The Social Enterprise with Adam Tinworth

Imagine...

2009-09-26T10:01:33Z

Social is not new, businesses have known about social for a long time. It's the greater access that we now have (potentially) to learn more about how to do stuff well through collaboration that we are excited about - or we should be. Imagine if you could connect with people who think like you throughout the organization

Imagine indeed...

The Role of the Corporate Blogger

2009-09-25T10:51:25Z

This video from one man social media whirlwind Andrea Vascellari is well worth your time. It's a talk in which Skype chief blogger Peter Parkes takes a thoughtful look at the role of the corporate blogger:

Social Business Ahoy

2009-09-24T16:42:46Z

I admit it - this blog is all but moribund. But I thought I'd sneak a post or two on here before James takes it away from me.

The discussion about use of social software in businesses seems to have risen up people's radar significantly in the last month or so, and there's some really interesting discussion starting to build around it. This post by Euan really caught my attention:

Why do I believe this? Because I believe there is a fundamental change in how we do business heading our way. Driven by the networked communication tools flourishing on the web, tools like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, not only how we communicate with those who benefit from our services but also how we organise ourselves to produce them will be changed forever.

The post is about as good a summary of the changes in the air as any, but it's the discussion in the comments on the post that really make it fly.

#csnf - Implementing Enterprise 2.0 Successfully

2009-06-08T12:12:32Z

2nd panel discussion, hosted by Iwona Petruczynik of Frost & Sullivan

What is web 2.0?

Olivier Crieche: the stuff people use at home and are now starting to use at work
Zeinab Lenton: It's about sharing and community
JP: It's what the web should have been

How to implement?

JP: get on with it. Look at e-mail. How much never leaves the company - is there a better way to do that?

When it goes bad?

Dominos Pizza: reputation damaged
KFC: had to cancel a promotion because bloggers spread it too fast and it was costing them too much.
One clent of Six Apart complained about the lack of feeds in Movable Type - which are built in. The UT department just didn't understand the product.
JP: you need both benevolant dictatorship from top and bottom-up adoption. If cost if repair is same as cost of entry, you suceed. If enough people can inspect information, you can make it good. You need a pincer movement on the immune system in the middle.

Twitter?

OC: use it to monitor customer problems with products, so they can reach out to them.
ZL: Teaches people new behaviours with low cost of entry.
JP: Twitter is publish/subscribe. 2. Is brief. 3. Assymetric follow. 4. 31 million reasons you carry on

#csnf - Krem and creating success

2009-06-08T11:37:02Z

[Switched to iPhone due to laptop battery death - please excuse typos]

Thijs Sprangers of Krem is up, asking why we aren't talking more about LinkedIn. Krem have defined five relationship roles, and think it is important to figure out what relationship your network is serving.

Look where your audience are active already and head there. It's not only business doing this, it's politics, it's banking...

Menno Braakman up now:

POST Method:

People:
Who are your target group and what us their online participation?

Objectives: Determine the goals of the community

Strategy: how will the goals change the relationship?

Technology: Then choose the right social tools, based on the above.

eg Alumni networks are a useful source of business referrals and recruitment. So they built a network for ORMIT Alumni, and connected with LinkedIn. Use the Alumni group on LinkedIn to advertise the functionality of the private group.

#csnf - Lee Bryant and Credit Crunch Culture

2009-06-08T11:10:32Z

Lee Bryant's thesis is that businesses cannot afford big expensive investments right now, but that social tools can give us decent returns from low investments.

Deliver more for less, and investing things that save money

Social tools can rejuvenate old systems by putting a social layer on the top.

Trust is fundamentally cheaper than control.

In the late 1990s intranets and the internet forked. The Internet went social, the intranets didn't. The internet has had umpteen users testing and feeding back on all its products. The intranet has lacked that evolutionary pressure. IT are rarely good user experience designers, and most people don't care. eBay's reputations system is 10 years old - nothing like it has appeared on intranets yet.

You need to look at the concept of network productivity. Over time, the network becomes more productive. We need to look at that, rather than just individual productivity. Cisco has reduced business planning from 6 months to one week using these tools.

We're wasting too much brain power in our organisation. We spend a lot of money on people, and sit them in front of Neanderthal tools. We also need to make use of hidden data and shared intelligence, like people's searches and click-streams. Microblogging gives us ambient awareness of what people are doing - and thus improve decision-making.

More and more platforms are including small elements of social networking, because these status updates are vital.

People start to negociate meaning for themselves - planned taxonomies are passing away...

It takes one to two years for good adoption and up to five to really transform businesses.

#csnf - AXA Case Study

2009-06-08T10:40:17Z

How do you launch social media in a company where every second of an employee's day is timed? That's the challenge Sonia Carter, head of online internal communications at AXA UK is talking about.

Intensive Customer Experience (love the name, so much room for innuendo...) training courses created great motivation, which wasn't sustained in the office, because too many other people hadn't done the course, and it was business as usual for them. one of senior management asked for "a blog" - was that what he meant? Did he mean that? Or a forum? Or a wiki? How can 12,000 people use a blog effectively?

So they decide to create an online community instead: OurSpace. Distinct separation between opinion/discussion space and the intranet which is the "hard facts", including visual cues in the design. Used a vBulletin forum. Guest hosts lead discussions on particular topics. The CEO as guest host melted the system.

6 weeks to launch
£4k to launch, then another £6k for a nice design later
vBulletin for forums, Wordpress for OurIdeas - heavily customised
You need to hide from/ignore/bribe IT, Security, Risk, Compliance, etc...

Majority of discussion is work-related. Fewer examples of best practice and success stories, more question answering. Using blogs for ideas, which people can discuss and vote on.

Site was promoted during training event, and followed up with e-mail invite. Simple acceptable use policy means little is inappropriate. Only 2 breaches so far in 18 months, one of which lead to a disciplinary. Not bad, given that there are 12,000 people.

#csnf - For and Against Social Networks

2009-06-08T09:37:10Z

James Garner is leading a reasonably robust panel on the pros and cons of social networking.

Panel are Euan Semple, a social media consultant, Trish Hunt from Dell and Dirk Singer of Cow.

Euan Semple - People confuse the internal and external use of social networking. But the line is blurring. I'm hearing more and more stories of people going home to work, because they can be more effective there. Doesn't want to respond to corporate Twitter accounts, because he doesn't know who the person is.

Trish Hunt - Yes, blurred. If you're speaking on behalf of the company, you should have responsibility. (She keeps calling Twitter "Tweeter")

Dirk Singer - First job with internet, they had to collect e-mail, for control. That's gone and will go with social networks,

ES: 10 to 20 years for command and control to go. Social networking is fun but does it add to the ROI of the company? Same can be said of meetings...

TH: People finding that they can share information and avoid meetings is a big benefir, especially if the can come into the office less.

ES: HR is embodiment of C&C backed up by IT - they have the most to lose, but the biggest opportunity.

TH: Disagree. From a Dell perspective, we're committed to it, but there is monitoring and management.

DS: Survey after survey after survey shows that most companies are taking a different approach, and are becoming more restrictive. Laurel Papworth is a good source for this.

One of the audience asked about the death of e-mail. Euan siad he didnt think it was dead, but people need to learn to manage it better. Trish agreed. The questioner asked then if e-mail was more considered than Twitter, which Dirk countered by saying that 140 characters forces consideration.

Biggest Blockers?

ES: Culture

TH: Sales force who think it gets in the way of the sale

DS: Bosses, who don't think it's work.

#csnf - Managing the Modern Employee

2009-06-08T09:16:35Z

Robert Johnson, strategic consultant at the Central Office of Information, knew nothing about social networking when he took on the talk.

60s: people told what to do without explanation

70s & 80s: more communication and buy-in

90s: Corporation as friend, expectation of employees as innovators. Blame-free, supportive culture.

We have baby boomers, GenX and Generation Y in the workplace at the same time. Three different sets of people with different needs and aspirations - but the general shift is from telling people what to do to a collaborative environment.

Lots of detail on Johnson's speech - hopefully the slides will be up after the event, because there's more than I can capture here. The summary is that the GenYers with their need for engagement are more prevalent than ever before. People are happier, more productive and more likely to stay if they have good relationships - so you can't ignore the new social tools. But implementing is a complex, many-layered thing, particularly at the social rather than technological level.

Key points:

Recognise that sharing and learning are valued
Seek out information for yourself
Bee a good networker
Support others
be inclusive
Be sensitive to commercial boundaries
Use tech to add value
Consider their work/life balance.

Niall Cook on Corporate Social Networking

2009-06-08T08:51:43Z

Niall Cook has started his talk with a challenge to preconceptions about social networking in corporates. It's not a case of buying something with Enterprise 2.0 on the box and thinking it will work. It won't.

Why

Any innovation in history usually is based around a technology that has been around for a while, but it requires a perfect political. social, technological storm to make it work.

The credit crunch is what is making it work. The "R" of ROI doesn't need to be much if the "I" is very small. You don't need to spend millions to get something that works. Our existing internal systems don't work. E-mail is overloaded. Intranets aren't working either. They're not collaboration tools, they're publishing tools and nobody's interested. The more social stuff is the only place that traffic will be holding up.

There's a shift from CEO as God to CEO as guide. And employees don't want command and control any more - they want managed engagement. The research says that if you're employees aren't engaged, they're creative negative value for your company.

The workplace and the business are changing. It's more mobile, and more information-focused. The expectation of the workforce is greater than ever. They don't go "I'm at work now, I'm quite happy working in this structured, clunky system and then go home and use Facebook." They won't put up with the old-fashioned stuff any more. There's a shift in the psychological contract between employer and employee.

Digital natives are entering workforce - they don't care what impact their technology choices have on the business. Technology is part of their culture and they won't leave it at the door.

]]> What

Connecting - people want to connect with other people, as well as content and information. They do that using social software outside the organisation. Bring that inside the network.

Communicate - we all have a human need to communicate. Lots of lessons in how pople use the social web, and bring it inside the network.

Co-operation - The success stories of social networking are around this. No defined end goal - just an ability to share things organically. Very difficult for companies to get their heads around because they want the control.

Collaboration - Putting things in place to get the job done - wikis, etc.

How

Speed and Flexibility - the old model of IT deployment is dead. No longer good enough to take 6 months while the IT department works out if there's a business need. If I need a wiki and the internal one isn't good enough, they will go an use a web one. That's a bigger threat than getting speedier.

Ease of Use - Why do we continue to put clunky, horrible, difficult to use software in front of our employees?

Demand - Do it based on demand. What do they want? What are they suing?

Individual value - Flickr isn't successful because people want to contribute to a mass of photographs, but because they can share their photo. There must be good personal reasons for employees to use the tools.

Organisational culture - If you're not a collaborative company, there's no point in using those tools.

Opening Keynote: Suraj Kika on Twitter

2009-06-08T08:31:41Z

Opening keynote is by Suraj Kika of Jadu.

He's compared the massive growth of Twitter (1600% in 2009) with the wholesale shift of people's attention away from mass media to personalised media.

It's been a very example-based presentation so far. He cited #amazonfail as an example of engagement gone wrong - complete silence from the Amazone twitter account throughout.

The company designed offices based on a blog post by Joel Spolsky, and went on to use his FogBugz software - from follower to customer in less than a year. They interact with many of their suppliers through Twitter.

They have their own Twitter account - @jaducms

Short version of their approach:

Turn your customers into your evangelists on Twitter
Put real content out there, don't just market
Engage with people

Oh, and it's a great way to learn about the rest of the social stuff that's happening on the internet.

ROI? Already got two strong leads. People are tweeting, so if you don't get to them, your competitors would. People talk about our products on there. Need to be aware of that. If you add it to your marketing mix, you can benefit.

Google Wave pushes Twitter five years ahead - real time conversation and collaboration in the browser.

Corporate Twitter versus personal? He has three - a locked personal one, a professional one @surajkika and the corporate one - @jaducms - to which all the company can post. They manage this through the Jadu CMS which provides a workflow and trail.

How The CEO's Kids Drive Adoption

2008-12-16T12:19:50Z

Great post from Lee Bryant at Headshift looking at the evolutionary pressures around Web 2.0 tools in the workplace:

What I really like about the consumer Web 2.0 world is the fact that it has given us an amazing experimental laboratory for new tools and communication techniques. It has produced a Cambrian explosion of start ups, tools, features and buzzwords, each of which has evolved very quickly through exposure to rapid feedback at scale. Conversely, in the enterprise tools space, users are of secondary importance and therefore there are few evolutionary pressures that can improve the generally poor quality tools and systems that IT departments force on the business. This is starting to change as more and more senior people ask why their children have access to more effective tools on their home PCs than they have access to in the office.

Time to be proactive in providing stuff, before the CEO comes asking some hard questions...

Making Users Happy with Social Software

2008-12-16T12:01:33Z

As part of a post looking at predictions for 2009, Ross Mayfield of enetrprise wiki provider SocialText presents som interesting figures about making social software projects successful:

Line of Business implementations not only experience growth, but greater success. According to this year's McKinsey survey on Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise, IT-driven implementations had 60% user dissatisfaction, whereas LoB-driven had 74% satisfaction. Part of this is vendor selection, but LoB implementations have greater engagement and adoption. I believe the best approach is to partner LoB with IT, what I once called middlespace, for the benefits of top down and bottom up adoption.

However, at least one group is finding that wikis are slow to catch on internally...

Le Web 08: The Social Stack

2008-12-10T09:41:07Z

Marc Canter (who didn't, in fact, perish yesterday) lead an entertainingly scrappy session on open standards around social information. He started by giving Facebook's senior platform manager Dave Morin a hard time about Facebook apps. Has the social network pushed apps back with the recent revamp of the site?

Morin responded that there were always multiple integration points for apps, and the most important was the profile box, but that didn't always give a good user experience. The news feed has become very popular, and that's become their focus. Users can display most recent actions. Devs can user it to get engagement.

Canter riposted quickly: "The feed is the epitome of your locked in strategy."

Dave Recordon, the open platforms tech lead from Six Apart joined in the criticism: "Open platforms have been more successful, historically," he argued. Even if Facebook is currently the shiney place, if developers can write and application once and put it loads of places, Facebook will be marginalised.

MySpace has taken the opposite route, argued Max Engel, head of data availability initiative at MySpace. They're building using open standards because the "internet routes around roadblocks and we want to be part of the flow". MySpace users already thing of themselves as Myspace.com/profile, so we're in a great place to bring thsi forward. "We've now implemented everything on the open stack." The stack is a group of technologies which enable open social platforms. Canter gave us this slide of it:

]]>
For example, OpenID is a profile web address that you can use to login to any site that supports it. OpenSocial solves the desire to use any app on any site on the web, with the same people relationships and profile data you have elsewhere. Apps written for this standard run in any site that support Open Social container. David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, explained that all of these technologies are needed to create a good user experience.

And surprisingly, Microsoft is claiming to be an OAuth leader using the delegated sign-in system. And Jeff Hansen, general manager services strategy/Livemesh talked about the firm's move towards openness, inclusing the ability to pull your profile and friends data out of Microsoft services, edit it, and push back in. It's a two way API - genuine portable contacts.

However, Canter raised the spectre of Twitter, a hugely popular, data-locked service. "We're all putting our balls in Ev Williams' vice," as he colourfully put it.

Hansen's attempts to defend the less open parts of LiveMesh were met with a derisory "different ways to plug my balls into your vice" from Canter.

He then rounded on Glazer. "What's good for the open web is good for Google," says Canter. "Every company here has their own agenda, but we always have to keep the users in mind."

Gmail has data lock in, he argued. "If you don't want to be open - you're not open," he said. The response form Glazer, backed from some of the others, was that you probably don't want your e-mail to be shared...

Morin launched into a fairly hopeless attempt to boost Facebook Connect as an open platform. "Facebook allowed people to control information and share more than ever before," he said. "Now you can take privacy settings with you wherever you go."

Recordon skewered that one quicky: "We were doing that on Livejournal years ago," he pointed out. "Why are you giving Microsoft access to the e-mail addresses without my permission?"

Glazer offered the rather weak defence that Microsoft doesn't keep the e-mails. And questioning from the floor was just as hostile. Mike Arrington of Techcrunch stated forcibly that Facebook is not interested in open software stack and that Canter should call bullshit on its claims. And Tom Morris challenged Microsoft's commitment to open standards after the OpenXML affair.

Le Web 08 Day One Photos

2008-12-10T08:58:51Z

Business people in the breakout area
Originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth

All my photos from day one of Le Web are now up on my Flickr stream.