The Connectbeam Social Computing Blog

Enterprise 2.0 Conference: A Platform to Measure the Evolution of a New Market

This was the third time that Connectbeam sponsored the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. It was yet another great show with so much to learn and explore. The most amazing thing was to see how the market has evolved over the last three years. Not trying to say we’ve reached the tipping point in the Enterprise 2.0 market by any means, but it was clear that companies are moving forward and trying to find ways to apply Enterprise 2.0 technologies and principals to better address current collaboration needs.

 

In June of 2007, Connectbeam sponsored the first Enterprise 2.0 show. Our demonstrations at the show centered on the ability to bookmark and tag the information people were finding using Google and other internet search engines.  We also demonstrated our first interface into the Google GSA.  People were widely interested in our solution, with the majority of discussions centered on understanding “What is Enterprise 2.0 really?” 

 

At the Enterprise 2.0 show in 2008, we launched our initial Centralized Tag Repository solution – now known as the Social Activity Repository.  We worked with a very large networking company in the development of the new capabilities, and our demonstration centered around the ability to automatically capture tags (labels) as they were being created in the Atlassian Confluence wiki, and provide those tags and related social content (expertise, communities, etc.) directly within MS SharePoint and Outlook. Our out-of-the-box SharePoint webparts were a hit and were on display at the Microsoft booth.

 

As you can imagine, we were very excited with the new release, and there were several very interested potential customers for the technology.  On a much larger scale, however, there were many attendees at the show who were just trying to decide “which Enterprise 2.0 technology should I deploy first, a wiki, a blog, or social bookmarking?

 

The Enterprise 2.0 show in 2009:  what a tremendous change in just one year!  The show attendees were highly knowledgeable, and many were experienced in implementing Enterprise social applications.  In fact, we spoke to many companies that were already making product changes.  They implemented a wiki or a blog a year or two ago, and they are now making decisions to replace technologies which haven’t truly met their needs. I can clearly recall a year ago at the same conference we had to repeatedly explain what a ‘tag’ was and how tagging – specifically in the form of a folksonomy – was useful for sharing/discovering content and expertise. We probably completed over 200 demos at the 2008 conference, and the one question which seemed to be asked the most was “why are some of the words in the tag cloud bigger and bolder?”

 

This year questions from attendees were not much about ‘why’ – why use wikis, blogs, etc. – but more about ‘which’ and ‘how’. People were more interested in ‘which’ wiki, blog, microblogging or collaboration solution to use and the ‘how to’. What are the best practices in implementing E2.0 solutions given the traditional collaboration tools in the existing IT infrastructure? Yes, we know it’s not just about the technology, but how do we get past the ‘cultural’ barriers behind the firewall? Companies have also realized that the true value (ROI if you will) is measured by applying E2.0 principals to ‘improve’ or ‘replace’ existing business processes that simply don’t work today. This is truly a sign of the evolution of a new market.

 

We were really excited to see that our ‘social activity aggregation’ message was well received and resonated with almost everyone who stopped by our booth or attended the presentation. That by itself says a lot about the evolution of this market. The following diagram from our presentation at the show illustrates how Connectbeam fits into a typical social collaboration ecosystem in an enterprise, and help connecting traditional and E2.0 world together. I thought I would use an example and briefly describe the solution in case you missed us at the show:

 

Imagine in a large Fortune global 500 enterprise, Corporate IT has decided to rollout SharePoint MOSS 2007 – that includes wiki and blog capabilities – and NewsGator RSS as company-wide news feed and collaboration platform. Engineering in R&D department, however, have been using Atlassian Confluence wiki to manage day-to-day design, and project team collaborations for a while. The marketing team has been using the Yammer microblogging service for the last 3 months to communicate company news and messages with all employees. The technical support team, on the other hand, has been piloting and now ready to roll out Telligent Community to engage with external customers and partners. There are probably other homegrown tools and solutions in play but let’s just assume this is the current social software footprint at this company. In the long run, each tool above will greatly help employees and management solve a series of collaboration and communication problems. However as ‘standalone solutions’ they create new ‘social information silos’ because they don’t communicate with each other. The content stored in the Confluence wiki by the engineering team might be very valuable and relevant to the product marketing team who uses SharePoint on a daily basis, but don’t necessarily use the R&D wiki – they might not even know that wiki exists! So this and similar real world examples from our clients illustrate the need to aggregate social activities and user generated content across the enterprise regardless of the originating source. That’s where Connectbeam Social Activity Platform^TM comes into play.

 

Social activities from various platforms and solutions above are aggregated through out-of-the-box or custom connectors (using published REST APIs) and the ‘people to people’, ‘people to content’, and ‘content to content’ relationships are analyzed and captured for future collaboration use.  This aggregation service can deliver the most relevant user generated content and activity ‘in the flow’ of the user’s daily workflow – through integration with existing applications and not by introducing yet another destination.  This not only improves overall productivity but also greatly increases the adoption of newly added E2.0 tools in the enterprise collaboration ecosystem.

 

We also believe that a strong analytics solution – not displayed in the picture above but an upcoming part of Connectbeam’s offering – built on top of the social activity repository is an essential part of this service and can greatly help with raising awareness and visibility into ‘how’ people interact and connect with each other and ‘where’ they turn to share and discover information and expertise. One can only imagine how valuable it would be to extend this solution to outside the firewall, connecting customers, partners and suppliers social interactions.

 

So to summarize my thoughts on this year E2.0 conference, I can think of 3 takeaways:

1. The Enterprise 2.0 market is rapidly maturing and decision makers are increasingly interested in applying new social technologies.
2. Large enterprises won't standardize on a single platform or application anytime soon. There will always be valuable social content and activity in point solution.
3. There is a real business need to aggregate and analyze the social metadata and user activity from various collaboration tools and E2.0 solutions across the enterprise, particularly as the number of these tools in use grows.

Looking forward to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2010 at Boston.

When Your Enterprise Customer Asks About Social Software Governance

Jennifer Okimoto is a social computing evangelist and management consultant for IBM Business Consulting Services. As you can imagine, she's very experienced in working with large companies in the implementation of large-scale software.

On her blog, she recently posted a great piece about the issues of social software implementation and adoption. Specifically, four questions that relate to governance issues.

In this post, we want to highlight the questions and highlight her responses. We'll then examine one of the questions in greater depth.

1. How detailed should social media guidelines be?

Jen recommends keeping the guidelines simple, clear and few. Too many rules will result in employees not reading them. And guidelines are an overarching set of principles and behaviors, not a codified set of rules.

2. When introducing social media into the workplace, how do we address HR concerns about reduced employee productivity?

Her answer is one that we share as well. Employees are simply transferring activities to social media that they have always been doing offline:

• Searching for people
• Connecting
• Sharing
• Conversing
• Researching

We're going to explore this one a little further in a moment.

3. How do you guide employees or manage employees in navigating the gray with respect to posting content that is or is not appropriate in the work environment?

Jen offers a good perspective here. The community is very good about identifying these types of posts and responding accordingly. For posts that are clearly beyond questionable-for-work territory and are solidly in an offensive zone (e.g. racist, sexist, xenophobic), company management shouldn't hesitate in removing them. And deal with the employee through regular HR policies.

4. What about content that falls squarely in the HR domain? What if employees use social media to publicize HR issues, or to "supporters" to their cause?

Jen notes that IBM generally is hands-off with regard to what employees post. This particular issue hasn't happened. But she stresses that so long as everyone is respectful, the conversation can carry on.

Improving Employee Productivity

We have long maintained that usage of social software will improve productivity, not reduce it. It's the same content, conversations and ideas that employees have always had, but now put into applications that allow:

• Broader participation: more viewpoints, ability to tap the right information
• Findability: when you can find the person or information you need quickly, you're going to get things done faster
• Stronger connections: strengthen and diversify your internal ties, avoid receiving redundant information from just your in-person connections

For the final word in this post, we turn to Intel corporate blogger Laurie Buczek. In her February 13, 2008 post Why Intel is investing in Social Computing, she writes the following:

The average Intel employee dumps one day a week trying to find people with the experience & expertise plus the relevant information to do their job. We have calculated some of the $$ impact due to lost productivity & opportunity.  Let me just say that it is motivating us to take action.

Good point. Social software is about improving productivity. Keep that in mind when it comes to governance and enabling open employee participation.

Three Silos That Enterprise 2.0 Must Break

"Expertise is emergent" says Harvard professor Andrew McAfee.  By this, he means that the people and information which can help with a particular issue can come from anywhere inside an organization. Greater access to a diverse set of information, analysis and opinions is a driver of the success of prediction markets.

Given these factors, why haven't companies instituted better ways to allow expertise to be emergent? Historically, the tools haven't been up to the job. The nature of most business applications is to focus your attention on executing a specific task. It's efficient, but the idea of making what workers know and do accessible to a wider audience was really never part of the plan.

Traditional work has three silos which limit companies' ability to realize the full value of emergent expertise:

1. Information silos
2. Knowledge silos
3. Connection silos

Addressing these three silos is a key responsbility of Enterprise 2.0 if it is to drive meaningful improvements inside companies. Let's examine each of them.

Information Silos

Information silos are repositories of recorded information that are inaccessible in the regular flow of work. This definition deliberately broadens the meaning of silo beyond being only a closed application with limited user access rights.

Email is an example of an information silo. Only those who receive the email can access information in it. Your computer's local hard drive is another example of an information silo.

But how about something like a wiki or a blog? The information is accessible to all. How is that a silo?

If you think the key characteristic of a silo is that people aren't accessing the information, then any friction which limits people accessing information raises the "silo factor" for an application. With email, it's a structural limitation to access. With open applications, the silo is based on the failure to put the information in-the-flow of daily work. If employees don't consult an application for information they need in their jobs, you have a de facto silo.

Strategies for breaking these silos differ.

• If the silo is based on structural access limitations (e.g. email, local drive), getting key users in the organization to actively change their behavior is an important step. Relevant information that others want needs to migrate to social software
• If the silo is based on an application being out-of-the-flow of daily work, integrating that application and its content with existing systems is a smart strategy. Notifications of relevant content are also useful for share of mind.

The strategies for addressing these silos are actually more complex than laid out above, but those are topics for another day.

Knowledge Silos

Knowledge in this case is the information and perspectives we carry around in our heads. As Telligent's George Dearing tweeted the other day:

client's comment discussing collab strategy -- "it's not about sharing things in SharePoint, it's about sharing our brain"

Our heads are the silos. There are actually two definitions for this, tacit and implicit:

Tacit: The subjective, intangible knowledge we have, but of which we are not aware and cannot articulate.

Implicit: Knowledge that can be articulated, but has not yet.

In the knowledge management movement, historically the effort was on recording the information people carried in their heads. This is an honorable undertaking, and the reirement of the baby boomers is a motivator for this.

But the act of recording information outside a direct tangible need is laborious and incomplete. It's estimated that 80 - 90 percent of organizations' knowledge is tacit or implicit. The effort to record this would take a lot of time and quickly become out of date, as such knowledge is constantly evolving.

A better strategy for breaking the knowledge silos is to expand the opportunities for what's inside people's heads to be applied as situations occur. This is fundamentally different from the historical KM focus. The emphasis is not recording information, but on matching people to others who can help them.

The typical organization is not well-equipped for accessing the knowledge inside people's heads on a scalable, recurring basis. Sure, mass emails would catch attention. But also hits a lot of people who won't have knowledge that can help and will become treated as spam over time.

Increasing the intersections of need and knowledge is the opportunity for Enterprise 2.0 to help organizations.

Connections Silos

The most natural thing for people to do is to turn to those with whom they have existing strong connections when they need help. Approaching total strangers to help answer questions is not typical or welcome behavior.

The challenge this presents is that solving problems becomes overly dependent on the knowledge of those with whom you share strong ties.

 

This isn't to say they won't provide valuable input. But there are two risks with being overly reliant on strong ties:

1. Development over time of a redundant point of view by the group
2. Missing valuable input from someone who could be quite helpful

This is the third silo, call it the Connections Silo.

Enterprise 2.0's mission is to expand the scope of one's ties inside an organization. Connections don't happen overnight, so exposing the activities and knowledge of others gives rise over time to familiarity with different colleagues throughout the organization. And enabling employees to find colleagues who might be able to help lets them do a bit of outreach: the first step in diversifying one's information connections.

The Opportunity

This is a prescriptive post. It doesn't go in-depth into the optimal ways to solve the three different silos, although it does give some of our point of view. But generally, breaking these silos is the assistance that social software vendors must provide to organizations. It is then that expertise can be truly emergent.

Four Enterprise 2.0 Prognostications for 2009 by Industry Leaders

The new year 2009 is underway, and with that we're enjoying the round of prognostications about what lies ahead the next twelve months. Three particular sites caught our eye:

• Susan Scrupski's Hello 2009. Here's lookin' at you, kid.
• Mike Gotta's 2009: Planning Considerations for Enterprise 2.0
• CMS Watch's Tony Byrne and Alan Pelz-Sharpe in 12 Technology Predictions for 2009

There is some commonality in the areas covered. And what's interesting is to see where these folks agree, and where they diverge. Let's take a look at some of their predictions, and we'll add our two cents.

Microsoft SharePoint

In the enterprise software world, no observations are complete without considering Microsoft SharePoint.

Susan Scrupski:

Just deal with it. Microsoft will continue to play in the starring role of the 800-lb gorilla in the corporate corridors of IT power. And, sadly, IT still has a heavy hand in what technology users can liberate their inner social child with. If Microsoft says it has wikis, blogs, and RSS then guess what...? IT will believe them and make a safe choice.

Mike Gotta:

My position for some time has been that the next release will be a tipping point for Microsoft's social computing efforts. Either Microsoft "gets it right" and delivers a forward-looking release with significant improvements that transforms SharePoint into a market-leading social computing platform, or it delivers a release that has only incremental improvements to existing functionality that reflect a backward-looking competitive landscape (circa 2008 as things get locked-down).

Tony Byrne:

The next release of Microsoft SharePoint will cause customers to reassess. Byrne says that he expects Microsoft to release a Beta version of Office 14 in 2009, which may include some updated SharePoint tools. Even though the 2007 edition of SharePoint is still very new to a lot of users, many have complained that they've been unable to fully comprehend certain functions -- and the new release is expected to address those concerns, Byrne says. This fervent hope, he adds, may lead to a re-evaluation of the product among current and prospective users.

One thing I can say from our perspective is that we continue to get a lot of inquiries about how we integrate with SharePoint. We tend to point out the ability to make content from across the enterprise social software apps available inside SharePoint.

The collaboration market is too big for Microsoft not to get right, even if it means iterative releases. While not perfect, SharePoint will continue to draw interest.

Enterprise Social Software Adoption

This is an area that gets better every year, but still needs to be a top-of-mind issue for vendors.

Susan Scrupski:

The opportunity for vendors is to help show the way, gently introducing concepts and not igniting wholesale culture shock/religious wars about how work should be done. The emphasis for 2009 will be the soft side of the 2.0 (r)evolution: PEOPLE vs. technology. Changing hearts and minds, not dazzling displays of tech grooviness.

Mike Gotta:

The need to focus on non-technology factors rather than the underlying tooling was a consistent theme during client visits and telephone inquiries as well as the field research study I conducted on enterprise social networks. Most IT organizations are not charged with time, money and resources to really focus on adoption issues.

The social nature of these apps makes it tough to force adoption, unlike, say, installing an ERP system. We've actually got a set of starters and guidelines for using Connectbeam, specifically for the project champions and the initial users.

This has always been important, and will continue to be so in 2009.

Trialing Social Software

The enterprise social software industry continues to innovate, and new apps and features are introduced regularly, like microblogging start-up Yammer.

Susan Scrupski:

A-list vendors with easy to use, useful technology will find it easier in 2009 to sell into forward-thinking (risk averse) enterprises. There will be budget available to experiment with these technologies as the recession/global crisis will accelerate the “do more with less” mantra.

Mike Gotta:

The trend now is to downplay reliance on point solutions (e.g., blog vendor, wiki vendor) and think more along the lines of a "social platform" (e.g., a consistent platform that offers blog, wiki, and a social network site). This makes the decision more complicated in some ways but the investment becomes less volatile and the investment has the potential to have more staying power in the market.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe:

Social computing will continue to make inroads, while smaller niche players will sneak in with new offerings. "So much hype is cleared away and the reality is starting to come through," Pelz-Sharpe says. The report predicts that standardization is still a ways off -- probably 2010 at the earliest. Movement toward social computing will build, but it remains a young market.

There's some truth in what Mike says, as vendors add more functionality there will be a natural uptake in adoption of suites with higher functionality. But Enterprise 2.0 is nowhere near a maturity level for this to happen on a meaningful basis yet. The innovation will continue from vendors.

Also, once a point solution has become ingrained in the processes of a company, it becomes hard to dislodge.

Social Software Analytics

The thrust of Enterprise 2.0 has been on employee collaboration. But as the originator of the term "Web 2.0" Tim O'Reilly notes in Why Dell.com (was) More Enterprise 2.0 Than Dell IdeaStorm, 2.0 is about more than explicit collaboration, contribution and "the wisdom of crowds".

Mike Gotta:

While this area would include social network analysis (SNA), it would also include all types of social analytics (rankings, ratings, tags/bookmarks, etc). Without social analytics, it's difficult to know how to measure what's going on within social systems and how to value those interactions and activities. I hope 2009 will be the kick-off of this topic becoming more of a priority.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe:

Enterprise search now involves personalization, stickiness, and analytics. Pelz-Sharpe expands upon this notion: "At the end of 2008, buyers were starting to understand the limitations of search engines. Search is a complex area, and buying needs to reflect that." There will be new emphasis placed on application search -- and the idea that "you are what you search for" will become central to enterprise search.

Analytics remains a fairly untapped area inside enterprise social software. Yet the upside for this informaiton is tremendous. Better handle on where the focus of the line employees is, improved understanding of internal employee connectors, netter handle on the enterprise social graph, and toher uses.

Expect more innovation around this in 2009.

And So We're Off to the Races

Fun to see what experienced, smart folks are thinking about the social software market. Now it's time to go make it happen this year.

Photo credit: iMorpheus on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/sfj/1313709/

Tangible ROI: How Connectbeam Saved $50,000 for a Company

A recurring theme you will see here is that companies can significantly increase the value of their various social software applications by tying them together. A second theme that is seen in the market is the need for hard dollar ROI for social computing.

 

With that introduction, I’d like to relate a story we heard from one of our customers. This company saved $50,000 because of its Connectbeam implementation. Here’s a bulleted summary of the story:

 

• An employee created a wiki page explaining how to get a discount on software
• Wiki page was shared on Connectbeam
• Employees in other departments Googled the name of the software app
• The wiki page was returned alongside the Google search results
• Other employees clicked on the link to the wiki page, learning how to get the discount
• Result = $50,000 savings to the company

The Full Story

 

Large enterprises have thousands of employees, dozens of departments and multiple locations around the globe. Coordination can be quite challenging. And unsurprisingly, valuable information that can help others is often not found, costing companies real money and lost productivity.

 

Our customer has an enterprise wiki. Wikis are fantastic for letting employees share knowledge and collaborate on projects.

 

An employee created a wiki page explaining how to purchase software from a third party vendor. This employee’s department uses a third party software application extensively, and had negotiated a favorable departmental vendor license agreement (VLA) over time. The employee’s wiki page explained the details around this VLA.

 

The employee’s wiki page also was shared into the Connectbeam application. There are two ways to do this – bookmark the page, or leverage Connectbeam’s integration with Confluence.

 

Now it turns out that this software was getting interest elsewhere in the organization. In the absence of knowing about the departmental VLA, others would have negotiated new VLAs with the software vendor, at full price.

 

So here was the problem. Highly valuable information was on the wiki. Employees needed this information, but it didn’t occur to them that others in the organization might know something about it. Instead, they did what a lot of us do – they turned to Google.

 

And here’s where Connectbeam kicked in. Connectbeam can integrate with any search engine. When employees search, they are presented not only results from that site, but results from Connectbeam as well. Here’s a screenshot of how that works:

 

Employees elsewhere in this company were presented with a similar search side panel of results from its Connectbeam application. And the original employee’s wiki entry for the software VLA was included in the Connectbeam search results.

 

They clicked on the wiki entry describing how to buy the software, and were able to tap into the departmental VLA to get the discount. Result? $50,000 saved by the company that otherwise would have gone to the software vendor.

 

Putting Information In the Flow of Daily Work

 

When we discussed the ‘why’ behind the release of Spotlight 3.0, we highlighted the following elements:

 

• In the flow: put information where employees do their work
• Connect enterprise apps: need to make it easier to find the incredibly valuable information employees create everyday

As you can see from this case study, there are real opportunities for companies to improve results when they make it happen. 

Three Ways to Double the Value of Your Social Software

We gave a webinar yesterday, titled Double the Value of Your Social Software.

So how exactly does one “double the value” of social software? Well right now, organizations face a new issue of "enterprise silos" 2.0.

The great thing about companies rolling out the tools of Web 2.0 is that it lets people from everywhere contribute. Multiple people jump on wikis, blogs, microblogging, etc. Social software can tear down the departmental and geographic walls that separate employees.

So it’s ironic that these wall-busting apps end up as new walled gardens of participation. Employees update their Confluence wiki, they blog on Movable Type and Yammer away. But there’s no integration of the apps.

The core of the "doubling" argument is that integrating the various social software apps inside companies produces a new layer of value. In terms of how this happens, we developed three areas of focus:

1. Expand information’s reach
2. Create an employee skills database
3. Diversify and strengthen workers’ sources of information

The Slideshare below is the presentation we used in the webinar.

Double the Value Of Your Social Software

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: bookmarking blog)

As always, feel free to contact us if you'd like to discuss this further.

Webinar: Double the Value of Your Social Software

Are you using multiple social software apps in your organization? Each one is individually valuable. But ironically, these collaborative apps end up as new data silos, not integrated with the wider organization. Tying the apps together improves accessibility and is the foundation for employee social networks. This was the gist of our earlier blog post Fix the Enterpise 2.0 Silo Issue.

We're holding a Webinar - Double the Value of Your Social Software - to discuss the benefits of connecting enterprise 2.0 apps, and how Connectbeam does this to significantly increase their value. We welcome your attendance. Here are the details

Thursday November 20

1:00 pm EST, 10:00 am PST

Click here to register

Economic Downturn: Putting a Dollar Figure on the Value of Enterprise 2.0 for Companies

The times they are a-changin'. In a space of weeks, the global economy has slowed. Employees are concerned about their jobs, companies are preparing for negative growth. Everyone's in a tough period right now.

For the Enterprise 2.0 industry, this is indeed the time to demonstrate the business case of social software. On the FASTForward Blog, Jevon MacDonald penned a great piece: In uncertain times, Enterprise 2.0 takes the stage. Included in the post is a quote by Enterprise 2.0 consultant Thomas Vander Wal:

The interconnections and interactions between people spark great value, but the more costly traditional tools have missed out on this great reservoir of value, but the newer lower cost solutions offer these gems up wonderfully with a little coaxing.

Enterprise 2.0 improves three critical components of companies' success: innovation, productivity and responsiveness. During times of economic stress, productivity rises to the top in terms of priorities...

Do more with less.

In that spirit, we want to discuss a fantastic academic paper that studies the effects of IT, multitasking and social networks on companies. Specifically, the researchers studied a multi-office, geographically dispersed executive recruiting firm.

The results are eye-opening, and provide empirical evidence for the power of social software to improve productivity.

How to Do More with Less

The study Information, Technology and Information Worker Productivity was produced by researchers at MIT, NYU and Boston University. The team evaluated over 125,000 emails, detailed accounting data, completion rates and team membership for over 1,300 placement projects, and surveys with most employees. What were they looking for? "The fine-grained relationships among information flows, IT use, and individual information-worker productivity."

The researchers found statistically significant relationships among social networks, technology use, completed projects and revenues for project-based information workers. Here are the four findings of the research team:

1. The structure and size of workers' communication networks are highly correlated with their performance
2. IT use is strongly correlated with productivity
3. Productivity is greatest for small amounts of multitasking, but too much multitasking reduces productivity
4. Asynchronous information-seeking promotes multitasking

The full report includes many, many nuggets of valuable information. We want to focus on two outcomes of their research that put a dollar figure on the value of social software.

Putting a Dollar Figure on the Value of Social Software

A key finding of the researchers was this:

A one standard deviation increase in betweenness centrality in the email network is associated with approximately $76,000 greater revenue output per year controlling for human capital, demographic variables and use of the ESS system.

A one standard deviation increase in network diversity is associated with approximately $83,000 greater annual revenue output.

What this report gives us is a dollar figure for the value of social software inside companies! The research computed significant productivity gains for workers with superior positions on two attributes:

• Betweenness centrality
• Network diversity

Both of these attributes are core to the value of social software. But let's define them first, because the terms sound daunting.

Betweenness centrality: What's the probability that an individual will fall on the shortest path between any two other individuals? This attribute measures the strength of an individual's connections to other employees. Sort of a probability-based LinkedIn.

Network diversity: Measures the degree to which an individual's contacts are connected to each other. If your social network consists of people who all know each other well, your network diversity is low. If your social network has a lot of connections that don't know one another, your diversity is high.

Let's examine one of the attributes, network diversity. The $83,000 improvement in revenue production referenced above was for a one standard deviation improvement relative to the mean. Graphically, here's what that means:

Employees who connect to a wider range of their colleagues generate higher revenue for their companies. In this case, an employee in the 84th percentile of network diversity delivers $83,000 more in revenue annually than average. Why?

If all you ever see is the same perspective from your cohorts, it can be hard to figure out solutions to  problems that are new to you. As the researchers note in their study:

Information in local network neighborhoods tends to be redundant

Soliciting input from a greater array of co-workers brings new ideas, information and perspectives to an employee. This becomes a competitive differentiator, and a basis for better collaboration across the enterprise. The question, as always, is how to find and build relationships with others who can help beyond your normal internal contacts?

Now here's where this becomes an interesting opportunity for companies. The results calculated for these high-performing employees were based on their email social networks. In other words, these employees' email contact lists present an after-the-fact look at how they're connected.

For an employee looking to improve her social network, it's hard to use email in this way. A random email over-the-transom will do little to foster a new, vital connection internally. It lacks context.  Unfortunately, most systems inside organizations are ill-suited to provide the context for what co-workers are working on, as Thomas Vander Wal notes above.

As a result, diversifying an internal social network is slow, and likely stagnant, for all but the most proficient workers.

So how does one break out of the small, insular social network?

At Connectbeam, our application lets workers identify their expertise, interests and projects. It aggregates the workstreams of employees, providing a way to find the information that colleagues generate. Colleagues that an employee already knows well, as well as those beyond her normal social network. Suddenly, there's a better awareness of others' work and context for reaching out to them.

If you're a statistical type of person, the objective is to move the average of the normal distribution to the right (increase average production per employee) in the above graphic, and to tighten up the curve (everyone enjoying the fruits of network diversity in a similar way).

Check out our product page for more information on how we improve both network diversity and betweenness centrality.

And for companies looking to get more done with less in these tough economic times, recognize that social software provides a solid, statistically based way to improve productivity.

Five Moves of Power Users in Enterprise 2.0

Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee recently penned an interesting post, Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings? The post examines the idea of applying ratings to workers based on their activity with social software applications. Ratings would be part of the toolkit of adoption techniques.

The comments to his post are a good discussion about the problems with this approach. These ratings hold the potential to undermine the spirit of "let's get people talking and collaborating" that defines Enterprise 2.0. That's not to say the idea is wholly without merit. But "ratings" carry negative connotations in this context. Maybe there are "levels" that employees could earn, without the stigma of having a low "rating".

His post did cause a discussion here at Connectbeam. Rather than focus on ratings, we wondered:

How would a power user operate in our application?

There are actually a lot of ways. This being a blog, and we're going to keep things tight. Here are five that we came up with...

The Power Moves

1. SEO your social profile. On the web, those whose success is built on people finding them are very good at maintaining their profiles. Profiles are a basis for being found (e.g. LinkedIn). Inside a company, same rules apply. The power users will be unusually good at building their Connectbeam Social Profiles with key words, along the lines of search engine optimization techniques. The Connectbeam app lets you find people in two ways:

• People search based on terms in their profiles
• Recommendations based on common expertise, interests and projects

Want to ensure your reputation precedes you and co-workers know what you can do? Maintain a vibrant Social Profile.

2. Build a good-sized social network base. Out on the Web, there are individuals who have successfully built up a following of ten of thousands of individuals on Twitter and on their blogs. There are two benefits to developing your own community:

• You can learn a variety of information and viewpoints from others
• You can get your message out to a large number of people, who will in turn talk about it with their networks

Now those kinds of numbers are pretty daunting. Inside the enterprise, power users don't need that big a network. But having a good-sized network does provide them with an information advantage, and a fast way to communicate out to the organization at large.

How to build out a good-sized social network? See #1 above, and read on below.

3. Comment, engage, discuss. A key understanding of social networks is that people want interaction. For many social media first-timers, that can be one of the biggest challenges: how to get the conversation going. The Enterprise 2.0 power user understands this, seeks out areas of interest, and interacts. This simple act does two things:

• It creates a bond between the power user and others
• It moves the ball forward in terms of drawing people into the larger enterprise conversation

A central point of Enterprise 2.0 is to collaborate. Having power user instigators who can push things forward is a tremendous value. And they get the benefit of building a strong internal network.

4. Celebrate and communicate the workstreams of others. Recognition and acknowledgment are important motivators of employees. In Connectbeam employees will see bookmarks, wiki entries, blog posts, etc. The power user will find those nuggets shared by others, and celebrate them. This is not easy - if one re-shares things that others don't find useful, the power user quickly loses status.

But having the talent to spot useful information shared by others accomplishes two things:

• Raises awareness for valuable information that will help co-workers and the company
• Motivates the original source of the information to connect more closely with the power user

In Connectbeam, one can simply re-share a bookmark from one Group to another, including attribution in the comments field. Or one may maintain an internal blog that lists the "best of" information shares. Or even the occasional email pointing to the bookmark.

5. Share information with a vengeance. Build up the set of information you share with others. Share relevant information often. Be it in web bookmarks, wiki entries, blog posts, etc. If the content shared is relevant and useful, the power user's name tends to show up a lot when others in the organization are looking for information in the Connectbeam application. Don't think that goes un-noticed.

Want to develop a reputation for expertise and understanding markets/technologies/customers/etc.? Share with a vengeance.

Those are five moves of the Enterprise 2.0 power user. What we like about them is that they are not only good for an individual's career, but also are good for the organization. If you think of any others, feel free to leave a comment.

Fix the Enterprise 2.0 Silo Issue

Came across a nice post by CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne on KM World, Enterprise Social Software Technology. In the post, he articulates the functional underpinnings of social computing software. If you're tracking the Enterprise 2.0 space, it's a good read.

A couple quotes caught our eyes here. First:

Vendors are also "socializing" existing software products. On the main, that is a good thing, but it should not be confused with dedicated social software tools. In the absence of accepted integration standards, adding things like tags, profiles and instant messaging services to longstanding applications can create just another set of siloed communities.

A core principle of social computing is connectedness. Adding social computing features to existing enterprise silos certainly helps, but fails to connect the larger organization.

Here's the other quote from Tony's post:

But it is equally clear that no single vendor in the marketplace excels at all or even most of those services. In fact, many successful social software case studies revolve around the dedicated application of a standalone tool.

We have not yet seen the emergence of a full-suite vendor that addresses the different needs of the market. Expect to see enterprises with multiple social computing apps for the foreseeable future.

Companies' Opportunity in Connecting Enterprise 2.0 Apps

Finding information in the various social computing applications certainly is a function of enterprise search engines. Enterprise search engines are great for what they do:

1. Index content from different applications
2. Apply term frequency algorithms to rank search results

But there is a layer of meta data, of employee judgment in the creation and sharing of knowledge that is not captured in typical enterprise search engines. This data includes:

• Who created or saved the information
• Tags to provide richer meaning (how was this information useful)
• Groups to put the information in context

Capture this information, and you can create a connected layer of social information that opens new possibilities for employees:

• Find useful information faster
• Figure out quickly which colleagues might be able to help with a project
• Create a single go-to repository for the valuable content that is produced and shared throughout the organization
• Build their own social networks based on common projects and interests

Yes, we love enterprise search. We even have connectors ready to go for Google Enterprise Search and FAST. But there's much more to the story when it comes to the content generated in the various social computing silos inside companies.

Connectbeam Spotlight 3.0 Is Now Available - Here's the 'Why' Behind the New Release

One of the great things about working with our enterprise customers is that we get a ringside view into what they want to accomplish and what issues they are facing. Companies see the benefits of collaborative information sharing, and are working hard to connect employees and knowledge. Andrew McAfee articulated well the value of information sharing and collaboration in his bulls eye post, which provides a great analysis for the value of internal social networks.  The companies with whom we talk are moving aggressively to create authentic, useful employee social networks.

With that as backdrop, we're pleased to announce today the release of Connectbeam Spotlight 3.0. Spotlight 3.0 adds a number of features to the Connectbeam application designed to make information and expertise easier to find and share. Full details are available on our Products page. Here are the release highlights:

• Integration with leading enterprise applications
• Feeds of user generated content from Enterprise 2.0 apps
• Social Profiles with both employee-provided knowledge and experience, and real-time updates for their work activities

There's a lot to this release, and the Connectbeam website and data sheets will tell you more.

We wanted to give you a sense of why we released Spotlight 3.0. The reasons shed some light on the direction of the enterprise market.

In-the-flow: Michael Idinopulos of SocialText wrote about the differences of putting tools in-the-flow or above-the-flow of employees' daily activities. This is a critical consideration for vendors in the social computing space, and it's an approach we pioneered here at Connectbeam. To maximize knowledge touch points, and user adoption, inside an organization, we're big fans of in-the-flow tools. That's why Connectbeam integrates with leading enterprise apps. We want to put information and internal resources right at the fingertips of employees.

Connect enterprise apps: Companies have significant investments in their existing technology stacks, both financially and operationally. They also tend to have a collection of best-of-breed apps, particularly in the enterprise social computing realm. Full-suite Enterprise 2.0 solutions are still a ways off. So the problem they're experiencing is a lack of visibility for the amazing amounts of user generated information that has been created inside their walls. Connectbeam sees tying together these different apps as a major benefit for companies. Through our Connectors and APIs, we pull in content created from across the enterprise, including wikis, blogs, news feeds, forums and other applications.

Workstreams: Connectbeam's roots are as the leader in social bookmarking and tagging inside the enterprise. Fundamentally, what we bring is the ability to tap employees as sources of relevant data and filters for what's valuable. From this, everyone in the organization gains. With Spotlight 3.0, we're extending this philosophy by integrating the workstreams of employees. Workstreams include bookmarks, wiki entries, blog posts, forum discussions and other activities. There's tremendous value in providing a single repository where these workstreams:

• Can be organized and are searchable
• Form the basis for social networking and collaboration
• Can be discussed
• Are integrated into the everyday applications that employees use

That's a brief explanation for how we approached Connectbeam Spotlight 3.0. Hats off to the team for a great job pulling this one together.

Cory Treffiletti’s Companies to Watch

Cory Treffiletti writes a blog about marketing strategy and fundamentals. He is President and Managing Partner for Catalyst:SF. Cory's been in interactive marketing and advertising since 1995. He writes a weekly column for Mediapost.

Cory recently published a post, Company to Watch: the Bonus Issue. These companies were drawn primarily from the Stanford Always On! Summit that occurred earlier this month. I was pleased to part of panel, CEO Showcase, at the event. I was also honored to see Connectbeam included in Cory’s list of companies to watch. Cory’s blog is worth looking at if you are interested in emerging trends in marketing, especially through new media.

Research Shows Majority of Fastest Growing Companies Are Adopting Social Media

ReadWriteWeb recently reported on a follow-on study by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research. This research into social media adoption at 500 of the fastest growing companies in the US has found that familiarity with and use of social media nearly doubled in 2008 from what it was in 2007. Now 77% of respondents report at least some use of a social media tool in their business.

I was especially pleased to see than social networking topped the list on familiarity over online video, blogging, message boards, wikis, and podcasting. It was also on top in 2007. Consistent with this social networking also top the list on usage in 2008, moving up from third in 2007. Last year “don’t use any” was the top category. Now don’t use any” is fifth, only barely beating podcasting. Asked to rate importance for business strategy, 44% said very important and 34% said somewhat important. This is all good news for social media and is consistent with prior research.

It was also interesting to see that while 11.6% of Fortune 500 companies currently have a public blog, 39% of the Inc. 500 companies are blogging. This is not surprising as these smaller firms are often more progressive.

I found this study through Keith De La Rue who writes the blog AcKnolwedge Consulting for the Australian firm by that name. I found his blog as Keith linked to my post on Forrester Reports that Corporate Social Networks will Augment Strategic HR Strategies. There is a nice coverage of enterprise 2.0 on AcKnolwedge Consulting blog.

Promoting Innovation and Co-creation Within the Enterprise

McKinsey recently released a study on the topic of co-creation, The Next Step in Open Innovation. The abstract says, “The Internet and new social-networking technologies are allowing companies and their customers to interact with unprecedented levels of richness. Some leading organizations are using this opportunity to draw customers into the heart of the product-development process.” However, they also caution, “Cocreating products and services with customers, however, is uncertain territory fraught with challenges and questions—for instance, who owns the resulting intellectual property?”

I think reaching out to customers and the wider internet is a great idea. Cisco’s I-Prize is a wonderful example. Cisco has launched a contest and invited the world to give it great ideas. The winner gets to join Cisco and is funded to make the idea real. This is a smart move but we do not want overlook another important source of innovation, those within our own enterprise.

A number of years ago a major manufacturer launched a search to find best practices to reduce costs at their plants, only to discover that these best practices were operating within their own plants but they did not have an effective means to discover this knowledge. Now with the tools of enterprise 2.0 we can look more effectively inside the organization, as well the wider web. This is a goal at Connectbeam, to help firms discover the innovation within. Intellectual property and some of the other issues with co-creation outside the organization are greatly simplified when we look inside.

McKinsey on Building Enterprise 2.0

A new research report from McKinsey, titled, Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise: McKinsey Global Survey Results, provides some useful and encouraging information. This report covers their second annul research survey on the topic. This year the researchers found that companies have adopted more Web 2.0 tools this year than in 2007 and are using them for higher-value purposes. They add that companies that are satisfied with their use of these tools are starting to see changes throughout the enterprise. In addition, companies that are deriving business value from these tools are now shifting from using them experimentally to adopting them as part of a broader business practice. This fits with what I am seeing with our customers.

I was also interested to see that companies use Web 2.0 technologies more frequently for internal than for external purposes. This is all good news for Connectbeam. In the list of tools that count, social networking came in second to web services, ahead of blogs, wikis, RSS, etc. This is consistent with the Forrester study I wrote about earlier.

There are still challenges and not everyone is happy. The study found that higher levels of usage are found at companies that encourage it by integrating the tools into existing workflows, starting enterprise 2.0 efforts in conjunction with other strategic initiatives, and getting senior managers to act as role models for adoption. These are all good adoption practices that have proven useful in the past for new technologies.

The study concluded with the prediction that companies will continue to spend more on web 2.0 technologies, even the ones not yet satisfied. The majority of the companies that are satisfied with their web 2.0 technologies see them as a driver of competitive advantage. McKinsey said, “Expect these companies to become more aggressive in the marketplace against rivals that are slower to get on board.” They predicted that driving innovation may be the next major use of the new technologies. There is much more in the report. I have only hit the highlights in yet another positive report on enterprise 2.0

Defining Aspects of Social Computing, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, and the Consumer Web

Susan Scrupski and Jevon MacDonald are working on a model that breaks apart aspects of the new web world, inside and outside the enterprise. See Susan’s Circles of Expertise in 2.0 for Biz post for the current model. The four areas as range for digital marketing and mass collaboration (or co-creation) to social media and enterprise 2.0.

Connectbeam is squarely in the enterprise 2.0 space and I think these types of distinctions are important to develop. It helps to avoid the confusions that can arise over issues like the role of Facebook in the enterprise that I have written about on this blog. Susan writes, “Although there is overlap among all these groups, the areas of focus are distinctly unique. Of course, businesses can benefit by incorporating the expertise from all these areas, but they’d need to source it separately.”

It will be interesting to see where this model goes. I would bring the connection between enterprise 2.0 and mass collaboration a bit closer than the current model depicts since this mass collaboration can, and should, occur within the enterprise as well as out on the web as a whole through projects like Cisco I-Prize. One of the benefits of a social networking tool that combines social bookmarking like Connectbeam, is that we can help with this mass collaboration by getting the right people together inside the enterprise to more effective engage in this collaboration. Susan and Jevon are inviting contributions to their evolving model in this shared space.

Is Increased IT Investment and Disruptive Technology a Business Game Changer?

Andrew McAfee addresses this question in a clever way in a recent post, Technology Beats a Full House. He begins with a long discussion on the decline of variation in baseball hitter’s averages. He references the work of Steven Jay Gould in Full House and quotes his conclusion that “Complex systems improve when the best performers play by the same rules over extended periods of time. As systems improve, they equilibrate and variation decreases.” In baseball there have been no significant game changing rules in over 100 years so the variation in batting averages has continued to decline as the stats show.

Andrew then takes this concept to business to see what, if any, game changing events might disrupt the performance of companies. Andrew writes, “If the combination of the Web and commercial enterprise IT really was a ‘game changer’ for the competitive game of business, then the introduction of these technologies should be accompanied not by a decrease in variation in performance, but instead by the opposite—an increase in performance spread among competitors.” He looks at data from the 1962 to 2004 and finds a major disruption in the variation in company performance through several measures beginning in the 90s when significant investments in enterprise IT began.

He divides industries into those who spend heavily on IT and those that do not. He found that “For virtually all the ratios we considered, variation in high-IT industries started to increase in the mid 1990s and stayed high after that, with some exceptions during the post-2000 economic slump. The less IT an industry had, the less pronounced this trend was.” Andrew offers some useful graphs that clearly illustrate the dramatic difference between industries that spend more on IT and those that do not. These results support the idea that IT is a disruptive game changer and that as rules change, the winners become more separated from the losers.

Enterprise 2.0 and social software are changing the rules of engagement in business now. Andrew’s evidence suggests that the winners will come from those who continue to invest in these disruptive technologies. The data also suggests that the gap between winners will increase during this disruptive period until the rules settle down again, if that ever happens.

Defrag 2008 Conference Discount

The Defrag conference will be held November 3-4 in Denver Colorado. It is “focused on the tools and technologies that accelerate the "aha" moment, and is a gathering place for the growing community of implementers, users, and thinkers that are building the next wave of software innovation.” Connectbeam is pleased to be a sponsor.

There is a great array of speakers including Esther Dyson, Stowe Boyd, Daniela Barbosa, Charlene Li, and Clay Shirky. Rich Hoeg, from Honeywell and one of our clients is speaking on “Social Search in the Corporate Environment.” I will be speaking on “Unleashing the User Generated Content Inside of Enterprise Apps.”

As a Gold Sponsor of the event, we can pass on a discount code to you that is offering an additional $100 off the early bird registration. Use the code – cb1 – and this defrag conference link.

Enterprise 2.0 Virtual Conference - July 23, 2008

This Wednesday, July 23, ebiz is sponsoring an Enterprise 2.0 Virtual Conference. David Mitchell Smith from Gartner will provide a keynote, Innovating the Enterprise with Web 2.0, and Rob Koplowitz from Forrester will offer another keynote, Control Versus Chaos: The Enterprise Web 2.0 Effect. I am participating in a panel, Web 2.0 and SOA, with Dan Woods, CTO and Editor, Evolved Media, and Nathaniel Palmer, President, Transformation+Innovation.

Here is the description of our panel from the ebiz site. “Web 2.0 is about enabling end users to easily access information from multiple sources, and use it in new and creative ways, including creating new applications, and customizing their interactive web experience. But will end users actually be able to create their own mash-up applications? How will IT control and manage this new breed of applications? Is SOA still a relevant part of this discussion? What are the implications for IT infrastructure requirements?”

I hope you will be able to participate. Registration details are on the ebiz site description of the session. Krissi Danielsson writes an ebiz blog, Saas Week, to support the conference series.

New Aberdeen Report Indicates that Best-in Class Companies Make Greater Use of Social Computing

I recently read the June 2008 Aberdeen Group report, Workforce Collaboration and Web 2.0, that has some nice things to say about social bookmarking and social computing, in general. The report drew on an aggregation of surveys and interviews with more than 270 organizations worldwide. They defined workforce collaboration as “connecting employees and sharing knowledge to achieve identifiable goals.” That sounds like our objectives for Connectbeam.

For purposes of their analysis, the Aberdeen Group divided companies into best-in-class, industry average, and laggards. The best-in-class group reduced project completion time on average by 34%, shortened time to resolution on average by 22%, improved new employee time-to-productivity on average by 19% and decreased training cost per employee on average by 14%. These are all good numbers.

Using these distinctions, Aberdeen then looked at the use of web 2.0 (aka social software) for collaboration in the best-in-class group. They found that 39% of companies that are considered best in class use social software to find the experts within their organization while only 20% of companies than are not considered best in class do this. This means that best-in-class organizations are 69% more likely to use social software to ensure employees are connected to subject matter experts.

These best-in-class organizations also make significantly greater us of social software throughout the employee talent management process. For example, 48% of best-in-class organizations use social software to help with employee on-boarding while only 11% of the others do this. An important part of on-boarding is finding the right people in the organization and to understand who knows what about what. These are all objectives for Connectbeam.

The Aberdeen report said that these best-in-class organizations are using social software in more strategic ways and more “more likely to focus on capturing institutional knowledge, expertise, and experiences, codifying it and making it available throughout the organization.” I could do agree more. They also said that these best-in-class companies “focus on generating and capturing content form the workforce and allowing others to access it and add to it.”

There is a lot of additional valuable material in the report. The Aberdeen report concluded with these required actions for companies than want to be best-in-class and remain in this status. They must capture and transfer organizational know-how, seek collaboration between IT, HR, business managers to ensure the right technologies can be supported, and educate stakeholders on the potential and derived value of workforce collaboration. The first action has been covered above. I think the second is also critical as there needs to be an enterprise strategy for social software to achieve the network effects on enterprise collaboration and information access and to avoid creating a lot of silos of disconnected social software tools. This second goal is essential to produce the substantial value that can be communicated in line with the third action.

This is one in a series of analyst’s reports that are consistently coming out of the value of enterprise social computing. I have covered the Gilbane report on Collaboration and Social Media-2008, the Forrester Report on how Corporate Social Networks will Augment Strategic HR Strategies, the AIIM Research on the Need for Integrated Approach to Enterprise 2.0, and the Forrester Predictions of Large Growth in Social Networking Market. Each of these reports are consistent with, and support, the Aberdeen conclusions.

Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web (and Enterprise) Search?

Here is an interesting paper, Can Social Bookmarking
Improve Web Search?, I found (via ReadWriteWeb and Mike Gotta). It starts with the statement that search is probably the most important application on the web and goes on to say, “what will be the next big thing that substantially improves search quality? One of the big contenders for this "next big thing" is social search: the idea of adding user annotations or other metadata to the process.” So they looked at the question in their title, Can Social Bookmarking
Improve Web Search?, by studying the effects of del.icio.us. Their main major findings were: “Social bookmarking URLs are full of new and fresh information (Results 1 and 2). Tags on URLs are often redundant given title, domain, and page text (Results 10 and 11). Social bookmarking is probably still a bit small to have a big impact on web search (Results 8 and 9).”

As I have written, social bookmarking and tags are not the same thing. Enterprise social bookmarking goes beyond simply applying tags and tags are used widely outside social bookmarking in a variety of tools. I like the first two results as they support the use of social bookmarking. In terms of the results 10 and 11, this redundancy is generally avoided with type of tagging done through Connectbeam.

This research was done in the context of the consumer web, where I guess you need that critical mass of tags relative to the overall index of the entire World Wide Web. Things work differently within the enterprise where the volume within the index is smaller. Also, the fact that page links do not get refreshed as often in an enterprise search index setting (compared to public internet), that adds a new parameter to this research and equation that was not even touched upon in this research as it primarily focused at the consumer web. Therefore, our take is that this inflexion point of influence described in results 8 and 9 above arrives much sooner in the enterprise. In addition to providing social information to complement search results, Connectbeam can also be used to augment enterprise taxonomies and search indexing.

CMS Watch Says to Look Carefully at Social Software Vendors, Big and Small

Computerworld recently commented on a study by CMS Watch that found a “general lack of system and administrative services threatens to undermine the benefits of improved collaboration and networking from social software technologies.” Tom Byrne, CMS Watch founder’s comments are based on a recent CMS Watch study’s findings that evaluated 20 major social software suppliers through extensive technology research and customer interviews.

Tom commented that while enterprise customers are showing increasing interest in extending internal social tools outside the firewall, vendors are having difficulty supporting customers’ internal and external environments at the same time. CMS Watch attributes this difficulty to significantly different functional, performance, and security profiles of both environments. CMS Watch commented that while the large players like “Microsoft, Oracle and IBM have actively promoted their social software products, each arrived relatively late in this market segment. Consequently, such vendors still rely on established portal services for key functionalities.”

I am pleased that they found a silver lining in the study, “Despite the gloomy study results, CMS Watch notes some exceptions such as wiki vendor Atlassian that provides comparatively strong security and access control. The analyst firm says that hosted community vendor Awareness has good multi-site management; while Connectbeam’s social networking solution provides highly functional back-up and restoration services.”

The Computerworld article concludes, “"Customers should not automatically assume that social software modules from their incumbent vendors are somehow more mature or better integrated than some of the smaller players in this space," says CMS Watch research analyst, Jarrod Gingras.” I am very pleased to see Connectbeam included in this group of respected smaller players. We have focused on the needs of the enterprise, and internal deployment from the start with increased security and other features. We are also working to integrate with and enhance the offering of the large players with our Microsoft Sharepoint and Google Enterprise Search integration.

Social Bookmarking has Great Value in the Enterprise – Thomas Vander Wal

I was pleased to see Thomas Vander Wal’s post, Getting More Value in Enterprise with Social Book Marking (via BizTechTalk). Thomas is an information architect best known for coining the term "folksonomy."He is also known for initiating the term "infocloud." Under the subheading social Bookmarking has Great Value in the Enterprise, he starts, “Every organization needs to know itself better then they currently do…The need to connect people inside an organization with others with similar interest, contexts, and perceptions is really needed.”

Thomas then goes on to say, “As people also share these bookmarks in the organization with their tags and annotations, they also realize quickly they are becoming a valuable conduit to helping others find information and they grasp the value they will derive from being a resource that adds value in the organization. Other people derive value from information in the organization and outside it being augmented with individual perspectives and context.”

Thomas next has some nice words to say about Connectbeam in this context, “When this is pair(ed) with search, as Connectbeam does with their social search that pairs with existing pairs with existing FAST, Google Search Appliance, and others in-house search engines, the value the whole organization receives is far beyond the cost and minimal effort people are putting into the tools to get smarter, by more easily holding on and sharing what they know.” I have great respect for Thomas’ viewpoints so these words and much appreciated. He has captured our goals at Connectbeam.

Thomas concluded that every attendee to workshops he has delivered on enterprise 2.0 quickly sees that they undervalued the impact and capability of social bookmarking in the enterprise. His firm, InfoCloud Solutions, provides consulting and training in many areas of enterprise 2.0 There is an extensive list of workshops at his InfoCloud Solutions site.

Let’s Not Confuse Tagging with Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is often called tagging or a tagging system. While tagging is an important part of a social bookmarking system, it can cause confusion to say they are the same thing. The wikipedia offers many definitions for tags within eight categories from sports to personal identifiers. The relevant one here is “Tag (metadata), a keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information.”

The wikipedia defines social bookmarking as “a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata.” It goes on to add,” Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags.” So tags are an important component to most social bookmarking systems but they are just one component and tags are not limited to social bookmarking. Social Bookmarking helped make tagging popular so they are often called tagging systems and the act of using one is often called tagging. Now social bookmarking has moved beyond the internet to move inside the enterprise through tools such as Connectbeam. At the same time, more and more other tools are allowing for tagging as they realize its benefits.

Going to the full definition of tags (metadata) in Wikipedia, we find that, “Tagging was popularized by websites associated with Web 2.0 and is an important feature of many Web 2.0 services. It is now also part of some desktop software.”

This widespread use of tags beyond social bookmarking, while providing an added benefit within these systems, has the potential to create multiple silos of tags within the enterprise. This issue is one that we are working on and I will be writing more about it in the coming weeks.

More on the Rise of Social Bookmarking and Social Networking in Enterprise 2.0

The recent Gilbane report on Collaboration and Social Media-2008 has some interesting statistics. In their research Gilbane looked at medium-sized to very large companies — $25 million or above in revenue and more than 250 employees in size. They picked this size as they felt firms of this size or larger are most likely to be seeking solutions to their communications, collaboration, and information sharing problems. I would agree. Working with the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, headed by Nora Barnes, the survey researchers conducted telephone interviews with 286 respondents in November and December 2007.

Among other things they looked at how people were using social media and how they felt about a number of social media, both channels that might be considered Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. When asked to rate different media as "very effective" - social bookmarking – (46%), mashups (48%), and social networking (59%) achieved the three highest scores of enterprise 2.0 tools , well ahead of blogs, wikis. podcasts, and even RSS. They also added that social bookmarking adoption rates are expected to grow significantly (66%) next year. This is consistent with the Forrester Reports I commented on earlier (see Forrester Predicts a Large Growth in Social Networking Market but How Will Its Integration Occur with the Enterprise?) and more recently (Forrester Reports that Corporate Social Networks will Augment Strategic HR Strategies). I am pleased to see this growing recognition of the value of social bookmarking and social networking within the enterprise.

They conclude their extensive report with the following statement. “Over the next five years, we expect the social media tools and technologies to continue to improve, the domain knowledge to expand, and the methodologies to become more sophisticated. Among the emerging population of digital natives, collaboration skills are well developed and participation in communities is a way of life. All in all, we believe that collaboration and social media will be among the fastest-growing technologies and that the information needs of business people throughout the world will be better served.”

This report is further validation that there is a growing market here. Members of our team were recently at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston where we served as a sponsor. We heard that attendance was double from last year and last year was double the year before. We certainly had a lot of interest in our booth and were glad to attend.

More on Integrating Enterprise 2.0 Social Data

I am pleased to see more conversation on creating the integrated Enterprise 2.0 environment. In this case it occurs in a blog post under that name by Ben Gardener on Dif-fer-en-ti-ate. Ben is an internal consultant at a large blue chip Pharmaceutical company based in the UK. His current role involves facilitating clients with re-engineering their work processes.

Ben lays out an architecture to get the social side of enterprise data acting together. There are three components in his scheme.

1. Single User ID – so users have a single identity across all the tools. As Ben writes, Enterprise 2.0 has a big advantage over Web 2.0 as it can leverage this via LDAP or Active Directory.

2. RSS Enterprise Server – an RSS enterprise server could provide a tacit method of aggregating all content from social computing applications with an RSS feed.

3. Tagging Service - this would provide a way to aggregate all keywords/tagging and annotations a user assigns to the content they interact with along with their microblogging.

Ben writes that this approach is achievable. I would agree and it is something we are looking into as it would be very beneficial to the realization of the rich connections possible with enterprise 2.0. I will be writing more on this in the coming weeks. See the post Providing an Integrated Tagging Feature Set for the conversation so far.

Providing an Integrated Tagging Feature Set

John Eckman wrote an interesting post, Enterprise 2.0 Conference - Social Bookmarking and Tagging, after attending the session of Thomas Vander Wal. Thomas is the man who coined the term “folksonomy. ” The wikipedia now defines this term as “the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is generated not only by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content.” It also gives Thomas credit for its origins.

John focuses provides the presentation from Thomas’s session and focuses on the portion where he says “the tools are “too simple” - where their feature set isn’t the one most likely to lead to effective use by the most users. Stemming, an awareness of the danger of single tags, recognition of co-occurrence of tags, inline help and context setting, as well as an awareness by the tagging application of the social environment in which the user operates, all can lead to a more effective tagging experience.” Thomas says that tags can be lacking structure and less effective when there is no grouping of taggers, the ID does not tie to a person or profile, and there is a lack of a relationship with the tagger. He also adds that they need to work across many applications and services.

I agree completely with both John and Thomas. This is our goal at Connectbeam as I have written in a number of posts on this blog. We want to provide a tagging capability that integrates to enterprise applications, as well as profile information on the tagger and their communities. We combine social bookmarking with social networking. I will not repeat past posts but you can find how this works at the following:

Connectbeam and Microsoft Announce Spotlight ConnectTM for SharePoint 2007

Connecting Social Networking and Social Bookmarking

Connectbeam Release 2.2 Offers Enhanced Enterprise Application Integration Opportunities for Social Networking and Social Bookmarking

New Online Community for Collaboration and Content Management - Content Management Connection

A few weeks ago, I joined George Dearing’s social networking group, Content Management Connection. It is an “online community for technology practitioners, software companies, and end users to share thoughts and ideas on the changing landscape of content management and collaboration. This site is produced by The Dearing Group LLC., a marketing and new media communications company.”

There are 46 bloggers the last time I looked. A number of the participating blogs are already on my blog list and others look interesting. You can add your own blog to have it reach a new audience. It also has news, events, and surveys. In addition, there are features like most read posts, ability to comment on posts, quick surveys with instant results, most discussed authors, most active authors, most highly rated posts, etc.

George also writes his own blog on new media, marketing, and technology. I liked his post on 3 mistakes customers make with their content. Essentially, he warns people against buying on price or personal reasons and using last decade’s technology but goes into more detail. I think these are also more likely the last decade's buying practices but agree with George that they are still around. With all the integration possibilities within enterprise 2.0 these tendencies can cause even more problems now for the buyers who uses them. George also regularly publishes links to key content management and enterprise 2.0 reports and blog posts.

Forrester Reports that Corporate Social Networks will Augment Strategic HR Strategies

Zach Thomas of Forrester recently came out with a report, Corporate Social Networks will Augment Strategic HR Strategies, which stated that enterprise social networking applications are an emerging trend. Assisting on the report were Paul Hamerman, Claire Schooley, Charlene Li, and Meghan Donnelly. Zach added that many business processes could benefit from these applications. He wrote in the summary, “savvy human resources (HR) professionals are taking the lead and using them for recruiting, alumni programs, mentoring, learning, collaboration, and connecting people across the entire organization. They understand that corporate social networks are not a replacement for human interactions; this technology should augment — not replace — existing process automation apps, and they will need broad internal support for their initiatives to succeed.”

This has been a theme at Connectbeam and we are pleased to see these conclusions from Forrester. The report begins with a section titled, “professional networks are the backbone of business.” I could not agree more. He points out that collaboration translates into innovation, strong personal ties increase employee retention and they help with sales. He added that failure to establish a means to support this networking can result in lost knowledge when someone leaves, difficulties in finding the right people to help with pressing business challenges, failure to optimize relationships across geographies, and disappointment in younger workers who experience these networks outside work and expect them to be provided on the job. These younger employees may then turn to consumer web tools that are not designed to support business functions (see The Role of Facebook in the Enterprise) and will only operate in silos of the subset who might engage with them.

Zach offers a number of useful HR related applications for social networking applications in the report. It is nice to see Forrester continue to cover enterprise 2.0 and social networking. They predicted in an earlier report on the enterprise web 2.0 market that social networking applications will make up the largest share of the $4.6 billion that enterprises will be spending on enterprise web 2.0 applications by 2013 (see Forrester Predicts a Large Growth in Social Networking Market but How Will Its Integration Occur with the Enterprise?).

Zach divides the corporate social networking software market providers into three groups: targeted solution providers, adjacent solution providers, and platform players such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Connectbeam is included in his list of targeted solution providers and points out that we operate behind the firewall. We feel this offers greater security, control, and integration into company IT infrastructure than operating out in the cloud. Zach predicts that larger established application vendors will lag behind innovators in this space. At the same time, he predicts that many firms will stay with established tools such as Sharepoint as the market matures. This is one reason we recently announced our Sharepoint integration. He concludes with the good advice to align social networking tools with pressing business problems.

Connectbeam and Microsoft Announce Spotlight ConnectTM for SharePoint 2007

Today, I am pleased that Connectbeam and Microsoft jointly announced, at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008, Spotlight Connect™ for SharePoint, an add-on module allowing for the integration of Connectbeam Spotlight™ (formerly referred to simply as Connectbeam) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Availability for the add-on module is planned for July. Our Spotlight Connect™ allows SharePoint to better leverage the “social metadata” that is generated naturally as employees interact with information and colleagues. Now each person’s tags, bookmarks, as well as relevance rankings of these indicators become available and useful to everyone in the organization from within the Office SharePoint Server 2007 platform.

A large part of Andrew McAfee’s original vision in Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, was the ability to support more spontaneous, knowledge-based collaboration. He wrote back in 2006, “These new tools, the author contends, may well supplant other communication and knowledge management systems with their superior ability to capture tacit knowledge, best practices and relevant experiences from throughout a company and make them readily available to more users.” We feel the integration of Connectbeam Spotlight increases the enterprise 2.0 impact of Sharepoint and is part of our ongoing efforts to integrate with enterprise applications.

Connectbeam Spotlight gives employees across the company not only a platform for finding highly relevant information and documents quickly, but also for discovering the people and expertise behind that content. Spotlight makes the social metadata, the data that describes the experiences and knowledge of colleagues from across the company, accessible to everyone through a central tag repository. Here is a demonstration of the Connectbeam Spotlight integration with Office SharePoint Server 2007.

One of our mutual clients, Thomas Chapin, Director, Knowledge Management, WBB Consulting in Reston, Virginia, said, “The fact that Connectbeam allows the capture and use of actual day-to-day and historical human experience in an organization (in conjunction with their central tag repository) means that when paired with SharePoint Server 2007, all the promise about collaboration can actually happen… naturally. As an enterprise license holder of both Connectbeam Spotlight and SharePoint, we’re pretty excited about the possibilities.” So are we. I will have more about this in upcoming posts.

Enterprise 2.0 2008 Conference Offers Discount

Connectbeam is pleased to be a sponsor of the Enterprise 2.0 conference. As a sponsor, you can use our discount code CMBYEB34 to get a 20% discount on attendance if you use the Enterprise 2.0 Conference link to register. We will be speaking on "Context is Everything!" on Tuesday June 10 from 5:05 - 5:15 PM. We hope to see you there. The conference will be held at the Westin Boston Waterfront in Boston, MA from Monday, June 9th through Thursday, June 12th. It is a great event with many of the leading thinkers in the Enterprise 2.0 space.

AIIM Research Shows Need for Integrated Approach to Enterprise 2.0

Carl Frappaolo recently wrote in his Taking AIIM Blog, a post on Putting the E in E 2.0. He noted that in their recent research on enterprise 2.0, Market IQ, that they found few organizations have taken a strategic and holistic approach to deployment. He wrote, “In terms of "Enterprise 2.0", in most organizations today, enterprise refers only to use of Web 2.0 technologies within the firewall, not the application of these technologies across the enterprise, leveraged as a truly enterprise resource. This piecemeal approach to deployment, our research found, typically leads to fragmented pockets of functionality, whose value is not maximized or shared across the enterprise.” I could not agree more. His organization is now offering training programs to address this issue.

Our latest product directions at Connectbeam are designed to address this fragmentation. We now allow for integration of our Connectbeam social networking and social bookmarking capabilities with enterprise applications such as Google Search and Sharepoint to look across the enterprise and share the social context of information. We will soon be announcing some new initiatives to take this a step further and help aggregate the social information across the enterprise from multiple sources. I will be writing about it soon on this blog.

“People and Information are Deeply Mismatched in Most Organizations” - Andrew McAfee

Andrew McAfee recently posted on - What I Said About the Revolution. He said that at a recent event he was asked to "Briefly describe a “design flaw” or “impediment” that undermines the capacity of organizations to adapt, innovate, or fully engage the talents of their members." In response to this question, Andrew said in bold that, “Impediment or design flaw: People and Information are Deeply Mismatched in Most Organizations.”

Andrew went on to write, “it is striking how few opportunities people have to generate, modify, and share information freely and widely on the Intranet, especially when compared with their abilities to do the same on the Internet. Since so many organizations describe people as their most important assets, it is puzzling why these opportunities are so constrained.”

In response to this challenge, Andrew proposed the following again in bold, “Radical Remedy: Create an Emergent, Social Enterprise Information Environment.” He added, “This environment should contain mechanisms to let structure emerge over time; such mechanisms include linking, tagging, voting, rating, and trading, as well as algorithms that generate recommendations, assess relative popularity, etc.”

As you might imagine, I agree completely with his diagnosis and his remedy. This has been our goal at Connectbeam from the start. We want to connect people through their ideas and provide a number of the features that Andrew describes above. It is nice to hear this position articulated by one of the most respected new IT thinkers. Andrew was recently selected as number 38 on the top 100 Most Influential People in IT by Ziff Davis. As an aside, Andrew credited his blog as a major reason for this influence. I hope he continues with messages such as the one above.

Infovark - Blog “Digging the World Of Enterprise 2.0”

Dean Thrasher and Gordon Taylor write the blog, Infovark. They also run the enterprise 2.0 software company by the same name, headquartered in Northern Virginia. Their first product, also call Infovark will appear later this year. I am sure they are hard at work getting this out but they have also managed to write the blog since September 07, when they founded the company.

They recently responded to my post on Making the Enterprise Knowledge Market More Robust in a post, What do you know?. They wrote, “The real knowledge in your enterprise is in your colleagues’ brains” and add later, “Most people learn more things from each other than from reading a procedure manual or browsing the corporate library.” Not understanding this simple premise was the problem with many traditional knowledge management efforts. I agree and this is the premise of Connectbeam, making it easy to connect people around business ideas.

Dean and Gordon are providing some useful commentary on other enterprise 2.0 bloggers (e.g., Jon Husband and Kathy Sierra) on enterprise 2.0 and productivity. Their blog has an interesting feature. There is the regular blog, and then the underground blog. When you click on the underground part - you find the link back to the front end is referred to overground. The overground blog has more traditional commentary posts and conceptual pieces about their product development efforts. The underground is where they share some of the technology and experiences they run into as they build Infovark. It is much more about the technical bits. This is nice way of splitting their content for two different audiences.

Dean and Gordon are also big on Twitter and you can access their Twitter feed from their blog if you what even more immediate indications about what they are up to. I look forward to their release.

Biggest Enterprise & Web 2.0 Business Obstacles: Security and Information Leakage

Actually, those two issues sound like variations on the same theme. A recent study reported in eWeek, Enterprises Diving into Web 2.0 Waters, said that, “When asked to name their two biggest concerns with social networks and other Web 2.0 technologies, respondents named security more than any other issue (41 percent), followed by a fear that these open platforms would result in leaks of sensitive company information (35 percent).” At the same time adoption of “web 2.0 technologies” was largely driven by the desire to help workers inside the firewall with 82 percent of respondents indicating serving current employees was the adoption driver. Consistent with this goal, when asked about the goal for implementing the new web technologies, 71 percent of respondents said improved communication and collaboration among internal staff, while only 46 percent said it was improved communication and collaboration with customers.

Like other studies on enterprise usage, the study found little love for consumer social networking tools like Facebook but instead businesses looked for tools designed for business objectives. There has been some talk in the press about social networking tools having a negative effect on productivity. The study found the opposite as only 15 percent of respondents worried that the use of the new web tools would cause a hit to employee productivity. Cost reduction is also not a driver even thought some tools are free. Only 15 percent of respondents to the survey named “reduction in IT costs through the use of free apps” as one of their two biggest drivers for implementing Web 2.0. This is not surprising as a free tool might not be the first choice to an enterprise buyer who wants proper support and continuity from the software provider.

The article also quoted a Forrester study that found “three challenges face vendors: IT shops are wary of what they perceive as insecure, consumer-grade technology; ad-supported Web 2.0 tools on the consumer side have set ‘free’ as a starting point; and Web 2.0 technologies enter a crowded space dominated by legacy software investments.”

All of these trends align with our goals at Connectbeam. The security issue was one reason we created Connectbeam as an application packaged and delivered as an Appliance that sits behind company firewall. It is also designed to not compete with legacy enterprise applications but, instead, we integrate with many of them. We did not modify a consumer Web 2.0 application for the enterprise but designed a social networking application for making business connections within the enterprise. The study found that twenty-seven percent of respondents said they had implemented a social network for use at their company and Forrester sees this number as growing, both in an absolute sense and as a percentage of the enterprise 2.0 tools that organizations adopt. This also makes sense as blogs and wikis, the current leaders, can be brought in on an individual basis without approval. A social networking tool has a broader enterprise reach and requires approvals at broader levels to be effective. We are seeing that an increasing number of firms understand the value of business social networking tools and feel excited about what is happening in the market.

Connectbeam Enterprise Social Computing Covered at Minnibar 2008

Matt Craven at Blog Herald recently blogged about a presentation at the May 10th Minnibar by Rich Heog that included his firm’s use of Connectbeam. Minnibar is the Minnesota version of barcamp with the description, “Technology & Design (un)Conference: No Spectators, Only Participants.” Their site is a wiki and is a great use of that tool. There were over 423 participants and the site contains photos, media mentions, blog posts, Twitter updates, and other related information and links.

Matt attended Rich’s presentation and blogged it live. He wrote, “Connectbeam integrates with Exchange Server, if that’s your poison, and integrates with internal Google search appliances as well as external Google searches. It’s not an issue integrating services like LinkedIn, Facebook, and others into the Connectbeam platform.” He later adds that his firm has “tried for years to build a skills database to let folks connect with each other - the tagging within Connectbeam has really fulfilled that function. Senior leaders (direct reports of CEO) are using the system to some extent - and want to foster more connectivity amongst individual contributors throughout the company.”

You can see the whole post at Minnebar: Social Search in the Corporate Environment on Blog Herald. Thanks to Matt and Rich for the coverage. As their site states, “The Blog Herald was founded by Duncan Riley in March 2003 as a premium source of blog and blogging related news for bloggers. It was the first blog dedicated exclusively to the news of the blogosphere and remains the longest (and largest) standing resource of its kind.” Matt Craven is the former editor & publisher of The Blog Herald. Currently, Matt is the co-founder of Bryghtpath LLC, a boutique web 2.0 firm located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He blogs at Telegraphik & The Blog Herald.

Rich Heog also covered his Minnibar talk on his eContent blog in the post, Managing Your Most Important Asset: Knowledge, with photo of the presentation. We continue to appreciate his coverage of Connectbeam..

Daniela Barbosa Chitchating about Information Delivery

Daniela Barbosa writes the wonderful blog, Chitchating about Information Delivery. The very prominent blog, ReadWriteWeb recently named her one of the Seven Leading Corporate Social Media Evangelists. It said, “Daniela Barbosa is the Business Development Manager, at Synaptica, a division of Dow Jones Client Solutions. Barbosa is one of the most prominent advocates of semantic technology and data portability inside of a legacy institution. Her personal blog leverages almost every bleeding edge web technology you can think of.”

Her blog also includes a beautiful banner of photos across the top and then excellent content underneath with a lot of cool widgets running down the right column. I need to ask where she got some of that stuff. The archives go back to February 2005.

Daniela gives bloggers some good advice in her post, I Knew There was a Reason I Never Started Smoking, I Was Waiting for Something Better. She writes that it is important to understand the behavior that drives people to read blogs if you want to make them successful. Then Daniela covers a small sample study she found on the blog, Paid Content. Many of the bloggers were more obsessive than me about reading their favorite blogs but the idea that stuck out for me was the comment by one of the respondents that she quotes, “Rather than focusing on helping readers wade through a deluge of information content, one could envision tools that focus on the reader’s relationship with the blogger or allowing more fluid, nuanced interactions between bloggers and readers.”

Daniela went on the think of some ways to expand the engagement between readers and bloggers such as matching the readers 'Attention' to specific blog posts so the first posts the visitor sees when visiting a blog are the most relevant to them based on their current attention profile, allowing readers to comment beyond text for example with video replies, and allowing 'real-time' chat on blogs once you post some content.

I find the first one the most intriguing. You can do that manually now in a primitive by going to the categories on this blog that interest you but a more sophisticated multi-dimensional tag-based profile might provide better matches. We also have Google site search on this blog to help you find past content that is off the front page. Perhaps adding more social features like we do with the Google Search Application for the enterprise might enrich the readers experience and the connections with other readers of the blog. When we integrate Connectbeam with Google Search Appliance inside the firewall the combination provides additional ranking based on number of times tagged. This Google integration also offers related tags, related users, and related communities. You are able to see who else did the same search, what they found, what they thought about it, and are provided with the ability to contact this person with a similar interest. What do you think? Daniela asks for more ideas and I do also.

Connecting Social Networking and Social Bookmarking

According to many surveys, including the Forrester report I recently commented on, social networking is on the rise within the enterprise. I will continue to discuss our new directions on this blog, as well as general thoughts on our industry, but before going on, I want to share our fundamental belief about how to make social networking effective within the enterprise. It has to be built around business information access and discovery. This is why we integrated social networking and social bookmarking within Connectbeam from the start. As we mention on our web site, our goal is to connect people with ideas. We do this through four interrelated approaches: social bookmarking and tagging that leads to information discovery: social networking that leads to people discovery: expertise location that leads to communities of interest; and collective intelligence that provides the most relevant search results and their social context. We see these connections helping people within our clients to solve their business problems. We have found that Connectbeam spreads virally across an enterprise as people see the results of connecting the information and social sides of search. It makes enterprise 2.0 concrete without referring to the term or needing to propose the concept in the abstract.

We work in a standalone mode or integrated with other enterprise applications such as Portals like Sharepoint, Enterprise Search sytems like Google Search Appliance, FAST, and more, to add social context to search and allow for more social networking around search for information. I have covered the Sharepoint integration elsewhere. We also connect with Google Search Appliance, and FAST to provide additional ranking based on number of times tagged. This Enterprise Search Integration also offers related tags, related users, and related communities right within these enterprise search application front-ends. You are able to see who else did the same search, what they found, what they thought about it, and are provided with the ability to contact this person with a similar interest. Just as with our Sharepoint integration, our Google and FAST integration takes the Google Search Appliance and FAST even deeper into enterprise 2.0.This Enterprise Search connection not only integrates social bookmarking with social networking, but it also integrates social networking with search. These are just two examples of how we integrate with existing IT applications. I will cover the full spectrum of our integration with spans beyond portals and enterprise search into additional enterprise IT applications in subsequent posts.

We also wanted to take a novel approach to implementation to be more competitive with the large players entering this space. With a rapidly changing technology, we did not want clients to have to deal with implementation and deployment (getting the application up and running) concerns and face any issues with upgrades. This is why we created a hardware and software solution combined, packaged and delivered as a turn key Appliance that allows for a real plug and play solution to get things not only inside the firewall but also inside the box. It also enables one click back up and restores, one click upgrades, and automatic authentication to your enterprise directory services. We have been pleased that a number of the very large enterprises have adopted Connectbeam. Given their respective markets, these clients have appreciated the security, control, and flexibility around deep IT integration that the box offers, as well as our basic social software functionality.

Making the Enterprise Knowledge Market More Robust

McKinsey was recently promoting some of their classic reports. One of them caught my eye, Making a market in knowledge. This report, produced in 2004, starts with this observation.

“Put simply, there is great value in sharing, across a whole company, proprietary insights into customers, competitors, products, production techniques, emerging research, and the like. In practice, of course, companies find it far more difficult than do individuals to take advantage of all this knowledge. An individual's knowledge is self-contained, always available. But in companies—including small ones—it can be hard to exploit the valuable knowledge in the heads of even a few hundred employees, particularly if they are scattered in different locations. In a large, diverse company, the task expands to cover thousands of highly educated professionals and managers spread across a variety of specialties, locations, even countries. But difficult as it may be to profit from this diffused knowledge, the power that such large-scale interaction yields can dwarf what individuals or small teams, however brilliant or effective, can accomplish.”

I find this well stated and still true. This is our goal at Connectbeam. The authors go to describe three approaches to knowledge management that have not realized their promise. First is "build it and they will come," then there is "take it from the top," and the last is to "let a thousand web sites bloom." They actually say that the last version has been more successful, allowing organization units to solve their own knowledge problems. However, they point out that this only helps the small groups connected to the specialized knowledge and does not address the company-wide knowledge exchanges that are often needed.

The authors then say that rather than trying to management knowledge why not look at it as a market issue. Make the benefits of providing knowledge greater than the cost. Recognition is often the main benefit for knowledge providers within an organization. They suggest increasing the benefits to the knowledge provider. The problem with many traditional approaches to knowledge management is that the cost to the knowledge provider is quite high so then the benefits have to be that much higher. The authors offer a rather elaborate market system to orchestra these exchanges with costs in the millions. Remember this is 2004.

Now in 2008 we can use new capabilities and concepts to combine social bookmarking with social networking and lower the cost of knowledge exchange. What we have attempted to do with Connectbeam is to dramatically reduce the cost of contributing knowledge so there is more universal participation and thus greater benefits for the provider, who gets more recognition, and the user who gets access to a more comprehensive set of knowledge and experts. Instead of contributing knowledge, you simply tag knowledge that is a developed as part of work. Then colleagues can easily see the relevant documents and experts to their knowledge searches. All of the members of the organization and the work they produce become the dynamic knowledge management system. The benefits to the knowledge provider go up with broader recognition just the costs go down, a good market dynamic that should encourage participation. This is what we are finding with our customers.

Connectbeam is a Sponsor at Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008

Connectbeam is pleased to be a sponsor of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 held in Boston June 9-12. As the conference describes itself, “the Enterprise 2.0 Conference is the largest and most important gathering for the people ready to reinvent the way work is done.” There is an Enterprise 2.0 Blog to cover the conference.

There is an impressive list of speakers including David Berlind, TechWeb; Stowe Boyd, The Messengers; Maggie Fox, Social Media Group; Dion Hinchcliffe, Web 2.0 Journal; Carl Frappaolo, AIIM Market Intelligence; Andrew McAfee, Harvard Business School; and many others. Come and see us at the demo pavilion. Hours are Tuesday, June 10
, 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM
 and 4:30 PM – 6:30 PM, as well as Wednesday, June 11
 - 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
 and 4:30 PM – 6:30 PM. On Tuesday June 10th we will be giving a quick talk from 4:45 to 4:55, Context is Everything. We invite you to come and take a look how we turn ‘raw’ enterprise search into ‘social’ search. We hope to see you there.

My Conversation with Matt Moore on Social Bookmarking and Social Networking

I was recently interviewed by Matt Moore, from Sydney Australia, who writes and records the blog, Engineers without Fears. The interview is available as a podcast through his post, podcast - puneet gupta - connectbeam. I was first asked to compare Connectbeam to applications on the consumer web. I mentioned del.icio.us along with Facebook and LinkedIn since we combine social bookmarking with social networking. We made this combination since we feel that connections within the enterprise are best done around ideas and information.

With Connectbeam the content you bookmark can come from many sources inside or outside the enterprise. We can then build a social framework around these tags. This allows you to discover the social context of tags. Matt asked me about usage levels and benefits. I said that we see increased uptake as awareness builds. We are often brought into a firm by people who saw similar capabilities on the consumer web. Then awareness spreads as people see the value.

Another aspect of our solution that is most appealing to businesses and enterprise is the deep level of integration we offer into existing IT infrastructure. For example, if you have an enterprise search engine (e.g. Google Search Appliance, FAST, Microsoft Sharepoint, ...) - Connectbeam can enhance the search experience for your users by turning 'raw' search into 'social' search. Showing you what was useful to whom, and in what context. And providing you the ability to tag search result content, and connect with related users and experts.

As for quantitative benefits, I said we are finding that our customers are not squarely focused on that question just as when email and IM were introduced nobody sat down to draw out a detailed ROI spreadsheet. We are seeing customers receive value in areas like expertise location, helping to pull together the right people for the right job, onboarding new employees faster, retaining and capturing knowledge and information from workers which is otherwise lost in transition or worker turnover. Connectbeam can save a lot of time in this area and lead you to find the people that might not have been uncovered by other means. This can be very helpful in large global organizations.

There is much more on Matt’s podcast. I invite you to listen to our conversation.

Forrester Predicts a Large Growth in Social Networking Market but How Will Its Integration Occur with the Enterprise?

Forrester recently released their projections for the Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 To 2013. The report was produced by Oliver Young and some of his colleagues. They said in the summary that, “Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013, with social networking, mashups, and RSS capturing the greatest share. In all, the market for enterprise Web 2.0 tools will be defined by commoditization, eroding prices, and subsumption into other enterprise collaboration software over the next five years; it will eventually disappear into the fabric of the enterprise, despite the major impacts the technology will have on how businesses market their products and optimize their workforces.”

Our new Release 2.2 provides the application integration capability through our web services Application Programming Interface (API) that enables you to add the full functionality of Connectbeam social software into existing IT applications. This capability will allow the social context of information and people to become fully integrated into the fabric of the enterprise. While this can occur on a transparent basis, I would not use the word disappear to describe this integration. To be fair I do not think that Forrester really means that Enterprise Web 2.0 will go away but that social context applications will simply be part of most, if not all, enterprise applications and a standard way of doing business.

We are taking this enterprise-wide social context integration a step further with our Release 2.2. Most enterprise 2.0 tools and most social tools (e.g. wikis, blogs, etc.) are adding their own social networking and tagging features. However, the real value of social networking and tagging is only realized if they are detached from any single application. For example, while I am working inside many wikis, I can network with others who are also inside the same wiki. That unfortunately does not lend claim to 'true' social networking across the enterprise. Instead, it has the potential to create more silos.

Our APIs are bi-directional so we can draw tagging and networking information from multiple sources, breaking down the silos and setting the table for true enterprise wide integration of the social context of information. In upcoming posts I will further explore how Connectbeam can help break through these silos of information. It is this capability that can truly make social networking and tagging part of the fabric of the enterprise

We were interviewed as part of the research for the Forrester report and you can order it through the Forrester web site. ReadWriteWeb also offers a useful summary and I draw these summary comments from their post, Enterprise 2.0 to Become a $4.6 Billion Industry by 2013. First, Forrester excluded consumer services like Blogger, Facebook, Netvibes, and Twitter from their predictions. They felt that these services are aimed at consumers, often supported by ads, and do not qualify as Enterprise 2.0 tools. I agree with their assessment. There are possible roles for these tools within some enterprises as I wrote in The Role of Facebook in the Enterprise: A Post Script but they are not the tools for enterprise business applications.

One of the most interesting findings to us at Connectbeam was their projection that most of the revenue growth will occur in social networking tools. Enterprise 2.0 is often defined as social software so this should make sense. They rank social networking ahead of blogs, wikis, podcasts, and widgets on the growth curve. Mashups come in second. Now here is where it gets tricky as many social applications are using a form of mashups to integrate with other enterprise applications as Connectbeam is doing through its Application Programming Interface mentioned above. I do agree that social networking is the big new thing and would just add that mashups are the highway for social software integration with enterprise applications.

Connectbeam Release 2.2 Offers Enhanced Enterprise Application Integration Opportunities for Social Networking and Social Bookmarking

At Connectbeam we have integrated social networking and social bookmarking to enable and support personal connections around work-related ideas within the enterprise. Now we have taken this connection capability a step further as Release 2.2 introduces the Connectbeam web services Application Programming Interface (API) that now enables you to add the full functionality of Connectbeam social software into existing IT applications. The Connectbeam web services API consists of a series of programming interfaces that have been modularized into functional areas such as Social Search, Bookmarking and Tagging, Social Network, and Communities - allowing you to pick and chose the functionality you chose to integrate into your existing applications and IT infrastructure.

For example, integration with Sharepoint allows for the provision of social context data with the information Sharepoint normally provides. Here is a brief demonstration of how this Sharepoint integration works. In the demo a term, java, is entered into the Sharepoint search field. The standard Sharepoint response comes back in the left column of the screen. On the right side additional contextual information is seamlessly delivered through Connectbeam. You can see a listed of related tags, related users, and related bookmarks. Clicking on any of these links brings you to additional information relevant information about the social context of the search. For example, the clicking on one of the related user provides a list of the documents this person has tagged with the search term.

In the second example of Sharepoint integration in the demo, we take you to the profile page of the Sharepoint user. There is an “about me” tab that is part of the standard Sharepoint interface. Next to it is a “social context” tab that brings information from Connectbeam. For the individual who is profiled, you can now see their tags, their bookmarks, and their communities. Each item in each list is a live link to more information. In both cases, the integration between Connectbeam and Sharepoint is complete and not apparent to the user who sees the additional social information as part of the same interface. You can design the interface so the user is not aware there is another application providing this social context.

This integration is certainly not limited to Sharepoint. Connectbeam can integrate with most enterprise applications with open APIs, providing a personalized social context to your company’s information. An increasing number of enterprise applications such as SAP and PeopleSoft are opening their APIs, expanding the playing field for this potential integration. This can open many new opportunities for collaboration with known and previously unknown colleagues. All this information exchange sits safely behind the firewall.

In addition to this enhanced integration capability, Connectbeam’s new Release 2.2 also includes other features. There is automatic user provisioning for LDAP to eliminate extra user registration processes and dynamic email address lookup for ease of community invitations. Enhanced licensing infrastructure also allows you to better monitor application usage and adoption. Multi-language support is offered for global implementations. More information can be found on our Connectbeam web site. Thanks to the AppGap blog for covering this release, Connectbeam Offers New Social Networking Application Integration Possibilities.

Connectbeam at Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2008 - April 6-10 in Las Vegas

If you are planning to attend the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2008 in Las Vegas on April 6-10, 2008 come by the Connectbeam booth for a product demo and a chance to win an Apple TV.

We are located at booth #122.

The conference takes place at the Mandalay Bay Hotel.

Connectbeam is also proud to share the Gartner's Cool Vendor spotlight with Alfabet, Intalio, Opalis, and Primavera.

Connectbeam launches VMWare Virtual Appliance

We are very pleased to launch today - Connectbeam Virtual Appliance.

Connectbeam Virtual Appliance gives users and companies the option to download, directly from our website, full-featured Social Bookmarking and Social Networking application, and immediately get started.

The entire application can literally be up and running inside your company in a matter of minutes.

If you have a VMPlayer installed, simply go to our download page to download Connectbeam application.

If you dont have the VMPlayer installed, you can download it for free here.

For many companies Virtual Appliance will continue to suffice the need.
For those who wish to get started quickly, can now start their evaluation and deployment with the Virtual Appliance. As the usage grows, Connectbeam application provides a seamless migration path from the Virtual Appliance to our high-end Physical Appliance using the backup and restore feature under the administration console.

Value of Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise

Thomas Vanderwal, a principle at InfoCloud Solutions, also best known for coining the term 'folksonomy' and 'infocloud' writes about the value of Social bookmarking in the Enterprise.

Every organization needs to know itself better then they currently do. The employees and members of the organization are all trying to do their job better and smarter. The need to connect people inside an organization with others with similar interest, contexts, and perceptions is really needed. I am a huge fan of social bookmarking tools to help along these lines as it helps people hold on to information they have need, want, or have interest in (particularly with future uses) and put things in their own context and perception. Once people understand the value they derive from using the tools to hold on to information out of their vast flow and streams of information and data that run before them each day they quickly "get it".

Full write-up can be found here...

InfoCloud Solutions provides a series of workshops for businesses and enterprises to better understand and evaluate social productivity applications.

Connectbeam releases 'one-click' application upgrade feature

We have always maintained that the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 applications should go beyond the collaboration and productivity increases for businesses, but should also translate into reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for these applications (particularly w.r.t. installation, set up, and maintenance).

To that end, with Release 2.0 of our product we have launched a breakthrough feature - Single Click Upgrade.

Most of today's behind the firewall applications require a multi-part, multi-step upgrade process that consume tremendous amount of time and resources.

With Connectbeam this process is reduced to a single click.

The screen shot below is from the Administration section of Connectbeam application. All it takes to upgrade to the next release (or patch) is a simple single click of the Upgrade button.

Socialmediatoday on Connectbeam

We recently had the pleasure of speaking with Bill Ives, author of the popular socialmediatoday blog.

He does a great job of describing our product solution, and captures the essence of our approach to social media inside enterprises quite accurately - when I described to him, that:

"Our fundamental belief is that social networking when it comes to businesses and enterprise, has to be front-ended with information access and discovery.”

Thus the networking begins around sharing information and social bookmarking comes into play. In addition to individual sharing, Connectbeam allows for group sharing through communities.

Why you need Connectbeam? Hear it from people out in the field...

We had the pleasure of recently giving a product demonstration to folks from PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Ricardo Sueiras and Martin Dugage are both well aware of issues facing enterprises around better and more effective collaboration, and information discovery. They are both smart and well connected on the scene with social software, and how it benefits enterprises, and have written about it on their respective blogs.

Excerpt from Ricardo's blog:

It was a really excellent demo. The product itself is simple enough to understand, and works on the concept of using tags to connect information to people and communities. By using the concept that users use internal and external datasources to find information (anything that can be linked) the application provides a front end for this data – infact, anything that can be linked (has a URL) is a valid datasource. If one doesn‘t exist, you can even write your own.

Excerpt from Martin's blog:

...it looks like a great knowledge sharing solution for the corporate world. We still are in a world where corporate people do write short blackberry e-mails and client deliverables, but do not publish what they know in the form of blog posts or wiki pages. It will change some day, and maybe suddenly, but not now, at least not in this country (France). So building and managing links across people and content - which is what KM is really about - should work much better if it's based on the current demand-oriented and quite selfish behaviors of the average corporate employee. As such, social bookmarking tools such as Connectbeam could be seen as the stepping stone to the cultural change we all want to see taking place.

Martin brings up a great point. Something that has been at the very core of the foundation of Connectbeam as a company. He captures the enterprise user landscape (and sentiment) as it is today. At Connectbeam, it has always been our belief, and most of us at Connectbeam have worked at large companies, that the basic psyche or fabric of what motivates, and how information is shared inside a business or an enterprise is vastly different from what we see out on the consumer Web. The status quo is exactly what Martin as outlined above.

We feel social bookmarking is the most frictionless, seamless, and least disruptive to the existing environment, and yet delivers unparalleled benefits.

Ricardo and Martin also brought up an interesting point about ownership of bookmarks. Please see our response to it on Ricardo's blog.

Connectbeam announces Release 2.0 and Starter Appliance trial offer for $1,995

Today, we are announcing the general availability of our product release version 2.0.

In partnership and feedback from several customers, we are proud to bring to you innovative and break-through product features and enhancements, that are easy to use, and delivered to the user at their place and point of search. This will further empower team collaboration, people and information discovery - leading to unparalleled worker productivity inside enterprises.

The product tour link from our website will give you a high level overview of the new product and features.

Customers challenged us to deliver an application solution around information access and discovery, and team collaboration that did the following:

Where ever the user turns to search (inside the company or outside), deliver to user search results and information from:

1. Their own collection
2. What others in their social network have contributed
3. What is inside the company (Intranet)
4. What they find outside the company (Internet)

We deliver this experience to the user by presenting their social graph and view of their collective intelligence right at their point of search by integrating Connectbeam with their search experience through their web browser. Connectbeam's patented design and architecture delivers this in a completely secure and bullet proof manner, since Connectbeam's Collective Search Toolbar is installed and driven from the Connectbeam Appliance which sits behind company firewall and in control of IT administrator.

Simply put, rather than asking user to turn to yet another social software site to find information to get their work done, we deliver the information to where ever the user turns to in their universe of search.

To see a full list of Connectbeam features, please click here.

To see different Appliance models, and feature comparison, please click here.

We are also announcing a limited time, trial offer for 500 users for 120 days for $1,995. This includes the Starter Appliance hardware and full featured Connectbeam application.

Customers can place the order online, directly from our website.

At the end of the trial period, customers can chose to renew and extend the license, or not renew. In either event, the Appliance is for customers to keep - they do not have to return it if they don't renew the license.
We understand, you will inevitably put proprietary and sensitive data on the Appliance, thus specifically for this reason to not jeopardize your data, we understand that the Appliance be not removed from your location.