Social messaging enables users to interact and share information. It includes micro blogging and micro sharing, but the most important aspect is to provide and receive information. Users can collect it as in passing.

Read the full article on n:sight // networked insights blog:

Social Messaging – A Definition

The social messaging study driven by n:sight arrived at the next stage. During the last days we got the input from ESME , bluekiwi, Flowr and Communote. All of these vendors offer their solution as SaaS (software as a service) and server installation.

SaaS is a good option for small companies or testing with small groups. You just need an account and you can start. Bigger companies will switch to the server installation, when they will start running social messaging with the all employees.

I made the experience on my workshops that’s much better to show something than explain the features. SaaS can also be used to start with your group and present the result to your management afterwards. Especially, if you use an open source solution like ESME or if it’s a free offer for small groups available like bluekiwi, Communote and Flowr provides.

All solution provides several options to do status updates. I like especially the option to create polls offered by bluekiwi and Flowr. It’s a nice way to ask colleagues about their opinion.

Tagging is a very important function to organize the content. It’s needed for any Enterprise 2.0 application. All four solutions provide tagging for status updates. A useful function is auto suggestion related to tags like offered by bluekiwi, Flowr and Communote.

API and other interfaces as input for status updates are available by all solutions. So it will be easy to connect other systems. Communote provides a XMPP interface to connect messaging solutions like ICQ or Windows Live Messenger. So it’s easy to integrate chat which is used nowadays in a lot of companies.

I am looking forward to read the next input from other vendors. You will be able to read more details when the study will be ready in September.

Today Twitter is a mainstream application. Millions of people are using it for sharing information and networking, because it’s fast and useful. What does it mean for using social messaging in enterprises?

I think we’ll see the same development like on the web with Twitter. It will work in companies as well. I had the following topics in mind coming to this conclusion.

Simplicity

It’s very easy to use. Just a link and a very short introduction are needed to start. You don’t need training. Simplicity is one reason for a low acceptance threshold.

Fast
Nowadays people expecting news just in time when information appeared. Social messaging is the right tool to meet this requirement. The communication with social messaging is close to real time. Any new topics are spread out immediately.

Getting to the point
The number of characters is limit. It’s not possible to write long prose. So the authors are forces to write short and concisely. The readers are getting quickly the point of the message. Social messaging save time and the content is better.

Networking
A user just need to invite people to follow him/her and a network of people is set up. From that point they can start to share information or to interact with each other.

Company Indicator
Social messaging shows the pulse of the organization. You can easily see which topics are hot. It can be used by the employees not to miss important information or by the management to do the right decisions. It’s like making the kitchenette public.

Notice board
Everybody can write his/her own notice board. It can be used by the CEO or every employee. You just need to take care that the right people follow you or select the right authors to follow.

Several news channels in one
On TV/radio you are able to get information from one channel only at the same time. You need to switch, if you want to get information from several topics. With social messaging you are getting information about all topics you are interested in close to real time. You just need to follow the right guy or to monitor the right terms. A list with most used terms will help to identify new important news

Expert finder
Searching for topics you will easily find people which are writing a regularly about this topic and you can easily check whether they are creating useful content. You can just follow or contact these experts.

Chat
Chat is used in private live by a lot of people or by some companies. It’s really useful to communicate with other people, but the existing tools are not so good chatting with several people at the same time. On social messaging the user can easily decide whether he will chat with the community or with a certain person only. To find older posts is also possible. Older posts are stored locally on chatting tools.

Scalable
The size of the company doesn’t matter. It can be used easily from a company with 5 people or a big group can use it. It’s only a matter of some server capacity and memory.

Social messaging is a real good connector and communicator. It’s probably the best news board which can be used in a company today. We will see it in a lot of companies soon.

We are providing a seminar in Germany about social messaging. Please, use this link for more information:

“Social messaging im Unternehmen”, 13.July 2010 in Frankfurt

I would like to know your optinion. Therefore I created a poll about this topic.
Do you think that social messaging will be the killer application of Enterprise 2.0?

It’s not a pilot anymore. It was too successful to stay in pilot phase. 50% of the employees are joining the (pilot) project after 6 month. CSC started Enterprise 2.0 as a pilot project, but not as a small one like usual. The project was limited by time and not by focus. “A small pilot project with a limited amount of people doesn’t reflect the whole company” commented Mark Masterson.

CSC is a consultancy and IT technology company with 94,000 employees in more than 90 countries. The project started with a presentation for the top management. His advice was to be well prepared. You need to show that you understand the business. Than a CIO will listen and support an E20 project.

I guess it was the right decision to run the project as change management project and not as an IT project. The IT infrastructure is needed, but generally it’s not the most challenging part. To change the user behavior is the biggest challenge on projects.

Some of his suggestion to run a successful Enterprise 2.0 project:
• Do not start just to do collaboration. The target needs to bring value for the business like collapse time and distance.
• Involve top managers of local entities
• Start with content. Otherwise the people will have only one look and they are gone
• Face to face meetings are helpful
• Allow private content. It’s not burning time. IT helps to reach the business targets. People must be able to play and the company will earn the benefits.

Mark presented a well done project in a enjoyable way. It shows that you can’t plan to go viral, but you need to plan it well and you need enough resources.

On June 9 and 10, the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 was held in Milan. Organized by Emanuele Quintarelli (aka @absolutesubzero), the event covered the latest development, trends and innovations in the Enterprise 2.0 field. Interestingly, the conference did not only look into the classical topics regarding E 2.0 inside the company, but also had tracks on the “outside” aspects like Social CRM and Sales Communities.

The day before the conference, there were additional workshops, e.g. on E 2.0 innovation, HR, or governance. I attended the one held by Sameer Patel (@SameerPatel) about the strategic aspects from inception to the launch of a E20 initiative. The focus here was on the business aspects of the successful E 2.0 implementation in an enterprise. I was positively surprised that almost all workshop participants were very well familiar with the topic of E 2.0 and already implementing or working with E20 tools. So Sameer was facing a “tough crowd” as he rightly put it. The concept of the workshop also included an interesting vendors’ panel where three experts answered the proposed questions of the participants. The session closed with a best practice case by Lago, a furniture manufacturer, who presented their socially enabled Intranet “Olga”. So we discussed the topic of E 2.0 from three different perspectives: consultant, vendor and user.

For me, the most lively and active part of the workshop was the vendors’ panel with blueKiwi, BroadVision and Telligent.

At one point of the discussion Sameer asked the vendors whether it was more successful to introduce Enterprise 2.0 top-down or bottom-up. Carlos Diaz (blueKiwi) said that at blueKiwi only a maximum of 15% of companies are doing it bottom-up, the rest is top-down. In his opinion, the top-down approaches were in the long run more healthy and better functioning – because when the management believes in the idea, then there will always be enough money, human resources, time etc. to carry the project properly. For clients trying to do it bottom-up, this is a much more difficult process.

That all makes sense, of course. But isn’t the whole idea of E 2.0 about breaking down hierarchies and letting things emerge? Mandating the use of Web 2.0 tools inside the company is contrary to this, but seems to work out in the end. Do we have to become a bit less idealistic about the idea of the free emergence of these tools and just put up with the fact that top-down is the better working and more commonly used approach? IMHO, no management can really force its employees to micro-share, blog etc. if they don’t want or aren’t ready for this yet. On the other hand, if started on grass-root levels, a strong backing from the management at some stage is essential, isn’t it?

Looking forward to your comments!

Recently, OpenText has announced very loudly an “integrated approach to Enterprise 2.0″ (see this page). As Craig Hepburn, Director of the Social Media Strategy at OpenText Web Solutions Group, is part of our upcoming conference I was quite eager what this buzz is all about.

We talked about 30 mins about the solution approach, the market and its development. Here are my notes to the interview:

• The OpenText 2.0 strategy consists of several product components - the more traditional compenents come from the LiveLink (for internal collaboration approaches) and Vignette (for external approaches) product. On top OpenText offers an updated version of the FirstClass groupware and messaging solutions. Besides traditional groupware and messaging functionality it provides a social network feature that brings a web-based social application towards the OpenText document and content world underneath.
• Like the other big players with ECM background this approach (1) provides a holistic and integrative view to the enterprise (if integrated the right way!) and (2) enhances the 1.0 document-/content-related business process by social information - but (3) is therefore also limited to the boundaries of these content/document object and the structuring of the information by business processes (in contract towards to the more flexible wiki information structure).
• Craig Hepburn points out the importance of the cultural background of companies - in this he sees also the main difference between E20 projects (and the E20 adoption in general) in the US and in Europe

For the full interview watch this:

Sevenload Direkt

I have done a short online video interview with Gonzalo Higueras from blueKiwi and Yan Neugebauer from Prisma EDV yesterday. Unfortunately we have had some technical problems regarding the quality of the recording for the desktop sharing and therefore for the demo (well, I guess Skype is not the best solution for that).

Anyway - the video still gives a good idea of what blueKiwi is about: It’s a kind-of enterprise microblogging solutions like Yammer or Communote. But as in comparison to the other approaches it differenciates in terms of structuring and organizing the discussions. While Yammer is very much focussed on group discussions and the idea of Communote is centered around a semantic tagging approach of micro discussions, blueKiwi (from perspective) is very much focussed on the discussions of ideas/issues/documents. So I would say this is more suitable to use cases where the motivation is to initiate some specific innovation processes - where as the other two approaches are better off for enhancing a general flow of communications within the company.

Another aspect that was pointing out by Gonzalo is the integration possibilities with document management systems (while this is very interesting the standardization of this approach has to be checked!). At this point the developments in the solutions market will be very interesting - as big players with strong DM background as IBM, Microsoft, Open Text and ORACLE are strongly pushing into this.

So here we go with the video:

Sevenload Direkt

I was linked this morning towards an article of the BusinessWeek that is discussing some statements of Socialtext CEO Eugene Lee about the preferable model of relationship for internal social applications.

SocialText CEO Eugene Lee argues that Twitter might be a better model than Facebook for next-gen communications within companies, so-called Enterprise 2.0. Facebook’s trouble? Reciprocal friending. The problem, he says, is that employees on corporate social networks start collecting friendships of execs. “Because the Rolodex is public, it becomes a matter of VP trading cards.”

A preferable model for corporate relationships, he says, is Twitter, where people lend their attention, not necessarily their friendship. In SocialText’s Twitter-like corporate offering, Signals , more people are likely to “follow” the CEO—assuming he or she has anything interesting to Tweet.

Despite the sales context of this statement I cannot agree more on this. As the objective of social apps within the enterprise is to increase transparency we need to inhibit any situation of asynchronous information. And refused reciprocal relations create asynchronous information. So "following" shows already my interest and my "trust" as well as recognition of any kind of "authority" of the followed person - but to refuse someone "following" me is to hindering him/her to get information he/she is interested in.

On the other hand there might be staff members that share some kind of "non public" information e.g. some R&D folks - how to proceed with these. Are the enterprises already ready for the full transparent information flow? Especially as the non-transparent competitor next door is just waiting to expose some competitive information and advantages?

What are your thoughts on this?

What is Enterprise 2.0 all about? IMHO - this is the most asked question when talking about this topic. As several bright heads have said before instead of theoretically talking about the Enterprise 2.0 vision we need to talk about use cases and case studies that show and unveil the power of this so-called “social business“. At the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT we have defined four different use cases that are going to be discussed along different best practices presentation. And while setting up an explanation of these use cases two days ago I ran along this nice post of Larry Hawes discussing the “nexus of business process & ad-hoc collaboration” that led me to an idea of a more broader view on the topic to be discussed in the following.

In his post Larry Hawes refers to post of Sameer Patel discussing the difference between ECM systems and social software:

ECM enables controlled, repeatable content publication processes, whereas social software empowers rapid, collaborative creation and sharing of content. There is a place for both in large enterprises. Sameer’s suggestion was that social software be used for authoring, sharing, and collecting feedback on draft documents or content chunks before they are formally published and widely distributed. ECM systems may then be used to publish the final, vetted content and manage it throughout the content lifecycle.

This relates to my understanding why enterprises need such thing as social software - because they need to change and to innovate in order to be more competitive in their markets. Consequently they have to discover new opportunities, ideas and information that is describing or representing these. And as a result from the organizational perspective companies need some kind of “reframing” of their business model.

Inspired by the post of Larry Hawes I would therefore describe the difference between established enterprise business applications and Enterprise 2.0 on a dimension of how the application is supporting the “reframing” process (I am explicitly not talking about “change” or “transformation” here because IMHO “change” is a consciousness thing needed to be done before and “transformation” might go far beyond the needed “reframing” in order to be up-to-date to customer and market expectations).

On this dimension established enterprise business application are “securing the precedent”. They support the planning-and-control-organization of the current operations by registering and certifiably documentating business incidents. The applications provide insights towards the historical status-quo of the business operations and can be distinguished by the business entity it is focussing on. On the one side there are established and defined processes and on the other side business-relevant data and unstructured information that have to be managed throughout their lifecycle.

If we take the scenario of Larry Hawes regarding the customer service issue there are business incidents - commonly in the sphere of knowledge working - that exceed these pre-defined processes and information structures. For these incidents the staff needs to move beyond the status-quo of defined processes and stored information. Former approaches to this used special methodologies like delphi studies and artificial intelligence toforcast the future in order to discovery new opportunities. At this point - social software offers a new approach - as it provides a way of harnessing the collective power of a interconnected setting of people to discover and ventilate new ideas - by externalizing and opening up data about information chunks, knowledge and process execution towards the crowd.

In regards towards this dimension of “reframe” I hence distinguish two further steps: first the “discovery” and second the “exchange”. This takes account of the idea of the learning organization that focuses on enhancing its systems to continually increase the organization’s capacity for performance. It also supports a phrase I first came along in a presentation of Lee Bryant: “It’s all about managing feeds & flows, and not objects“.

Along with the differenciation of business processes and business information, it helps again to keep apart four different use case scenarios of Enterprise 2.0:

1. Unveiling & associating information & knowledge (Knowledge Management 2.0):
   This is about working collaboratively on a state of externalized business knowledge e.g. project/process documentation, service issue/process documentation or sales-orientated product & market documentation. Giving access and authoring as well as sharing possibilities to the crowd creates the chance of someone adding not expected, but very valuable information towards the knowledge base and therefore enhancing it.
2. Support conversation & communications flow (Internal Communications 2.0):
   This is about the exchange and open discussion of new opportunities, ideas or gained knowledge throughout conversational systems as weblogs or microblogging infrastructures. This supports the distribution and ventilation of new ideas throughout the company - eventually reaching out to people that can give valuable feedback to ideas.
3. Supporting & enhancing ad-hoc collaboration (Collaboration 2.0):
   This is about supporting ad-hoc initiated team working to solve issues and problems that go beyond the pre-defined scope of problems or issues. As this would have been solved in offline circles of expertise so far Enterprise 2.0 approaches allow this to be solved on in a digital Enterprise-wide manner.
4. Supporting the learning organization and providing a market of ideas (Innovation Management 2.0):
   This is about interconnecting business entities with people and information about their tasks, interests and competences. Community-of-practices are a common tool for this approach though in times of social software this would rather implemented by an internal social network that is giving even a broader access to people and the relevant information flows within the enterprise.

Just to be clear the above mentioned use cases are not directly linked to technological solutions but certain social software concepts fit better to the one or the other use case. Therefore wiki solutions provide a good approach towards the collaborative knowledge work. While weblogs and microblogging solutions are better in giving access to the flow of information. And social networks provide advantages for supporting collaboration and the learning organization.

At the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT we will discuss different best practices for these four use cases and I will sum up my insights regarding the fit of this matrix towards the practical use out there in a post after the conference. But before this I would be very interested in your thoughts on this!

Last week there was another Enterprise 2.0 related event in Germany - the DMS EXPO. Martin and Thorsten Zoernert discussed the event and the open question to be addressed by the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT already here and here (unfortunately only in German!). One of the featured speaker at the conference of DMS EXPO was Stefan Pfeiffer, the German market manager for the IBM Lotus-brand. He is an well-known market expert on the topics of ECM/DMS as well as E20 - as he is in this business already quite a while. As IBM is a sponsor of our event I thought it might be of interest in having a short interview with him about Lotus Connections, the views on the German E2.0 market and his expectations for our event. And as we did this quite interactive on Facebook - I am happy to share his answers here with you also publicly.

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