Posts tagged ‘social networking’

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

Case Study: In Disrupted Media Industry, Meredith Drives Profitability with Enterprise Social Software

By Christopher Lynch | June 8, 2010, 12:24 pm | 0 Comments

If you follow the media industry, you know how much it has struggled to adapt its business model to the Web. But what’s not written about as frequently is how some media and publishing companies are using social software — one of the very technologies that disrupted the industry — to pursue new business opportunities and grow revenue.

That’s been the case at Meredith Corporation (here is our full case study we published today). Meredith counts 23 subscription-based publications in its portfolio, including Better Homes and Gardens and Ladies’ Home Journal. With its various properties, Meredith serves a readership of nearly 75 million women.

Meredith has been using Socialtext to manage subscriber campaigns, respond to market changes, and ultimately drive profitability in its circulation. Meredith utilizes Socialtext Signals for microblogging to share and discuss new ideas, SocialCalc (a social spreadsheet) to manage subscriber campaign reports and online workspaces to collaborate more deeply on strategic marketing projects.

At Socialtext, we focus very heavily on the business value that social tools can generate for companies internally. As someone who cheerleads for media companies who work hard to adapt to market changes (I used to work for one), I was encouraged by Meredith’s strong results during the course of my research.

“Since Meredith began using Socialtext in the fall of 2008, its subscriber numbers bettered an industry that was in decline. According to the most recent State of the News Media report, the magazine industry’s paid subscriptions, which make up nearly 90 percent of magazines sold, declined 1.12 percent overall. Meredith, meanwhile, in the second quarter of fiscal 2010, increased its circulation revenue by nearly half a million dollars from the same period a year before.
In a disrupted industry where flat revenue or even light losses are viewed as an accomplishment, the increase wasn’t lost on Meredith’s investors when the company reported its financial results. In fact, the company reported that the “revenues, profit and related margin in Meredith’s circulation activities (that) increased in the second quarter of fiscal 2010 compared to the prior year (were) driven in part by efficiencies in subscription operations.”

business value, case study, enterprise social software, media industry, social media, social networking

Socialtext Enjoys Record 2009 Performance

By Christopher Lynch | January 4, 2010, 9:02 am | 0 Comments

Momentum fueled by doubling of user base, record quarter-over-quarter bookings growth.

PALO ALTO, Calif., Jan. 4 /PRNewswire/ — Socialtext enjoyed a record-breaking year in 2009, setting its highest quarter-over-quarter bookings growth in the company’s history. Businesses are turning to Socialtext’s social software platform to gain higher levels of employee engagement, commitment and performance not achievable in the past. As the leading enterprise social software company moves into 2010, it expects continued growth in new bookings and renewals, and another record year in overall bookings and revenue.

“In 2009, there was a collective awakening about the value of greatly improved knowledge flows among a company’s greatest asset, its people,” says Eugene Lee, Socialtext’s CEO. “In 2010, social software will become a staple for enterprises looking to improve the way their employees communicate and get work done.”

Large and midsized enterprises across many industries — including media, health care, manufacturing, and technology — have deployed Socialtext so their employees can collaborate more easily and tap each other’s expertise, enabling them to stay connected, aligned and informed. With greatly improved knowledge flow and teamwork, these companies can now respond faster to changing market conditions and new revenue opportunities. In doing so, they better meet the needs of their customers.

“Socialtext got all my smart people pulling in the same direction.”
Don Smith, Vice President of Customer Service, OSIsoft

“People call it the single most useful tool that Davies has introduced to staff, period.”
Brandon Edwards, President & COO, Davies

To meet customer demand for its enterprise social software platform, Socialtext is expanding, hiring across multiple departments in 2010. While Socialtext is looking forward to the coming year, highlights from 2009 include:

From Q1 to Q4, the company grew bookings by more than 200 percent.
The company grew its customer base to 6,500, while active users doubled.
Each quarter, the company beat its record for renewal bookings.
Bookings growth from customer expansions nearly tripled, in large part due to organic adoption of Socialtext’s fully integrated social software platform inside companies.

“Once people saw what they could do with Socialtext, each business unit started their own social software revolution.”
Steve Brewer, Customer Connection Mgr. & Systems Integration,
FONA International

Socialtext released its Microblogging appliance, allowing companies to deploy secure, private microblogging enterprise-wide very quickly, and then expand into other uses of the Socialtext social software platform later, such as deploying a social intranet, a social corporate directory, and letting the activity streams and other automated mechanisms do the work of keeping the organization informed.

“With microblogging from Socialtext, people understand each other more, and they know what others are doing. This lets us respond more quickly to new opportunities.”
Tim Eby, General Manager, St. Louis Public Radio.

Socialtext shipped SocialCalc, the first and only social spreadsheet integrated with a social software platform, developed with VisiCalc creator Dan Bricklin. SocialCalc has allowed companies to stay in touch with the state of the business.

“With SocialCalc, I can go in at one point in the day and see what’s going on in all our active campaigns right now. It helps us distribute information and knowledge faster, so we can react more quickly.”
Dave Ball, Vice President of Consumer Marketing, Meredith Corporation.

Socialtext Desktop allows people to access the Socialtext platform via a fast Adobe AIR app, providing a real-time experience for Activity Streams and Signals.
The new Socialtext Mobile brought the enterprise social software platform to employees on-the-go.
The company’s new service partners program complements their in-house professional services organization and ensures customers get the fastest adoption and path to strategic business results.
The company launched a “freemium” package that allows companies to get up and running with secure microblogging in minutes, providing a replacement for microblogging networks that have cropped up organically among employees, and that are neither secure or IT-friendly.

About Socialtext:

As the enterprise social software leader, Socialtext applies Web 2.0 technologies such as microblogging, social networking and wikis to the critical challenges facing large and mid-market businesses. Socialtext’s enterprise social software platform allows employees to share expertise, speed workflows and get their jobs done faster. Socialtext provides hosted and appliance-based solutions to more than 6,500 customers world-wide, including EgonZehnder, Epitaph Records, Mayo Clinic, McGraw-Hill, OSIsoft, Symantec and The Washington Post. Learn more about Socialtext at www.socialtext.com.

SOURCE Socialtext

ROI of Social Networking for TransUnion

By Ross Mayfield | March 23, 2009, 8:50 am | 4 Comments

Internet Evolution interviewed TransUnion CTO John Parkinson about the ROI of Social Networking. It is relatively early in their use of Socialtext, but they are already achieving significant success. Here is the sidebar article, quoted in full:

Transunion Finds Cost Savings, Seeks More

Can’t put an ROI on social networking? TransUnion CTO John Parkinson has his: an estimated $2.5 million in savings in less than five months while spending about $50,000 on a social networking platform. The savings comes from buying less stuff. TransUnion is one of the big three credit report companies, and it runs on a lot of custom software code. Instead of buying more gear to improve IT performance, employees are brainstorming ideas across larger groups on the company’s Socialtext platform. “The savings mostly come out of teams that would have historically said, ‘Buy me more hardware’ or ‘I need a new software tool’ or ‘I need more processing capacity,’ who figured out how to solve their problems without asking for any of those things,” says Parkinson.

While the estimated ROI numbers look promising, Parkinson stresses that wasn’t why TransUnion got started with social networking. He thought it would meet a need for employees, and, just as importantly, “I wanted to defend against too much of this going on in public,” he says.

TransUnion knew it was time to provide an internal social networking tool when people started asking for permission to set up an employee group inside Facebook. So the company did a quick survey. About 2,000 of its 2,700 employees were using some kind of public social networking tool. Since the company deals in credit reports, it wasn’t keen on employees gathering to talk shop on the public Web. So the IT team set up Socialtext inside the company firewall. Parkinson liked the features of the online network Ning but decided he needed the software on its own network for security.

The Socialtext platform has profiles, a wiki capability, and instant messaging. Perhaps most powerfully, employees can use it to ask questions of a broad group. People can tune their settings to allow all questions or allow only those from certain groups or people. But all the questions and answers get written to the database. The platform lets people vote on answers they like. It also has tools to analyze which answers people are reading and using to solve problems, and how answers correlate to topics that are most valuable to the company.

Here’s where this idea gets even more interesting. TransUnion is studying usage data to learn who’s best at solving business problems raised in the social network. With that, it’s experimenting with new job descriptions for a couple of them, so that handling these questions within the forum is a formal part of their role.

“It was never very clear to us, looking in, who the authoritative sources were, who was good at solving problems,” Parkinson says. “Now we can see a lot of that because we’re starting to see patterns emerge, to see who’s following whom, who’s the good source of questions, who offers good answers. All those things that you sort of know by the grapevine, we now have data for.”

TransUnion’s Socialtext platform co-exists with Microsoft SharePoint, which has some of the same wiki and networking tools. Parkinson draws the line this way: If an activity is part of a formal process, the collaboration should happen in SharePoint. In bringing on a new customer, for example, many formal steps are involved, and SharePoint has workflow tools that allow for collaboration while making sure the necessary hand-offs happen and the process is completed. “On the other hand, if I want to improve the process of bringing on a customer, I launch a discussion on Socialtext,” Parkinson says.

Extrapolating on the company’s success so far, he hopes the platform can deliver $5 million to $8 million in total savings this year. The platform only went live in October, and company-wide in January. Will the momentum continue? Will people find uses that are less productive? Parkinson isn’t declaring victory yet, but he likes what he’s seen.

– Chris Murphy (cjmurphy@techweb.com)

case study, social networking

What’s different about enterprise social software?

By Adina Levin | February 18, 2009, 8:48 am | 0 Comments

When people talk about “enterprise social software”, they envision “Facebook for the enterprise” or “Twitter for the enterprise. But creating enterprise social software is a matter of adapting patterns from the public web, not copying identically.

What is “Enterprise Social Networking”

In the public web, social networking software has become embedded in people’s lives, as a way to stay in touch and to coordinate. Similar patterns will bolster collegial connections, expertise discovery, and collaboration. However, there are some significant differences between a social network on the web and a network behind the enterprise firewall.

What is Friending?

In a public web social network, the primary gesture is identifying others as “friends”. The graph of friends delineates the boundaries in which each individual shares information. Contact information is assumed to be private unless shared with a friend. But in a business social network, the lines of visibility are defined differently. In a plain-vanilla corporate directory, the assumption is that every employee has the right to see contact information for everyone else. You don’t need to mark “Dale” in marketing as a friend in order to see his phone number. More than that, what on earth is a “friend”? Will people simply go around “friending” high-ranking executives? Should I need to have to specifically mark my colleagues in the product group as “friends”? What does it mean if someone is not my “friend.” The gesture of explicit friending doesn’t have much value, and has plenty of potential annoyance and harm. In Socialtext, we use the “following” gesture common to Twitter and Friendfeed, and don’t support “friending.”

Where does Profile data come from?

In public web social software, people type in their contact information, alma mater, significant others, pets. In an organization, there is often already a repository of basic contact information in the corporate directory. HR and IT departments share responsiblity for keeping that information up to date. Therefore, a business social network needs to draw on corporate systems of record for basic contact information. Admins need to decide what information comes from the corporate directory, and what information users should add themselves.

What are the Activities in an Activity Feed

One of the features that’s most compelling about Facebook is the ability for people to see updates on their friends activities. Talia is dating / no longer dating / once again dating Jeremy. Bob just watched xyz movie. Scott is reading xyz book. This activity stream is compelling inside the firewall, for a different set of activities. People will be interested in updates on what their colleagues are working on, what documents they have edited, what key events have happened in enterprise systems. For example, “Shawn closed the support escalation ticket for Major Customer Q.” It would be nice, and foster adoption, to have some “small talk” applications that enable people to stay in touch regarding ordinary life. It can be highly valuable for the business to be able to be notified of important work-related updates. In social networks, the context of the activity feed is one’s social life. In an enterprise social network, the content is one’s work activities in enterprise systems, documents, and processes.

What does an admin do?

In private label social public social networks, administrators do things like configure the available features and the fields in a profile. In business social networks, administrators integrate the social network with existing directories and applications. They play a greater role in defining communities and creating social boundaries. In a consumer social network, the individual assumes that she has control over privacy and disclosure and there is controversy if those assumptions are violated by service providers. In a business social network, the administrator has more control. In some cases, this level of control is good and appropriate. Competing customers shouldn’t see each others information, and the activities of the M&A groups should be secret. An appropriate level of business confidentiality, like an appropriate level of personal confidentiality, increases sharing and honesty. In some cases, admins are familiar with applications deployed on a “need to know” basis, and want use these familiar practices to set up applications designed to gain value by increased sharing. There are gray areas that will need to be worked out in software design, effective practice, and cultural evolution. Next in the series: What’s different about enterprise Twitter

Introducing Socialtext 3.0

By Eugene Lee | September 30, 2008, 8:06 am | 0 Comments

Today we released Socialtext 3.0 to our production hosted service. Socialtext 3.0 is a trio of enterprise social software applications built on a common platform:

Socialtext People – Putting social networking for work
Socialtext Dashboard – Personalized dashboards with work-centric social update feeds
Socialtext Workspace – Dramatic upgrade to the enterprise wiki for business people>

There’s likely to be a lot of press and blogger coverage about Socialtext today, and a lot of it is likely to cover our announcement of another exciting product in the works – Socialtext Signals. Most folks are likely to call it “Twitter for the Enterprise” but we are thinking about it much more deeply – particularly how integrating it with People, Dashboard, and Workspace will help make it much more of a tool that blends with the flow of real work, and not just another cool social app. But more on Signals later.

Socialtext 3.0 has been in the works for awhile, and is the result of lots of learning from our innovative customers, input from our insightful advisors, adaptation of major social software trends in the public Web 2.0 world, and good old-fashioned home grown innovation. But at all times we focus on making our products relevant and useful to business users, which builds on our years of experience delivering business value with enterprise wikis.

Our team has put together a lot of materials to introduce you to these new products and capabilities – and how they work together. They’ll be posted on the main www.socialtext.com website on an ongoing basis – so check back to see what’s new.

For our existing customers, we’re completely refreshing the Customer Exchange www.socialtext.net/exchange – where we’re adding lots of content to help orient you and your colleagues to the new user experience in Socialtext Workspace 3.0 with Socialtext Dashboard, as well as the benefits of blending these with Socialtext People .

social networking, Socialtext 3.0, Socialtext Dashboard, Socialtext People, Twitter, wikis

A different kind of social capital at work – Attention

By Eugene Lee | August 11, 2008, 11:06 am | 3 Comments

I love Geek and Poke and saw this recently: Geek and Poke

I think the concept of attention is a key way to think differently about social networking inside the enterprise. As I already talked about in a previous blog post Will you be my friend yes or no? the explicit network ties between people who work for the same organization is nowhere near as useful or valuable as the implicit ones – it’s not “who knows whom” (and the vanity rolodexes that people put together) but rather “who knows what” and “who knows who knows what” that helps people leverage the company’s social network to personal and group productivity. This implict network is primarily based on who works with whom – independent (but not exclusive) of official org charts.

In addition to “who works with whom”, we’re enabling a different type of social capital and connections to emerge – “who pays attention to whom”. Given that the most precious asset that we all have is time, work effectiveness is often a result of how well can can find the most efficient paths to information, knowledge, assistance, experience, and context. Socialtext People and Dashboard allow you to “follow” a colleague – which includes their work activity updates (not just status “tweets” but actual work – blog posts, wiki entries, people tagging, group/workspace membership changes, etc.). This is subtly but powerfully different from how patterns emerge in Twitter. People follow Twitterers because they find what they “tweet” about interesting or fun; Socialtext users follow colleagues because they find what they are working on useful, informative, and relevant.

Back when I was hired into Cisco Systems (September 1997) I remember being overwhelmed by its size, scale, complexity, and pace. My wonderful boss (Howard Charney – one of the best executives I’ve ever had the privilege of working with) gave me some great onboarding assistance and told me that the best way to learn the business and the company and how to get things done was to first meet the right people. He set me up with about 5 different peer VP mentors from different parts of the company. I’ll never forget the advice I got from one of them about the huge amount of information and trying to figure out what’s relevant. He told me to just subscribe to all the same email lists he did, and then unsubscribe from the ones that weren’t useful or relevant to my part of the business. I did that – which was enormously helpful – but I also did the same with 2 of the key direct reports I was now managing who were obviously savvy and effective. This probably improved my onboarding by over 100% as “breathing their information smog” was a really focused way of figuring out which information firehose to drink from. I’ve used that technique at almost every new job since then (although with more modern tools; Ross Mayfield happily donated his ginormous RSS OPML file to me, for example). We think that “following” in Socialtext People will be even more useful, since you’ll get alert feeds based on “in the flow work” from your social network.

So while the Geek and Poke carton is funny, I think the concept is sort of spot on if applied to the enterprise – following and paying attention to the right people can really make you more effective.

attention, enterprise social software, geek and poke, social capital, social networking, Twitter

“Will you be my friend – yes or no?”

By Eugene Lee | May 29, 2008, 2:48 pm | 0 Comments

Our recent announcements about Socialtext People and Socialtext Dashboard have given me the fun opportunity to demo and discuss our new social networking initiatives with a large number of existing and potential customers. There’s some consistent themes that come up in these conversations, often unprompted by anything I say:

Many companies have been thinking about the business potential of social networking at work. Several have even built out complete strategies and visions of what they would like to see working inside of their environment – not just in terms of a technology suite or stack, but also in terms of “fitting in” to their existing way of working. This is really exciting!
At the same time many of them have a hard time explaining internally how the most commonly known and used public internet social networking tools show how this would really work “in the real world” of their environment. “Facebook is just for fun” or “How is that relevant to getting stuff done” or “what problems does that solve for me at work” are frequent questions that people either ask or get asked.
One nerve that runs deep that our demo often touches comes to the fore when I talk about how we at Socialtext think really deeply and differently about the value proposition of social software in the workplace vs. on the Internet. We think that the point is to help people and organizations get stuff done, which is dramatically different from “staying in touch” or “showing off how big your network is” or “hooking up”.

What prompted me to write about this was a conversation I had yesterday with a new customer. I was humorously talking about how the explicit “friending” gesture that’s at the core of almost every public social networking site just doesn’t work as is in the enterprise – after all we work for the same company, and the political ramifications of publicly visible “friend connections” is just subject to too much useless gamesmanship (“look how many execs I’m friends with”). We think the real potential of social software in the work environment goes way beyond explict graphs of “who knows whom” (or really “who says they know whom”), and should address much more powerful things like “who works with whom” and “who knows what” and “who knows who knows what”.

My new customer told me I must watch a very funny video called “Facebook in the Real World” which is here for your enjoyment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrlSkU0TFLs

Meanwhile all of this thinking was strongly influenced by one of my most favorite recent reads – David Weinberger‘s book “Everything is Miscellaneous”. I recommend this book to everyone – but in particular because of his chapter called “What Nothing Says”. My key takeaway is that the implicit is much more powerful than the explicit, and that what I do is more meaningful that what I say about myself. By extension, what others say about me is likely more relevant and trustworthy (usually) that what I say about me. These social patterns are much more useful and relevant than explicit links between people who know that the links are explicitly public.

Anyway, enjoy the video.

David Weinberger, enterprise social software, Facebook, implicit vs. explicit, social networking, Socialtext Dashboard, Socialtext People

Posts tagged ‘social networking’

Momentum fueled by doubling of user base, record quarter-over-quarter bookings growth.

About Socialtext:

Transunion Finds Cost Savings, Seeks More

What is “Enterprise Social Networking”

What is Friending?

Where does Profile data come from?

What are the Activities in an Activity Feed

What does an admin do?

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