Archive for Social Media
by Joe McKendrick
March 11, 2010 at 10:16 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Event Announcements, FASTforward'09, SOA, Social Computing, Social Media, User Revolution, Web 2.0
I just got back from the FASTforward event held in New York City, in which more than 400 attendees were treated to a range of applications and new thinking around the way organizations collaborate. Bjorn Olstad, distinguished engineer for Microsoft and CTO of FAST, kicked off the proceedings with an overview of the latest FAST search functionality, available as part of Microsoft SharePoint or as a standalone solution. He discussed the growing interconnectness between search — offered via internal networks as well as through customer-facing portals — and collaboration and real-time customer experiences.
Major organizations are leveraging collaborative tools to improve the experiences for customers and constituents, and this was explained by representatives of two major global organizations. G. “Gurvais” Clayton Grigg, chief knowledge officer for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, explained how his agency is managing an enormous flow of data into an already massive amount of content and documents. He said it was estimated that the FBI maintains enough paper to create a tower 178 miles high.
The challenge is transfer the nuggets of important information on some of this paper to a digitized and accessible form, Grigg says. Paper artifacts will be around for a long time to come, he points out. “The bad guys aren’t going to be organizing their evidence as metadata,” he says. “They’re not going to hand you everything on a CD.”
He said the agency’s strategy is to better leverage three sources of information — data, paper, and people.
Questions that need to be asked about information include “What do we know?” “Who knows it?” “How is it being used?” and “How is it being shared?” Grigg says. The ability to connect people and help them collaborate is paramount, he adds. “While it’s really good to help people find data, it’s even better to help them find the people with the data,” he says.
Technology needs to take a back seat to people and business considerations, he adds. “When people come to me requesting a technology, I first ask them to describe the problem without technology. If they can do that, they understand the problem better.”
Michael Rossotti, application services sr. analyst at Merck, explained how the pharmaceutical giant was leveraging the FAST Enterprise Search Platform and complementary solutions to deliver the latest information to physicians and consumers around the world.
The company maintains two primary portals, Merck Medicus, for doctors, and MerckSource for consumers. Both now have search capabilities built in.
The goals of the implementation, begun in March 2007, were to “have the user experience be central,” Rossotti says. “We wanted to build trust with the customer. Sometimes our only interactions with customers is through our portals.” The company conducted a phased rollout of capabilities, starting with an advanced search feature for Medicus. The first phase was linking to 50 companies across the enterprise that were crawled on a daily basis. The portals were later enhanced with a federated search capability to other search results, but still contained within the portal page. In 2009, the company integrated its portal search capabilities with SharePoint, he says. Currently, the system sees about five queries a second, he says.
Rossotti says some of the lessons learned from the experience include the need to “be wary of feature creep,” as departments seek to activate more tools and enhancements at the sites. “If you start to do too much, the experience for the client can become too complex.” The priorities, Rossotti, are to “step forward on governance, and meet increased demand.”
by Joe McKendrick
March 4, 2010 at 9:19 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, FASTforward'09, Social Computing, Social Media, User Revolution, Web 2.0
Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, raised quite a ruckus across the blogopshere in recent days with his declaration that enterprise software should look like Facebook. What does this mean?
Benoiff wrote that he originally used to wonder “why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com?” He pondered at the time that applications should be run from a simple Website, without software or hardware to install and pricey consultants to hire. That was the inspiration for Salesforce.com, he says. Now, he says, enterprise software needs to adopt the collaboration and social networking aspects of sites such as Facebook: “We need to take this idea to our businesses. We need to transform the business conversation the same way Facebook has changed the consumer conversation. Market shifts happen in real time, deals are won and lost in real time, and data changes in real time….”
While Benoiff used his declaration to make a blatant pitch for his latest “Chatter” feature, his point is worth some healthy debate. After all, when the Web and commercial Internet first emerged in the early 1990s, nobody immediately connected the dots between Websites and enterprise applications, which were largely accessed via industrial-strength green-screen terminals directly attached to back-end behemoths. Nevertheless, a decade later, every enterprise application was accessible through a front-end browser, which had become the new norm.
Critics, such as Charles Zedlewski in a follow-up post, argue that Facebook is more of a consumer entertainment venue than a serious, behind the firewall mission-critical application. And, it can be argued that Facebook is the flavor of the month, and two or three years from now, some other type of service will have captured the imagination of fickle consumers.
Actually, the evolution of enterprise software already began a number of years ago, even before Facebook began its existence as a college students’ online meet & greet. I mentioned the dramatic move to Web browser-style interfaces in the 1990s. Now, even without the influence of Facebook, enterprise software is feeling the powerful tug of social networking and Enterprise 2.0, and endpoints will continue to evolve to a collaborative look and feel that enables end-users to maintain their own virtual areas, sharing data and content for a multitude of purposes.
by Joe McKendrick
February 28, 2010 at 12:03 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Media, User Revolution, Web 2.0
David Worthington, technologizer for PCWorld, recently verbalized what we’ve all been suspecting in recent times: social media is where the action is these days for corporations, not just Websites. He calls this the “era of light computing,” and observes how networks are the new driving force of corporate success:
“The era of light computing has begun, and social media is big enough that the average person can shape perceptions. A Web site is no longer the most meaningful way for us to interact to tell companies about their products or to use online services…. At any given time, it is likely that conversations about big businesses are happening on Facebook, Twitter and other social media, and those conversations can be initiated by anyone from anywhere.”
Wortington labels a big part of this trend as “social CRM,” in which not only do businesses and customers talk to each other, but customers talk to one another as well. Businesses that rely solely on Websites to facilitate communications will miss out on the dialog.
How is your company or organization engaging in this latest evolution? Are your customers networking with each other? In all likelihood, they may be — whether you are part of the conversation or not.
by Joe McKendrick
February 24, 2010 at 11:29 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, FASTforward'09, Social Computing, Social Media, User Revolution, Web 2.0
A new survey of the Global 100 companies finds that eight out of ten are immersing themselves in popular social media sites, and are quite active in these environments. A recent Burson-Marsteller study of the world’s largest companies found that 79% are using at least one of the most popular social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or corporate blogs.
Twitter is the social media platform of choice — 65% have active accounts on the micro-blogging site. A majority, 54%, have a Facebook page, while 50% have a YouTube channel. Interestingly, only a third, 33%, have corporate blogs. About 20% use all four platforms.
It also appears that some companies are getting more comfortable using social media as they are interacting and engaging more and not just broadcasting corporate messages. Companies using Twitter are following an average of 731 people each and 38% of companies are responding to people’s tweets. Thirty-two percent have also “re-tweeted” or reposted comments user comments during the previous week.
Burson calls this rush to social media to better engage customers and markets “communications anarchy,” which it calls “the new norm.” “Social media has shifted control of the corporate message away from the organization and towards consumers and other stakeholders, and running away and hiding is no longer the safe option.”
There are wide variations in adoption across global regions. For example, more Asian companies have active blogs (50% vs. 34% in the U.S. and 25% in Europe) but much less activity on Twitter and Facebook. Asian companies currently appear to be more comfortable communicating with stakeholders via corporate blogs.
The study also notes that while companies are relatively less active on their corporate blogs than on the social media channels, there is a lot of commenting from stakeholders on active corporate blogs. For example, only 11% of U.S. corporate blogs had
posts in the past month, but 90% of the blogs with posts had comments from stakeholders. “While some corporate blogs have fallen into attrition, corporate blogs that are active and have a strong purpose and following provide a useful two-way dialogue for organizations and their stakeholders.”
The study also observes that “renegade” social media accounts are also prevalent — contributing to the “communications anarchy” the study’s authors allude to. Of the companies that are engaged on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, most have multiple accounts. For example, each active company has 4.2 Twitter accounts, 2.1 Facebook pages, and 1.6 YouTube channels. Organizations with blogs also had multiple blogs — an average of 4.2 — but those blogs were often maintained on the corporate site in a cohesive way.
For companies with multiple Twitter accounts, most often one was a primary corporate account, the study found. The other accounts were started and managed by a local market office, represented a research or special-interest division at the company or was related to a corporate sponsorship event the company was engaged in. “Often it took a few views to determine which Twitter account was the primary corporate account — if there was one — and it was not always possible to affirmatively determine if there was a primary corporate account.”
by Joe McKendrick
February 19, 2010 at 1:31 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Media, User Revolution, Web 2.0
All it takes is a social media champion at the right place in an organization to really start opening new doors. I recently talked about how decision-makers at Best Buy, Wal-Mart, McDonald’s and Proctor & Gamble were using social media to better understand their customers and build their brands.
Jeremy Victor, of B2Bbloggers.com, recently spoke to Jeffrey Hayzlett, chief marketing officer at Kodak Corporation, about his company’s activities in the social networking realm. For example, Kodak recently crowdsourced to develop a name for its new pocket video camera.
Kodak's new Playsport, named via crowdsourcing
Hayzlett is an active Tweeter, and can be followed on Twitter at JeffreyHayzlett. Hayzlett says his priority is get closer to Kodak’s customers “through relevant, continuous engagement” by all parts of the organization — including sales, marketing, and operations. Social media is enabling managers and decision makers to share information.
Kodak’s social media strategy, Hayzlett said, is the “4 E’s:” Engage, Educate, Excite and Evangelize. “Engagement is the new ROI,” he says. “We look at quantitative data via measurement tools …to analyze the extent and type of engagement we’ve achieved with our constituents.”
By engaging a range of social media strategies, Victor observed that Kodak is becoming a social business. Hayzlett agrees, noting that he challenges his team “everyday to come up with new ways to engage with customers and facilitate conversations.” One initiative included a contest, held via Twitter, to name Kodak’s new high-definition pocket video camera, now called Kodak Playsport.
Kodak also sponsors online forums, called K-Zones, which encourage consumers to discuss their experiences with imaging, video, and photography. “It’s not talking about us,” Hayzlett told Victor. “It’s talking about what we can learn from the experiences of others.”
In doing so, Hayzlett fulfills one of the cardinal rules of social networking: engage in conversation that’s meaningful to the customer. Networking works best when it creates movements, connects tribes, and enables the sharing of information and insights between individuals and organizations. By facilitating this information sharing, Kodak will strengthen its brand.
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