Enterprise 2.0

Socialtext Wins TiE 50 Award

By Christopher Lynch | May 11, 2011, 6:22 pm | 0 Comments

I’m proud to share with you that Socialtext was named a TiE 50 Award winner. Based nearby in Santa Clara, TiE is “a global, not-for-profit network of entrepreneurs and professionals dedicated to the advancement of entrepreneurship.”

TiE provides a platform for mentoring, networking & education, to entrepreneurs with over 14,000 members in 54 chapters across 13 countries. Socialtext, which TiE acknowledged as the first social software company, won the award in the category of software and cloud computing, and Eugene, our CEO, will be speaking at their annual TieCon event on Friday in Santa Clara.

The award puts Socialtext in some great company. According to TiE, which stands for Talent, Ideas and Enterprise, previous winners have attracted more than $20 billion in investments. Of the winners, about 42 companies have been acquired, merged or gone public.

Eugene had this to say prior to my posting the news today.

“Socialtext was founded on the idea that we could build a company that helps people perform their best work together,” he says. “This TiE award is a nice acknowledgement of the hard work our team does to deliver enterprise social networking tools that people expect at work, and that meets the needs of world-class IT departments.”

awards, socialtext, tie50

Finding People – My profile is just an opening bid

By Eugene Lee | May 10, 2011, 4:39 pm | 2 Comments

Well-written use cases presented by prospective customers is a fantastic sign that a new technology space is becoming less immature – and this is definitely happening in the Enterprise 2.0 market. I’m excited by the scenarios that our prospects are presenting to us. They have well-defined business problems that they want to utilize social software to address. It’s a great step forward from the generic “we want to get social inside our company” we heard a couple years ago.

The ability to assemble teams around a new business challenge is a use-case that has flourished the past year. Whether it’s a pitch team for an advertising RFP, a launch team for a new product introduction, a cross-functional team investigating new market opportunities, or a consulting team for a new client – all of these scenarios share some core, common questions:

“Who has worked with this client or customer before?”
“Who knows their industry issues?”
“Who has expertise and experience in specific technical skill XYZ?”
“Who is a well-regarded thought leader in issue XYZ?”

And so on.

Most people presume that using enterprise social networking to assemble teams inside a company would be based on a LinkedIn or Facebook type of model, but we don’t find that practical.

Let me explain why.

Facebook and LinkedIn are symmetric networks based on mutual “friending.” Symmetry in those social networks works because it strengthens intimacy and increases confidence to share. But because corporate social networks need to be transparent, you can see everyone that a colleague friends anyway, making this model less useful. It can cause corporate networks to devolve into what I call the “VP Trading Card collection game.” (See my post, Will you be my friend – yes or no?). In other words, you friend people for reasons of status; not because they’re the right people to help you get your work done and serve customers.

More importantly, most people logically assume that the way to make sure you can find people with the right attributes (answers to the above questions) is to ensure that their profiles are rich and thoroughly populated. Unfortunately, this relies on people filling out dozens of profile fields, most of which they might not update after their first day on the job. Consequently, what I do and what you say about me trumps what I say about myself.

Socialtext People, our profile capability, takes a different approach for some important philosophical and strategic reasons.

What I say about myself (my profile) is really just an “opening bid.”
What others say about me (Tags on my profile and how my colleagues interact with me in the Activity Stream) is much more interesting
What I DO (my activity stream generated by my in-the-flow-of-work actions) is the MOST relevant set of information about me – what I do, what I say, who I work with, and on which topics

Vote with my attention, not my politics

Moreover, we’ve adopted an ASYMMETRIC social networking model (ie Twitter’s “follow” instead of Facebook’s “friend” model) – anyone can follow me, and I don’t need to “approve” them. And I can follow anyone. This leads to a much more scalable network for the transmission of signals with much less noise (See Tim O’Reilly’s excellent post Goodreads vs. Twitter: The Benefits of Asymmetric Follow). It also avoids funky unintended political behavior (see my post A different kind of social capital at work – Attention especially for a humor interlude from Geek ‘n Poke).

For example, if a VP of marketing limits his or her network to other VPs and senior directors, that person might miss out on some valuable information or knowledge held by someone lower in the organizational hierarchy. So if that marketing VP was working on, say, a strategy to reach new markets in Asia, they may want to start following someone in business development or the new sales rep based in China. These other colleagues may not be as “powerful” as the Marketing VP, but their updates may be far more relevant to what that VP is working on.

It’s these kinds of connections that can lead to the elimination of silos and true business transformation inside a company.

asymmetric, connections, e2.0, follow, follower, network, profiles, social networking, symmetric

Application DevelopmentCustomer SuccessEnterprise 2.0

Forrester Research: How Socialtext Customer Hayes Knight Built the Social Layer

By Christopher Lynch | April 20, 2011, 6:38 pm | 0 Comments

Last June, Eugene, our CEO, delivered a keynote talk at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston called “The Social Layer.” The concept was simple: Social software should be a layer of technology that spans an entire organization, pulling together relevant people, content and systems of record in one easy place. It wasn’t about us or any one vendor; it was about moving the industry forward.

To do our part, however, we introduced Socialtext Connect, an integration technology that lets you surface critical events from enterprise applications (CRM, ERP, etc.) and inject them into the Socialtext platform, where employees from across your organization can collaborate and take action. To get started, we delivered two pre-built integrations to Microsoft SharePoint and Salesforce.com.

But Rob Koplowitz, the lead Enterprise 2.0 analyst at Forrester Research, didn’t just have to take our word for it: In his latest research note, Rob and his team featured Hayes Knight, a customer of ours in Australia that has used Connect to integrate key systems of record with Socialtext, including a homegrown job management system (built on Microsoft .Net) and CRM data from Salesforce.com. (The Forrester report focuses on the first system, and we have a blog post on the CRM integration, which enables Hayes Knight to serve customers 50 percent faster).

When I visited Hayes Knight’s headquarters in Sydney back in November, I remember being amazed at how much they’d done with Socialtext Connect and our REST API. At the time, Jack Pedzikiewicz, our champion there, told me his favorite part of our platform was its flexibility, and this report does a great job of highlighting it.

A quick except:

Every trend needs a trailblazer, and in the case of establishing an integrated social layer that facilitates core operation processes, Hayes Knight is at the forefront. A group of companies offering accounting, business strategy, and complex tax services, Hayes Knight makes its living from the production and distribution of high-end knowledge. And it does so in Australia, one of the strictest compliance environments in the world.

Like most organizations, Hayes Knight has legacy systems in place to handle key business functions. Yet most systems were largely transactional in nature, and Hayes Knight’s work product was anything but transactional. Jack Pedzikiewicz took on the task of turning the culture to one of knowledge capture, sharing, and collective decision-making while maintaining the context provided by the company’s core business systems.

Pedzikiewicz targeted several of Hayes Knight’s core business processes for the initiative. Bridging the structured business systems and the new enterprise social capabilities through rich and deep integration was the key technical capability. After exploring the capabilities of multiple core business systems, his primary criteria for product assessment focused on the APIs provided to get information in and out of the system. He landed on Socialtext as the best platform to achieve his goals.

Meanwhile, at Socialtext we’ve remained focused on moving our part of the Social Layer story forward (see an article today in CMSWire). We’ve not only been developing our own features, but we’ve been working with customers in our SocialDev community to help them create the integration they require to run their businesses. The best part of the community is that customers are sharing code and ideas among themselves, without us even having to be involved.

I know I speak on behalf of the entire Socialtext team in saying that we’re thrilled Jack and his team got the recognition they deserved in this important research note. And we’re looking forward to more social layer stories going forward.

Customer Success, hayes knight, integration, Salesforce.com, sharepoint, social layer, social software, Socialtext Connect

Enterprise 2.0News & Events

InformationWeek: Socialtext Named Number One Social Software Vendor

By Christopher Lynch | April 11, 2011, 7:49 pm | 2 Comments

InformationWeek released its Enterprise 2.0 Vendor Evaluation Survey, an assessment of enterprise technology vendors that deliver social applications inside the enterprise. Not only did the survey find staggering adoption of social software across organizations, Socialtext ranked number one in overall performance, beating out competition new and old.

Alex Wolfe, the editor in chief of InformationWeek.com, authored a summary of the report, and put the findings into context:

“We use two sets of criteria to rank vendors. The first set rates the relative importance of 12 standard benchmarks used for all product sets. The other measures vendors against criteria tailored to specific features and capabilities customers seek in the product category–for Enterprise 2.0 applications, these include the ability to integrate with internal applications, quality of the user interface, and completeness of the feature set. Notably, respondents to this survey favored smaller players like Socialtext even when we delved into very specific Enterprise 2.0 features”

Our friends in the Enterprise 2.0 echo chamber will debate the methodology, but we like the premise of it: Rather than interviewing the vendors, this report is based on the feedback from more than 600 IT professionals. While Socialtext participates in many analyst assessments of the market, those reports tend to be much more subjective, favoring larger and less innovative vendors that check off features rather than adding real business value. We believe social software is successful when it exists firmly in the flow of work — enhancing, rather than ignoring, the business processes a company has in place.

Our strong performance in this report reflects what’s been a universal goal for Socialtext the past few years: Let’s deliver the simple, social tools that people want to get their job done, while giving IT the security, scalability and flexibility they require — all with the low total cost of ownership that comes with Software as a Service.

During our all-company meetings, Eugene, our CEO, always says the best innovations come from customers (and the vendors who are smart enough to listen to them). For us, this customer-focused approach is helping us deliver social software that enables people to perform their best work with colleagues. This survey is a nice reminder that we’re having some great success.

business value, Enterprise 2.0, social software

Customer SuccessEnterprise 2.0News & Events

Webinar Recording: See How Two Socialtext Customers Leverage Knowledge with Social Software

By Christopher Lynch | March 23, 2011, 11:28 pm | 1 Comment

Yesterday, Socialtext participated in a KMWorld webinar called “Social Tools for Business: Engage, Optimize, Collaborate.” Alan Lepofsky, our Director of Product Marketing, gave a talk on how social software brings people to the forefront by not only surfacing what content and knowledge is shared across a company, but by which colleagues. He also talked about how social tools enhance key business processes, encourage expertise sharing, and eliminate knowledge silos.

He highlighted these themes through the lens of two Socialtext customers: GT Nexus, a global supply chain company, and Hayes Knight, an accounting firm in Australia and New Zealand. Below are slides from yesterday’s webinar, along with Alan’s commentary. We hope you enjoy them, and let us know if you have any questions.

Social Software Is About People and Business Process

View more presentations from http://www.slideshare.net/Socialtext”>Socialtext

business process, business processes, case study, gt nexus, hayes knight, KMWorld, people, use case, webinar

Enterprise 2.0News & EventsProduct Updates

Where Is Everybody? Moving Intranets from Static to Social

By Eugene Lee | February 24, 2011, 5:14 pm | 1 Comment

Making corporate intranets social is the main theme of Socialtext 4.6, which we announced today. The focus originated from my favorite source of insight: Our customers. I love it when they hit you over the head with use cases that emerge inside their companies.

Starting several months ago, we noticed an exciting pattern amidst many of newer customers: Their usage and adoption rates were accelerating on a curve previously unseen by us, or, frankly, most Enterprise 2.0 use cases for that matter.

Interestingly, several of these customers didn’t have grandiose plans of transforming their intranet. They merely sought to leverage social software to solve specific pain points their businesses faced. They were engaging in what our VP of customer success, Michael Idinopulos, would refer to as “In the flow of work” collaboration. They also wanted to eliminate knowledge and information silos that hampered business performance. In one case, the head of worldwide sales tasked about 200 people from his team, product marketing, and sales ops to improve training materials and product launches. In another case, we saw a broad, horizontal deployment to modernize knowledge sharing across disparate teams and functions.

But after launching these focused deployments, word spread fast.

Why?

Other employees looked at their intranets and realized what it was missing: People.

Pretty soon, employees outside the targeted usage groups at these companies started asking why they couldn’t have the same easy-to-use social applications in their intranet. Why did they have to tolerate the static, frustrating, and out-of-date intranet that was in place?

We’ve seen two results from their requests. Some of our customers have actually replaced the front door to their intranet with Socialtext – particularly with Socialtext Dashboard as the starting point. Dashboard allows people to not only access tools within Socialtext to connect with colleagues and share content, but they can also access other systems, applications and sites across their company. Others, though it wasn’t their intention at the onset, scrapped their intranet entirely and moved to Socialtext. These customers have transformed the look and feel of their intranet by injecting social patterns into it. Employees can share via microblogging, self-publish through blogs, collaborate on wikis, and form groups across organizational boundaries.

Meanwhile, my team also noticed a trend in the language used by our sales prospects. They began hearing phrases like “Our intranet stinks” or “No one can find anything in our intranet.” Just yesterday, I talked with the CIO of a large company who said, “We call our intranet ‘The Junk Drawer.’” Last month, we did a webinar called “Your Social Intranet – The Place Where Work Gets Done.” During the event, we ran a fun contest to see who could propose the funniest David Letterman-style “Top 10 ways you know your Intranet needs updating.” The visceral and sarcastic nature of the submissions we received speaks volumes about people’s frustration with current intranets. (More on that in future posts.)

So the new features that we’ve rolled up into Socialtext 4.6 are really the result of focusing our development and innovation through this lens – helping make your intranet more social. We’re doing as much as we can to make PEOPLE be a first-class object in your intranet. As a result, we can make the intranet be a place where people go to get work done together — not just a place to try to find information, documents, and application links.

4.6, enterprise social software, intranets, social intranets

Companies Aren’t Communities

By Michael Idinopulos | February 22, 2011, 3:33 pm | 13 Comments

Companies aren’t communities. They aren’t forums.

Companies are companies.

Of course company life has community aspects, and those community aspects can be quite important in getting the job done. But a lot of social software folks seem to forget that there’s a lot more to a company than community. They treat companies as if they were consumer communities or forums that all just happen to have their paychecks signed by the same person.

Why does the difference matter? Let’s look at the numbers. Online communities and forums typically attract very small audiences relative to the total target population: Less than 1% adoption is typical, and 5% adoption would be a grand-slam. That’s fine for the consumer web, but those numbers inside the enterprise aren’t exactly a ringing endorsement.

Successful enterprise implementations of social software have orders-of-magnitude higher adoption rates. For example, yesterday I was in New York meeting with Getty Images. Getty’s Socialtext implementation is seeing 95% active adoption. Those are the numbers we’re looking for inside the enterprise!

So how do we get there?

Companies, by very definition, have reporting structures, established workflows, shared systems and processes, defined roles and responsibilities, and closely managed performance. Those are assets we don’t have in communities and forums, which are typically ad-hoc groups of individuals–mostly volunteers–in a collective endeavor without clearly defined roles, processes, reporting, deliverables, or metrics.

Getty and others achieve the adoption rates they do by integrating their social software into all those structures, workflows, systems, processes, roles, and responsiblities. As Getty’s Director of Learning and Development, Jennifer Fox, told me today, “We no longer going to teach people how to use Socialtext. We are going to teach them how to do their jobs…which happen to require the use of Socialtext.”

I’ve been saying for a few years now that companies achieve adoption and business value when they place social software in the flow of work. The tools achieve real benefit when people do their jobs–not their evenings-and-weekends jobs, but their actual “day” jobs in social software. That’s when it becomes woven into the fabric of a company’s business processes. Adoption is almost a foregone conclusion, because that’s where you do your work. Business impact is demonstrable because business processes are measurable.

What, specifically, does this mean? It depends on your business, but it’s things like:

Your company Intranet is social (i.e., built and/or integrated with social software tools like wiki workspaces, microblogging, and social networking)
Marketing and Product post sales collateral in your social software tool (not in email!)
Customer Support’s knowledgebase is collaboratively maintained in social software (again, not in email!)
The executive team and other key teams keep meeting agendas and notes in social software
CRM, ERP, and Enterprise Learning systems automatically post major events in social software
Quick links to important resources are available–and maintained–in social software
Technical Help Desks and other internal support functions field requests via social software

Contrast that with an online community, like a gaming group or a technical forum. In communities, there is no flow of work. That’s because most people don’t come to communities to do work. They come to get support help, to swap tips, to praise, to complain, to socialize. Even those people who come for professional reasons are casual, sporadic visitors. The only person who really works there day-in-day-out is the forum/community manager.

There are three groups of people who cling to the “company as community” concept: the “kumbayeros” who wish that companies were as open and democratic as communities, public community managers whose consumer-facing experience has shaped the way they view all online social interaction, and community software vendors who are looking to re-purpose their consumer-oriented products for the internal market.

In the enterprise, we need to take a more pragmatic approach. As the old saying goes, “The business of business is business.” Social software fails when it tries to turn businesses into consumer-style communities. It succeeds when it turns businesses into better businesses.

adoption, business value, Enterprise 2.0, in the flow

Enterprise 2.0News & Events

Are You Ready To Make Your Intranet Social?

By Alan Lepofsky | February 1, 2011, 9:00 am | 0 Comments

During yesterday’s Making Your Intranet Social webinar , Socialtext CEO Eugene Lee asked attendees to submit their ideas for the “Top 10 Reasons You Know You Need To Update Your Intranet.” We received more than 100, fantastic submissions, and the winner (see below) will receive an Apple iPad and the two runner-ups Socialtext t-shirts. The ideas included references to Star Trek, Facebook, Post-It-Notes, Liquid Paper, blinking text, the water cooler, even Dionne Warwick and the Psychic Friends Network!

After a long review, I present you with the top ten as voted on by my fellow Socialtexters:

Top 10 Reasons You Know You Need To Update Your Intranet:
10. The most common question about it is “What Intranet?”
9. Today employees just look for the cafeteria lunch menu
8. The CEO was given upgrade suggestions from their 5th grader
7. The employee directory still lists job titles from 6 years ago
6. You want to level the playing field between the introverts and extroverts
5. Your organization has more silos than on all of the farms in the state of Vermont
4. There are more servers under employees’ desks running wikis and blogs than in the server room
3. When you click on the link to open it, you hear “No, I’m sorry, Dave. I cannot do that …”
2. The CFO thought microblogging was cheaper than blogging
1. You’re not popular on Facebook but maybe you could be a corporate collaboration hero

Think you have a better one? Then share it with us in the comments section below.

We asked the same question internally and here are some of our own ideas:

To change anything you need to launch DreamWeaver
A common search result is “Your guess is as good as mine”
The amount of “forgot password” requests exceeds actual log-ins
Your still searching for the right person via org charts
There is a logo that says “Download Internet Explorer 4.0 now!”
Profile pictures are in ASCII art
PROFS is one of the menu options

While this was all in good fun, the fact is that many organizations are in serious need of an intranet upgrade. Some of yesterday’s participants shared with us the real reasons they are looking to update their intranet:

Because taxonomies don’t solve problems, people do
So that we can work and communicate more effectively
An intranet without social is like a phone without a dial tone… missing its true potential
We are going social to get out of our silos, collaborate, find info faster, connect with experts
We need our intranet to be more social so that we can leverage our global capabilities and reach our full collective potential
To help new employees who may not know something like how to book projectors or where to find specialists – they could quickly ask a colleague rather than sitting at their desks feeling despondent
A more dynamic intranet with help us turn the “light bulb” into a spot light

For more information, a recorded playback of yesterday’s webinar is available. Are you ready to have Socialtext turn your intranet into a compelling and strategic corporate tool?

Socialtext – Where work gets done. Together.

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Enterprise 2.0

Socialtext Wins TiE 50 Award

Webinar Recording: See How Two Socialtext Customers Leverage Knowledge with Social Software

Companies Aren’t Communities

Are You Ready To Make Your Intranet Social?

Socialtext – Where work gets done. Together.

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Weblog on gaining business results from social software.

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