Community Casebook

Company Twitter

In  "BT Richard's" post, as previously mentioned, he discusses examples of Internal and External social media use and wonders if a better approach couldn't be found to provide more of a One Stop Shopping (my words) experience.

They've developed an internal version of Twitter, but employees also use the real Twitter (external in reach), including his team!  What do they do with it? Well, the use Grouptweet, ideal because they are in large a remote workforce! In Richard's words they "can bond and share on an on-going basis." He is sure it will have a "positive effect on team dynamics". They also use  Twhirl, a desktop client that makes for more of an email experience. I beam when I read, "I think this is a really good example of how the intranet has become more than just web pages behind a firewall."

BT also launched a full enterprise social network and is intelligently incorporating/integrating content from Twitter and Blogs... so that a profile can truly reflect the person and their thought contributions. Not sure how these integations relate to the complaint of multiple versions (internal/external), but I'll let you know after I speak with him and find out!

BT's Internal and External Challenge

Richard's blog is a fun one to follow. I follow his, and Chuck's from EMC. These are two companies that are ahead of the curve introducing not only social media, but also a comprehensive enterprise strategy, to their organizations. A more complete listing of companies taking this journey (Pfizer, IBM, and so forth) will be found in the article I wrote (with a senior analyst from Booz Allen) for the Futures edition of People and Strategy, the journal of the HRPS (expected out in the fall).

It is worth a look at this post from Richard at BT.  He outlines that BT is rolling out a lot of various point solutions (blogs and twitter, for example, in both internal and external form...). Have two solutions for each tool- external and internal- forced the question about possibly finding an easier way to publish content to multiple places at once. (Or do we need to tweet in two places?). He mentions they have a permeable firewall. He also mentions issues of global scope... that the purpose of social networking and social media is in large part to break down geographic communication barriers. So being limited by the barriers of the company firewall seems counterintuitive. 

Charlene Li and I had a conversation a few weeks ago, and quite certainly she is an advocate (as I am) for breaking down the firewall. It is time to communicate freely. There are ample ways to protect secure information- there are platforms with sophisticated permission systems built in. But tweet in two places? That is too much. Company intranet with social features for "business" communications and collaboration, OK. Company Social Network that is both intranet and extranet. BETTER. Integrate with Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn. IDEAL.

(Richard admits that while he keeps up his external blog brilliantly (my words), his internal BT blog has two posts.)

One Stop Shopping for Value

I follow a few blogs out there that are written by IT folks at major corporations that are going through the process of changing communications and systems to embrace social media. Various companies are in various places along the way of this journey, but several have come to the point of deploying internal "Facebook" type solutions- internal company social networks (not for collaboration purposes... as much as to provide the virtual watercooler... an important distinction... and there are some solutions that can provide both).

Some of these companies have a bevy of social media tools IN ADDITION to a social network, which I imagine is quite confusing to manage.  For instance, if the company has a blog tool, and I keep a blog, am I supposed to do that IN ADDITION to posting thoughts and comments in the social network?

Even more confusing: there are blog tools for EXTERNAL use (blogging to the world, for example), while others are for INTERNAL use (blogging to the staff). I've even heard of having two social company social networks... one for INTRANET type communication, and one for EXTRANET (remote staff or partners, customers, alumni, etc.). HOW CONFUSING!

Am I really going to stay up to date with my correspondence in multiple places? I'm going to give fractional attention to each of these sources, as will others, and so each solution will have FRACTIONAL VALUE.

In the next post, I'll look at the experience of BT's Richard Dennison (the gentleman tasked with BT's social media strategy).

"Crowdsourcing Turns Business on its Head"

A colleague sent me a link today to a great article about crowdsourcing for innovation. "Crowdsourcing" is more or less a Web 2.0 kind of terminology- at least I've heard it used most by community companies building ROI arguments for social networks. To be sure about it, I checked the ultimate collaborative glossary.

"Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call... The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals."

We'll follow this notion and case studies/examples as we go forth with Community Casebook. Here's one interesting example from a shoe company, RYZ, whose CEO, Rob Langstaff, who used to lead Adidas, admits, according to the article, "that giving consumers control is humbling — and risky. But, he says, 'it's almost less risky to have most talented actors on your stage than to try to do it yourself.'"

Another expert in the article, MIT professor Eric von Hippel, an "expert in innovation management," indicates this is "the biggest paradigm shift in innovation since the Industrial Revolution... For a couple hundred years or so, manufacturers have been really imperfect at understanding people's needs. Now people get to decide what they want for themselves."

I supposed if the right technology is in place to allow for truly efficient and creative online crowdsourcing techniques, and the community also facilitates employee interactions to process suggestions and pass them through the internal network of the organization efficiently, from marketing to product development and beyond, the customers won't only decide what they want for themselves- they might also actually GET it! And therein, money- and loyal customers- will be made.

IDC Report: Multi-level Social Network Case Study

My last post outlined my thinking with regard to advocating a multi-level network for cost savings, improved communications and improved efficiencies. IDC recently released a report regarding one company's innovation mission... to improve processes both externally and internally. The company is Serena Software...  Highlights include:

Serena Software, a 27-year-old applications lifecycle management vendor, is redesigning its business for the new century. With an aggressively innovative approach to organizational structure, it is also using social networking to innovate in its product and go-to-market strategies. While using social networking in some standard ways such as to enable functional communication within the company, it is also deploying social networking to:

• Create a Mashup Exchange that represents a new go-to-market channel for Serena's products

• Manage highly sensitive communication for its board of directors on the same platform used for broader corporate communications

• Use the same social network as its intranet and primary document management solution

While supporting Serena's new mashup business was the most critical requirement for selecting software, Serena also wanted to enable enterprise networks and collaboration. With 35% of its workforce working from home and employees flung around the world, it was important to allow employees to both collaborate and communicate more fluidly and bring isolated employees into the core communications channel of the company. 

Additionally, part of aligning IT priorities with marketing was the resulting mandate to remove operational cost in favor of SaaS solutions. In that process, Serena is considering phasing out Microsoft SharePoint and moving its corporate email from Outlook Exchange to Gmail.

 

Taking an Innovative, Integrated View

It has been my passionate belief, for about a year now, that all the various point solutions out there (blogs, wikis, forums, tweats, videos, documents) need to somehow come together into one community experience, for the user's sake, not to mention the sanity of the marketing communications team!

It's also been my vision that companies should have one integrated community- with multiple membership levels and a wide variety of content and activities- with which to serve a variety of audiences.  Customers, Prospects, Employees, Partners, Investors... the list goes on.

One thing I've experience already on LinkedIn... people come into your world wearing one hat, and then they stay in your world even though their hats may change. A former colleague becomes a partner. A partner becomes a job seeker, etc.  That same job seeker takes a new position and- boom- becomes a customer. What companies need are larger social networks with multiple points of entry.

If you collect your "people" in one community, it is then quite easy to click the box that changes their "membership" from alum to employee, for example. If they've been navigating happily through the community as an alum, it won't take very much for them to find what they need, and explore further expanding networks as an employee.

Having disperate social networks, however, is a recipe for less success... and for integration and API concerns to build a brige for that person's profile information, content contributions, and network affiliations, to somehow auto-populate their existnace in a new social network. 

We don't want MORE networks to join... we want FEWER that are BETTER (and more complete).

What will they think of next?

This is too cool (and someone has too much time on his hands):

• "A friend of mine wrote an app called Twitterlicious - it’s a mashup of Twitter, Del.icio.us, and Ma.gnolia.com. http://www.twitterlicious.com/

There is also a Twittersync application in Facebook (that apparently rremoves the “is” and “is twittering” prepends that Facebook or the Twitter application create in that space) that makes a more seamless sync between the two. So, a Twitter post then updates Facebook status.  And, there is a Twitter widget as well (within Facebook) that publishes Tweets to the profile without overtaking status (in that case designating "is twittering").  Kind of cool, too, to differentiate between something that is a Status (I choose to tell the world I am doing X) and a Tweat ("here's a 140 character thought or update, for those who may care").

By the way, I get a lot of these cool ideas from various blogs around and about. This is from comments to a post called "2.Optimizing Blog, Twitter, Facebook". I am going to borrow that term: 2.Optimzing. Great stuff.

... sharing the blog...

The rumor is that it takes $50,000 to set up a company page on Facebook. If that is a one-time fee, it is considerable down from what it used to be... one company I know having spent more than $500,000 for an annual spot to collect fans (in their case, for recruiting purposes).

I've also heard $25,000 per month for a social networking company profile page. Let's do the math quickly, $300,000 per year. (Yes, I did pull up my trusty little widget calculator.)  Clearly, this is prohibitive (albeit, in some cases, proven effective.)

So you've hit one site... what about the others? There are at least half a dozen sites worth serious consideration (especially for a global company... the US demographic sways pretty loyally towards Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn). But let's say you have three...

And then what about the forums package you bought back in 2006 on a three year license, and the four blogging options introduced (one by marketing, three by IT)? Do you recreate the message all over the web, or is there a way to get SAVVY?

The very cool thing about social media is that it is SOCIAL and everyone is talking about it... including best practices for consideration.  Here's a thougth from a favorite blog:

• "I am also feeding my blog posts into Facebook via the Blog Friends Application which become part of my profile/newsfeeds and makes it a breeze for others to follow my posts as well as for  me to follow anyone in my Friends lists on their blogs (if they’re using the same application). Wordpress, and many other social companies, also have created tools to feed blogs. Note: company blog feeds to company- or employees' or fans' profiles, viral, etc.

• Why stop there? Facebook (and others) share their APIs to allow for more than blogs to be shared. Determine what portion of your web content you would like to push to Facebook to synch web campaigns and content with what you've put out there on Facebook. Can't tell you how many companies have stale, outdated info on these spaces and are being ruled by activity within the Facebook community! Here is a chance to regain power by providing up-to-date info; after all, would you run old ads from last quarter's campaign?

There are many more ideas... please share!

How do big companies get social?

I've had some very interesting conversations these past few weeks with very large companies looking to get social... for important purposes (like innovation, creativity, coordination or an honest dialog).

 Some are looking for a meaningful, insightful, innovative and well-organized option for internal communications, to improve and invigorate the workforce experience, and others are looking for ways to get creative and communicative with customers and fan-base.

At the end of the day, everyone has the same problem: BUT HOW do we get social? How do we use these tools in an organized, thoughtful way that can gel with our every day (overworked, over-full) activities?

This is an interesting conundrum (ooh! I used one of my favorite words!). The situation stands that we've been barraged by social media "point solutions"... the twitter, the blog, the viral video, the forum, the poll... And different vendors offer different solutions... and they are all cool... and they are all APART!

So, how do we bring it TOGETHER?  I would argue for one social media platform, on which to base a variety of departmental or project initiatives... and there are other approaches to consider as well.

Market Insights

Let's move in a slightly different direction today and consider- were you to have all your people, current and prospective, employees and customers, organized into an organically grown, but well structured community, what kinds of insights might you gain?

Imagine having a tap into the conversations of all your employees around every water cooler (or Starbucks cart) throughout the organization.  Imagine also knowing who asked which questions, who came up with the most widely read and highly rated answers, and what are those people saying?

Imagine having a tap into the conversations of all your customers around their dinner tables, living rooms, chats with friends, and comments shared with anyone willing to listen online. Imagine also knowing who said what, which ideas are gaining traction, which opinions get the most weight, and what are those people saying?

Imagine innovating everything from processes, to products and communications, all through creating a community that allows you to inspire and share in organic but structured conversations? Imagine the data, the contributions, the insights...

I've no doubt that the best of the best will build on this and make innovation a top priority throughout the enterprise.  After all, capturing the important and good ideas is the very purpose of focus groups, water coolers, and dinner table conversations.

Dell and Starbucks are using a SalesForce product (they bought a smaller company for this) to collect and prioritize ideas from employees, partners and customers.  According to Chris Bruzzo, Starbucks' CTO, this will help define the future of the company.  HiveLive currently provides the same kind of functionality within its community solution for customers such as Rally Software, sponsor of the Rally and Agile Software Development Communities found at Agile Commons, that feel insights are a high priority. Rally's CTO, Ryan Martens, feels that after 14 years of evaluating online community systems, "HiveLive is truly something that will change the community game."