companies use social software to solve specific pain points in their organizations and accelerate their ability to pursue new business opportunities.

For us, the Enterprise 2.0 Conference has been the place to hear from the best thought leaders in the industry who are working to help companies utilize social software to meet their business objectives.

Other keynote speakers include:

Andrew McAfee, Principal Research Scientist, Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Management
JP Rangaswami, CIO and Chief Scientist, BT Design
Murali Sitaram, Vice President and General Manager, Cisco's Enterprise Collaboration Platform
Gentry Underwood, IDEO

Eugene is excited to share what he has learned from his experience in the world of collaboration, and the thousands of Socialtext customers who give us valuable feedback and insight each and everyday.

SaaS Forces Alignment between Customers' Success and Socialtext's Success

2010-02-24T21:35:56Z

During the past month, I've spoken with a lot of analysts, journalists, bloggers, customers, and prospects about the great momentum in our business and explaining the underlying reasons for our success. One topic I always emphasize is Socialtext's business model, which is all SaaS (Software as a Service). In the software industry, the term SaaS can mean many different things. To me, it means that all our contracts with customers are on a subscription (usually 12 month term) basis.

Many folks (investors especially) like the SaaS model --- and its "gift that keeps on giving" annuity feature, but that's only true when renewal and retention rates are sufficiently high to cover the costs of customer acquisition and support. For Socialtext, the good news is that we've been in business long enough to be in what I call the "SaaS economic leverage zone." What I mean by that is our renewal revenues are a healthy chunk of our ongoing business, and our renewal rates have increased by an order of magnitude during the past two years. I'm really proud of this achievement. It can be attributed to the combination of major product enhancements, coupled with more pedestrian operational improvements, including faster contract-to-launch times , improved coordination with customers pre-launch (often pre-contract), and more intimate partnerships with our customers throughout their lifecycle.

Adhering to this this SaaS model has great benefits for us and our customers. Here are some of the benefits we have seen and what about the Socialtext offering that's different than other vendors out there:

SaaS forces alignment

What I love the most about this business model is that it completely aligns my team with the goals of our customers. If our customers don't realize the value from our platform that they were expecting, then they just won't renew. If they do find value, they renew. If they achieve results beyond their expectations, they'll increase their Socialtext footprint. The best testament to our progress on this front is that our business from customer expansions tripled in Q3 and Q4 of 2009 vs. our previous average.

Socialtext's appliance is secure on-premise SaaS

For Socialtext, "SaaS" does not have to mean "cloud-based solution." While we offer a shared hosted service like other SaaS vendors, we also provide our customers the option of deploying via an on-premises Socialtext appliance. This secure, behind-the-firewall, 1U rackable box is easily integrated into the customer's existing datacenter (and enterprise directories, backup, etc.). It comes pre-configured, so there is nothing to download, install, or configure. Our Services team works with the customer to schedule monthly updates which are pushed down to the appliance, requiring no time or cost of administration on the customer side. Finally, for those customers who want the privacy of a single-tenant service, but don't (yet) have a datacenter of their own, we also offer a "hosted appliance" option. It provides all the benefits of the appliance model combined with the convenience of having the server hosted by Socialtext.

It's all about customer success and business value

The official job titles for our team members that work with customers during their deployment is "Customer Success Manage." This isn't just fancy business card blather - these people are measured and goaled on pretty much the same metrics that our customers use to measure their deployment success - timeframes, usage metrics, and most importantly, business value. Our software is fully instrumented to measure a wide range of user activity, and these reports are shared (assuming the customer gives us access) between the customer team and our team during our periodic scheduled update calls.

By contrast, vendors who continue to follow the perpetual license sales model will continue to be motivated to sell you as many seats as possible up front, which I believe is why there are so many Enterprise 2.0 Adoption "support groups" out there, and why that topic dominates many of the industry conferences and forums.

Customer-Driven Innovation

I've often used the line "the best ideas come from your smartest customers - are you organized to listen?" A great deal of our product enhancements and innovations have come from feedback and suggestions from our customers - not just in the form of feature requests on a one-off basis, but rather in the context of an ongoing relationship we are proud to build with them. One example is the way Socialtext's new groups capability works the same way whether you are using groups defined in your corporate LDAP/Active Directory or setting up ad hoc groups for cross-functional teams.

We only succeed if you do

An amazing amount has been written about the SaaS model and why it's good for customers. These include lower up front costs, better matching your expenses with adoption and deployment, reduced risk, less capital needs to self-host software, and lower IT headcount requirements (to name a few). But I think the biggest advantage is that your vendor only succeeds if you do.

Learnings from web ratings systems

2010-02-24T15:36:00Z

"The Wisdom of Crowds" is one of the driving principles of Web 2.0. The idea, explored in James Surowiecki's influential book, is that decisions made by large numbers of people together are better than decisions that would have been made by any one person or a small group. This principle has powered the wide adoption and success of tools including including Google, collaborative filtering, wikis, and blogs. One common technique, following the Wisdom of Crowds principle, is the use of ratings. The hope and expectation is that by enabling large numbers of people to express their opinion, the best will rise to the top. In recent years, rating techniques have been put into practice in many situations. The learnings from real-life experience have sometimes been counterintuitive and surprising.

The failure of five-star ratings

Many sites including Amazon, Netflix, and Yahoo! used five-star ratings to rate content, and this pattern became very common. Sites hoped that these ratings would provide rich information about the relative quality of content. Unfortunately, sites discovered that results from the 5-point scale weren't meaningful. Across a wide range of applications, the majority of people people rated objects a "5" - the average rating across many type of sites is 4.5 and higher. Results from YouTube and data from many Yahoo sites show this distribution pattern. Why don't star ratings provide the nuanced content quality evaluation that sites hoped for? It turns out that people take the effort to rate primarily things they like. And because rating actions are socially visible, people use ratings to show off what they like.

How to use scaled ratings effectively

So, is it possible to use scaled ratings effectively? Yes, but there needs to be careful design to make sure that the scale is meaningful, that people are evaluating against clear criteria, and that people have incentive to do fine-grained evaluation. Examples of rating scales with more and less clear criteria can can be found in this Boxes and Arrows article - the image from that article is an example of a detailed scale. There are tradeoffs between complexity of the rating criteria and people's willingness to fill out the ratings. Another technique to improve the value of scaled ratings is to weight the ratings by frequency and depth of contribution, as in this analysis by Christopher Allen's game company. This techniques may be useful when there is a relatively large audience whose ratings differ in quality.

Like

The simpler "thumbs up" or "like" model, found in Facebook and FriendFeed has taken precedence over star ratings systems. This simpler action can surface quality content, while avoiding the illusory precision of five-star ratings. The vote to promote pattern can be used to surface popular content. This technique can be used in two ways - to highlight popular news (as in Digg) or to surface notable items in a larger repository. Several considerations regarding the "like" action: this sort of rating requires a large enough audience and frequent enough ratings to generate useful results. In smaller communities the information may not be meaningful. Also, the "like" action indicates popularity but not necessarily quality. As seen on Digg and similar sites, the "like" action can highlight the interests of an active minority of nonrepresentative users. Or the pattern can be subject to gaming. Another concern is the mixing of "like" and "bookmark" actions. Twitter has a "favorite" feature that is also the only way for users to bookmark content. So some number of Twitter "favorites" represent the user temporarily saving the content, perhaps because they disagree with it rather than because they like it! Systems that have a "like" feature should clearly differentiate the feature from a "bookmark" or "watch" action.

The risks of people ratings

Another technique that sites sometimes use, in the interest of improving quality and reliability, is the rating of people. Transaction sites such as Ebay use "karma" reputation systems to assess seller and buyer reliability, and large sites often use some sort of karma system to incent good behavior and improve signal to noise ratio. The Building Reputation Systems blog has a superb article explaining how Karma is complicated. The simplest versions don't work at all. "Typical implementations only require a user to click once to rate another user and are therefore prone to abuse." More subtle designs still have an impact on participant motivations that may or may not be what site organizers expect. "Public karma often encourages competitive behavior in users, which may not be compatible with their motivations. This is most easily seen with leaderboards, but can happen any time karma scores are prominently displayed." For example, here is one example of karma gaming that affected even in a subtle and well-designed system.

Participant motivations, reactions, and interactions

When providing ratings capabilities for a community, it is important to consider the motivations of the people in that community. In the Building Reputation blog Randy Farmer talks about various types of egocentricand altruistic motivations. Points systems are often well-designed to support egocentric motivations. But they may not be effective for people who are motivated to share. Adrian Chan draws distinctions between the types of explicit incentives used in computer games, and the more subtle interests found in other sorts of social experiences, online and off. People have shared interests; people are interested in other people. The motivations come not just from the system in which people are taking these actions, but from outside the system - how people feel about each other, how they interact with each other. In a business environment, people want to show off their expertise and don't want to look stupid in front of their peers and superiors. They may want to maintain a harmonious work environment. Or in a competitive environment, they may want to show up their peers. These motivations affect the ways that people use ratings features as well as how they seek and provide more subtle forms of approval, like responses to questions in a microblogging system. Thomas Vander Wal talks about the importance of social comfort in people's willingness to participate in social systems, particularly in the enterprise. People need to feel comfortable with the tools, with each other, and with the subject matter. The most risky form of ratings, direct rating of people, typically reduces the level of comfort. Depending on the culture of the organization and the way content rating is used, content rating may feel to participants like encouragement to improve quality, like a disincentive to participation, or like an incentive to social behavior that decreases teamwork. Even with good intentions and thoughtful design, the results may not be as anticipated. In that case, it is important to monitor and iterate.

Scale effects

The familiar examples of ratings come from consumer services like Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook, with many millions of users. With audiences as large as Amazon's, there are multiple people willing to rate fairly obscure content. In smaller communities, such as special interest sites and corporate environments, there are many fewer people: hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands. While the typical rate of participation is much higher - 10-50%, rather than 1-10%, that is still many fewer people. With a smaller population, will there be enough rating activity to be meaningful. If an item has one or two ratings, what does this mean? Smaller communities need to assess whether the level of activity generates useful information.

Summary

Ratings and reputation systems can be very useful at surfacing the hidden knowledge of the crowd. But their use is not as simple as deploying a feature. In order to gain value, it is important to take into account lessons learned: * Think carefully about the goal of the ratings system. Use features and encourage practices to achieve that goal * Use an appropriate scale that addresses the goal * Consider the size of the community and the likelihood of useful results * Consider the motivations and comfort level of the community and how the system may affect those motivations and reactions Then, evaluate the results. The use of a rating system should be seen not like a "set and forget" rollout, but as an experiment with goals. Goals may include quantitative measures like the volume of ratings and the effect on overall level of contribution, as well as qualitative measures such as the effectiveness of ratings at highlighting quality content, the effect on people's perception of the environment, and the effect on the level and feeling of teamwork in an organizational setting. Be prepared to make changes if your initial experiment teaches you things you didn't expect.

For more information

The Building Reputation blog, by Randall Farmer and Bryce Glass, is an excellent source of in-depth information on this topic. The blog is a companion to the O'ReillyBuilding Web Reputation Systems. Other good sources on this and other social design topics include: * Designing Social Interfaces book and companion wiki, by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone. * Chris Allen's blog * Adrian Chan's blog

Video: Socialtext CEO Eugene Lee on the Future of Enterprise Social Software

2010-02-23T20:07:44Z

Recently, Eugene and I had the opportunity to visit with Michael Singer, a senior editor at Internet Evolution's offices in San Francisco. Eugene shared his thoughts on the future of social software, and how it affects enterprise and mid market companies. What made this interview especially unique is it offers a glimpse into many of the exciting things we're thinking about here at Socialtext, both from a product perspective and, more importantly, the value it provides our customers.

I've embedded the video below, where Eugene emphasizes:

The importance of focusing on the business value that social software provides a company (not simply adoption).
People are achieving transformative business value, not just innovation, by moving work across silos with social software.
Social software platforms will serve as a place to surface the events from other enterprise systems. In doing so, we can make traditional enterprise apps more social and useful.

Business is Conducted by People, not Users

2010-02-09T22:25:49Z

One of the more unfortunate words that prevails in the software industry is "user." "User" marginalizes the importance of people, and subconsciously implies that we should simply use the software in the way it's presented to us without question. It makes it seem as if people should adapt to a vendor's terminology, data model, and workflow. In reality, it should be the other way around: Software should enable people to communicate and collaborate with each other, share knowledge, make informed decisions, and get our jobs done faster and more efficiently than ever before, in a model that makes sense to them.

I've only found two industries who describe their customers as "users". One is high tech, and the other is drug dealers.

We have even evolved highly specialized disciplines whose monikers involve the word "user" - "user interface" or "user experience." Worse, the science of "user interface" has historically been called "human factors" - where we're now describing "humans" as organic life form alternatives to the preferably predictable and "error-proof" silicon powering the machines we force users to adapt to.

In reality, business is conducted by people, not users. People introduce themselves by job title or organizational affiliation. They have passions and expertise, and like to share knowledge with the teams and groups they're on. Almost no one describes themselves as "an Oracle user".,

Socialtext has always focused on reaching out to business people first - which fits hand in glove with our all-SaaS business model (as opposed to selling big perpetual license deals to IT who then try to stimulate adoption with users). Our whole company is aligned around the priority of enabling our customers to achieve business value, not just adoption. That starts first with designing and delivering functionality that enables customers to answer more substantial questions (such as "who knows what" or "who knows who knows what", not just "who knows who"). Our entire sales and marketing methodology emphasizes the importance of identifying business champions (see Michael Idinopulos' excellent post "How to Find Enterprise 2.0 Champions"), and partnering with our customers throughout their implementation to ensure they are realizing business results. We continually adapt and innovate product enhancements based on their feedback.

Business people feel proud of business results they achieve by being part of something bigger than them - and usually by being part of a team that made it happen. Software should adapt to these people and their needs.

Why Enterprise Microblogging Must Be Integrated with Other Social Apps

2010-02-03T23:30:27Z

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.

How to Find Enterprise 2.0 Champions

2010-02-03T20:03:26Z

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:

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.)
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?
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.

Industrial Mold Uses Enterprise Microblogging and Social Software To Serve Customers Faster

2010-01-14T22:05:49Z

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.

Serendipitous Signals: How Microblogging Helps the Sales Process

2010-01-06T22:17:46Z

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.

Learn How To Use Socialtext Effectively

2010-01-05T13:45:00Z

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.