Column 2

Peter Kim moderated a panel of three people from end-user organizations – Ben Foster of Allstate Life Insurance, Greg Matthews of Humana, and Morgan Johnston of JetBlue – on social media adoption for both external as well as internal use by enterprises.

Allstate recently launched the consumer-facing Good Hands Community, including both a social site and a Twitter presence, for both traditional marketing and sales purposes, but also to maintain a relationship with ex-customers who may have left for financial reasons but still could benefit from Allstate information and potentially become a customer again in the future. It includes tools and calculators, discussion forums and other information.

JetBlue uses social media – specifically Twitter, where they have 730,000 followers as of today – to engage customers, inform customers about what’s happening at JetBlue, and even provide updates on weather and other information that impacts their service delivery.

Humana has a social site run by their consumer innovation center – a sort of center of excellence for enterprise social media – that they are using to try and transform how they interact with their customers and partners; unfortunately, my bandwidth right now won’t allow it to actually load, so I’ll have to take their word for it. This is run separately from their corporate website, and doesn’t include any private customer data.

All of these are intended to engage the consumers, both for informing and for gathering feedback. Social media can be a sort of “canary in a coal mine” about impending problems, and it’s a valuable channel to monitor in order to hear how people are talking about your products or services, potentially heading off PR and customer service disasters before they occur. It’s also a sales lead generation channel, with companies like Dell using Twitter to broadcast deals that aren’t available anywhere else, generating significant revenue from those tweeted deals.

It’s important for multiple departments in an organization to contribute their ideas and needs for consumer-facing social media. It’s not just an IT project, although IT is going to be involved in order to deploy the platform, and there’s a need for rapid prototyping and changes to the site without having to go through an old-fashioned waterfall development approach: this might dictate that the existing corporate IT not be involved, but a new team formed to support this sort of agile approach.

One of the panelists noted that you can see the trends in conferences: social media is now on the agenda at IT conferences, at marketing/PR conferences, at HR conferences and at customer service conferences, indicating that people from multiple areas within organizations that have an interest and a stake in social media.

You have to learn by doing with social media: people have to get in there and start producing content, then see what the consumer feedback is like for that content in order to tune the message and style. That’s a scary thing for most companies, but these three are setting a good example.

An eight-person panel discussed how organizations can use social messaging to improve internal and external communication and collaboration. I’m not even going to try to track who says what, since I’ve lost track of who’s who (except for the lone woman on the panel), so just random notes:

• Unified Communications vendors need to open up their products to allow social messaging to participate. Voice seems to be ignored in Enterprise 2.0 (note that there are no sessions on voice at this conference), but needs to be a part of it. This is especially true when we consider devices such as the iPhone, which is used to participate both through social media and voice. People don’t want think about what tool to use, they want to focus on the problem that they’re trying to solve.
• Enterprise 2.0 isn’t about giving people “one more thing to do”, but to help make people more effective. This is a big one that I see when trying to get people within my clients to collaborate, often because they don’t give up doing things the old way, so see the new collaboration tools/methods and an additional step rather than a replacement for an old and inefficient way to do things.
• Social messaging is about forming weak ties, not necessarily about pre-targeted recipients. The ROI may not be obvious up front, but serendipitous discovery of information and people provides unexpected value.
• We need to stop focusing on the tools and applications, and start focusing on the people and use cases. That is especially obvious in this panel, which still has too much of a tool focus – Marcia Conner from Pistachio Consulting has to keep dragging the conversation back to the people, practices and conversations.
• The same issues of information security apply to social messaging as to any other form of communications. Social messaging tools don’t equate to information leakage, they just provide another platform for what is likely already happening by voice, email and other methods if you have employees that don’t adhere to your security policies. Governance begins with individuals, and if you can’t trust your employees, you need to monitor their activities. If the corollary is true – that if you monitor your employees’ activities, that means that you don’t trust them – then I see a lot of companies with no trust in the people whom them so carefully recruit and hire. It’s impossible to completely lock down data in any organization, so there needs to be policies (and education about those policies) that lead to self-policing.
• There is insufficient granularity of presence: with most social platforms, there is a single view of you that is exposed to everyone who you choose to expose it to, and you can’t tune the experience for different audiences. In other words, don’t put anything on Twitter that you wouldn’t want your employer, your competitor or your mother to read. I’ve noticed that although platforms like Facebook are providing tools to allow you to limit what parts of your profile are available to different groups of your contacts, very few people bother to use them.
• Enterprises matter less; relationships and conversations matter more. Don’t limit yourself to just an enterprise conversation, think about a participatory culture. (I think that I won the Enterprise 2.0 buzzword bingo on that last statement)

These are just the high points; you can check out the Twitter stream for this session or the replay of the video if you want to hear the entire panel.

The morning started with Andrew McAfee interviewing Shawn Dahlen and Chris Keohane from Lockheed Martin about how they’ve progressed on their internal social network since we heard about it at last year’s conference.

Back in 2004, they approached the CIO to get project seed money for internal blogging, since there was a need for internal communications that wasn’t being met by company newsletters. For a few thousand dollars, they were able to set up a blogging platform that allowed internal affinity groups to communicate, then realized that they needed to lock down some of the information for security purposes and closed down some of the access, particularly to employees outside the US.

The 9/11 commission report noted that the existence silos of people and information – a “need to know” environment – was part of the problem in government and defense industries, providing Lockheed with the motivation to start opening up some of their information across the company, regardless of location. They worked closely with their internal legal department to make sure that they were

They took their SharePoint environment, which was already in use for document collaboration, and added more social networking aspects by upgrading the blog and wiki capability. This allowed them to evolve an existing, familiar platform into something more social, providing an easier migration for Lockheed’s 150,000 employees. The revolutionary part was to make these communities open to all employees by default, rather than defaulting to a closed site, and currently 65% of their thousands of communities are open.

Because they were making SharePoint do things that it didn’t naturally do, there was a lot of customization involved, but what they’ve ended up with is the ability for anyone to create a community. Apparently, HR resisted this, and lobbied for more centralized control of who could create an internal site rather than allowing self-service, but with the number of internal communities, this would have seriously crippled the spread of the tools to support collaboration within the company.

McAfee asked the question about how easily Lockheed’s aging workforce adopted these social solutions; interestingly, some of the 20-something engineers were some of the ones that had problems with the social community, since although they knew how to use the tools, they didn’t have the business experience to make the tools support the Lockheed business processes. Some of their most prolific bloggers are from the over-40’s workforce, probably because they just have more knowledge to contribute. In other words, enterprise social networking isn’t about age, it’s about appropriate tools, motivation and having something worthwhile to share. You need to have the younger and older parts of the workforce work together in order to achieve the best results.

They went through – and are still experiencing – challenges with acceptance by the executives and across the organization, and have learned that social media needs to be grounded in the challenges of your enterprise. You need to create tools that support what people need to do, not just push something in and force people to use it. The result is that they have leaders within the company who blog regularly, but more importantly, who read, comment and act on what they read in blogs: this shows that management is participating, and that they see it as a channel for

They didn’t set rules around what content should or shouldn’t be included on the sites, but it has taken on the form of what would be normal employee behavior, which is pretty much what we heard yesterday from IBM, Deloitte and EMC. They provided two examples of “misuse” that were removed from the sites: one where someone was talking about their new car, and the other where someone was complaining about the employee review process using questionable tone and/or language.

There’s a breakout session this afternoon with the two Lockheed guys, going into more detail about their social networking platform and its adoption.

Lee Bryant of Headshift looked at the adoption challenges for Enterprise 2.0 technologies in companies that have grown up around a centralized model of IT, particularly for the second wave adopters required to move Enterprise 2.0 into the mainstream within an organization. He points out that we can’t afford the high-friction, high-cost model of deploying technology and processes, but need to rebalance the role of people within the enterprise.

External tools are subject to evolutionary forces and either adapt or die quickly, whereas we are forced to put up with Paleolithic-era tools inside the enterprise because it’s a captive market. 21st century enterprises, however, aren’t putting up with that: they’re going outside and getting the best possible tools for their uses on demand, rather than waiting for IT to provide a second-rate solution, months or years later.

There is a shift from individual productivity to network productivity, that measures the improvements that occur because we’re doing things together and connected rather than as individuals. If everyone in the company has common goals, then there’s a big boost in productivity when people work together.

There’s a need to make hidden data visible and use it to drive collective intelligence – I see this all the time with the need for enterprise search and content management for static content, but also enterprise micro-blogging and other conversations that surface more transient ideas for consumption.

It’s all about improving processes and reducing the cost of doing business, although not necessarily in the structured BPM style of process improvement; instead, it’s about using social tools to change how people can collaborate and work together. This might include adding a social layer to existing tools, such as we see when collaboration is added to ECM and BPM but moving beyond that.

However, even though all of this is happening already, there’s the issue of bringing these tools, techniques and methods to the people who don’t normally use social networking for either business or pleasure. Do the revolutionary ideas that we hear bandied about at this conference really have a place in the cubicle farm? Interestingly, I’m seeing an arrogance exhibited at the conference that really puts me off; it manifested partly in the Microsoft-bashing at this morning’s panel, but comes down to a complete lack of respect for the structure of many existing enterprises. How do we respect what’s already there in those organizations while helping them to move into the 21st century?

Bryant showed some of the ways that they drive out behavioral use cases within organizations, match that to available social tools, then develop behavioral transition strategies that effectively “tricks” people into using these new tools in order to bridge the old methods and tools into the new. This is all about focusing on the tasks that people do and the things that they know, and providing some tweaks that get them doing things differently. For example:

• For people who are addicted to email on their Blackberry, transition them to reading RSS feeds on the same platform (also within Outlook 2007): it looks similar, it provides a similar broadcast functionality, and lets them get away from filing and deleting the information.
• Replace the phone book with a social network that provides the same information, and allows people to “friend” people who they contact frequently.
• Get rid of the intranet, and create something that looks like your old intranet, but has edit buttons everywhere. In other words, turn your intranet into a wiki where anyone can update information if they have it. The information is more up-to-date and accurate, and gets people in the mode of being authors. It doesn’t mean that you have to allow every page to be editable by everyone, as Razorfish did, but can provide a more controlled environment that allows people to edit their team’s areas.
• Create a place for employees to share and rate ideas, sort of like a suggestion box with voting.
• Organize information in new and interesting ways, such as providing a social bookmarking tool to allow people to add tags to documents within their enterprise content management system in order to improve findability and indicate interest in documents. This can be used just to allow people to “organize their stuff”, or can be used in the case of an upcoming platform migration, where people can tag documents that should be migrated to a new ECM platform.

The thing to note about all of these ideas is that they are focused on things that people were already doing, and just tweaking the methods that they use to do them. That makes it a lot less threatening, and therefore much more likely to be adopted.

It also comes down to giving people choice, which is often not done inside large organizations: IT usually dictates which tools are used for which purpose, and which content goes into a wiki versus a content management system versus a blog. Unfortunately, years of having IT dictate tools and content location means that many enterprise users are somewhat sheep-like when it comes to choice: if you give them a choice, they’ll keep doing things the same old way since it’s the path of least resistance, and in today’s economy, they’re probably busy doing the work of more than one person. The reality is that although they could be more productive with the new tools, they have no time to learn how to use them and how to make them a part of their work environment.

Luis Suarez from IBM was in the audience, and talked about his own personal journey over the past year at moving himself – and the the people who he works with – off email and onto social media platforms such as blogs and wikis. When he would receive an email, he would show people how to use a different platform instead of email, such as SlideShare for sharing presentations.

There are still going to be barriers: salespeople may not want to share their information, even with their colleagues, because they are financially incented to not share; and middle management doesn’t want their teams to collaborate because they perceive that they’re losing control over what’s happening. As Bryant points out, the ultimate solution to these barriers is human mortality and natural selection.

Peter Kim (formerly a Forrester analyst, now Dachis) moderated a panel on lessons learned from internal communities – that is, the social networking communities inside enterprises – with Jamie Pappas from EMC, Joan DiMicco from IBM Research and Patricia Romeo from Deloitte.

I met DiMicco at last year’s conference in a session with Jeff Schick talking about IBM’s social networking strategy, and she focuses on Beehive, their internal Facebook-like social networking site. I have friends who work for IBM who really like Beehive, and use it both for socializing and for finding like-minded people for work projects; the 60,000 other people inside IBM who also use it likely agree. Beehive is an internally-created research project that is only available within IBM; eventually, the functionality will be productized in Lotus Connections.

EMC’s EMC|ONE is similar in nature, providing an internal social network that helps to break down silos within the organization. They see this as a way to learn about social networking and work out some of the kinks with their usage, as a starting point for eventually engaging their customers and partners. They’ve used Jive’s ClearSpace as the technology platform, including the wiki and blog functionality. They have about 12,500 internal users with another 10,000 lurkers who haven’t registered as users but access the information, representing about 2/3 of the employee population.

Deloitte’s D Street was developed for the same reasons of connecting people across the organization, but was also explicitly created to make the workplace more attractive to the incoming Gen Y/millennial workers; in fact, Romeo comes from the HR side of the house, and this had a big HR push behind it. They built on a SharePoint 2007 platform, but customized it significantly to create a more complete experience. 90% of the US Deloitte employees have visited D Street at least once, and they currently have 20,000 profiles which represents about half of their employee population.

Peter Kim started on some panel questions:

• With respect to who funded the social network, for Deloitte, it was HR; for EMC, it was marketing (since they have a goal to have an outward-facing site) and they still can’t get their HR involved.
• DiMicco stated that the age demographics of the users match the demographics of IBM, and are not biased towards the young engineers that everyone else figured would dominate the site usage. I’m so relieved to hear this, since I’ve been saying that it’s not an age thing – her hypothesis is that people will socialize their achievements internally in order to support their own career growth, and that inside a (more or less) private walled garden, people will share and participate. Maybe the difference that people are attributing to age is really about what people are willing to expose in a public forum, rather than how willing people are to participate in social networks.
• There was an interesting discussion about the balance between internal and external social networks, and whether there was some consideration of how people were already using sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook.
• An audience question about attrition indicated that there is no real tracking of any dropoff in participation: once someone creates a profile on the enterprise social network, they’re considered to be a participant even if they never update it or contribute in any other way ever again. I think that this should be measured; otherwise, there will be a burst of people who sign up initially then never contribute again, without any good understanding of what is required in order to keep the community alive. IBM is doing some research in this area; they have a bit of an advantage because they are a research organization and are developing a product, which is quite a different focus than EMC and Deloitte who are just end-user organizations in this context.
• D Street has a staff of 3 people who are monitoring and moderating content that is added to the site, plus technical resources to keep things running. Beehive is not actively monitored, but allows readers to flag content if inappropriate; a team of four people built and maintain the site. ECM|ONE has a bigger team of moderators, probably because they have a goal for outward participation and may have bigger legal/compliance/governance concerns.
• IBM has a social media policy, grown out of their original blogging policy, which is part of their general policy on what is appropriate in the workplace; they have very few problems because it is just part of general employee behavior guidelines. EMC and Deloitte said pretty much the same: very few problems have occurred (although they both have content monitoring/moderation which might impact that) and mostly it falls under employee behavior guidelines.

There was an audience question about whether the usage levels of these three technology-oriented companies would be representative of enterprises in general, and how they marketed the social networking sites internally. EMC tailored the message for each individual group to tell them what’s in it for them, rather than trying to have a one-size-fits-all collaboration message. Deloitte, since they came in through the HR side, use the profiles as the launch point for any internal references to employees, which led people to click through and see the profiles, sometimes inspiring them to create their own. This tied into a discussion about measurement, and what each of these companies were measuring about their sites. IBM used Beehive as the networking site for an internal conference last year, so had the opportunity to measure how people used the site in the context of that conference (Beehive users must feel like lab rats sometimes), as well as some analysis of the social graph that is created as people use the site. DiMicco had a great term, “return on contribution”, to show how they measure the value that contributed content provides to the enterprise. I can completely get into the concept of return on contribution 🙂

This was a great panel with three very different views on enterprise social networking. In all cases, the companies see the social network as being a bigger part of their intranet, and even a part of their externally-facing network.

I’m watching the panel entitled “Enterprise 2.0 Reality Check: What’s Working, What’s Not, What’s Next”, moderated by Matthew Fraser, and featuring Christian Finn of Microsoft, Nate Nash of BearingPoint, Neil Callahan of mktg and Ross Mayfield of Socialtext. Amazingly, I’ve found the optimal way to do this is to go back to my room and watch it streaming over the web, since the wifi is completely overloaded in the conference area and the seating is cramped.

It’s always difficult to blog a panel since the topics tend to vary widely (and quickly), so just a few thoughts:

• The Enterprise 2.0 technology is mostly an evolution of what has come before, although the cultural changes are more revolutionary.
• Finn talking about how collaboration spread throughout Microsoft, both through official and unofficial channels, which allowed SharePoint to gain a foothold internally. Small projects get it started, then people see the value and get executive sponsorship. Mayfield followed up by stating that revolutions happen when people don’t have a choice, and pondering how choice is changed by the very large footprint that SharePoint has.
• Fraser asked the panel if there was an ROI for Enterprise 2.0; Finn responded by comparing the ROI of a document management system to that of a wiki; as Mayfield pointed out, there’s not a lot of “I” in the ROI of Enterprise 2.0. Callahan talked about the shift from “technology is scary” to “technology is fun”, bringing out the old chestnut about how our kids are all more tech-savvy than our CIOs (which I believe to be both incorrect and irrelevant); his point was that IT is no longer bringing the technology to business, but that line of business managers are having to make their own decisions about purchasing technology, shifting the ROI case from the boardroom to the LOB managers. This is a pretty interesting point, since it shows not just that LOB managers can make their own technology purchasing decisions, but that LOB managers must make their own technology decisions. Stowe Boyd popped up from the audience with a comment that we no longer look at the ROI of putting a telephone on someone’s desk (Finn had made the same point earlier about how we’re not giving up email any time soon), and that ROI may not be relevant in this case.

There was quite a good discussion about the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 that followed; check out the on-demand stream of the video. The large number of vendors/researchers/analysts asking questions (as opposed to actual end-user organizations) is noticeable.

You can also check the Twitter stream for this conference session here or for the entire conference here. I’m not a Microsoft supporter, but I have to say that the Twitterati was a bit hard on Finn (lots of “Mac versus PC” cheap shots): yes, he was talking a lot about SharePoint, which is not always used as a shining example of Enterprise 2.0, but the reality is that SharePoint is installed in a lot of “old economy” organizations; even if it’s not the best collaboration tool out there, it’s the only one that a lot of companies have, and it’s how they’re going to learn about some Enterprise 2.0 functionality. With one of my financial services clients, SharePoint is the only thing that remotely resembles collaboration that they have inside the firewall (and therefore approved for corporate information): several people there have actually laughed at me when I suggested using a wiki, and I’ve had to drag some of them kicking and screaming onto SharePoint just for document collaboration. Another client uses wikis, but only within IT, and is unwilling to open up wiki-based information collaboration to non-technical people. The game is changing, but it’s changing very, very slowly in some market segments.

Good panel, covering a lot of issues about both technology and people.

There’s been a lot of muttering that the Enterprise 2.0 conference is just a vendor love-fest, rather than having a significant attendance from people who are actually doing Enterprise 2.0. Whether it’s because the bloom is off this conference’s rose, or the economy, it’s telling that I was able to pick up a room here at the conference hotel through Priceline for $120/night, considerably down from the near-$300/night rate offered as the “special conference rate”. Last year, there was not a room to be had here several weeks in advance. Incredibly, they’re planning a second Enterprise 2.0 conference later this year in San Francisco; maybe the more relaxed west coast business attitudes are proving more receptive to Enterprise 2.0 in general, and certainly there will be a lot of vendors glad for only having to make the short drive north from the Valley.

Lots of disruption yesterday as flights into Boston were delayed or cancelled due to weather conditions, and the rainy weather here this week will impact attendance at the evening events, if not the conference itself. I arrived yesterday in time for the afternoon workshops, but left after 45 minutes of a not-very-insightful presentation (probably okay for newbies, but not if you’ve read anything about Enterprise 2.0). At least I made it to a couple of good social events in the evening, since this has become a conference where I come to hang out with interesting Enterprise 2.0 people rather than learn any new Enterprise 2.0 content.

I poked my head in to the starting keynotes today, but headed back to the breakfast table when Matthew Fraser started reading the captions on the tedious making-fun-of-management cartoons that he had pasted into his presentation. I’m now back in the conference room, electrical power at my feet but only sporadic wifi, and see a more interesting slate of presentations coming up for the remainder of the day. Up next is the keynote panel discussing an Enterprise 2.0 reality check, looking at what’s working, what’s not and what’s next. This afternoon, I plan to attend a panel on lessons learned from internal communities, Lee Bryant’s presentation on adoption strategies, and Aaron Levie’s (of Box.net) presentation on content-centric social networks. Stay tuned.