I wrote a little about my background here, here and here if interested. Things have come a long way since my early days with Socialwrks and the market is now at the cusp of great things so it felt right to reconsider my options in the context of this. New vendors, consultancies and organisations of all kinds (most importantly new organisations like those I have been helping) are now firmly on board with social business as I have written about here. I have often switched “sides” in my career because I believe it builds a diversity of experience. I have worked for agencies, clients, technology vendors and finally for myself and so all of these options were again on the table.
I was not fixed on the idea of joining a technology vendor although perhaps there was a slight leaning – hence my deeper level investigation here :) Whatever the reasons for choosing one direction over another, the important thing for me was to explore the organisation’s purpose, its culture, positioning in the marketplace, its future prospects and make sure there was a match with my abilities, aspirations and their needs (this included continuing in my current guise). Without mentioning all the organisations I spoke to and investigated in my explorations, I have found what I believe is a superb match – Yammer. I also believe after all my homework, that they are the best option. I feel extremely fortunate to announce that I will be joining Yammer imminently – they are on fire and have reignited my passion (if that was possible :) I’ll fill a role in their European operation helping make customers successful at social business – what I feel I was born to do :) This blog and my newsletter will continue but at this stage I’m not sure how – please stick around for even more insights (as permissible). Thanks for your time reading this and please contact me if you want any further information, including help with Yammer :)

Image reference.

I have tried to capture the essence of each main point that I found to have the greatest relevance, with the best articles/reports supporting each and including my take:

Customer engagement and relevance!

This excellent article highlights the need for customers to be provided with a reason to coalesce around communities of interest and why this should be leveraged by marketers. Martin Hill-Wilson suggests that wealth or financial management is a common human concern and a great opportunity to engage for those that provide services in the industry/sector. In relation to this he covers the need for companies to act as one across often disparate and silo’d customer-facing departments: marketing, customer service, sales, etc. He also covers the need to start internally as I have before (and indeed this recent research from Celent reports – Collaboration and Insurance 2.0: An Overview of Social Software and Enterprise 2.0 for Insurers, registration required), empowering employees to serve customers better and more cohesively. He suggests that customer service employees are often in a cross fire (or piggy-in-the-middle as he puts it) between the internal and external agendas that brands seem to find so difficult to effectively align and this needs to be resolved. I agree with the need to find relevant themes or content, especially for subjects which normally have a high barrier to engagement (i.e. people are not generally inclined to converse and connect around financial or insurance topics and will probably only do so when they need it). Adding value around those themes and content is a big challenge but there is potential. Added value that will keep customers coming back but more importantly, that will make their lives better in terms of how they manage their wealth (simplifying issues is an especially good opportunity in my view). Doing all this should result in high customer engagement levels, increased sales, recommendations and sharing amongst friends – propagating the value. Alexander & Strunk Insurance epitomise this approach with their line “To advise you on insurance, not just sell it” and they are doing a pretty good job with social media too. Blue Shield of California finds that social apps and rewards (gamification) engage its employees in wellness programs and sees potential for its insurance customers. I think there are also many other factors to consider which are probably best addressed in a separate blog post but for now here are a couple of slides I put together that cover some other key, related considerations.

Some other excellent reference links which I think provide related insights/considerations should also be read. This article on customer journey mapping – a prerequisite to successful customer engagement I would say. This article on content marketing around social content. Finally this great overview of how P&G is transforming around social business.

Dion Hinchcliffe does a great job of tackling the big hairy issues this type of industry faces around business strategy, compliance and regulatory issues. A point explored is that many financial industry firms fundamentally make their living by profiting from information scarcity. “The idea is that they have more information than the market does as a whole and can profit from the arbitrage created by the disparity between those-in-the-know and the know-nots. This then, at its root, more than other “difficult” industries, often puts the business strategies of financial services in sharp contrast – direct opposition even – with the basic premise of social media, which essentially says that the most productive and useful conversations are ones that are the most open, transparent, shared, and participatory.” The anathema that social media represents a foreign way of operating for financial services firms thus provides the first big challenge, i.e. the ability and willingness of financial services firms to change the way they do business in a changing digital world. I think very important for this challenge to be overcome is for the industry to see things in terms of what they might gain through effective customer engagement – see first article points. In terms of compliance and regulatory issues and overcoming these, Dion suggests cultivating and maintaining a healthy social media policy lifecycle that’s enforced in close concert with legal, HR, and compliance as a key strategy for success. Alternatives are to automate the compliance process – see next article.

Standardising and automating compliance through social media compliance platforms

• FINRA/SEC compliant infraction monitoring, capturing, archiving and Rogue Page Finder
• Single sign-on (SSO), LDAP directory integration, and integration with CA Site minder and HP Autonomy to deliver security, compliance, ease of use and scale
• Scheduling posts and campaigns across firm, business unit, and individual employee profiles, business pages, and timelines
• Social CRM to enable a deepening of customer relationships
• Social Analytics enabling the user to roll-up metrics on social media profiles across the company

I think these types of technology and activity are increasingly likely to make adoption of social media by insurance firms easier and less risky, thereby facilitating broader adoption. They may also go a long way in assuring standard firms although the one note of caution I would add across the board is that these technologies and activities should strive not to hamper or dampen the kind of spontaneity that are so crucial to social technologies.

Are insurers and other financial services firms in danger of their lunch being eaten by the social networks?

A view in the latest of a Gartner series of reports (Top Industry Predicts 2012: Industries Face intensified Consumerization and Technology Disruption – covered here since its a paid for report) cites “radical shifts in customer behavioral changes and buying habits… challenging many industries to reinvent their product development and sales and services processes to align with customer expectations and technology use.” They predict that “offering insurance products to their communities would be a natural extension of social media providers’ financial services strategies and would allow them to capitalize on their extensive set of information they constantly collect about their users.” Is this all far-fetched prognostication or is there a grain of possibility in the disintermediation of financial service firms to include, for example, the enablement of online debt management services and peer-to-peer loan pools, all of which happens by way of social networks more than by stand-alone web sites? I don’t see it being too implausible. From a brand point of view, in the same way traditional brand extensions such as Virgin or Tesco selling financial services have worked here in the UK, it could work the other way. But social media providers becoming financial services powerhouses may be some way off, especially since trust is fundamental for a brand extension into a non-related field to work (and social media providers are not paragons of trust). Facebook and the like may not become better at providing insurance services to customers than an insurance company itself, but it could become the social front-end with the back-end outsourced to a partner insurance company. To stay competitive, traditional banks (Gartner cites Citibank as the leader here) have launched services that reach their customers through Facebook, and enable them to conduct transactions through a social network rather than a Web site. Considering that a lot of experimentation and activities by firms are already taking place on the social network, financial transactions cannot be far behind. This all points to some very real possibilities on both sides in my view. Image reference.

First off I realise that technology choice plays only a small part in the success of any social business initiative and I have put it in its correct place amongst the many other considerations. Still, as mentioned in that post, “it plays a disproportionally influential role, especially when it comes to social technology”. I wanted to get that point out of the way. Now as to context, I think it becomes necessary to understand the context of use before you can decide on the best tools for the job. Recently the whole jobs-to-be-done approach to creating valuable customer propositions has seen some renewed interest (2 great posts here and here). I think it provides a really good framework for understanding the role of social technology and in aiding choices of the right tool sets. I covered this previously in my getting started with social business slides to some degree, based on a similar approach as you can see from the diagram. I’ve also done this kind of exercise for a client in the past, especially focused on idea management – you can download the report freely at the bottom of my newsletter page. I’d like to dive deeper now as a basis for broader evaluation of social technologies in terms of the jobs they are required to do.

The jobs-to-be-done framework is a helpful diagnostic in determining what a user might want done, and in evaluating potential resources to do those jobs. I have constructed a framework that leads to a particular technology with a specific set of features that might meet a business objective as well as satisfy a user need. This might provide a good basis for making choices in terms of how different platforms satisfy the user need and business objective. In some cases the user is the end user, perhaps an employee, in other cases it could be an administrator or manager. I’ve not distinguished between these but you should be able to see where the difference lies. So herewith the list:

Am I barking up the wrong tree or is this the right direction to go in? Ultimately a check list for businesses could be arrived at and used as a basis for planning social technology deployments and vendor/platform selection. Can you think of any more if you agree with this framework? If so please add in a comment covering the subjects at the top of the 3 columns.

These slides were put together for some client work (the getting started part obviously enough :) and I thought after making them a little generic and taking out some info I was not able to share, they would be worth making public. Some points to bear in mind:

• There were several clients in fact, in similar positions and stages of evolution – the beginning essentially. As such the quick win examples which were identified together with the client are rather simplistic and focus on alternatives to email but this is often a good place to start in any event
• Following on from the last point, I would say that an organisation perhaps a little more experienced or bolder should consider some really meaty projects to get behind and supporting with similar tools to the ones I mentioned, still with quick wins in mind
• Please note the credits section because the thinking was far from all mine :)

Let me know what you think in a comment.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for social software in the workplace 2011

I guess any review would have to start with Gartner and their Magic Quadrant series that is relevant to this sector. I have already done a review of their latest report (as far as the copyright allows me to) and so I don’t propose to go through any of their input here other than to use their list as a basis for mine. On a hilarious aside and lest we take these types of report too seriously – check out this really funny video parody of Hitler’s failure to get his cloud app in the leader section of the Gartner magic quadrant. Not to say that that Gartner’s input (or any of the other analysts) is not valid or has been influenced in any way, just that they may not be the “be all and end all” of views. You can buy the report here. I would say it is a relatively comprehensive review of the different platforms but at a high level with no breakdown of features in comparison to others, nor major technology components or company considerations, costs, etc.

The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Social Platforms, Q3 2011

Forrester provides a worthy counterpoint to Gartner and it is interesting to compare the two lists and see where they tally up. Click on the images to see for yourself. Forrester has a smaller list. They used a set of inclusion criteria that eliminated a number of more focused social technology offerings. Vendors that placed a primary focus on specific areas of functionality, typically microblogging, activity streams, and profiles rather than broad platform functionality evaluated in the Forrester Wave (e.g. Yammer, Socialcast) were excluded. Other vendors that have placed a premium on specific vertical or horizontal capabilities, like PBworks and Traction Software, were also excluded. Vendors adding social capabilities to existing products — like portals and applications, e.g. Oracle with its WebCenter Suite, salesforce.com with Chatter, and Tibco with Tibbr were also excluded. Finally, those with insufficient market presence and/or market awareness within Forrester and its client base were excluded (e.g. Igloo, Moxie, and Saba). You can buy the report here.

THE LIST

Before I head into the list I’ll just say that it was gleaned from a combination of Google searches, the use of Zemanta which is a WordPress plugin that aggregates relevant content from blogs that can be included in a post and my knowledge of experts in the field that sometimes write about these platforms – I’m following some of them in one of my Twitter lists. And it would be remiss of me not to reference a list (perhaps the “mother of all lists”) that was started way back by one of the leading experts who used to work at Forrester (I think he started their Wave series), Jeremiah Owyang and his List of “White Label” or “Private Label” (Applications you can Rebrand) Social Networking Platforms, Community Platforms. That is rather an outdated list now and there has been a lot of consolidation since. I also want to stress that my list is not as complete as his and will focus on the biggest players in the corporate space (meaning those that have large corporate customers with tens of thousands of employees at least). So now the list in alphabetical order, lest any favouritism is suspected.

 Atlassian Confluence

If I hadn’t made that last caveat about favouritism you would have suspected me having started the list with them since they are a partner I’ve worked with for many years :) They are on the list for their Confluence enterprise wiki product amongst their suite of products (with Jira being their flagship product). Best reviews I could find are:

• Emergent Collaboration Vendor Review: Atlassian’s Confluence

blueKiwi

• Their site
• Review from the social software matrix site

Drupal

This open source alternative  can be rather confusing since they have multiple offshoots and service alternatives so to be clear, the one that I will cover is Commons with Acquia as its formal service provider.

• Review from the social software matrix
• Acquia Drupal Commons 2.0 Promises Quick Social-as-a-Service Setup for Businesses 

Cisco Quad

• The site
• Quad: The Death of E-mail and Cisco’s Social Enterprise Ambitions

Clearvale

• Their site
• Broadvision’s Clearvale Express Offers Free Social Media Capabilities
• Clearvale Express Updated: Activity Streams, Tasks, Mobile Access & More
• Clearvale Social CRM Integrates Customer Engagement Channels for Better Communication
• BroadVision’s Clearvale Provides Comprehensive Enterprise Social Networking Platform

Huddle

• Their site
• Review of Huddle – Part 1. What is Huddle?
• Review of Huddle – Part 2. Signing Up and Trying Huddle

IBM Connections

• The site
• Big Blue Launches IBM Connections Software for Social Business
• IBM Connections: Analytics, Email, the Activity Stream & More
• IBM Connections Conversations – 2: Overview of Next Release
• Review from the social software matrix

IGLOO

• The site
• I just recently did a review of the platform (something I will be doing more of on other platforms)
• Emergent Collaboration Vendor Review: Igloo Software

Jive

• The site
• An Initial Look at Jive Software
• Review from the social software matrix
• An Independent Review for Jive’s Social Software
• Jive Five Test Drive

Microsoft Sharepoint

• The site
• Review from the social software matrix
• The Art of Sharepoint Success Series
• Why SharePoint Is So Popular, Yet Gets Such A Bad Rap

Moxie

• The site
• Emergent Collaboration Vendor Review: Moxie Software
• Moxie competes in enterprises with Yammer and Salesforce Chatter with a better design (video)

Podio

• The site
• GetApp Review
• Podio Is An Impressive Social Collaboration Platform, And It Comes With An App Store

Saba

• The site
• Product Review: Saba Social
• Saba Software: All about People (Cloud) – Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

SalesForce.com Chatter

• The site
• Salesforce.com upgrades Chatter, plots HTML5 app

SAP StreamWork

• The site
• A World Class Way to Collaborate – Review of SAP StreamWork
• The Many Ways to Use SAP StreamWork: Saving Time With Streamlined Annual Conference Planning (from SAP)
• SAP StreamWork For Collaborative Decision Making

Socialcast

• The site
• Socialcast Now Collaborates with the External Enterprise

SocialText

• The site
• Review from the social software matrix
• SocialText: Social is Layer, Not a Feature

Telligent

• The site
• Telligent Adds Ideation, Innovation Management to Community Platform
• Telligent Acquires Leverage Software: Mobile, Cloud and Usability Key Benefits

Tibbr

• The site
• Tibco launches Tibbr 3.0: Aims to cure enterprise social sprawl
• Tibbr 3.0 Transforms Social Computing, Unifies Communications
• TIBCO’s Tibbr: Inching Towards Great

Yammer

• The site
• Yammer Now Works With Box.net and Five Other Cloud Services
• How one general practice is using Yammer

If you have any great articles, reviews or reports on the above vendors or think one should be added, please let me know in a comment or via Twitter. It would be best if they were as independent and comprehensive as possible.

Follow @stephenwrks

A. Company

1. Jim Balsillie, the ex co-CEO of RIM, is Chairman of the board and their primary investor is RBC Ventures, the largest bank in Canada
2. IGLOO was initially focused on the not for profit and healthcare sectors but is now far more widespread
3. It is based in Canada but has offices in several other countries (in London for instance, for the information of local readers) and global efforts and customers are part of a strategic push
4. 60% of its sales are via partners and I have already been invited into the partner community site which is based on IGLOO of course and can only say good things about it – see specific notes below
5. IGLOO is also one of Gartner’s magic quadrant vendors (from its latest assessment which I covered here). Again further on I’ve covered some aspects of their input.

B. Product

1. Their is only one product from IGLOO, a platform configured via applications and templates, but a nice approach they have taken is via those applications and templates they allow users to use it fairly distinctly, either as an intranet or extranet. It can also be configured to focus on specific tasks : sales, project, companywide collaboration, etc.
2. It is built on .NET and has a developer community adding functionality to it although I cannot verify this. So it operates as an App platform and can also incorporate functions from other platforms, e.g. Salesforce
3. It is 100% Software as a Service (SaaS) so you can only use it in the cloud paying a monthly subscription fee – you cannot host on your own servers if you wanted to. They claim this avoids complex forking of core product code and allows for 90 day release cycle s for new features and functions which they say are 50% driven by customer/partner feedback (pretty impressive stats).
4. Prices range from price: $4, $6 and $10 per user per month, per instance (the latter being flexible) – see price list for more.

Key features

1. With the widget/app approach, each page can be configured independently to display different content, feeds (from other parts of the site) and functionality. Also html widgets can bring in other functions from outside, e.g Wufoo forms
2. Fine grained permissions are possible down to page level and even documents in a page
3. Collaborative authoring very strong – docs (ppt, word, etc) can be edited inline
4. Blog, wiki, forum and idea functions all come as standard although I’m not sure how powerful they are in their own right
5. Gamification is well served with points and badges all deeply integrated into the captivity stream
6. Profiles and personal spaces are all well served and can have different visibility levels as you see fit. You can follow people (Contacts), a people directory comes as standard and to some degree there are activity streams although not at a global level from what I saw. Rather you can see activity streams at various different levels interspersed into other functionality sections
7. Can be extended and modified fairly easily from what I saw, in terms of the design and branding interface. Not sure how easy to extend functionality, capabilities in the .NET framework nothwisthtanding
8. Integrates Office documentation and other document types really well through a flash player (not sure how well this is handled via mobile, especially iPhones and iPads). In a follow-up note I was told that as IGLOO move to enhance their support across all mobile platforms in Q2 of 2012, they’ll also be moving towards supporting HTML5 so that their doc preview engine is compatible with Apple products.

Below are my single sentence views on where I think IGLOO’s most important strength lies and where I might be a little cautious (I’ve incorporated Gartner’s magic quadrant view here too)

C. Strengths

IGLOO’s stand out strength for me is what I saw in terms of its breadth of capability with so many standard features that do a more than adequate job and which mostly seem out of the box – if this is what you want with little need to extend or customise then IGLOO is for you. A rich-text editor and drag-and-drop widgets mean that it is very easy for a non-technical user or business professional to publish content, manage settings, etc. Gartner praised IGLOO on their viability (growth, market reach and penetration), functionality and build out of their product ecosystem to work with other platforms like Salesforce.

D. Cautions

Just as a strength can be a weakness so here it could be that there is perhaps a little too much on offer which makes things more complicated than needed for the average user but I think this could be overcome by careful configuration with ease of use design in mind. Furthermore a user is able (at an individual level) to hide applications from the navigation disabling applications like wiki, blog, forum, microblogging or calendar within a collaboration space – further aiding simplification. Gartner highlighted the complexity issue too (for non technical users) and also mentioned the lack of an app store and extendability via third party add-ons but since their report is from August 2011 it seems IGLOO has plugged this gap. Also, this complexity issue is probably not specific to IGLOO only and like many other vendors, they are looking to improve all the time.

A little context

Open innovation, according to Henry Chesbrough who originated the concept, has two facets. One is the “outside in” aspect, where external ideas and technologies are brought into the firm’s own innovation process. This is the most commonly recognised feature of open innovation. The other, less commonly recognized aspect is the “inside out” part, where un- and under-utilized ideas and technologies in the firm are allowed to go outside to be incorporated into others’ innovation processes. I’m sure a definition was not required for most of you but I thought this distinction was rather important. This article by him (Everything You Need to Know About Open Innovation) provides a lot more detail if interested.

Now onto the social side. Many views are still broadly that it is “employees’ use of social media as either time-wasting, or a threat to carefully-crafted marketing messages” (this is from a definition in a working document outlining the scope of The Work Foundation research). There often appears little distinction between social media as the output of purposeful and open collaboration between organisation stakeholders (employees, customers, partners or suppliers) based on social technologies which have been put to specific business use and the loose set of activities on the public social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn to name just a few). Blurring occurs between business and personal use, between open and closed networks, between access points (mobile, web, apps, etc.). None of these distinctions are absolute, borders are porous and roles interchangeable. But the purposes of this post and exercise is not to resolve all this.

The point of my line of enquiry

I think social technologies in the context of business use are critical in facilitating open innovation. Essentially I’d like to start creating a framework for their use – a kind of open innovation social technology stack. What I find missing in most open innovation discussions is the role of specific technologies, especially social. Having said that, it is pretty much implicit in the definition for this new piece of research into open innovation: “technology to support the involvement of people (either inside or outside the company) in innovation processes” – registration required. The list below is far from exhaustive and I’d love your input in a comment (or please respond to the survey also mentioned at the end) to see whether this resonates before exploring further. I’ve bundled the technologies into four broad areas – see also diagram

1. The role of social idea management and crowdsourcing technologies

This is the obvious perhaps most important component – the vertical social technology most closely associated with innovation – and the main reason for the title of this blog post. A new breed of social technologies to facilitate innovation are starting to be used by organisations. Idea management systems that systematically manage the innovation pipeline through collaboration on people’s ideas as well as review and implementation of them (I did a whole study on this – download summary report bottom of page here). These are most often applied internally. Then there are those, often the same technology products, used externally to crowdsource ideas from users or customers. Ideas play a crucial role in open innovation and indeed are a core part of Chesbrough’s definition. There are now incredible technologies with key social features to manage this effectively (they are also the thin end of the social business wedge in my view). Great examples of products and use abound (OpenIdeo, Dell’s IdeaStorm, Ecomagination to name just a few).

2. The role of generic social technologies to support standard innovation technologies and practice

Organisations using technologies to manage various innovation processes is not new, from the basic spreadsheet (yes it still happens) to the very advanced product lifecycle management platforms (where admittedly innovation is only a part and there exists a lot of ambiguity). There are also various creativity tools and then all the processes that accompany innovation where standard tools are used. Some are choosing to supplement this all with generic social technologies like wikis, blogs, activity streams etc. which can work very effectively as an overlay to standard tools but ultimately could cause integration problems.

3. The role of social data, search and analytics technologies

This is a horizontal technology component that could work across verticals and cover the open social web and internal networks. The fact is that there is an explosion of social data that is set to increase but there is an equivalent explosion of tools that allow for this data to be mined, analysed and intelligence derived. I wonder if this area is especially relevant in the case of open innovation activities where different stakeholders are engaging in an open, collaborative way and deriving meaning from all of these interactions becomes key to out-innovate competitors. Whether you are dealing with open innovation in a systematic way using the tools mentioned above or not, there are separate social conversations and activities going on that you should be aware of and trying to figure out the meaning and bearing they have on your innovation efforts. See slides 39-54 of this deck from Dion Hinchcliffe who elaborates on the social data explosion and its impact.

4. The role of social talent and performance management technologies

Given that talent management is a key part of the workshop and talent management has gone social, I thought this was a vertical technology stack worth exploring. Ultimately, if open innovation is a key priority for a company then it strikes me that talent and performance should be managed for it somehow. I’m just not sure how well this could or should be integrated with innovation management systems. For instance, performance management (and rewards) could be handled in the idea management side through gaming mechanics and leader-boards determining employees effective contribution to innovation or this could be passed onto talent and performance management systems to be handled at annual review time. The latter might make open innovation more holistic. The article linked to provides some good examples in this area.

So these are my views on the core social technologies we should be considering when organising for Open Innovation. Do you agree. Have I missed anything? Would you approach this completely differently? I’d love your views. Add a comment or if you have a moment perhaps you wouldn’t mind answering a simple 2 question, 15 second survey here (results will be shared here in a week or so)? Find me on Twitter and let me know there too.

Follow @stephenwrks

Warning: This post comes with some kool aid :)

I’d like to be as dispassionate and rational as possible in this list yet it is inspirational for my own purposes as I have said. I’ve tried to avoid partaking of the kool aid too much and I’ve tried to counterbalance some of the positives in my list with some rational thinking. Note also my caveat at the end and read Susan’s post for links to some other counterbalancing points which prompted her crisis of faith. A last point before diving into the list is that I could probably have come up with many more than five themes but I wanted to make the list as all encompassing as possible and focus on the most important ones.

1. Culture and collaboration

Being different has still not gone out of fashion (thanks for the reminder Steve :) and culture which is a key premise of social business and has to be distinct for every company by definition, is still the best differentiator in my view. Culture (and by close association community) plays an increasingly important role for companies like Zappos, Apple and Google but has done for many of the greats for years (IBM, GE, etc.) and may be the only truly sustainable competitive advantage. It continues to attract people (employees and customers alike, ask any Apple fanboy) and provide a sense of purpose and belonging. Getting people with a strong culture collaborating in powerful ways (another key premise of social business and a timeless aspiration) make for a very powerful combination. Open Innovation which is essentially about customers and other companies collaborating with a company on new products and services and is also not new, is a key tenet of social business and was borne out of this desire to be involved and to collaborate openly.

2. Democracy

Aspirations to be free, creative, useful and self determining are not just the domain of robust democracies, struggling and oppressed societies or the founding ideals of nations. People don’t want to just be a cog in a machine and this is more relevant today than after the industrial revolution. Increasingly employees want to be engaged and increasingly call the shots- see tweet below. They also want to avoid outdated practices (see this awesome post on why sales commissions for sales staff don’t work). Democracy is a cornerstone of successful social businesses. Which is not to say have a voting system in companies or do away with leaders or management (although that is also a movement in its own right) but rather for leaders not to be autocratic, hierarchical and broadly have the endorsement of employees to do their specific (and necessary) management related work alongside everyone else’s.

56% of employees will not work for a company that bans access to social networks! weknownext.com/blog/just-the-… #swchat

— SHRM We Know Next (@weknownext) January 26, 2012

3. Technology

Technology has always been an enabler, it’s just enabling better now with the new breed of social technologies than it ever has before and this will continue. The point is there is this eternal fascination with technology, initially to mechanise then to automate and now to enable the connected company (allowing customers, employees and partners to collaborate, communicate and innovate more successfully than ever before). As long as technology remains subservient to the task, the solution, then I think this bodes really well for the future. And whereas the former theme is about people and is probably the more powerful driver or theme, technology put to effective use increasingly has the ability to disrupt and differentiate – smart companies see that.

4. Mobility

Independence from time and location has been an aspiration for less time than with any of the other themes mentioned here. But it is no less important and is increasingly being better served by mobile devices. This is not a social business theme per se but a lot of the drivers for social business are around mobile use (simply by virtue of the fact that a lot of connecting is done via mobile devices) and cloud based applications that allow people to work together from anywhere, anytime. This use is set to explode and I don’t have to trot out figures for you to believe me I’m sure – the benefits and indeed the demand will correspondingly soar. There is a growing economic and environmental imperative to make better use of our time and efforts in an increasingly crowded and globalised world, i.e. virtual, web-based and mobile work over the physical (which is not to detract from the necessity and advantages of physical interaction).

5. Transparent, measurable and accountable

Understanding of the underlying reasons for phenomena has been a cornerstone of the scientific and industrial revolutions and is no less applicable today. Now increasingly technology and credible metrics are available to organisations to make it more effective. Big data that is an outcome of the massive amounts of interactions between people (and increasingly with things) and sophisticated analytical tools allow us to monitor, analyse, understand and hold accountable and whole industries are springing up around these elements. On the downside it is also becoming more complicated to manage. Most important is that a lot of the interactions and data are transparent and available to the masses for closer scrutiny – http://data.gov.uk/ is a good example of this trend in government but this is being replicated in companies.

Dion Hinchcliffe’s recent presentation from the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris does an awesome job of covering off the rationale behind many of my points (mobile use, big data, consumerisation of IT, etc.) by way of a staggering array of statistics on how the world is moving.

My skin in the game and a caveat

I started on the path that I am currently on more than 15 years ago so have some basis for my observations. In 1996 in my dissertation for an MA in Marketing, a hypothesis I correctly proved through survey based research (that was presented at some pretty hardcore academic conferences), was that “the more corporate interaction there was, the more customers would deem products to be suitable to their needs and therefore the higher they would evaluate both the products and organisations those products came from”. At the time this had great bearing on company and product branding efforts although I would now say it goes far beyond this. See the diagram of my structural equation model and note that another parameter was also measured but it was the one on Corporate Interaction that got me started on my path. Corporate Interaction by the way, was defined as 1.) use of technology to “listen”, understand and quickly respond to customer preferences and 2.) integrating marketing with design/manufacturing – involving customers early in development so customers become “co-producers” and loyal.

In 2002 when working for SONY running a pan-European CRM programme for them, I started blogging on my Transforming Business Blog around similar themes and then in 2006 I left SONY to start up Netociety (now Socialwrks after a rebranding exercise) to do many of the things I was talking about and am still doing, just independently. Lets hope the new CEO of SONY takes on board some of the social business inspired recommendations I left his predecessor to turn this once great company around (see last post on my old blog to see what I mean :)

The caveat is that there is a monstrous commercial movement/enterprise (mine included) that is geared to perpetuating some of the positives I’ve mentioned above. In other words vendors of technology products and consultancy services alongside them. Enough said :)

Let me know what you think in a comment or on Twitter.

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The critical part

The list of 10 items relates to the things that make an intranet social so before getting onto those let me cover the other aspect of the topic which is why an intranet is critical. I have captured a similar list of reasons why a social business should start internally and if you agree with any of this, then you will agree (as I believe) that the intranet is the platform to make it all happen. Since I compiled that list, two key articles by others essentially verify this. One recounts how PepsiCo makes employees social ambassadors by turning a bit of its intranet inside-out making selected internal newsletter articles available to post externally. The other focuses on why internal social networks are now an important proving ground as both a means to drive collaboration and as a test bed for future social initiatives, according to IBM’s 2011 Tech Trends report.

So now onto the list of 10 reasons that make an intranet social (they are brief and to the point in keeping with our micro-blogging age :) However, note these points relate to a social intranet in its ideal sense because of course very few organisations are achieving this ideal as this recent research points out.

The focus in new style social intranets is now on people not content as it used to be although this does not mean content is no longer relevant – see next point

Content is authored collaboratively by anyone and the emphasis is either knowledge sharing or documentation that is useful and up to date (all related to the business of course – in this sense context is key)

Further to the last point, anyone can contribute and everyone is involved (from CEO to PA’s). In other words, there is top down and bottom up involvement and this is critical for success.

It supports work processes and helps people get their work done more efficiently (its not just virtual water cooler). Focus is therefore much more around integration with existing processes, supporting day to day work or alongside project work

Publishing workflows and approvals are kept to a minimum and so too private areas (although for highly sensitive data this is still important)

It has a mix of key social features: activity streams, authoring (wiki style), networking (connecting, finding expertise, visible social graph, etc.), blogging, etc.

@confetti change of corporate directory to social profile, feeding in person’s social contributions to profile = expertise locator #swchat

— Andy Jankowski (@andyjankowski) January 26, 2012

From the Twitter conversation mentioned earlier

Outcomes are measured in terms of business performance: better and faster decision making, improved knowledge sharing, increased innovation effectiveness, greater employee engagement (improving motivation) which in turn is reflected outward towards satisfying customers, etc.

A community manager or team is in place alongside a light yet necessary governance policy in order to guide employee behaviour in light of the newly enabled conversations

Intranets are predominantly internal and closed but boundaries (firewalls) are becoming permeable. Access via mobile, remote work and the open social web that people demand access to and at best there is some integration with (as in the PepsiCo example above) drive this.

Gaming constructs (gamification) play an increasingly important role as a way of rewarding contribution but also of making the process of collaboration more enjoyable, thus creative, innovative, etc.

Can you think of any others or were any of mine wrong? Please add a comment or let me know on Twitter:

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