Our goal has always been to provide a comprehensive social software platform that helps employees be more efficient and effective, no matter where they are located, around the world.

Today, we’ve taken another step towards our vision of a fully connected, internal network, with the announcement of a partnership with NetDocuments. This partnership provides our customers with the ability to create, share and manage documents through the native Socialtext interface. As an industry-leading cloud content management provider, NetDocuments is a great partner to work with towards this vision.
Our client, Climateworks Foundation, is a non-profit organization that prevents dangerous climate change globally. They initially approached us to develop a social knowledge exchange that would allow partners across their global network to share information and learn from each other in order to quickly and effectively execute against initiatives. Sarah Nichols, director of knowledge management at ClimateWorks, envisioned a solution that would inspire different non-profit and philanthropic agencies around the world to collaborate and share ideas to improve the network’s success as a whole. And thus, a partnership was born.

By integrating Socialtext functionality with ClimateWorks’ existing structured NetDocuments content management system, practitioners are now able to customize the organization of their information, create content together, maintain version control and easily connect with one another to share information and new ideas.
At Socialtext we’re continuing to drive our vision of the “social layer”, making all systems of record easily accessible for social collaboration and enabling more efficient execution of business initiatives. Our partnership with NetDocuments, in addition to our existing integration with systems such as salesforce.com and Microsoft Sharepoint, underscores our progress in moving towards developing a fully connected, internal network.

And as always we’re excited about working with smart customers like Climateworks and great partners like NetDocuments.

For more information about our partnership with NetDocuments, please see our release here.

When we first defined how our technology would be most useful to a user of the Socialtext platform, we easily found inspiration by looking into our experience helping clients over the past nine years.

Finding the best people for an important project

We built a global network for one of the world’s largest advertising networks with the goal of supporting their growth agenda. We enabled them to put together teams to pitch new clients, and focus groups to get critical feedback on big ideas. They look to our network daily to build working groups and project teams literally in hours instead of weeks. This has helped them gain an edge on their competition, as they are able to pinpoint specific expertise and experience instantly. This capability was made possible by adding a layer to the profile of every employee that captured key skills, passions, experience and professional interests.

Making connections to build strong mentoring relationships

Another great use case is how NASA connects their scientists, engineers, mathematicians and technologists to our nation’s educators. The goal is to make it easy for a teacher to reach out to the NASA network and find someone to help in a variety of areas that will improve that teacher’s ability to engage and excite their students. These mentoring relationships build on profiles that capture information such as ‘How I can help others” and “Where I need help”. This information is also used to inform the larger training and development agenda for STEM education in the United States.

It’s not who you know, it’s who you don’t know, yet.

We provide the network for many professional events, including the Fortune Growth Summits where C-level executives come together to be inspired by others and share best practices. Part of the event centers on locating their Top Five Matches at the event to kick start new relationships and help busy executives grow and expand their connections. This capability extends to events inside an organization as well.

Learn About Others in an Instant

One fact of life is that we are all too busy and it’s nearly impossible to find time to learn new things, much less learn more about the people around you that could make a difference to you, if you only knew what they knew. Our focus on providing a unique radar-like visualization of people you work with, those that are following you, and those that you follow, and showing them in relation to what you have in common allows you to learn about your team mates and other employees you have not met yet in an instant.

Matching Task to Talent

By providing a new, rich set of organization specific keywords to each Socialtext client, we can match task to talent in a way that has never been achievable in such a short amount of time. Whether it’s to find a single person to email, ten people for a team, a hundred people for a focus group or a thousand people to rally for a mission – finding the right people instantly is now a reality.

Mark Sylvester, a guest contributor to the Socialtext blog, is the CEO and Co-Founder of introNetworks.

At last week’s E2.0 conference in Boston, I was surprised and pleased by the way my “in-the-flow” phrase has gained common currency.

I was also surprised, but less pleased, by some of the “best practices” I heard flying around. Whether in keynotes, sessions, or just hallway conversations, I heard a lot of claims of dubious merit, claims like:

• Start with a small pilot and let it grow virally
• Invest heavily in community management, because a community is only as successful as its managers
• Workers won’t use social software without personal incentives
• Workers who don’t belong to the Facebook Generation don’t “get” social software.
• Social software adoption requires a culture of collaboration
• You shouldn’t launch collaborative tools without a collaboration strategy

There’s a common theme behind all this advice: You should be scared of launching enterprise social software, because achieving adoption is really hard, really time-consuming, and really expensive.

Sorry friends, but I’m calling Bullshit.

In the hands-down best session I saw at the show, Karthik Chakkarapani from American Hospital Association described how AHA achieved phenomenal adoption. Here’s the video Karthik’s team put together. It’s a must-watch for anyone interested in this topic. And for those of you with ADHD, here’s the Cliff Notes version:

• Made Socialtext their Intranet (so there’s one place to go).
• Integrated all mission-critical work tools into that very same Intranet (so there’s one place to go)
• Implemented Single Sign-On to remove the barrier of extra logins for the different applications (so it’s easy to get there)

AHA launched with a project team of 2 FTEs working for 3 months. Six months out they’re getting over 95% active adoption.

Karthik’s success makes me think that a lot of E2.0 experts don’t really understand what “in the flow” means. If your company is using social software in the flow of work, that means that the social software is where people work. It’s not a side-room where happy people take time out to brainstorm, swap ideas, or post random tweets. It’s where people go to work. Every day.

And it ain’t that hard.

When companies ask me how to deliver enterprise social software adoption, my advice is simple: Go to your local drugstore.

Walk into any drugstore in America and whether it’s Walgreen’s, Wal-Mart, Rite-Aid, CVS, or an independent, I can guarantee you it’s laid out the same way: The pharmacy is in the back of the store.

The marketers who create drugstore planograms figured out a long time ago that the pharmacy customer is a captive customer. If you walk into Walgreen’s for Zoloft, Zyrtec, or Zyprexa, you will fill that prescription. By locating the pharmacy far from the entrance, drugstores force you to walk past a vast array of other items that you may not have come in for: magazines, candy bars, greeting cards, shampoo, toothpaste, and even groceries. While you’re in the store, why not pick up AAA batteries and a few chocolate Easter eggs for the kids

The same principle applies to enterprise social software.

If you want your colleagues to try enterprise social software, you must get them in the door. Every organization has its “prescriptions”, information or transactions which employees need on a regular basis. If you make your social software implementation a place–better yet, the place–to fill those prescriptions, you greatly increase the likelihood of its adoption long after the hype and hoopla of the initial launch has faded.

What prescriptions do your colleagues need to fill on a regular basis? The answer depends on the nature of your business. Here are a few good, generalizable  examples:

• Product information. Elsevier and Getty Images post product specs, FAQs, pricing, and marketing collateral that their Sales Reps need to sell a rapidly changing product line
• Transactional systems. American Hospital Association and NYU Stern School of Business have integrated transactional systems and forms into their Social Intranets
• Ongoing operations. Epitaph Records and Meredith Publishing manage marketing and promotional campaigns in collaborative workspaces
• Customer solutions. OSISoft and GT Nexus maintain the technical knowledgebases required to support their enterprise customers

These are very different use cases in very different businesses, but they have two things in common. First, they fill prescriptions. They deliver must-have content and functionality that a broad cross-section of staff need on a regular basis. Second, they lead to other “purchases”. Users who initially show up to submit a Help Desk ticket or look up a price quote often find themselves staying to post an idea or upload a slide deck.

When companies struggle with social software adoption, it’s usually because they’re not filling anyone’s prescriptions. They try to lure shoppers into the store by promoting items that are perceived–at least initially–as non-essential. Because those lead promotions are weak, they don’t attract the traffic required to generate follow-on business.

If adoption is an issue for your company, I ask you this: What prescription are you filling?

Warning: Side-effects may include euphoria, engagement, reduced frustration, enhanced productivity, and noticeable spikes in interpersonal connectedness.