December
An article originally posted on The Content Economy
Michael Idinopulos at SocialText shares some advice about how to successfully implement social software company-wide.
1. Encourage a broad range of use cases
2. Recruit energetic champions across the organization
3. Launch the tools with hands-on experiences for new users
4. Route repeated activities through social software
5. Integrate with existing systems of record
6. Leverage public communities
Read the full article at www.thecontenteconomy.com
If you don’t know where to start, start here. One more post from “The Content Economy” which is crystal clear and plenty of sense!
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November
An article originally posted on www.socialenterprise.it
“Knowledge Plaza offers without a doubt a new and extremely powerful platform for locating and capitalizing business knowledge, skillfully mixing advanced concepts such as social filtering, people tagging, the merge of taxonomies, tags and facets, the use of experts such as vertical search engines. (…)”
Read the full article at www.socialenterprise.it
Emanuele Quintarelli, an information architect, user experience and social software consultant, wrote up this complimentary article about Knowledge Plaza. If like me you are not Italian literate, check out the following English translation.
Grazie mille per il relè Emanuele and we’ll be glad to gather your feedback for making the interface even more intuitive. 
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October
An article originally posted on
We’ve been delighted to welcome Thomas Vander Wal from Infocloud solutions for a few days with us in Belgium. Thomas is a senior consultant in social software and personal knowledge tools, also known for coining the term “folksonomy“. It offered a great opportunity to share perspectives and visions of the future with the whole team including our visionary friend Scott.
Thanks Thomas for your visit and for your eye-opening presentation! It was also a pleasure to put a face and voice on a blogger previously played by our Feed jockey.
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October
An article originally posted on www.readwriteweb.com
“The New New Thing Is Social SaaS
If SaaS was simply doing traditional enterprise IT but with a Net Native design at a fraction of the cost it would be big. But that is only the start. What really differentiates the SaaS winners is that they have a social media/networking twist at the core of their value proposition.”
Read the full article at www.readwriteweb.com
SaaS can prove to be useful and meaningful in various scenarios. The most evident one is interaction with clients where you can provide them with an exchange platform for projects and knowledge sharing.
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October
An article originally posted on mashable.com
“As the corporate adoption of microblogging tools like Twitter continues to increase, it’s only a matter of time before companies decide that there is something there worth exploring. Well-known startups like Mahalo have a 50% adoption rate of Yammer. Companies like IBM are using similar functionality on their Facebook-like internal communities. With so many potential benefits, why wouldn’t a company want to give this a try?”
Read the full article at mashable.com
Microblogging in the enterprise has been getting a lot of attention lately and speculations are made about its usefulness (or the opposite). To my mind it won’t help manage your information, but it will definitely help it flow and get people out of their e-mail boxes. Informality is another aspect of microblogging which helps quickly materialize knowledge that they would otherwise keep to themselves, yet without locking them into the silos of point-to-point instant messenging as microblogs are logged and shared.
Finally, one of the most important factors for adoption is the “what’s in it for me?” question which also gets a straightforward answer: if you know what people are up to, you’ll be more effective at finding the right person at the right time in order to get your own job done right. It also creates more opportunities for interaction and helps gathering feedback on your own work.
To those who blame these tools for additional information overload and attention diversion, what are you afraid of as long as the tool provides sufficient network/topic/project filtering features and its users stay professional? Receiving 20 status updates is far more useful and less disturbing than being disturbed by 3 people who are looking for information you can’t provide.
At the end of the day, you’ll only know if you try it out for yourself. So if you have the opportunity, I strongly recommend you give these Instant Messenging derivatives a shot. How? Well first choose a tool candidate requiring a minimal setup procedure (this article compares several amongst which my current favorite – Yammer). Find a few motivated folks in your workplace to test drive it but guide them with usage examples to avoid creating just a playground or another “information pit”. Finally, gather their feedback before considering a possible wider deployment.
Remember, even a small communication benefit over zero implementation effort leads to infinite return. So why wouldn’t anyone want to give this a try ? And if you have, what were the hurdles and solutions you encountered ?
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September
An article originally posted on Read/WriteWeb
“A new report about Enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, by Awareness, Inc., shows that employers are increasingly allowing staff to use social media applications in working hours. Awareness puts the figure at 69 percent of businesses in 2008, up from 37 percent last year.”
Read the full article at www.readwriteweb.com
Which enterprise doesn’t yet use a wiki or have a blog?
Social media and web 2.0 are invading the enterprise landscape. They are more and more used internally as well as externally to enhance respectively knowledge sharing and communication with clients and customers.
This study statistically shows that web 2.0 technology results in essential company tools and provide best practices to adopt them.
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September
An article originally posted on Web Strategist
“With the popularity to Twitter and other Microblogging tools, we should expect to see a flurry of simliar tools for project and program management for the enterprises (..).
Stemming from commodity technology, I’m sure I’ll have a hard time keeping this list up to date over a few months –expect IM vendors, blogging vendors, community platforms, enterprise 2.0 vendors, and a flurry of startups to offer similiar features, first read up on the pros and cons as well as some potential use cases.
It’s interesting to see the need to justify enterprise needs of such tools that are already being adopted by consumers, typical of enterprise settings (I’m a former enterprise intranet manager). With that said, let’s start the definitive list.”
Read the full article at www.web-strategist.com
A good starting point if you are looking at deploying microblogging inside your company. A few backlinks also give you an idea of pros and cons, as well as potential use cases.
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September
An article originally posted on www.iht.com
“It’s just like living in a village, where it’s actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already. (…) The current generation is never unconnected. They’re never losing touch with their friends. So we’re going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that’s very new. It’s just the 20th century.”
Read the full article at www.iht.com
In-depth article of The Herald Tribune about the new perception of privacy induced by social media such as Facebook noticed by Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has closely studied how college-age users are reacting to the world of awareness.
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September
An article originally posted on www.ibm.com
“IBM’s Enterprise Tagging Service cost $700k to develop and deploy across the worldwide intranet as a sidebar to a number of key web properties: traditional search engine results, top content pages, and web applications like the IBM internal social brainstorming tool, Thinkplace(..)
The ETS team instituted a survey to ask users how this tool helped them. What they found was amazing when you look at it in context: the average person saved 12 seconds, across the 286000+ searches performed through ETS each week. This sums up to 955 hours saved each week across the company. In terms of cost savings, it amounts to a rough estimate of $4.6 million a year, in terms of productivity gain. The reusability of this page widget also resulted in $2.4 million in cost avoidance (reimplementing this for each site).”
Read the full article at www.ibm.com
In a recent McKinsey survey I commented on, business executives didn’t seem to regard tagging as a very useful web 2.0 tool.
These numbers from IBM should make them think again.
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September
An article originally posted on www.theappgap.com
“The truth of most modern work is that we analyse data and information and reach out to our networks in order to gain access to knowledge. We collaborate on ideas and then have a burst of work that reflects the sharing of ideas. And, of course, once we have produced something, we then tend to socialise it again within our networks in order to refine the ideas we’ve produced. This is knowledge work in action and people are at the centre of it.”
Read the first full article at www.theappgap.com
“Various theories from social psychology have been used to explain this ‘whats in it for me’ factor to better understand how to successfully introduce social computing tools into corporate environments. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is often the first theory put forward.”
Read the second full article at www.theappgap.com
Matthew Hodgson summarizes how enterprise social tools fit into daily collaboration and provides perspicuous illustrations to this purpose.
In an apposite post to Andrew Boyd’s article, he then addresses the issue of adoption and describes values theories such as Maslow’s pyramid in an attempt to answer the “what’s in it for me” factor. Enjoyable read.
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