Ofttimes, people come up to me and say “please stop taking pictures” or “get off my lawn”. Othertimes, I talk to them about communicating to their stakeholders in an online fashion.
There are many tools to accomplish this. The variety becomes a problem because clients may see it as a shopping list. The real issue is the usability. If you do NOTHING online, do you expect an analyst to go to the stock exchange or regulator, or your company’s head office, and ask there for a report at reception? Of course not.
Its a continuum, stretching from extreme discomfort at getting public information, to extreme ease of use. The client has to decide where to jump off this line. As it is all really low-cost technology, the question should not be solely around cost.
continuum of investor information
What one must bear in mind, is that we live in a multi-channel world. By making all the formats in the graph available, some will still choose to have a printed report, others a PDF, others will only concern themselves with the Excel while some will have scanned the newspaper.
You can’t be all things to all people, but you can give all the options to all people.
I reckon that technology-ignorant clients are a double-edged sword. The Law states that whatever sophisticated concept you manage to run by them with no resistance, thou shalt be smitten with much rebuking about low-end things, eg:
this content management tool doesn’t accept my MS Word tabs and indents! Shriek!
I just want to print one piece of paper off this website page, not all 20! Rant!
Search on my site doesn’t find the document I put up on the intranet last week! Rail!
An essential point about client education was made by Dominic Jones in a different forum: XBRL. I quote:
Most US investor relations officers (IROs) are not directly involved in disclosure technology and have a very poor understanding of it. This is mostly because about 75% of investor relations sections on US corporate websites are outsourced to hosting services. IROs have generally been entirely hands off when it comes to these sites so they’ve lost out on a lot of important learning over the years. They don’t understand what HTML is, so XBRL is even more alien to them.
As much as we think of expediency and taking problems out of the clients’ hands (or outsourcing those to us in these times), it makes us party to them not knowing more about the technology issues. The cycle continues.
Taking a leaf out of the “teach a man to fish” parable, I’m going to escalate the training of clients. Not just in terms of social knick-knacks, but along the lines of: What Every IRO Should Know.
The relevance is that the enterprise strongmen are consolidating the market. Everyone knows 2008 will be about shrunken IT budgets yet also about the excitement of enterprise social media and the coming of age of SaaS.
All removable, all transitory. All according to plan
Serena software, developers of lifecycle management systems and the conceptualisers behind “Facebook Fridays“, embody the spirit of Enterprise social media: they take ideas from the user phenomenon of social media (w2) and apply it to the enterprise with remarkable results.
They’ve adapted the retail and sociological ideas of the Long Tail into how it is relevant for the organisations’ internal mechanisms. And it fits.
The Long Tail theory is essentially that the web is so vast, one can satisfy niche desires without creating uncostly overheads ie: you can sell something of little demand, and also sell that of massive demand simply because storage, and shipping in the online world is not a factor. The same is true of media: some blogs and op-ed pieces have great following, however it does not detract or disqualify from blogs with small audiences. They can co-exist, unlike in the old media world where there are costs and economies of scale associated with any publication.
The way this works in the enterprise is thus: IT has large, visible and critical applications that it has to occupy itself with at any given time. Other needs have to wait, get political backing or get in the queue. However, the influx of digital natives and social media have made knowledge workers competent enought to create their own simple applications or use existing web applications or services that come free.
In order to aid and abet this, Serena has introduced a Mashup Composer. Althought I’ve not played with it, it appears to be something along the lines of Yahoo! Pipes and the Google open APIs. Think of it as the guy in Accounts who had cred because he could write macros. And who replicated himself.
This new approach enables power users in the business and IT to quickly address their everyday needs, while freeing scarce application development resources to focus on more complex tasks.
IT concerns? Of course. The mashups will be built on top of existing architecture, and it seems like it will consume existing web services rather than write to critical databases.
Microblogging (Twitter, Jaiku) has caught the imagination of millions as a revolutionary communication tool. Many have grokked the uses of microblogs for the enterprise, but nothing has transpired as yet, excepting Google rousing and snapping up Jaiku. Perhaps corporate IT are still getting to terms with Web 2.0 and microblogging is a late entrant. Perhaps we’re focussed on trying to pinstripe Twitter, and are limiting the brief of what enterprise microblogging can be.
So this is first in a two-part series. While we redefine the benefits of enterprise microblogging here, the next instalment will be a wishlist of what we want in such an application. I refer to microblogging here as evidenced by Twitter and Jaiku, although make it clear that they are not enterprise-ready.
Convergence
As you know, you can email, IM, blog, SMS updates to your Twitter profile. In the spirit of Web 2.0, you can retrieve them all in the same way. Bear in mind the following:
91% of mobile phone owners keep them within arms-reach 24-7 (Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley)
IM has been identified as the web-based enterprise technology CIOs feel has the most business impact
SpinVox recently announced voice updates to Twitter (and Facebook and Jaiku)
Every Facebook user (everyone you know) is extremely familiar with posting short status updates, checking for updates from others and possibly even mobile posting, RSS updates and IM
Urgent news Dissemination
The fires in California have seen a tipping point in Twitter adoption. Weather, fire news and authority news can be relayed to people in all the formats mentioned above. The LAFD has had a Twitter site for months.
If your enterprise relies on this kind of rapid dissemination, you would do well to replicate these systems.
Presence
Facebook and Skype, and now Twitter, have taught us that constant status updates pre-empt unnecessary calls or emails. When you know someone is in Brazil or otherwise not available, you don’t waste time trying to contact them. Easy notification of employees’ availability is not just to enforce presenteeism. Call centres have been identified as a critical operation that relies on presence: the agent can check expert or supervisor availability, escalation options and customer query progress.
Easy adoption
Using Twitter is as difficult as using SMS. Digital natives will bring it into your enterprise anyway, for personal use. After you block it (which you will) and they move it to their mobile devices (which they will) we will have enterprise microblog apps and they will teach you how to use them while other companies have advanced (which we will).
On that note, IBM has moved on this with their BlueTwit application. Unfortunately, that’s all I know about it: the name.
Lifestreams or rolestreams
Many digital natives and meta-bloggers (bloggers blogging about blogging) are suffering from information overload as they manage various profiles, websites, RSS feeds and try out each new application. Out of necessity, they often aggregate all their own RSS feeds or RSS subscriptions into a microblog, and may even synch their calendar with the blog due to its dispersion methods via SMS or IM. This lifestreaming is a river of the knowledge snippets which make up their day.
I bet many knowledge workers feel the same. Too many rely on Outlook to manage all their information, yet the information therein is hardly portable to other notification applications. Microblogs are built to leverage RSS, and could be a live, AJAX scrolling alert system that sends up flags or alerts based on hierarchy or importance (Oops, I’m straying into the wishlist article).
The added benefit of a lifestream, or rolestream, is that its time based and easier to round up billable hours at the end of the business day..
The Wires
The instant information retrieval nature of microblogs mean that companies can bypass traditional wire services. As IR WebReport recently blogged:
“In essence, [microblogs] can be a notification system and an editorial system. It can tell someone news is available and provide a link to it. For example: “Sun reports Results for Fourth Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2007 http://tinyurl.com/2h5osq”
It can also be an information system by delivering the news in a concise format: “Sun Beats Profit Target Q4 Revenues $3.835 billion, EPS $0.09 vs consensus $0.05 http://tinyurl.com/2h5osq”
Sun’s recent decision to bypass PR wire services for its earnings releases is but a baby step in what is coming.
Ticker
The relation of a microblog to a blog post is often compared to the snippets of news on the ticker below the main news story on CNN or Sky TV News. Often a few pithy words is all the information you need to convey, and it does not detract from the main stories which are actually a different media. Stock traders have a need for some figures and a word or two to describe sentiment to make million-dollar decisions. Sure, often the source of that information is an analyst who has gone through reams of data and submitted a lengthy report. Its wholly complementary.
Presentations
Creating a microblog for a live conference, that’s projected on the stage, allows the audience both at the event as well as external to pose questions or make statements. I worked on a financial presentation for a dual-listed company where we wanted to synch Twitter or Jaiku with the webcast. In the end, the lack of moderation and branding confusion made me just hack a WordPress blog to deliver live comments. Enterprise microblog? I could not have paid enough for it.
Brevity
TinyUrl and pithy sentences lend themselves to a new form of communication where rambling is not respected. Just the facts. A global furniture concern got me to develop a secure application where they all executives could share snippets of strategic information in their respective markets. It was restricted to 250 characters and the administrator was notified by SMS with each entry. This was in 2006, they were microblogging.
We recognise that email is an indispensable office tool, but email overload is as real as the lack of importance we place to information trapped deep in an email’s body.
Knowledge Management
Much like enterprise bookmarking, enterprise microblogging can allow employees to send quick “hey, look here” updates. Others can act on it or be enlightened by information snippets that would have been beyond their reach. Sending an email to a vague, amorphous group, CC’ing other employees with a subject like “interesting link” and, in the body, a link that is not human readable, are all signals for the recipient to disengage with this communication.
Networking
Follow the travails of Twitter and you’ll come to hear that its a form of social networking. Sure it is, but that’s a spin-off to its larger benefits as highlighted above. Anyway, you have a social network, its called your Company. Or office, or team.
I wouldn’t suggest a that a major benefit of microblogging is that it brings your employees closer or improves morale. That would be trite. I do think you’ll have benefits of moving conversations off email and project leaders will be able to swarm all project members, developers can scrum and sprints will be slick relays. That should be a given. However, you can use it to create dialogue with your customers or stakeholders. You can also track usage in the Twittersphere and be alerted whenever anyone mentions you, your brand or your interest.
Buzz
You can use your channel as a media outlet and a buzz engine for product releases. Twitter is pretty viral and following a stream is a one-click process. These buzz strategies are far better detailed in Jeremiah Oywang’s post.
On ZDNet; Dion does a sound milestone analysis with some lessons that bear consolidation at this point. I repeat them here along with his graphic:
Lesson #1: Enterprise 2.0 is going to happen in your organization with you or without you.
Lesson #2: Effective Enterprise 2.0 seems to involve more than just blogs and wikis.
Lesson #3: Enterprise 2.0 is more a state of mind than a product you can purchase.
Lesson #4: Most businesses still need to educate their workers on the techniques and best practices of Enterprise 2.0 and social media.
Lesson #5: The benefits of Enterprise 2.0 can be dramatic, but only builds steadily over time.
Lesson #6: Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t seem to put older IT systems out of business.
Lesson #7: Your organization will begin to change in new ways because of Enterprise 2.0. Be ready.
Love it or hate it, Facebook and other social media are here and they’re changing the online habits of your employees and customers. It would be churlish to dismiss social media as a fad with no impact on your organisation other than being a tool for employees to squander their billable time; at the same time, Facebook is not going to propel your company into an early listing just because it has the undivided attention of tens of millions of users. Right about now, you have a IT policy in place regarding use of social media or are undecided about what action to take.
Time to take a step back and do a business case on this phenomenon. The purpose of this article is for you to realise what lessons and habits your employees and online customers have learned in the last few months while being introduced to social media. Consider these , and then discuss them within your own organisations. Don’t be stuck on Facebook, your employees are probably using other Web 2.0, or social media, applications on an hourly basis.
1Web publishing is simple
Ten years ago the message was “anyone can publish a web page. Learn a little HTML, some Photoshop, some odds and ends about HTTP and web hosting and there you go!”. This spawned a cottage industry of web designers and web design courses, but lets face it: it required a steep learning curve in languages and standards that were changing every few months.
Blogs are far easier to set up, but people from non-creative industries or non-media types have to think long and hard about design, posting, commenting and plug-ins. Its no surprise that most blogs reference “web 2.0″ or “social media”. While blogging is a tsunami, it doesn’t get everyone publishing.
Enter Facebook. A simple setup process, no level design playing field, click-n-play plugins and publishing in a manner more similar to text or instant messaging than email or word processing.
The business case: employees will finally be able to take short cuts and ask questions like: wouldn’t it be simpler to put this online? Can’t we create a mash up of our sales figures and geographical areas like the travel apps in Facebook? (The answer to both is Yes).
2Facebook is a start page
Enterprise applications like SAP and Microsoft Sharepoint allow one to set personalised home pages on their intranet start pages or as their default browser pages. Facebook is similar, except the information on it is mostly of a personal nature.
The business case: you may want to consider pulling Facebook’s notifications as an RSS feed into your existing employees’ start pages. In that way they can keep abreast of friend’s movements at a glance from within their business application. This may sound abhorrent to some policy makers, but ask your IT to do a test implementation for you and you’ll see how innocuous it is. Will it keep employees of the phone and emailing? I don’t know the answer to that question, but consider this option if you don’t want to ban Facebook outright.
3Social networking online
When you send your sales, marketing and client service to a conference, do you exhort them to network their buns off? Probably not in as many words, but that’s what you want. Surely your enterprising employees will use online social networks to initiate joint partnerships or get valuable information, perhaps even to disseminate your company news in this channel (for free). If you manage IT staff you would be foolish to discourage them from joining sites like Experts Exchange, Slashdot or Tech Republic. When they hit a coding snag they can submit the question online or nose around the forums for the answer, rather than spend two days trying to reinvent the wheel.
Facebook has most likely informed your employees about how to leverage their social network (even though some will only use Facebook to organise parties and send chain mail!)
The business case: Social networking online is a way to make customers gather around product (Amazon), supply you with invaluable ideas (Dell Ideastorm) and engage with approved demographically-selected profiles (eons).
4Naked communication
A person’s personality comes through on Facebook more so than in any other medium. Those who boast offline, boat on Facebook. Those who sent chain letters with Hello Kitty drawings at age 8 do the same on Facebook at a more advanced age. That is the power of the medium, people manage not only their relationships but their personas through it. This naked communication builds stronger online and offline relationships.
The business case: like Amazon’s recommendations, Digg’s articles and del.icio.us bookmarks, users trust content generated by their peers, known or unknown, more than what businesses tell them to believe. This is evidenced in Facebook and other social media, and your business ought to have a strategy in place to interact and monitor this channel.
5Friends
Can a22 year-old be friends with a multinational car manufacturing corporation? Can Barack Obama be friends with thousands of potential voters? In Facebook you can. You can even have stronger relationships with entities than with friends you see every weekend for dinner. It may be a perversion of the concept of friendship, but its the term we’re saddled with when we try and explain these relationships. Users and customers can be friends with your brand, usually around a competition, cause or campaign. This is free permission marketing, are you still complaining?
The business case: we learned that people trust the official line when published in a blog format more so than when it comes as a press release off the wires. In the same way, an intranet modified into more of a social network, a customer care section of your website or a graduate recruitment site will benefit from bringing your brand to the level of peer rather than patriarch.
6Always-on culture
Generally speaking, the last two generations in the workplace don’tlike the commitment of formal telephone calls. They weren’t taught telephone etiquette and the concept of “taking a message” is beyond them. Sometimes one uses a SMS or IM message as a status checker: are you in? can you make it? The pressure is taken off having to tell a white lie, which is not as easy when speaking to someone in real time over the telephone.
Facebook’s status updates allow you to mention in a brief, pithy manner about your whereabouts, mood and recent events in your life. Friends are notified immediately, and will act thereupon by contacting you directly, leaving you alone, or not bothering to schedule a meeting for you as you have stated that you’re ill or on leave.
The business case: Churches are increasingly blogging their sermons to their communities. Some people just don’t want to attend church but they want the information, much like workers who hate meetings but want to participate in the project nonetheless. What if your board gave brief updates to the other members or subordinates in a secure environment once a day? They could pass on critical leads or thoughts that others could action or research the merits thereof. Teams could get rapid updates rather than gathering in time-consuming meetings, analysts could offer rapid assessments of stock and send out to subscribers in all the various formats.
When getting approval from a client around some material or dealing with a supplier, you’ll find IM is faster than email. You can store the conversations for later reference. The stand out in this area is Rackspace, the hosting provider. After spending a few minutes on their site, a window pops up with a sales assistant asking if you need help. You can then ask questions and answers to them, with audio or simply through the IM interface.
7The Internet is a raw document repository
Google taught us that you can find anything online. Wikipedia taught us that information about everything can be found online. Facebook taught us that anyone you would want to find is probably online. This is a simplification, as others have identified class differences between MySpace and Facebook, not to mention those who are not even online. If you are reading this, however, and can identify with the issues, then you know that your kindergarten playmates or high school sweethearts are a click away from discovery.
The business case: managers tried to block the internet and they tried to block IM. That was until they realised the benefits for productivity and communication inherent in both. Facebook and other social networks may have business applications that are not immediately apparent.
8Microblogging
I believe microblogging will be the preferred communication method of the near future. The current providers allow one to text, IM, email, blog or phone updates to your personal blog. The updates are then disseminated by notifications like RSS, email, IM, text etc. Publishing and dissemination are therefore combined in one medium through many devices, something which standard websites and phones cannot replicate. This is where Enterprise 2.0 will be focussing its attention right now.
The status updates of Facebook and the wall posts as well as the notifications of your friends are just as in microblogging.
The business case: microblogging allows for sending and receiving key updates through all technical devices. Project updates or urgent information release (See the LA Fire Department’s microblog) are native to microblogs.
9Fad
Sure, Facebook is also a fad. Remember at school you had fads like marbles, collecting cards, hairstyles and clothes styles? They were great, then the powers-that-were moved on them and banned them. The fad usually went underground and the fad mutated into a cult. Feelings against the school management were probably soured for a while. Things may or may have not been written on lavatory walls. Tongues in cheek aside, the same is happening in corporates world-wide.
The business case: everything in social media is, for the corporate, a threat and an opportunity. What usually tips the scale into the overall positive side is that everything is measurable. People can blog about you, but you can blog about yourself and respond to them too. And you can track when somebody mentions you in a blog post. The same principle applies to Facebook and other social media.
10Knowledge gathering
Since employees have been given internet access to perform their tasks better, they have usually been updated with links and jokes and websites and now Facebook. They’ve been exposed to more disparate information and interest groups than they would probably have found in that evening’s newspapers. This is a part of the great tradition of the Enlightenment, and as mentioned above, they will place worth in content not only coming from the traditional news sources.
The business case: if you are in a creative field, I would suggest giving employees limited or unlimited internet access, underpinned with a performance contract. I would also set aside two hours for a meeting at the end of the week where everyone has to report on what they found online that could contribute to the business aims of the organisation. A reward of more access could be considered? Then your internet and bandwidth can be assessed as a valid business tool, and you and your employees will be reaping the benefits that social media is infusing into our traditional media channels.
Corporations have had to react to the phenomenon, ranging from banning use of Facebook outright, through to limiting use thereof to the marketing departments, to creating an official presence on Facebook and tying the company profile into graduate recruitment and news dissemination.
Don’t base your Facebook decision on appearing cool to your employees or external stakeholders. Rather look at the points made above, distribute to staff and convene an open discussion with their own points of view. You could see financial or productivity rewards, or perhaps you may only establish a better dialogue with staff and your customer base.
Remember, this is social media. A top-down approach to information distribution usually lands bottoms up.
One struggles to define Web 2.0 and social media to the uninitiated, even explaining Enterprise 2.0 and the Attention Economy to the initiated (unless you’re Mike).
Just like the first eight of engerland, Microsoft get to the loose ball slowly, but they drive on relentlessly, onward and on. Pardon the analogy, but that’s how MS is being interpreted by my RWC2007-addled brain. They are johnny-come-lately (not Wilkinson) along with other ERM giants to the benefits of enterprise 2.0, but once they’ve arrived their presence is felt. SharePoint had already adopted blogs and wikis for internal use in its product, today they cemented that vision.
Today Microsoft is announcing two strategic partnerships, with enterprise software company Atlassian and RSS solutions vendor NewsGator. The partnerships link togther Microsoft’s SharePoint product with Atlassian’s wiki collaboration product Confluence and a new offering from Newsgator called ‘NewsGator Social Sites’, a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware for SharePoint. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a key product for Microsoft – it has collaboration, business intelligence, content management, search and “social computing” capabilities (Microsoft’s term for ‘web 2.0′, according to this page on Microsoft’s website).
The aim of the partnerships is to add more “social computing platform” capabilities to SharePoint, which up till now has mainly been promoted as an “enterprise productivity platform”. In other words, Microsoft is adding more web 2.0 functionality (e.g. collaboration, personal publishing) to SharePoint, using best of breed web products from Atlassian and Newsgator.
