Today, our vision is being further realized through our expanded partnership with Southeastern, the UK’s busiest commuter railway. In the past six months, Southeastern has leveraged Socialtext Connect, a flexible and robust developer toolset built on our REST API that enables developers to socially enable existing systems of record, such as ERP, CRM, or content management systems. The Socialtext solution, now integrated into the Southeastern infrastructure, enables employees to access train status information on the fly, in real-time with visibility across the entire workforce. By providing Southeastern with a more efficient way to share knowledge, expertise, ideas and information, the company can more quickly respond to change and serve their patrons effectively.

The enthusiastic adoption by Southeastern’s employees has paved the way for Socialtext to spark connectedness and information sharing companywide. The stage was set for Southeastern with “employees regularly asking for social networking tools to engage and share information with their colleagues,” said Sarah Boundy, Southeastern’s Head of Communications and Publicity.
Boundy further explains:

Our customers demand accurate information quickly, so it’s vital that our staff is connected to each other and have fast access to real-time information in a rapidly changing environment. Sharing knowledge and expertise with colleagues is key and with our original pilot program, Socialtext allowed us to do this in a quick and efficient manner. We look forward to rolling out this successful service to all of our 3,800 employees in the coming weeks.

We look forward to participating in Southeastern’s success, especially in light of the upcoming London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, beginning on July 27, 2012. This is going to be a great opportunity for Southeastern to put enterprise social collaboration into action, with an anticipated 20 percent increase in passengers. Utilizing Socialtext to provide real-time visibility and flow of information means operation fluidity and timeliness during such an honorable and exciting occasion.

Socialtext will be investing in resources to grow the business by accelerating our rate of innovation, expanding our market and delivering more benefits to our customer base. Peoplefluent will be working with Socialtext to bring the benefits of social collaboration to its customers by adding a social layer to its talent management suite and will leverage Socialtext’s location to create a flagship presence in Silicon Valley.

The enterprise social software space has seen tremendous growth and innovation over the past few years. This is beginning to contribute to the demise of information and knowledge silos previously seen in corporations. With this, enterprises have been able to unlock and release information and knowledge across teams, groups, departments, functional organizations, business units, and even across company boundaries. Breaking down silos of all types is our vision for the future for enterprise social collaboration.

Today I am pleased to announce that we at Socialtext have taken a huge step towards our vision by receiving a significant strategic cash infusion by Bedford Funding, the $1.4 billion private equity firm behind Talent Management Solution provider, Peoplefluent™. The infusion of capital that we are receiving will accelerate the development of our industry-leading enterprise social collaboration tools and augment sales efforts for both sides. We will ramp up hiring in all areas, and will also serve as the new Silicon Valley hub for Peoplefluent.

With this partnership, both Socialtext and Peoplefluent customers can now experience all the benefits of becoming a social enterprise has to offer. Deploying a Social Intranet inside your company can help you avoid the fate of information silos; more importantly, you can inject data, transactions, reports, and objects from your core enterprise applications into the social stream – by deploying what we refer to as the “Social Layer” within the enterprise architecture. The layer will span all employees across all organizational boundaries and be the connector to key enterprise applications beneath it in the architectural stack. Our initial approach to enabling the Social Layer was our introduction of Socialtext Connect, which we will continue to extend with Peoplefluent.

The talent management industry has quickly adopted the use of social software to get work done in a more convenient way. Peoplefluent will put Socialtext to work and are planning for a strategic software integration, which will allow employees to incorporate the solution into their daily workflows. Socialtext will continue to act, sell and service its social software customers independently and without interruption. Here’s what Charles S. Jones, Managing Director of Bedford Funding and Chairman and CEO of Peoplefluent™ had to say:

We are investing in Socialtext to help solidify its leadership position in enterprise social software. Our recent strategies have focused on creating solutions for our customers that enable greater employee engagement and collaboration across the enterprise. This investment in Socialtext, and its industry leading social software, immediately advances our approaches in customer support, service, education and ongoing collaboration.

At Socialtext, we strive to provide a social software SaaS solution that delivers a resource for customers to communicate, collaborate on internal projects and connect on the information necessary to be more effective in the workplace. Our unique deployment model – all SaaS, but either public or private cloud – meets companies’ specific and unique security requirements, while making sure companies still reap the benefits of software as a service (SaaS) — including fast deployment, fast iteration cycles, little or no maintenance and low total cost of ownership. With this, Peoplefluent will have the ability to simplify the exchange of ideas and corporate data, therefore knowledge silos that traditionally hampered them will be removed.

Moving forward, we are excited to be expanding our internal workforce, and will continue to adapt and produce an innovative product based on our customers’ feedback. With an increase in resources, we will be able to offer an even better customer service experience and expand on our priority of enabling customers to achieve business value, as well as adoption. After all, at Socialtext our methodology emphasizes the importance of identifying business champions through partnership with our customers and through implementation to ensure they are experiencing maximum business results, which will only increase as we join the Bedford and Peoplefluent family.

In our “Socializing Customer Support to Drive Business Value” webinar on Wednesday, March 28^th, Kate Leggett, Senior Analyst at Forrester, Timothy Kelly, Executive Director of Support at McKesson Physician Practice Solutions, and Evan Shumeyko, Director Social@Ogilvy at OgilvyOne Worldwide, joined us to discuss how to leverage social software to create social help centers for dramatic reductions in resolution time and increased alignment with sales initiatives.

In the webinar, Leggett shared that, “Ninety percent of customer service decision-makers say a good customer experience is critical to their company’s success and sixty-three percent think the importance of the customer experience has risen.”

Customer service decision makers are often torn between delivering great customer service and balancing operational costs to ensure KPIs, such as average handle time, number of cases handled, and adherence to compliance requirements are all in line. Yet, the biggest challenge support organizations encounter is the inability to efficiently access content. In many cases, there is a vast ocean of content and knowledge available, yet it is often distributed and impossible for a customer service representative to find. Obviously, this creates a less than desirable customer support experience.

The key to great customer service is communication. Content and experts within the company need to be accessible to those who handle customer issues. At Socialtext, we’re doing our part to increase internal collaboration and give companies the advantage they need to reach sales and customer service goals.

Socialtext’s social intranet allows communication to be done in real-time through activity and signal streams, and on various channels (or groups). Timothy Kelly discussed how McKesson uses various channels to keep its customer support teams informed including a customer channel, value added reseller channel, process policy and product content channels. Social channels are an efficient way to obtain accurate information quickly and McKesson wanted to implement a strategy that would have their support agents finding information they needed within one to four clicks, max.  Leveraging Socialtext’s activity streams, which are automatically populated with new content from the knowledge base and provide visibility into trending articles, enables McKesson’s support teams to access answers with single one click. Keyword searches, table of contents, labeling products, and a list of all key components to browse are also helpful resources that McKesson has delivered.

Now that customer service agents have the capability to find the right content to respond to support issues, McKesson is experiencing dramatic improvements in its key metrics across all of its teams. The average speed to answer has decreased 66%, same day resolution has improved by 12% and customer satisfaction is up. Customers now receive faster, better service as a result of McKesson’s support teams leveraging their social intranet. And with a customizable dashboard, agents can sync their interface strategically to maximize productivity.

Ogilvy’s Evan Shumeyko also presented a use case for a socialized customer support center, in this case consultative sales agents manning the front lines of a top-tier credit card company’s inbound calls for new products and campaigns.  With the challenge of bringing collaborative brand conversations to life inside the call center, Ogilvy turned to Socialtext. With Socialtext, Ogilvy achieved its goal of connecting people, process, technologies, and bringing innovation to the call center in a way that surfaces the most valuable nuggets of information and provides insight into content relevance.

Through the Socialtext dashboard, Ogilvy was able to create a virtual hub to push out the latest advertising campaigns, identify the informal experts around various topics, transplant knowledge, create call flows and act as a social media listening post.  Not only was the top sales agent the earliest adopter and user of Socialtext, the entire team benefited with an increase of 10% in conversions.

Customer service decision makers must find a balance between the needs of their customers and their business. Companies can benefit from a significant return on investment from social platforms, such as Socialtext, which allow agents to provide an excellent customer experience and strengthen customer loyalty. Agents can access up-to-date content to solve customer problems in a personalized way. In addition, agents are able to improve service skills, train and communicate about services on a daily basis. With access to the right tools, content and experts, employees can achieve a high level of customer satisfaction that will drive business and close more sales.

If you would like view a full recording of this webinar, please visit,  http://www.socialtext.com/solutions/webinar-socializing-customer-support.php.

I can understand the angst when you’re talking about public-facing social software deployments. There are very tricky questions about monitoring and moderation. Getting the answers wrong can lead to very public missteps.

Internal social software is a different story. The governance just ain’t that complicated. Successful internal deployments follow a principle I call the “Ownership Principle”.

Ownership Principle: IT owns the technology and content owners own the content.

Sounds obvious, right? IT should focus on central maintenance of the solution—making sure that the technology is running smoothly and supporting other business units and functions in their use of the system. All content decisions, however, should be left to the individuals and business units who are affected by that content. The Marketing Team drives decisions about marketing content, the HR team defines the process for posting HR content, and so on.

In practice, this means you should implement a kind of state/federal model of governance, in which IT and HR provide central infrastructure (technology, training, and support), and champions in the business drive content and collaboration around their local business needs.

At the central (“federal”) level, there are three main steps you can take to make sure you’ve covered the bases from a policy and process standpoint.

• Post rules and guidelines where all users can see them. (Many companies post these on the login screen.) Consult your Legal Department to come up with suitable language.
• Make sure that your Core Leadership Team (see above) contains representation from the different business units, so that you have clear lines of sight into the different content areas
• Train your HelpDesk on how to assign and manage permissions, so that they are able to assign the appropriate levels of administrative control to local champions.

Once you’ve put these central measures in place, you should leave the substantive governance questions up to the individual business units or use case champions (“states”):

• Who can post content? For some use cases (e.g., project team collaboration) you will want to encourage all team members to participate. For others (e.g., posting HR policies) the champions will want to restrict contribution to a select few. You should leave these decisions up to the local champions.
• Who can add users? Here again, the answer should be left up to local champions. Sales and Marketing should be decide who can add users to the Sales and Marketing Groups. Leaders of the Women’s Initiative should be allowed to decide whether the Women’s Initiative Group will be self-join or private. IT’s job is just to make sure that these local decisions are centrally supported by your Socialtext configuration.
• Who will monitor content? By now you can probably guess the answer: The local champions are responsible for their content. For some use cases (e.g., HR and Legal conversations) this may require strict supervision of the content. Other Groups (e.g., Marathon Runners) will see no such need.

One final piece of advice on governance: Relax. In our experience, governance concerns loom much larger in theory than in practice. This is not social media on the consumer web where users can post content anonymously. Because authors know that their content is attributed to them, their posts are respectful and appropriate.

Socialtext Page Editor

Our easy to use page editor enables you to create pages just like you would in any document editing program.  You can easily change fonts, background color, add bullets, numbered lists, tables of any size, insert images or videos…. The list goes on and on – take a look here.

Working With Images – Basics

This video will walk you through the basics of adding images to your pages, how to size images and how to align them as well as few extra tidbits we’ve thrown in.

Working With Images – Advanced

Here, you’ll learn how to apply some advanced functions to your images such as word wrapping, adding image borders, linking to a website and more.

Working with Tables

Working with tables has never been easier, this handy tutorial will show you how to add tables into your pages and specify the exact look you want for them, including alignment within the page, or defining the size of columns and rows. Our handy one click icons enable you to quickly add rows and columns, move rows and columns or just cells.   You can also customize cells with color backgrounds and also enable sorting on different columns or rows.  We’ve also added a bonus tip so be sure to watch the video to find that tip.

Socialtext was fortunate enough to have Anessa Fike and Jeb Bishop from Motley Fool join us recently for a webinar to discuss the many successes Jingle has provided the company. See below slides from the webinar.

Since deploying Socialtext, Motley Fool has experienced benefits from increased collaboration and communication, to a significant decrease in noisy email traffic, and improved employee wellness and bonding. Jingle offers employees from different departments and different offices, around the world, one place to come together and obtain the information they need instantly.

Motley Fool has just scratched the surface of what is possible with Jingle. The company has been able to take advantage of the communication features to reinforce community and corporate culture, develop groups based on shared affiliations and interests, consolidate conversations to allow everyone to contribute, and made it easier to find and share information. On a regular workday, Jingle is open on computers and continuously checked for updates and information. From edits and reviews on documentation, news feed updates or newly added groups, the phrase “Did you Jingle that” is often being thrown around the office.

Socialtext’s flexible infrastructure allows for customers to customize their intranet Widgets, which Motley Fool leveraged to develop tools for employee access convenience. These dashboard pages include: Quick 360 Feedback, which provides a place for employees to ask for and provide feedback on a work related item; a Quick Start page that offers quick links to get you started on Jingle; and Important Fool News, which hosts links to the top news items for that day. Jingle is proven to be user-friendly and easily adoptable. Although Jingle is being uses throughout the entire company, the technology department has the greatest adoption rate.

For a company dedicated to its employees, Jingle has provided Motley Fool with a great resource teamed up with a fun element that has brought people together. This is clearly displayed by having groups such as QuarterlyChallenge, in which employees rally together once a quarter to identify and accomplish a company challenge; or the Wellness group, which puts an emphasis on employee health and allows for daily workouts during the workday. Jingle has truly become the core of the company’s collaboration, providing a comfortable space for employees to brainstorm on business initiatives, bond over similar interests, learn about company events and keep up-to-date on news.

To learn more about Jingle, you can view the full webinar with Motley Fool by registering here.

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.

SOPA, which has been dropped for the time being, represents a fundamental change in the way the Internet works today and could undermine all SaaS companies and working in the Enterprise 2.0 space. This poses a great threat to many enterprise social networking providers, such as Socialtext who have shared hosting with their customers. Additionally, if this bill was passed, it could have broken-down the advancements made in international business if other countries followed suit and disabled the ability to provide services globally.

At Socialtext, customers use our technology to interact and share socially across the enterprise, from marketing to customer support, engineering, research and more. We were the first company to deliver enterprise social software and are focused on delivering a SaaS platform that enables social collaboration, allowing employees to share knowledge with their colleagues and teams. In addition to sharing internal knowledge and documents, customers also share information off the web, which can pose a problem if the sites and/or content shared comes from a site deemed infringed. In result, customers (especially those using extranets) would have to self-police themselves or face substantial penalties.

After strong protests and, according to PC World, $4.5 million people signing the Google anti-SOPA and PIPA petition, the bill is currently being assessed and reworked. So, what does the future hold for Internet security? Will OPEN gain more ground than its predecessors, SOPA and PIPA? Only time will tell as SOPA sponsor and Chair of the House Judiciary Committee Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) continues to work on getting an antipiracy legislation passed.

For more thoughts on this please check out my special guest piece, “SOPA: Dead but Not Forgotten” on TMCnet.com and featured interview on Technorati.

Like so many orthodoxies, this one’s due for a re-think.

The whole notion of a knowledge worker or a knowledge industry is confused. It suggests that there’s a certain class of workers who problem-solve and innovate for a living, and another class of workers that don’t. But that’s just not the case. An assembly-line worker who thinks about how to reduce the failure rate of brake systems rolling off the assembly line is a knowledge worker, at least in my book. A consultant who reads bullet points from a deck that someone else has written is not exactly doing knowledge work. Knowledge is a characteristic of how the work gets done, not of the work itself.

If you don’t believe me, just compare the cappuccino you get at a world-class cafe like Lovers and Madmen in Philadelphia to what they sling down the street at McDonald’s. Both were made by baristas, but only one was made by a knowledge worker.

There is, however, a fundamental difference between activities that are more routinized and those which are more bespoke. Doing warehouse pick-and-pack for the latest James Patterson thriller is a routinized activity. Sourcing a clean copy of Russell and Whitehead’s 3-volume Principia Mathematica is bespoke. Soliciting $10 donations over the phone is routinized; soliciting $5 million donations is bespoke. Building the prototype of a new car model is bespoke; building the 100,000th instance of that same car is routinized.

Routinized and bespoke activities require different types of supporting tools. Routinized activities require process tools to run the activity at scale as efficiently as possible, with as little variation as possible. Bespoke activities require a toolkit, a basket of techniques, tools, tips, tricks, and experts upon which a practitioner can draw to meet the needs of the moment.

In the early days of Enterprise 2.0 (mid-2000s) enterprise social software was good at toolkit-style functionality. Blogs and wikis gave people useful frameworks and reference materials for doing bespoke tasks. But there wasn’t much functionality for businesses that run a lot of routinized process.

These early tools appealed to high-end consultancies, law firms, PR agencies, and tech startups, which lean towards more bespoke activities. I suspect that’s where people first got the idea that enterprise social software was for “knowledge workers.”

But social software has changed, and changed fast. In the past year, business has started to embrace social software for more routinized processes as well.

The combination of activity streams, robust APIs, and mobile means that social software now integrates with–and improves–industrial-strength process. In London, for example, Southeastern Railway is using social software to automatically alert railway staff when trains are delayed–and to enable those staff to collaborate in real time to get the trains back on track (sorry…couldn’t resist the pun). In Ohio, Industrial Perfection Mold and Machine uses social software on shop floor iPads to regulate and improve the manufacturing process.

Which type of activity should your business try to optimize? My answer: Both.

Every business runs on a combination of routinized and bespoke activities. Running the trains in and out of London may routinized, but when a train breaks down the work becomes very bespoke. Tier 1 customer support is routinized; Tier 2-3 customer support is bespoke.

What businesses really need is an integrated combination of the two: Stream-based tools for routinized activity and wiki-based toolkits for the bespoke stuff.

To borrow a line from the Anita Bryant of my youth: “Social software. It’s not just for knowledge workers anymore.”