“Social technologies are transforming the way that people use the web and, with it, the way that companies engage with their customers and employees. Search is certainly being affected by the increasingly social nature of online activities. Impacting the socialization of search are the factoring in of the social graph and social activities into search results. Also, online people increasingly turn to their social networks when seeking information, recognizing that these people are likely to lead them to results. Li, a former Forrester analyst, provides insights into how social technologies are transforming the way people search for and discover information and how you can prepare your organization for—and create business advantage with—this shift.”

Charlene is now writing a book on how social technologies are impacting organizations and making them more open.  She started her talk with search.  Googlesearch results now provide a lot of personal context.  Then she showed Twitter results on Bing. It shows the most popular links about a topic. She said search will change to provide more social content both inside the enterprise and on the Web.

There are three ways search will improve. First, semantic search will better understand the meaning behind your search query.  For example, people will use the words Saints differently. Some people will think of a football team. I would. It will also be more personalized and more social.

Your social content will be integrated everywhere. You will not have to go to a site like Facebook but it will be found in many contexts.  Now there is a greater culture of sharing.  The engagement pyramid starts with watchers, then sharers, then commentors, then producers, and finally at the top are curators.  The curators mange the content produced by the pyramid.  She said most organizations support the top of the pyramid but the focus should be at the bottom so the watchers are well served.  These people are the foundation.

Facebook Connect puts Facebook content on other sites. For example, you can comment on Huffington Post and it will appear on my Facebook and my friends can see it.  So you can bring your friends into Huffington Post and bring Huffington Post into Facebook. This openness is the future.

Then she showed Tech Crunch with Google Sidewiki. You can see the side conversations around this site. Tech Crunch cannot control this conversation but now you can see it easily.

Next, she showed Amazon with GetGlue that allows you to see comments on a book from multiple sites.  You can see what people are saying and where they are saying it.  The comments are being separated from the site and pivot around the topic or the person.

With these tools you can target marketing much more. You can use social graphics: who is like you who might have the same interests. Media6 identifies who is closest to you. Then they can target those people with ads based on what you do and like.  You can also map relationships within organizations to target business communication.

Be careful not to get too wrapped up in the technologies. Start with what types of relationships you want with your employees and your customers.  Loyal and constant relationships are more valuable.

Obama redefined political campaigns.  The relationship with the candidate was more personal and got more engagement with supporters. This type of connection will be very powerful for businesses.

You also need to create learning organizations. There are many tools for seeing what is happening on the Web. Good to get these tools in the hands of everyone so they can see what is happening inside and outside the organization.

There also needs to be a culture of sharing. Internal micro-blogging tools such as Yammer can promote this sharing.  You need to create new information workflows to support this sharing. Everyone is getting the information that used to be department focused and siloed like marketing.  Comcast is using Twitter to respond to customer issues very quickly and the whole organization has become more customer focused. I have conversed with Comcast through Twitter and they are very responsive.

Kohl’s has a very interactive Facebook page and responds quickly to comments put on the wall. Saleforce.com is integrating a Twitter-like comment feature so you can talk about sales issues.

Openness requires accountability. The Red Cross gave guidelines for its employees on how to use social media and avoid risks. Finally you need to be open to fail and but you need to learn from these failures – Google says fail fast and fail smart.  Walmart failed many times at first with soclal media through fake blogs and other stuff. Finally they started a blog for their buyers that worked.

In summary, Charlene said you cannot ignore social networks as they will be everywhere and integrated into many things. You need to be prepared to give up control to succeed.

“Andrew McAfee focuses on how emergent social software platforms are benefiting enterprises, and how smart organizations and their leaders are making effective use of them to share knowledge, inspire innovation, and enable decision making. He shares strategies, stories, and real-world examples of successful enterprise collaboration using 2.0 tools.”

Andy began with his definition of enterprise 2.0, It is “the use of emergent social software platforms by organizations in pursuit of their goals.”  Here is what I wrote recently. (see What is Your Definition of Enterprise 2.0? Here is Mine.) I think they are very similar. Andy said that now technology is not being used to tell people what to do but instead it is being implemented to let people decide what to do about it. I really like this. He then asked those who find their intranet easier to find stuff than the Web. Five people raised their hands. This is the first time that I have seen anyone raise their hand as I have been asking audiences the same question with attribution after I first heard Andy ask it several years ago.

Andy told a story about the recent time when he was in a rental car that did not work. So he tweeted and asked for help and got 16 responses in a few minutes, most from people he did not know. People do want to help each other. I found this out last weekend when I had a Twitter spam attack and got lots of help to fix it. So he said let’s stop worrying about the risk of social media within the enterprise. People are usually helpful. He finds very few horror stories inside the enterprise.

One difference from the Web is that your identity is traceable within the enterprise so bad behavior will be found out. I would add that you are also working with colleagues who hopefully share a common goal. In fact, I think that enterprise 2.0 can help people be more aligned around common goals. Andy said that enterprise 2.0 has improved his view of humanity.

He then said to avoid the idea that there is one way to do things. Innovation is more the issue now than strategy. There are now chief innovation officers. Crowdsourcing is becoming more common. Companies are now sending problems out on the Web for others outside the enterprise to help them solve the issue. Merck is one example.  The diversity of people looking at an issue increases the rate of solving a problem.

The key is building communities than people want to join and participate.  Verizon has opened up a portion of their web site and let others help them solve customer issues.  Some people are spending a lot of their time for free helping Verizon with customer service.  These people do get status and recognition.

Andy said he used to be against the wisdom of crowds. He thought crowds would get dumber when they got together. Now he has completely changed his mind.  He gave an example where a group prediction market beat an expert and a synthesis of the polls on the electoral college vote spread in the 2008 US presidential election.  The lesson: crowds can be very wise. You should enable peer review and experiment with collective intelligence.

The great benefit of using Enterprise 2.0 is not sharing documents for collaborating. This is helpful but it is not the biggest benefit. Instead it is connecting the dots on issues. He gave the example of the wiki set up by the US intelligence community: Intellipedia. Because of this wiki people now know better who is doing relevant work on topics of interest.  They are discovering useful people on their topics of interest.  There is less parallel play and re-inventing the wheel.

He gave some major benefits from a recent McKinsey study that found increased customer satisfaction, increased innovation, access to knowledge, access to internal experts, and employee satisfaction.  While these results are likely from true believers, the magnitude is impressive.  Adopting enterprise 2.0 seems to be a necessary move.  Now the internal processes of the organization can be supported through technology.

He concluded with some pointers for success.  He twisted this by talking about how to fail.  Declare war on traditional management and technology, Bad idea for two reasons. It is bad marketing and it is wrong.  Allow walled gardens to flourish. Do not have disconnected content and teams. Accentuate the negative.  Do not worry too much about the risks.

Another thing to avoid: Try to replace email.  It will be hard and email does have its uses, especially as a single source.  We tend to overweight the advantages of the technology we are using.  A replacement technology needs to be ten times better than what you are using.  Email is the current technology and is not that bad.  Over night success occurs when there is no existing technology on the issue, examples are Facebook and Twitter.

Another thing to avoid: put into many features. Keep it simple like an iPod, Google, etc.  Technologists love features but users respond to simplicity even it then think they want more features.

Another thing to avoid: Overuse the word “social.” This is not top of mind for senior execs. While I would agree with this I would also not go with enterprise 2.0 with execs. It seems that technology labels are difficult in general. Just promote what it does.

“Search engines, big and small, have certain standard elements and processes. The more you understand them, the easier to tune them to solve your real information needs. This practical overview provides a big picture view of how search fits within enterprise and websites, and a focused introduction to search technology and user experience. Elements of search covered include robot spiders, database connectors and other tools for locating content, indexing issues, query parsing, retrieval, relevance ranking, and designing usable search interfaces. The workshop addresses common search problems and solutions, security issues, languages, new interface elements, important (and unimportant) features as well as providing tools for choosing a search engine or evaluating an existing one.”

Avi began with similarities and differences of enterprise search and Web search. The differences include:  limited scope, fewer meaningful hyperlinks for link analysis. Security and access control issues, content in databases, more control (for specifying value ranking, etc.), and no search spam.

Next she covered text search vs. data base search. Text search indexes multiple content sources and uses simple search commands instead of SQL. There is flexible indexing and retrieval and relevance ranking (major issue). There are new features such as spell check, auto completes, and facets. It works in the real world (e.g., eBay, Google).

Then she covered how information architecture works with search.  Information architecture is the art and science of organizing information for access and use. It creates order and systems and provides standard vocabulary. Search can supplement information architecture through user vocabularies and dynamic changes with new content.

KM and search are opposite ways of approaching content. KM organizes stuff, and search finds it.   There are two main types of search: known item with short queries and “good enough” answers and exploratory search for research purposes. Avi said that search is an iceberg and people often see it as magic.

It is useful to index everything as it is hard to know in advance what people want.  Twitter has changed expectations for real time indexing, even for intranets. Three minutes is a good expectation. Here is another impact of consumer Web on enterprise computing.

Index security is an issue. Without the right security you can see stuff you should not see. Need to work with security people on search issues to avoid this and have capabilities in the search tool.  The first step requires knowing what needs to be controlled and then you can determine how to do this.  Be aware of privacy laws.

After you determine what to secure, then deal with access control. Best to keep access control info as part of document store. There are four levels of access control. One – access to search engine, two – collection-level access control (to portions of the search engine), three – locked results for a teaser for subscription, four – hit-level access control – link to a access control database at the point of display – hardest to do, useful when constantly changing rules.

Robot spiders start with a base URL for all hosts. For each page they repeat this process: read text info into internet format, save document in cache, save words into index, extract all links and check for rules, if they are new URLs add them to the list. It can repeat process over and over.

There are common problems with robots that SEO tries to avoid. Spiders can be disallowed by robots.txt or robots meta. Also cannot handle URLs with ? and & (but all spiders should handle these now), Javascript, forms, and interactive dynamic links, session IDs that change, multiple views of same data (wikis and Lotus Notes).

External sources that have APIs like Twitter can be brought into enterprise search. You might want to partition this so it does not clutter standard search. Remember relevance is relative. (sounds obvious but need to remember this when creating relevance listing).

Indexing multimedia needs to be dealt with now. There can be internal and external metadata to support this.  Best to use human judgment rather than automated systems. Automated systems can be a starting point but they need to be fine tuned by people. Speech to text and other automated capabilities are still buggy.

Stop words are common terms or ubiquitous terms. Traditionally you excluded them but there are consequences – such as copyright mentions. Best to index everything, especially since storage is much cheaper now. Avi gave a good example of excluding stop words by searching for phrase “whatever well be,” a song title.  On the other hand you can lots of irrelevant stuff.  Another example, the rock band, The Who, Here is where relevance can help so you get a lot if you include stop words but only need to see best ten examples. I tired this on Google and it did work as the top results related to the band even though there were 457,000,000. Avi said that Google may have set up an exception for this term. She also said you might get different results on wordpress.com.

Dealing with duplicate documents can be complex. First you need to decide what is a duplicate and then what is the primary if there are some slight differences (e.g. typo corrections).  Exact match is easy but similarity is more useful, harder but worth it.  Best to remove duplicates from index and hide results unless requested. This is what Google does. Can create rules for handling duplicates. This is a good idea. However, you need human supervision but it is worth it.

Avi went through the search process: search form – query parser – query engine (goes to inverted index and back)  – relevance ranker (goes to document store, get stuff and brings back – formatter – search results.  This all happens very fast now. Queries come from many sources, not simply search fields. There are alerts, saved searches, automated searches, geographic information systems, and others.  You need to balance relevance and completeness. You cannot have both.

Relevance ranking algorithms work differently. The most common is TF-DF or term frequencies : inverse document frequency. How often is the query word in document and how often is word in the index? There are others but this is most efficient. Look at title, metadata, and top of document. Remember relevance is task specific. There is no such thing as objective relevance. You can never please everyone. More like berry picking than hunting, Try different stuff instead of locking on single goal.

Be sure to limit the user interface complexity. Google is a great example. Use familiar use interface elements. Put search into navigation so it appears everywhere. With auto-complete, use a drop down menu of matching words. Base this on search logs and use 7 – 10 most popular in alphabetic order

In summary, with enterprise search you have much more control on the capabilities and decisions with your search capability than on the Web. Make good use of these decisions.

Miko said he is working on a long paper on cloud adoption and shared some of the thoughts he is working on. He began with a definition of an enterprise as an organization that requires size, and longevity to carry out its mission.  This has implications for IT. First longevity tends to create IT segmentation and silos and this leads to complexity in IT supply. Size and growth create organizational fragmentation that leads to complexity in user demands on IT.  These factors can impact IT strategies. For example, SOA can be a rational response to simplify the complexity of IT supply but it can fail to address the complexity of user demands in not implemented correctly.

Miko puts these complexity factors in a 2 x 2 grid.  Organizations tend to start in the simple supply and demand quadrant. The ideal situation would be a simply IT supply that can meet complexity users needs. However, most organizations have developed a complex IT supply before all of their complex user needs had emerged. So, lacking a green field, this approach becomes difficult. If there is already a complex IT supply, the cloud can add to complexity, rather than simplifying it.

How I asked Miko how can you be successful in this typical situation. He replied that several factors need to be present. First you need a mature understanding of how the behavior of the organization connects to the mission. This requires strong leadership. Then you need an enterprise IT architect that reflects this understanding. Unfortunately, most IT architectures are limited to IT issues and not business issues. It is not about optimizing IT, but optimizing the business.

This lead us to a discussion of process. Miko said that processes are done at the micro level. Part of the challenge for an organization is to become best in class in the many niches that their processes inhabit. Processes are often done in a silo and not at the enterprise level. The goal should be to align these silos but not to tear them down. Miko said that the goal of enterprise 2.0 is not to break down silos but to align them allow for cross-silo communication and collaboration.

This makes a lot of sense to me. It reminded me of some work I was involved within the early 90s that was done in the spirit of enterprise 2.0 but with the tools of the day. In a property casualty insurance company we created new processes for underwriting, claims and sales. The best practices of the organization where embed in individual applications. Then these applications were aligned and connected.  We were trying to break down silos of communication but not silos of processes and applications. These latter two types of silos were essential for efficient processes and should not be destroyed.  Now alignment of silos along a value chain is an enterprise level task and can benefit from enterprise 2.0 approaches.

This line of thought took us back to the question of cloud computing. To be successful it needs to recognize and deal with the complexity of user needs and the alignment of silos, but not the destruction of necessary silos.  I am sold.

In some cases, IT viewed social networking as a technology endeavor, especially when social networking functions were already part of existing collaboration platforms. In this case, IT organizations felt it was sufficient to simply “turn on” those features rather than look at vendor alternatives. However, the report found that even in cases where strategists had identified business and IT drivers for social networking projects, many organizations were still uncertain regarding the business case and return-on-investment.

There is a lot of useful detail in the report and I will comment on some it in this post but first there is a larger issue here. Social networking is only one component of enterprise 2.0. It can be seen as an isolated utility. I feel that this is a mistake. It can be aligned with business drivers and that would be useful. However, I feel it will best work as part of an overall enterprise 2.0 strategy that contains this business alignment. It is not surprising that firms are not developing such strategies for social networking but they need to go beyond this to create overall enterprise 2.0 strategies that include social networking.

It was interesting to read that many organizations feel they are behind their competitors in social networking efforts when the report found that most organizations are in the same boat. To continue the metaphor, they all lack a compass.  Even companies that have initiated social networking, the efforts are mostly in the pilot stage. In addition, they are struggling with many non-technical issues such as metrics, policies and controls, roles and responsibilities, employee participation models, and cultural issues. The report suggests that these issues need to be addressed upfront.

After reading this report, I had lunch with Barry Camson who has many years experience in organizational design and related business transformation and culture issues. He wants to get more involved with helping firms with their enterprise 2.0 efforts. I said to him that you are exactly the type of person that these organizations need. They just need to wake up to the fact.  A person with your experience is much more valuable than someone who simply knows the latest features on a few social media tools or how to do the technical bits.

None of the findings in the report will be surprising to anyone who has been implementing technologies that touch the social side such as knowledge management.  I keep getting a massive déjà vu when I see reports like this. However, the report is very useful as it documents the status of social networking and offers some excellent suggestions to enable initiatives to be more successful. As report states, there is a need for clarity amid the hype.

There is much more and I will comment on the details in one or two more posts but I wanted to share with you the headlines and recommend taking a look yourself.

Among other things John said that, “if you want to compete in a medium, you have to understand it.” They built a great web site with no SEO considerations and no one could find it. Another lesson: measure, measure, measure. The Web allows you to measure, take advantage of this. Perhaps most important of all he said that traditional media needs to do R&D to find innovative new offerings that take advantage of the new Web and not just try to get more money for current offerings.  The “us” versus “them” mentality needs to be trashed.

I was reminded of a session that I attended at Harvard’s JFK School of Government in early 2005. On one end of the long table were managing editors of several large papers, including the New York Times. At the other end were some of the big time bloggers of the time such as Dave Winer, Dave Weinberger, and Jay Rosen.  The newspapers said that they spend millions putting reporters out in the field and fact check extensively while the bloggers attract big followings hanging out in their basement in their pajamas writing on their laptop. Dave Weinberger objected to the comparison. He said that the bloggers were just having conversations about what the news reported, among other things.  It was not the same thing. I would agree.

Blogging has opened up a new channel of communication. If the older ones wake up to this they can see how to effectively take advantage of the opportunities. The New York Times has done as good a job as anyone in this area since that 2005 event.

The recent Technorati 2009 survey of the blogosphere also touched on this topic.  It said that, “despite being perceived by some as enemies of the traditional media, bloggers actually carry a journalistic pedigree. 35 percent of all respondents (bloggers) have worked within the traditional media… and the true overlap reveals itself in the 27 percent of respondents who both blog and work in traditional media.”

I actually got started blogging by pitching an article on the topic to a print trade publication early in 2004. I have to confess that I had only heard about blogs the week before. When I sold the piece I started a blog as part of my research and started attending Dave Winer’s blog evenings at Harvard law School. I got hooked and write for many blogs now and still occasionally for traditional media, as well.

Thierry Hubert, who also attended Webcom 2009 wrote, about the discussions I alluded to at the start this post in Webcom 09 – The Misplaced Fear of the Mainstream Media.  He wrote that “The battle is not one of formal versus informal, but one where formal content providers need to listen and engage in the dialogue.”  He adds that at the same time traditional media need to hold on to their charter as “leaders and champions of valued and verified information.” They need to participate in the new social media without losing site of what made them valuable in the first place.

There can, and should, be a symbiotic relationship between traditional media and the new social media.  Traditional media has given me a lot to blog about over the past five years. I look forward to more and hope that it takes the steps to survive by better engaging in the new Web.

I think this makes sense.  If you try to use performance incentives to promote enterprise 2.0 adoption, you need to be very careful that it does not reward the wrong behavior.  It certainly needs to be aimed at overall team success if used at all.

So what does Rex offer instead? He writes, why not fun.  Here I am completely onboard. I have often been involved in knowledge management implementations where we introduced fun as part of the awareness campaign.  This approach succeeds even more if it makes the work more fun, such as meeting new interesting people to collaborate with and finding out more about your colleagues.

Rex closes with a great video from Volkswagen that seals the deal. It shows how if you make one channel more fun it will trump the easier, formerly more popular,  one.  We should add the spirit of this approach to our enterprise 2.0 implementations. It could only help.

In order to help finance professionals make the case for their organizations use of web 2.0, Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in London has created guidelines for framing business cases.  These guidelines help management accountants through the decision making process and identify the use of tried and tested techniques to help organizations make the right decisions and measure their return on investment.

The report is appropriately titled, Beyond enthusiasm: making the business case for your organization’s use of Web 2.0. While they are certainly not the same, I think the report will be useful for both Web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 efforts. Louise Ross authored the report.

Here is a blog post she wrote about the effort, More than enthusiasm for web 2.0. Louise wrote that she did this report to bring an accountant’s perspective to the issue. I certainly applaud this view. She also did the report to “to share my desk research, and collect together cases of web 2.0 implementations to give others an idea of potential benefits and pitfalls. Management need to be reassured that implementing web 2.0 doesn’t have to be a blind leap of faith. Given evidence about others’ experiences, and guidance on how to deal with rather unpredictable outcomes, it’s perfectly possible to construct a business case for web 2.0 as it is for any other investment.” These are more wise words.

The report begins with a quote, “technology can serve as a bridge, never a destination.” I like it already.  It contains twenty cases and looks at successes and failures. It ends with a framework for constructing business cases.  Louise acknowledges that while it can be difficult in finding benchmarks for a new technology such as Web 2.0, that is no excuse to not determine the business case. She adds that accountants are trained to deal with varying qualities of data and how to present them to senior management. She concludes that making a Web 2.0 case for Web 2.0 is not essentially different from other efforts, it does pose special challenges in the areas of control, governance, and risk management.  Louise also feels that the greatest benefit from Web 2.0 is encouraging collaboration. To that end she requests comments about the report on her blog. I did try to do this but it appears that you have to be registered with the CIMA to make a comment.  That is my only fault with the effort so far.

Now I have to admit that I have only skimmed the details but it looks quite good and wanted to share this with you now rather than wait.  Let me know what you think.

It found that their sample used social media in the car (over 35 – 9%, under 35 – 40%), at work (over 35 – 29%, under 35  – 64%), on vacation (over 35 – 41%,  under 35 – 65%), on a date (over 35- 9%,  under 35 – 34%), and after sex (over 35 – 8%,  under 35 – 36%).  This raises several issues. For example, I wonder how many of the at work users are doing at the companies that ban social media at work?  How many of the drivers are violating laws against this activity?

Twitter seems to be the most addictive. For respondents under age 35, 27% of those who use Facebook said they check it more than 10 times a day compared to 39% of Twitter users checking in on Twitter more than 10 times a day. I certainly find twitter more addictive. The activity is very fast and real time so you want to stay connected and it is easy to make a quick check.

The biggest enablers of this new addiction seem to be smartphones and other mobile devices, especially if you are under 35. In the Gadgetology study only 19% of the 35+ group use a phone as the preferred device for social media services with 81% preferring instead a desktop or laptop computer. This is me as I never use a phone, even though I have an iPhone. Perhaps I will as I get more used to my iPhone. Over on the other side of the generation gap they found 46% of those younger than 35 indicating their preference for a mobile device for all things social media.

This has already affected the workplace in several ways. Mobile devices are found to drive up business related social media use in other studies and observations.  Some organization like the State government in Utah have recognized these trends and acted proactively by creating guidelines that encouraged appropriate use. This is much better than banning it at work. However, there are situations when bans are the right thing. For example, the dangers of doing social at the wrong time are being recognized by such actions as the recent ban on Federal government employees texting while driving.

Social media will not go away.  In fact, it can be addictive for some. Work place policy and governance needs to recognize this and channel this addiction in appropriate ways. Bans are not the answer or even simple limitations. If your job involves business intelligence or customer service you might what to check Twitter at least ten times a day.

I will look most closely at one theme, social computing for enterprises, in this post.  Alex wrote that social computing — from member-driven communities to user-generated content — is becoming ubiquitous in our personal lives and business versions of these will become prevalent. I agree and think they already are but I may be talking to too many vendors.  The key technology trends enabling this spread of social computing start with the fact that collaborative platforms are becoming social, or people centric is Alex’s words.  I see constantly new vendors in this enterprise 2.0 space. At the same time established vendors, large and small, are adding social features to their tool sets.  Since these tools need to be aligned with business processes to work, Alex notes that the organizational change requirements are high, even though the tools are relatively simple and the concepts familiar because of the wide spread use of their consumer Web cousins. These adoption challenges is one theme of this blog.

The next trend is integration of customer community platforms integrate with business apps. I see this in such concepts as social CRM. Once again the complexity is high because of the necessary alignment with business processes and strategy. Alex also notes that telepresence will gain widespread use and better enable video conferencing. This puts more of the social aspects of business into computing and away form physical meetings. This will be easier to do, especially with the budget reduction and green implications. It is also more of utility that requires less business process integration.  I would add that other utilities such as micro-messaging (akaTwitter in the enterprise) will be easier to adopt for the same reason.

The useful report covers four other groups of themes. Several of the themes within them will also enable social computing such as the continued rise of cloud computing, the Web 2.0 enablement of BPM, and mobile as the new desktop.  Many enterprise 2.0 apps are cloud based and mobile computing increases user-generated content.

Alex recommends that you develop your own technology watch list. I would agree and put a lot of social computing aspects in it. To read more about how Alex selected his technology watch list, read his blog post, Identifying The Technologies That Will Matter.