Alright…. before I get a bunch of hate mail – you all know I don’t normally plug anything here, I make a conscious effort to restrict the conversation to best practices and my experiences working with customers. It wasn’t an easy decision to blog about Signals, but I’m literally so excited about it that I don’t think I can possibly do anything BUT blog.
“What’s so amazing about Signals – it’s just internal Twitter, right?”
Well, yes – and, no. The reason I’m SO excited about it is that in the real world use cases that we’re seeing at Socialtext, Signals is actually (not just theoretically!) revolutionizing the way that our customers work. Holy smokes. Allow me to digress.
I would posit that the value proposition for external discussion forums (capture the conversation yourself, control the dialogue) is diminishing daily in viability, namely because the nature of online social interaction is moving away from visiting a corporate web-page to engage in their discussion forums…that’s soooo 2007! Instead, the world is shifting to a model where folks go to Twitter and comment on their experiences with everything from praise for their local florist to arcane technical questions. We filter our attention stream so that as people interested in those things we’re kept up to date. One place online for all those conversations to happen, and all kinds of aggregation and attention stream options to make it your own. As you’re no doubt aware if you are active in this realm, loads of brands are leveraging Twitter for marketing efforts as well as engaging both evangelists and unhappy customers in a public dialogue. Signals allows you to seamlessly incorporate social tags from Twitter into your Signals environment. Obviously this has impact across the organization – from Marketing to Executives to Sales to Support… and allows you to internally network with the right resources before responding officially. In real time. Um, yeah – that’s what I’m talking about!
Ok, so that’s cool – but obviously we’re talking about more than just that one use-case here. The internal use case for discussion forums has always been engage the wider audience of people, maybe cross-functional who might have an answer to your question. Well, that argument is not dead yet, but guess what? It will be once Signals gets wider adoption and better market understanding for just how flexible and powerful it really is. Instead of having to navigate to a section of the site where it might be a good place to post a question (or might not) and hoping for the best, we’re seeing discussions, updates, activities, announcements, questions happening across groups or the whole organization in real-time in a non invasive way, getting real-time responses, available in a sweet Adobe Air desktop client that includes all of the context of your collaboration space, people, content, activities to boot…. it just doesn’t get much cooler, easier to use and adopt, or sexier. Seriously.
I can tell you that after less than a week with Socialtext, I’m absolutely convinced that this technology IS the future of internal and partner/B2B collaboration. We aren’t playing Ent. 2.0 catchup here, folks. We’re developing truly innovative applications that change the frame of reference around collaboration, that work with you to make what you do easier, better, smarter, faster. Did I mention I was pumped?
The influence of social media is felt everywhere these days! I have heard from a ton of folks over the last few days congratulating me on my new position with Socialtext (thank you!) and many questions about my short stint with Telligent. Firstly, I am not going to deride Telligent or speculate negatively about the company. This is about me, not them It probably helps, therefore to understand how the last few months played out in my world.
When I left Jive, I jumped on the opportunity for an overdue extended holiday in dear Tassie with my loved ones. This decided, I snagged a bargain airfare and booked the trip before having a solid path to my next position. The end result was that I had literally 10 days to pull the trigger, and was still undecided right up until a couple of days before I left.
Given this climate of rush timing and pressure I ended up with a couple of possible viable options. Based on what I’d seen, I made the call to accept the offer from Telligent. Over the last few months, however I realized that we didn’t really align from a sales process/philosophy standpoint, not to mention my personal long term goals. After an exhaustive due diligence process, I settled on Socialtext (thankfully, they also settled on me!)
I would like to thank all of the talented, hard working, smart and fun Telligent folks I came to know in my time there. You know who you are – I’m looking forward to staying in touch with y’all on Facebook and Twitter… social media strikes again! Drop me a line if you’re coming my way
…SharePoint just doesn’t cut it for internal collaboration. Sorry, guys.
A customer recently told me that the last round of enhancements to SharePoint are simply the proverbial “lipstick on a pig”. We all know and reiterate that the application does a fine job of being a storehouse for documents. Document Workflow, Versioning and storage of structured information are definitely the core of the application’s functional strengths.
So, what happened? Why did Microsoft decide to take a highly structured CMS and try make it social? Good question. I am sure there are many smart people at Microsoft who work on SharePoint, however there’s also a very reactionary element who can’t stand to be provoked. Certain people (you know who you are!) couldn’t resist taunting Microsoft regarding their lack of social capabilities in SharePoint.
Instead of focusing on their traditional competition (Documentum, etc) Microsoft decided to jump on the social bandwagon and attempt to change SharePoint to the next big thing in internal collaboration.
The reason for the title of this blog is that IT have embraced the notion that “nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft”. They are going down fighting against business teams who are begging for an intuitive UI, functional social elements and the ability to smoothly leverage content across business silos.
What’s the answer, when you are trying to spend wisely in this troubled economy? One approach I’ve seen be highly effective (sorry, Microsoft) is to use the free version of SharePoint for document storage and versioning for the structured content that belongs there.
When your business teams need something that has blogging, open document authoring, rich profiles, microblogging, commentary, ratings – in short, a social media application – leverage one of the best of breed players out there. They aren’t as expensive as you’d think, and your infrastructure/IT resource costs can be very minimal depending on the application of choice.
A combined approach will allow you to preserve the Microsoft environment and utilize their technology for what it does very well, but also better connect your people and leverage their mindshare to solve problems more quickly, find experts and build a sense of organizational connectedness. Get people collaborating in open access content areas, asking questions and helping build a vibrant storehouse of knowledge and the people who make your organization successful… not just a file system with a bunch of lightweight bells and whistles.
Your organization has decided to provide a community on your external website for customer/prospects to discuss your offering, potentially get support from their peers or help you refine your products/services to better serve your end users? Great! So, your next step is to start investigating vendors… when you realize that in this space, there’s a rocky, crowded sea of vendors to choose from… and new ones every day. Yikes!
Phase 1 – before you open Excel to start drafting an 80 page RFP,you may find it useful to ask yourself the below questions…
What’s in it for you? This is the very first step to successfully navigating the social media space. What are the success criteria for this project? Are you looking for a platform to leverage multiple communication streams and increase brand awareness/SEO? To defer support costs by having a peer-to-peer support option? Identify brand Evangelists? Increase ideation? Is this a pay-based site that members will need to subscribe to be able to view? Do you need to get it up and running quickly, or do you have some lead time? Iterate the high level goals, have consensus between all of the relevant project sponsors and immediately you’ll start to limit your options (in a good way, I promise!) This will also help you to understand what the value is to the business of this application, and the ROI should those objectives be met. One thing to keep in mind also is that once you’ve established your objectives, ascertaining how those goals will be demonstrably met through reporting/analytics or facets of the application itself is critical to measuring your success.
Who are your target audience? Will all content be accessible to the general public, or will you need a robust permission model to enable control over who can see what? Is SSO a must-have, or are you content with self-registration? Will your audience respond well to status/reward points? Do you need to own the data at the end of the day? What will the terms of use be for the site? Are you expecting technical attendees, the general public/fans, people new or used to Web 2.0 technologies? Understanding the social technographics of your site will help you eliminate vendors quickly that do not have registration, status, privacy or profile capabilities that you may require.
Who are you? Are you a start-up or non-profit? Are you a large, brand-sensitive organization? Do you have concerns around legal/regulatory compliance? Do you have expendable time/resources to police the community? What is the skill-set of your technical folks? Do you have staff in place to act as moderators or Community Managers? These questions will help you determine whether you need the UI flexibility, controls, built-in pre/post moderation capabilities and structure of an Enterprise solution. Case in point: Community Server has a “designate bozo” feature that means our obnoxious “bozo” user continues to post annoying commentary infinitely, but the rest of the community is blissfully unaware of their contributions. Neat, eh?
What is the end goal? Regardless of whether you elect to move forward with an open source or commercial offering, keep in mind what you anticipate for the next few years. Transitioning platforms is costly and can cause angst within an otherwise functional Community if features/look and feel change (even if as an improvement!) Case in point: Lithium is well known for their Support communities – which may fit with a current initiative. If you see the project expanding to other areas of the business (Marketing, Developer, Internal etc) you may elect to review broader offerings. Or Support might be the total landscape for you – it’s important to have the discussion internally and make a decision based on the overall business goals.
What’s the use case?I can’t tell you the number of times I have engaged with prospects who have RFPs have created by asking stakeholders “what are your favorite features of Web 2.0?” or some similar brainstorming approach. Responses may include inviting friends to a discussion, creating groups, “liking” content, streaming videocasts or events. Asking “what is the value to our organization? how would we use this?” is vital – and if you don’t have an answer, or can’t think of a practical use case that helps you achieve your stated objectives for the community (step one!) then put it in the “nice to have” bucket and move on. This whole process is much simpler if you invest the time in the beginning – what do we want from the community? and work backwards.
It’s definitely a big space at the moment, and only getting more crowded (I hear of someone new literally every week!) which leads me to Phase Two….
Phase 2 – questions I would be asking of potential vendors to make SURE you receive the best possible fit for your organization:
Who have you worked with that’s like us? In terms of size of implementation, industry, objectives – ask for URL’s to specific implementations
We have decided we need X feature. Can you explain how that works in your platform? Rather than a checklist, really take the time to explore must-have features. While many of the applications available have similar features, they all function slightly differently (for example, some discussion forums have robust Q&A workflow that also can be tied into CRM, or very solid email integration, etc… many do not)
How many customers do you have? Sounds obvious… but there are a lot of very new players in this space. You might not necessarily want to be their 4th customer/guinea pig
Who are your biggest competitors? You can learn a lot about a vendor by who they come up against. If you’re looking for an Enterprise class solution, but the company you are talking to is running into Pluck/Drupal as their competition, you might want to learn more about why.
What are your licensing/hosting options? Depending on the vendor, they can either be highly flexible, or you get what you get, or somewhere in between. If you’re using Capital Expenditure to fund this project and the vendors you are speaking with only offer term licensing, you might run into an impasse. Understand what the options/risks are and how best to leverage them for your business.
OK – one last piece of advice Analysts have done a great job of assessing this space and the specific applications on offer. The best to-date (and not just because Telligent were highly ranked!) in my opinion is Jeremiah Owyang’s Forrester Wave Report. It’s available free of charge on Telligent’s website if you haven’t seen it yet, and well worth the read for anyone looking to begin a vendor assessment process. Gartner also published some analysis a while back however this space is moving so quickly that it’s now a bit dated.
A quick overview of the top 4 typical areas where project ownership lands and what risks/benefits apply to each (in my experience). Note we’re talking typical here There’s always the social visionary in HR, or the highly business-oriented Director of IT as an exception to the rule!
IT - The business is hollering for social technology. They might even be planning a revolution involving a server under someone’s desk and an opensource technology. IT says “whoa, Nelly! we can’t just pick the prettiest, shiniest thing here folks!” Risks: IT has been known to select tools that fulfill a 60 page RFP , but don’t operate functionally for the majority of the business (eg SharePoint, Confluence). If the application doesn’t work for the end-users, it will be under-utilized. Benefits: IT know their world and know when applications aren’t well suited to provide additional value to that environment (eg the only Java app in a .Net shop) Recommendation: Cross-functional Business team and IT work together to set up a task force and make sure the interests of the majority are represented.
HR/Corp Communications own the Project – but they don’t drink the Kool-Aid. Seeing their users set up their own Facebook groups to collaborate with one another gives HR hives, but they aren’t sold on this internal free-for-all. They want governance, and fast. Risks: HR have a reputation for being too heavy-handed with employee generated content creation rules, and can stifle or kill a social site with moderation/rules. Benefits: Nobody is likely to get sued if HR are in charge. Recommendation: More conservative organizations than yours have done this. Ask your late-stage vendors to connect your teams with like implementations (size, scope and industry if possible) and understand how they have been successful and any negatives they have experienced, and how they combated them. First-hand is always best.
The “Business” - For the purposes of this blog, I’m using “business” in place of Department (Marketing, Sales, etc) or internal silo (Retail, Wholesale, Media, etc). The group/horizontal entity within an organization has identified a need for their teams to better collaborate, and actively pursues an application that can serve those needs. Risks: Business selects a vendor that services only their specific requirements. Often, these decisions are based not on the validity of the application for the Enterprise, and may ultimately exclude them from the larger conversation. Benefits: The team in question acquires a product that (in theory!) matches their particular use case. Recommendation: Many organizations are large enough that providing different applications to service each group’s needs is virtually unavoidable. If you are going the path less traveled, at bare minimum make sure that your application of choice can be leveraged as a platform and is accessible to other applications within the Enterprise environment via RSS or a rich Web Services API.
Executives own the project. In flight magazine/CIO magazine is preaching the benefits of Social Technology behind the firewall. One Executive decides this is the next big thing, and picks one (or more) of the above groups to go out and buy some Enterprise 2.0. I have seen this decision making process boil down to an Exec opening his office door and saying: “Who has a Facebook, raise your hand? Ok, you, you and you – you’re on this project”. Risks: The Exec in question may not necessarily understand this technology (and the differences between vendors) very well. They may also be unreasonably enamored with an incumbent provider (IBM, Oracle, Msoft etc) Benefits: it is difficult to win Executive sponsorship for these initiatives at times, and having someone high up the food chain who is willing to go to bat for the application to be open, conversational and truly collaborative is a huge win. Also, if they are willing to be Pilot bloggers and put themselves out there somewhat, they truly can lead by example. Recommendations: Ensure that the Execs are being consulted along the way and are involved in demos, Proof of Concept phase, etc. Leverage Analyst White Papers etc. to make sure they feel comfortable with a best of breed vendor selection process (Forrester/Gartner both did excellent studies in ‘08, for example)
In short, I think all of the above groups can successfully select, deploy, manage and administer social technology. It’s good however to be mindful of the nature of community, what your organizational challenges are and how to best serve those challenges for the long haul. Best practices guidance for your specific needs and challenges should be something a top tier vendor is able to help with, and collaborating with your peers for help is, well, just like sipping your own champagne, now isn’t it?
I’ve spoken with several organizations in recent weeks around getting their community up and running… in short, what they will need to launch and what kind of an ongoing/maintenance workload lies ahead. A theme that surfaces repeatedly (regardless of whether it’s an internal deployment for collaboration or an externally-focused site) is Community Management/Moderation.
I’ve worked with hundreds of companies over the years around their online communities, and I’m interested in learning more about how you’re approaching community management today; if it’s fulfilling your needs, what has worked and what hasn’t, and how you think the role could/should be.
Below are some of the variations I have seen in recent years, with differing levels of success:
By-the-hour, outsourced to a firm – typically moderation only – delivered as a service
IT handle the application/fully managed hosting and business handle the moderation
In-house expertise, typically prominent personalities within the community who blog, seed content, motivate the user base, reach out to power users, moderate, perform site management and administration, etc.
Contracting an individual or firm to act in the role of in-house expertise
I’d love to hear from all of you who have gone through this process in recent years, your successes and where you ran into obstacles. I’d also love to hear how many community members belong to your online community, if it’s internal collaboration or an external community and any “real-life” examples of how your community management strategy has played out in reality.
For example: A customer I worked with recently hired a firm to perform moderation services. The customer’s reputation was that they would be concerned about any implied slight, and as a result the Moderation company were overly enthusiastic, deleting several posts that were in fact not in violation of the customer’s policies. As a result, they had to work through the relationship together to make sure that there was better communication regarding appropriate moderation going forward.
Email or DM me if you don’t want to share publicly!!
…well, actually, I think I have rats. Yes, raaaaaaaaaatsssssss (eek) but Mice 2.0 sounds so much nicer.
I returned from Sunriver last night after a hell drive in the snow to find this lovely piece of rodent handiwork:
Rattus Rattus takes a chomp
So, yes, the door used to come much closer to touching the floor… and behind door number 1, Mr. Rattus Rattus had left me some number 2s.
Charming.
Needless to say, the “be nice to your neighbor” tidings of the season went out the window and I braved the snow purely to acquire some Rat nibbles…dinner’s ready, Mr. Rat ….
Despite Mr. Rat moving in, Rian and I were grateful to be home safe from hell drive last night. The weekend in Sunriver was lovely, though – we had a great time snowshoeing, playing games and watching all 10 hours of the Lord of the Rings, extended edition (yep, we’re geeks…)
The dogs frolicked in the snow the whole time… unfortunately they also picked up fleas from the house we rented (ew) and then when we got home, Sadie decided to have a go at a silica packet. Apparently it’s “benign” although she might have the dry horrors… per my vet.. sheesh…
I hope you’re all safely tucked up in your homes for the silly season and have plenty of love and cheer to go around for the next few days! To my Australian 1st and Wisconsin 2nd family – sending lots of love your way
So, dear reader, as in all tales of drama, I’ll start with the bad news first. As many of you are aware, I returned Saturday night last from a month in Australia. While I was two weeks into my stay there, my lovely room-mate (yes, just a room-mate, folks – keep it clean!) Brian informed me that he’d seen a mouse about the house. Twice.
Imagining the hordes of rodent invaders (or babies thereof) made me panicky while 8,000 miles away, so I promptly wrote it off to chance and put it out of my mind. I came back, spent a day at home and then traveled to Dallas to begin my new life as a Telligent salesperson (blog to follow on the awesome week)
So, this morning I awoke filled with a nesting urge and started to clean the house. Imagine my dismay, oh dear reader, to find skads of mousy poop. Like, Tons of it. And the little fella/sheila had been collecting piles of dog food in their dwelling to last ‘em through the winter. Awesome.
Of course, frenzied cleaning and mouse poop eradication followed. Apparently our mouse had been busy too, however and it took several hours this morning before the house was declared a fit habitat for humans and dogs.
Fast forward several hours. I’ve managed to fill up the garbage bin with detritus, and have bought all kinds of security for the dog food (airtight, no less) and other various doggie equipment. I change the bin liner and decide, on a whim to move the can around to see if I can accommodate the new dog food credenza. Imagine my joy when I found this under the can:
So, all’s well that ends well! Yes, readers, that WAS the good news!
well, that and that I can take my mouse eradication paraphenalia back to Home Depot unused this time… All humane, of course…
Remember when I said I was excited for the next big thing? Well, it turns out that the next big thing is to announce that I have accepted an offer with Telligent, starting on December 1st, 2008. Details of the position to unfold – I’m looking forward to speaking with all of you regarding what’s going to be happening over the coming months and what’s coming from their product line (which, by the way, is very sexy!!)
I am thrilled to be part of an incredibly passionate, energetic organization and am very much anticipating a successful future as a part of this awesome team. Put on your helmets! this is going to be a lot of fun…
I am off to Tassie for a few weeks starting early next week, however I expect I will be speaking with many of you in short order. Feel free to touch in with questions… you know how to find me….
It probably helps, therefore to understand how the last few months played out in my world.
What are your licensing/hosting options? Depending on the vendor, they can either be highly flexible, or you get what you get, or somewhere in between. If you’re using Capital Expenditure to fund this project and the vendors you are speaking with only offer term licensing, you might run into an impasse. Understand what the options/risks are and how best to leverage them for your business.
