Social Networking and the Enterprise - Visual

A DRAFT of my AIIM conference slides:
The caveat is that this will all change by the time I talk. There is no audio context, so you'll have to use your imagination.

AIIM Conference_Draft

View more presentations from John Hutchings.

With the exception of slide 5 (from my own imagination), much of this thinking has been mashed together from the likes of Dave Armano, Jeremiah Owyang, Josh Berman and others. They're all smarter than me, so credit where credit is due.

Social Networking and the Enterprise - Part 4 : How?

In a recent Forrester article and blog post, Jeremiah Owyang talks about the 5 ways companies are participating in Social Web. Although he's mostly speaking to the inside-out communication aspect of this phenomenon, the model is still applicable.

1. No clue: It's a complete free for all, it puts the organization at tremendous risk of Intellectual Property leakage and regulatory non-compliance, often without the firm knowing until it's too late.

2. The Corporate Representative: This is analogous to the 'tower' model where a silo of representatives, often senior leadership, are responsible for all Social corporate communications. This is safe, but doesn't truly embrace true sharing or collaboration. The analogy here is the 'Message from the President' newsletter.

3. Common Employees Blessed for Social: This model lets a few more trained people within the organization behind the velvet rope to act as Social Media ambassadors. This, and 4 below, follow the 'hub and spoke' model. The challenge here is that you're creating two classes of workers and it is still more of a push model rather than true collaboration and sharing.

4. Everyone is Encouraged: Again the 'hub and spoke' model, with a cross-disciplinary team in the middle acting as a conduit between various business stakeholders. From a brand communication perspective: "This is ultimately going to be the future, but having a free for all isn't an excuse for having a strategy, guidelines and resources to support the brand and employees". For a regulated entity, it may take a long time to get this far, both externally and internally.

5. Shut it down: The pendulum swung to the other extreme of the free for all, this is analogous to organizations that block Internet access to Webmail and other 'non' work sites. This happens more often you might think, particularly in regulated verticals like Finance and big Pharma. (I once built a clinical trial portal for a large pharmaceutical manufacturer. It failed because the clinicians using the site couldn't use it to 'talk' with each other. Legal, Medical and Regulatory got a hold of it and were so concerned about Adverse Event reporting they shut down all community elements, including hard coding email addresses so they weren't clickable!). This doesn't work because employees will use their mobile devices or just surf from home.

So, which one makes the most sense? It depends. Maybe a checklist:

1. Involve your Regulatory, Legal and Privacy people early.
2. Do a POST analysis on your organization or team. It will vary from Marketing to Operations to Sales, so it's important to do more granular analysis.
3. Don't forget about your company's Intranet and email client. Your organization's Intranet can (and should) be the primary information sharing and collaboration space if it's easy to use and addresses the needs of workers.
4. Get Identity Management working - fast. My experience with regulated entities is that some employees have access to things that others don't. This is typically managed by multiple passwords or the user having to 'ask for permission' (via telephone or email) to gain access. With single sign-in and Role Based Access Control Lists, access to information is based on your role within the organisation. This leads to a better end user experience and improved information control. This can then be extended to the personalization and customization of the Intranet and in-house Social Networking applications.
5. Start small and practical. A blog or wiki? For one department? Yammer.com for your sales department? Perhaps start a 'Social Media Sandbox' with a pilot group or team?

I'm certain there are others. Any thoughts from the 'community' would be most welcome.

Social Networking and the Enterprise - Part 3 : If your organization should do it?

So, we've looked at definitions and have now answered the question about why Social Networking is important, both from an external marketing perspective and as an internal information sharing and collaboration tool.

Next is whether an organization should entertain it in the first place. In his 2007 bestseller Groundswell, Josh Berman proposes 'a systematic approach to social (media) strategy'. It's called the POST Method. It breaks down like this:


People: Assess your customers' Social activities. As mentioned earlier this has to do with your organization's demographics and culture. A company full of Gen Y workers is, in general, more likely to adopt than one full of Boomers.

Objectives: Decide what you want to accomplish as an organization. Better collaboration? Better information capture and sharing? Also decide on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) before you start. This drives the technology choice.

Strategy: Plan for how relationships with customers (in this case internal) will change. This is critical, particularly in a regulated environment. You have to plan for what could go wrong and mitigate it with safeguards.

Technology: Decide which Social applications to use. A common axiom here is 'don't let the technology tail wag the dog'. A good example is MOSS. It used to ship free with Windows. So, guess what? The IT guys played around with it, and to quote Greg: "spun it up and called it an ECM strategy". I recently completed an Enterprise Content Management engagement for a large Oil & Gas company. They literally had hundreds of SharePoint sites running. And the majority of business users had no idea where to look for information...

Let's look at a simple example. Where I work:

P: Mostly Gen Y with some Gen X. Open, collaborative culture. Everyone is on FaceBook, most are on Twitter. The leadership and senior client service and strategy folks can all Tweet on the company's behalf.

O: One objective was to improve internal communication in a secure environment. Another was to have a information repository that is editable and accessible to all - it was about knowledge capture, management and transfer.

S: The strategy was to get individual workers to keep their conversations internal and work-oriented and to have a one-stop shop for all information.

T: We implemented Pandion as our in-house IM application and it is heavily trafficked. Our internal wiki is in huge demand, particularly among our development team who use it as a code-base repository.

How do we know they are working? We measure.

This isn't rocket science, but it is a simple and elegant way to determine how Social Media fits into an organization's marketing mix as well as it's internal communication and collaboration strategy. After determining the 'if' it's now time to explore how we are going to go about it.

Social Networking and the Enterprise - Part 2 : Why should we bother?

We've already established relevant definitions and put together a visual fabric about how Enterprise 2.0, ECM, Enterprise Social Software and Social Web stitch together.

Although the point of this exercise is to determine how regulated entities should incorporate Social Networking strategy, we should first establish the 'why' and 'if'.

So, why is it important to consider Social Networking as part of an organization's information sharing and collaboration strategy? Let's look at some top-level drivers:

1. Technology Populism: This really puts pressure on organizations to act and to give their knowledge workers the tools they require to share and collaborate. Although somewhat dependent on the demographics - and by extension the culture - of the organization, people are increasingly finding or using their own solutions. If your organization doesn't have an in-house IM application, guess what? They’re going to use their own MSN. No online collaboration spaces? Maybe your employees will start using a solution like Google Docs or TeamViewer.

2. Enterprise Software meets UEX and Social Networking: Many Content Management Systems (Red Dot, MOSS, etc.) are now shipping with built-in Social Networking apps - better integration and Usability make these a reasonable option with easier adoption

3. Cloud Computing and the virtual desktop: Innovations in cloud computing are making the virtual desktop the norm thus reducing the cost of connecting workers and thereby increasing the potential reach of corporate social networks.

It’s not all sunshine, however. A recently released survey by eMarketer reveals that 45% of Social Media Marketers think that Social Media is not effective at improving internal communications.

Taken from a Forrester paper “Facebook for the Enterprise”: Catchy Phrase or a Strategy for Collaboration”, there are other considerations as well.

1. “Notifications” and “tweets’ assume more connectivity is better. I don’t regularly use our internal IM application and I have trouble keeping up with Twitter.

2. Interruptions sap information work productivity. Research suggests that it takes workers 25 minutes to return to what they were working on.

3. Professional capital needs identity, reputation and objectivity. Translated: I can pretend to be anyone on Facebook or Twitter (although this is changing with vanity URLs), but within an organization, identities need to be verifiable. This is where Identity Management and Role Based Access Control Lists becomes critical.

There are also legal and Intellectual Property issues to consider. Even with safeguards in place, employees will find ways to let knowledge walk out the door. And, the ill-timed release of sensitive information can land companies in trouble with regulators.

So, there are things to consider on both the positive and negative side of the equation. With the ‘Why’ out of the way, it’s time to move onto the ‘if’. Before we even consider how an organization, particularly a regulated one, should implement a Social Networking strategy, we need to ask if they should even bother. That’s next in Part 3.

Pushbutton Ecosystem

An interesting post by Anil Dash (via Tyler) about the evolving ability to deliver realtime messages to a large audience using an open-source (read non-proprietary) plaftorm that he's calling Pushbutton.

Currently, it's mostly an asynchronous Push-Pull model. I update my blog, and then if you subscribe to my RSS feed, you get an ALERT that I've updated, but not the message itself. You, as a user have to go and physically get the message (either manually or via a Social Networking platform such as Facebook or Twitter).

!n the Pushbutton model, it's Push - Push. "...it proactively delivers not just the notification that there's a new message but the content of the message itself." In other words, it saves the user a step in receiving information - and it happens in near realtime.

A cool concept based on existing and expanding technologies.

Rise of the Machines

If you haven't seen this yet, check it out. Wolfram|Alpha.com.

As of now, Wolfram|Alpha contains 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains...Running on supercomputer-class compute clusters, Wolfram|Alpha makes extensive use of the latest generation of web and parallel computing technologies, including webMathematica and gridMathematica.

You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer. This is a 'thinking" computer engine and it's one important step towards artificial intelligence. Cool, but scary in the Terminator sense of things.

I could have used this in school

I read about this on Michael Wesch's blog. A new pen that links whatever you write to whatever is said at the same time.
The kind of pen that is worth saving.
It also makes a digital picture that you can send to colleagues and friends. Very handy for lectures, meetings and collaboration...I'm all for remembering, but this type of innovation points us to the future.
No wonder it one a Macworld best of show award.