I had such a tremendous response to my previous list of micro-blogging and enterprise 2.0 resources, that I thought I would research just a little bit more to see what else I could find. I came across this “live binder” of Enterprise 2.0 resources put together by Ellen Trude, a teacher by profession, and who is currently a training consultant for social media and special projects concerning collaborative platforms. Her live binder contains an immense amount of Enterprise 2.0 studies, blog posts and research that makes it one of the most comprehensive resources I’ve ever come across. If you’re putting together a presentation, post or paper on Enterprise 2.0, this is a resource you shouldn’t miss.

It is a pleasure to post the live binder here in recognition of all of the effort she put into it. If you wish to connect with Ms. Trude, please follow her @e_trude.

[iframe http://livebinders.com/play/play_or_edit?id=6233 100% 500px]

External link for better viewing:

Micro-blogging is the social media buzzword that gets some serious mojo going for those of you passionate about social networking for the enterprise (myself included). There are a plethora of tools available, and if you want a quick snapshot, you should read this CIO article on “12 Microblogging Tools to Consider.” In response to my previous post, “Extensive List of over 30 Enterprise 2.0 Case Studies and Resources,” I had an overwhelming request for case studies specific to micro-blogging. So here it is. I hope you enjoy your new bedtime reading material.

• A Case Study of Micro-blogging in the Enterprise: Use, Value, and Related Issues [Jun Zhang, Researching Social Networks in the Business World]
  This is a case study about the early adoption and use of micro-blogging in a Fortune 500 company. The study used several independent data sources:  five months of empirical micro-blogging data, user demographic information from corporate HR records, a web based survey, and targeted interviews.
• A Case Study of Micro-Blogging for Learning at Qualcomm [Slideshare.net presentation]
• PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Careful Yet Comprehensive Work with Social Networking [The Social Networking Roadmap]
• Cases 2.0.com – A  repository of enterprise 2.0 case studies that adhere to E2.0 best practices. Created by Andrew McAfee and hosted by enterprise wiki company Socialtext.
• Enterprise Microblogging Study 2010 (#EMS10) – Excellent study that provides guidance through the jungle of micro-blogging tools and vendors.
• Making The Case for Enterprise Activity Streams (And Why It’s Not Just “Another Tool”) – Really good post by SocialText one value of social streams in the enterprise [SocialText]

List of Case Studies by platform and then categorized by business need. Many of the case studies below apply to multiple areas; however, they have been organized into primary categories for ease of use:

Yammer

Idea Generation

• AAA - Yammer has become an idea hub for AAA employees: a place where questions are answered quickly, new and innovative ideas are discussed, and policies are debated.
• Deloitte AU – Deloitte Australia utilized an employee-submitted tagline advertising instead of hiring an advertising agency to develop the campaign. Since then, Deloitte Australia has used Yammer to start internal discussions about external information, such as reviews.
• SSE – Employees can post a question or idea and quickly receive answers and feedback from the entire company – all public so knowledge isn’t siloed.

Collaboration / Process Improvement

• Active.com – When issues arise on Active.com systems, developers can easily update the global team on bug resolution statuses.
• Dachis Group – Dachis Group has woven Yammer into its daily workflow, allowing easy company-wide collaboration
• Hill & Knowlton – Employees can connect with others who share their interests and expertise – connections that might not otherwise be made.
• IPC The Hospitalist Company – Yammer connects dispersed physicians in various regions of the country, providing IPC a major differentiator from other physician groups: a superior means of collaboration.
• Scribnia – Yammer allows the Scribnia team to maximize efficiency while working on opposite sides of the globe.
• SMG - Collective employee expertise is leveraged, surfacing key emerging topics.
• Suncorp – Overcame barriers to collaboration, providing instant connection for people, teams, informal networks, communities of practice and other shared interest groups.
• Think Brilliant – Yammer integrates seamlessly into the firm’s daily workflow, engineering time and energy can stay focused; Mobile connectivity: the team can stay connected in the office and on the go via Yammer’s mobile applications.

Build Culture

• AMD - Yammer has connected a global company and groups are forming and flourishing to better organize and distribute relevant content.
• Cargill - Employees who rarely post have reported that they’ve gained valuable insights into the company simply by reading and observing the Yammer stream. This is especially useful for new hires, who’ve been able to get caught up faster by participating in the Cargill Yammer network.
• ConnectNet – The ContactNet team has used Yammer to connect to new colleagues, helping to integrate the companies.

e-Learning

• Pitney Bowes – Yammer facilitates and augments the highly valuable “casual learning” that happens every day within Pitney Bowes.

Communication Management

• Nationwide - Nationwide chose Yammer as its primary communication channel in its push toward flattened hierarchy and better management.
• Razorfish – Employees can quickly attain what’s being said within Razorfish by scanning the message feed, rather than opening individual emails, and the globally-dispersed teams feel better connected and can access Razorfish’s institutional knowledge within Yammer.
• Flemish Government – The Flemish Government Communications Division uses Yammer for instant communication and sharing. As the group must stay on top of news stories and current events, the ability to share and consume information quickly is of utmost importance.
• Pepperdine University – Yammer breaks down communication silos by allowing faculty, staff and students to communicate across departments and geographic regions.
• Jordan Baris – Yammer has increased the speed of communication for the company, improving business execution.
• Philz Coffee – Uses Yammer for internal business communication on the management network, and as a virtual office where Philz employees can connect to one another on the Community network.
• Schipul – Employees used Yammer for Crisis Communication, enabling them to stay connected and informed at all times; everyone received alerts, as Yammer messages, via SMS sent from each of their mobile devices.
• Swiftcurrent – Swiftcurrent Strategies began using Yammer for internal communication, quickly realizing that the tool would be useful for clients as well

Socialcast

• Philips connects employees with new online community (Using Socialcast) [Simply Communicate]
• NASAsphere Case Study – NASA and JPL’s public findings about NASAsphere, the Socialcast program and internal social networking study [Socialcast]
• A Case of Piloting NASA’s Social Network [Allbusiness.com]

Socialtext

Idea Generation

• Meredith Publishing – Despite a disrupted industry, Meredith becomes more agile and innovative, and grows both subscribers and revenues.
• ‘mktg’ – ‘mktg’ released work from e-mail inboxes and made it collaborative. Ideation is faster, and all work is now highly leveraged.
• Osborne Transformer – Good ideas now come from all levels of the organization, and the company is freed from “trapped information syndrome.”

Collaboration / Process Improvement

• OSIsoft – 200 global support engineers all pull in the same direction, tap into collective brainpower, and serve customers better.
• Epitaph Records – Customers are more satisfied, with personal service and custom project management, while Epitaph actually saves money.
• The Hospital for Sick Children – SickKids is pioneering new ways to facilitate scientific collaboration; with Socialtext an answer or an expert is just a few clicks away.

Build Culture

• Egon Zehnder – Dynamic, social intranet lets 1,500 employees in 40 countries tap into firm-wide expertise for globalized executive search.
• Davies Public Affairs – Davies employees are now informed, connected and engaged. Ideas cross-pollinate, and new hires onboard quickly

e-Learning

• Echo360 – Fast, iterative learning cycles and real-time feedback loops keep Echo360 sales and marketing teams in lock-step alignment.
• Boston College – Everyone now actively contributes to classroom learning. Courses are higher quality, more up-to-date and interactive.

Communication Management

• FONA International – A more productive staff with a social intranet and 50K fewer e-mails, and happier customers with a self-service extranet.
• St. Louis Public Radio – With microblogging and a social intranet, employees stay informed, respond faster, and serve members better.
• Communote at Communardo – Communote is considered to be the central information and communication channel within the company

It’s only natural that everyone wants to know what everyone else is doing. Building an effective enterprise social technology strategy means looking into what other companies have deployed and whether or not they have seen positive results from their efforts. However, I’ve come to the realization that it is actually somewhat difficult to find a really good collection of case studies for enterprise 2.0 or information on what other companies have done to integrate social technologies within internal communications. With that in mind, I decided to put together some of the case studies and research I have found in my own search. The credit for many of the items on this list really goes to Jacob Morgan, who performed or found some of the case studies for his own blog, Jacob Morgan: Social Media Globetrotter. Please feel free to submit additional resources and I will gladly add them to this list.

Research Reports

• 2009/2010 Communication ROI Study Report: Capitalizing on Effective Communication [TowersWatson]
• How to use social media to solve critical internal communication issues [Melcrum]
• Social Media Survey 2010 [Melcrum]
• Behind the Firewall: Internal Communications 2009 [Society for New Communications Research Awards]
  Case study submissions on how an organization is using new communication and/or social media tools internally to enhance employee communications, or corporate culture, employee training and education. etc.
• Don’t Be Afraid of Social Media: Smart and Simple Ways to Use These Tools for Benefits Communication [Benz Communications]

Case Studies

• Social software in a corporate context: the BT experience [Melcrum]
• How Microsoft has incorporated new media tools in internal communication [Melcrum]
• Connecting IBMers across the globe with Social Media [Melcrum]
• How IBM Uses Social Media to Spur Employee Innovation [Social Media Examiner]
• UBM Case Study shows cash benefits of Enterprise social media [The Parallax View]
• Internal Communications in a Downturn at TVNZ [New Zealand Broadcasting company]
• TELUS Embraces Social Computing, Streamlines Formal Learning [Microsoft Case Study]
• Effective Collaboration Using Social Media: A Social Media Experiment at Suncorp [2010 Ark Group Presentation]

• Case Study: Booz Allen [The FASTforward Blog, Bill Ives]
  Booz Allen developed and implemented Hello, a suite of web-based enterprise tools designed to strengthen collaboration, connectivity, and communication across geographical and cultural barriers. 
  • Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Components
  • Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part Two – Change Management Efforts and Results
  • Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part Three – Operational Impact
  • Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part Four – Financial Impact
  • Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part Five – Lessons Learned
  • Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part Six – Plans for Enhancements

• Case Study: Océ; a printing company with over 21,000 employees around the world [Jacob Morgan Marketing]
  • Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Océ, Part One: Business Drivers
  • Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Océ Part Two: Making the Push
  • Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Océ Part Three: Change Management
  • Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Océ Part Four: Operational and Financial Impact
  • Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Océ Part Five: Lessons Learned and Future Plans
• Case Study: Vistaprint, an online supplier of printed and promotional material as well as marketing services, and is one of the fastest growing printing companies in North America [Jacob Morgan Marketing]
  • Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Vistaprint Part One: Business Drivers
  • Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Vistaprint Part Two: Change Management
  • Implementing Enterpise 2.0 at Vistaprint Part Three: Operational Impact
  • Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Vistaprint Part Four: The Future and Lessons Learne
• Case Study: Intuit, a software company with 8,000 employee’s worldwide that develops tax and financial solutions for consumers, small businesses, financial institutions, and health-care organizations [Jacob Morgan Marketing]
  • Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Intuit, Part One: Business Drivers
  • Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Intuit, Part Two: Change Management
  • Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Intuit, Part Three: Cultural and Organizational Shifts
  • Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Intuit, Part Four: Technology Adoption and Encouraging Use
  • Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Intuit, Part Five: Operational Impact and Lessons Learned

Also from Jacob Morgan Marketing:

• A collection of around 30 Enterprise 2.0 case studies from Social Text that features companies such as the Acumen Fund, TransUnion, and Citrix.
• Here is an interesting presentation of an Enterprise 2.0 case study by Scott Gavin.
• Another great post by Bill Ives of Enterprise 2.0 examples in the food industry.
• Yes, another post by Bill Ives citing what Vista Print has been doing with Enterprise 2.0 knowledge sharing.
• A short but sweet collection of around 10 Enterprise 2.0  examples and stories, thanks to Online Sapiens.
• An interesting look at Enterprise 2.0 following Zappos, ZDNet-Zappos-SR, it’s a PDF.
• A handful of great case studies from the E20 portal.
• A great white paper directly from Intel on developing an Enterprise social computing strategy.
• Andrew McAfee highlighted what Avenue A was doing with Enterprise 2.0 internally in 2006
• If  you like pizza and beer then this Enterprise 2.0 case study is great for you.  Thanks for the tip gustavjonsson
• A quick run through of a few Enterprise 2.0 case studies, nothing too detailed but good overviews…actually they look more like conference notes
• A great article from CIO.com on companies that have introduced web 2.0 into the enterprise, kudos to Dion Hinchliffe for being sited
• Solid Case study on Enterprise 2.0 from IBS complete with charts and graphs, thanks to Rickard Hansson

Slideshare Presentations

• Social Media for Internal Company Communications by Joey Shepp
• Web 2.0 and Employee Communications by Aon Consulting

Original Post: Using social media to improve internal communications, simply-communicate.com

As a social media agency, FreshNetworks is often asked to help clients develop and implement a social media strategy.

This was the case with Vets Now – a provider of out-of-hours veterinary care for veterinary practices across the UK. The goal was to engage internal stakeholders through social media.

Vets Now is the type of business where employees work not only alone, but also unsociable hours. By using social media, Vets Now hoped to increase communication and engagement amongst employees who don’t get the opportunity to interact with each other in person, let alone with anyone else.

Vets Now also hoped that increasing interaction among internal staff and stakeholders would help with knowledge sharing that would, in turn, help regulate and improve clinical standards and best practice across the industry. By doing this the aim was to position themselves as global experts in veterinary Emergency & Critical Care (ECC).

As Vets Now also wanted to use social media to help sell their internal training courses and to recruit staff, FreshNetworks felt that the best solution for them was to build an online community for their internal stakeholders.

The first stage was to help Vets Now pin down their objectives for the project so that the content – and the way the community was developed – helped to achieve their key aims. As Vets Now already had an intranet site, the community was integrated within that site so that all internal web-based communication tools were aligned and located in one place.

Using FreshNetworks’ social media software platform, an online community called VETECC (the “ECC” stands for “Emergency Critical Care”) was created. The community is managed by an experienced veterinary practitioner to ensure that all information and content is accurate and informative. The site has been up and running for over three months now and it has already achieved some of its primary objectives.

Traffic stats

The community currently has 924 members. 60% of Vets Now internal staff are signing on to VETECC at least once a day. More impressively, over 95% of the internal team are visiting the site at least once per week, proving that the community has successfully encouraged internal stakeholders to engage with each other and Vets Now itself.

The community also has a low bounce rate of just 20% and the average time each user spends on the site is 9 minutes, which means that people are taking time to absorb content and interact with other members online.

Recruitment and training

VETECC.com has also been the source of 10 different direct job applications in just 3 months. In real terms, 10 applicants equal approximately 3 recruits, which is a projected ROI of £5250 in the first 3 months. So projected ROI from recruitment alone is £21,000 per year. Further more, Vets Now previously sent out a monthly printed newsletter with information about their events, training and news from the profession. Since the launch of the Vets Now community,  a weekly e-news, hosted on the community platform, has replaced the monthly printed newsletter and Vets Now are saving around £14,500 per year in printing costs.

VETECC has also become a training resource for employees, linking to adverts about educational workshops and other events. Most importantly, the community has become a best practice platform, enabling vets to talk to each other and offer advice about medical cases in a private space that belongs solely to them.

Original post: A brief history of social network enterprise collaboration tools, VentureBeat

Social networking has become an integral part of office life. These commercial tools – Facebook, Twitter, etc. – are being used by more than half of employees, according to one study. But some companies have taken a reactive stance against these tools due to privacy or transparency concerns, and the number of companies selling tools specifically for enterprise continues to increase.

On top of this, the downward shift in the economy has forced companies to make do with less. Employees have had to learn to maximize their time and productivity and social networking collaboration tools for enterprise have allowed for the streamlining of information within a company. “Social networks make it easy for participants to share unstructured and ad hoc information that can decrease the time it takes to find information to solve problems. Social networks also encourage employees to help each other,” wrote Caroline Dangson, a research analyst at IDC. These enterprise collaboration tools continue to gain traction, with Cisco chief technology officer Padmasree Warrior recently predicting that the collaboration market could swell to be a $34 billion business.

“These products have to be more than a Facebook for business,” said Dangson. “So, we’ve seen some of the smaller players try and differentiate themselves.” Dangson sees a bright future for these tools, and an IDC report from August of this year sees large growth potential despite an entrenched reluctance from corporate culture to adopt to the rapidly-changing need for a more transparent environment.

“Corporate culture has everything to do with the current state of adoption of online community software. Online community software requires a community management model where leadership is distributed, all participants have voice, and employees feel they can initiate change. This model challenges, if not disrupts, the hierarchical management model of so many organizations today,” said the report, “U.S. Online Community Software Forecast 2009-2013.” The report predicts a $1.5-billion market by 2013.

“The return on investment is a big question,” said Dangson. “The phrase that kept coming up in my interviews with vendors was ‘connecting the dots.’ There’s a strong physical network within a company, and the social network extends this to weak ties within the company or externally. There’s still a lot of skepticism, as they need to know exactly the ROI.”

With this in mind, we thought it would be good to provide an overview of a few of the key players in the social networking enterprise collaboration market.

Socialcast
Socialcast bills its product as “enterprise microblogging” and it’s hard to be more concise than that. True Ventures funded $1-million for the company to further develop the tool that helps employees communicate in real time, using a Facebook-derivative interface to share new information, organize people and contacts, view questions from other employees, create a Socialbast e-mail, and find experts. The company has also tradmarked something called “Social Business Intelligence,” analytics used to track information flow, usage trends, community growth and participation patterns within a Socialcast community.

Jive
Jive Software is quickly establishing itself as a market leader, having recently received $12-million in Series B funding from Sequoia and moved its expanding employee base to Palo Alto. Jive’s SBS 4.0 includes blogs, tags, videos, social bookmarks, collaborative documents, an MS Office document previewer, polls, rich profiles, and status updates. Gartner Research, in its October 2009 report “Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workforce,” placed Jive inside of its “leaders” quadrant alongside Microsoft and IBM.

Mzinga
Mzinga’s OmniSocial faces both internally and externally, with products specifically for the workforce (OmniSocial HR), customers (OmniSocial Marketing), and customer support (OmniSocial Support). The product has many features, including networking, idea sharing, ratings and polls, HR functions, team-based content offering, and a simplified administration environment.

Yammer
Yammer is a limited-use microblogging service that provides short answers within and between employees to one question: “What are you working on?” The feed that results from this question contains answers, news, ideas, and links to other information. The company directory within Yammer also allows for looking at the expertise of other employees, but the information is shared on a strictly private network.

Dekks
Launched just a few months ago, Dekks, the first product from I.ndigo, is a way of building a knowledge network within a company. It does this by creating an automated way to find the proper source for information once an employee has entered a query. Employees are given what Dekks calls a ‘pulse’ (aka, a feed) where updates, messages, polls and tasks indicate the hot topics within a company. The product is also useful for management, allowing them to map a knowledge network within a company, where knowlege and people are interconnected.

Salesforce Chatter
Billed as a way to “completely transform the way you collaborate with people in your company,” Salesforce Chatter features real-time updates on people, groups, documents and application data. It does this by using a cloud computing interface, enabling a private and secure collaboration environment using a real-time feed. Judging by the demo, Chatter looks remarkably like Facebook and Twitter, despite the fact that company chief exec Marc Benioff has downplayed the “social” nature of the product in favor of the “collaboration” angle, most likely so as to be taken more seriously by a sales team. For the sales force, Chatter allows people to drill down into sale figures and sales opportunities and to follow the movement of an account in real time. Chatter also allows for widget embeds, such as Twitter, into its pages, and the product is also available for mobile devices. Chatter will be available to the general public in mid-2010.

MindTouch Enterprise – This is a cloud product. MindTouch Enterprise is an ‘enterprise wiki’ where docs can be shared and co-edited with update notifications. It also includes things called “CRM connectors” and “CRM and database dashboards” as well as microblogging, chat, task lists, and user profile pages within an environment that uses a variety of security levels. Its video notes that social tools “are not for business collaboration and decision-making” and touts MindTouch as a decent alternative to this. According to its site, MindTouch counts Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, Mozilla, Palm, and NASA among its client list.

WebEx Meetings/Connect/E-mail
Cisco offers three collaboration products which can be easily confused. We’ll discuss them separately, although there have been suggestions that they will eventually become one application. Connect allows for online collaboration, messaging, audio/video/VoiP connecting, and the ability to create project teams in a secure environment. Meetings is a robust real-time collaboration space that offers real-time desktop sharing with teleconferencing, where you can not only share documents but presentations and applications. It is supported on Windows, Mac, and Linux, Unix and 3G-enabled smart phones and is the only Web conferencing solution offered over a proprietary network, optimized for security and performance. With Meetings, not everyone needs to subscribe to WebEx to be part of a meeting. WebEx Mail, meanwhile, is the third collaboration product. It allows for larger storage space and ease-of-use for mobile devices. In the future, it promises an easy way to integrate WebEx Mail into Web conferencing, social networking, unified communications, and instant messaging. All of these products are delivered through the Cisco WebEx Collaboration Cloud.

Sharepoint
Microsoft’s SharePoint has been a huge growth product for the firm, and a 2010 beta was released in the last few weeks. Of course, SharePoint benefits from being part of the Microsoft lineup of software, but it has still had to prove itself in the marketplace, and it seems to be doing so. On each SharePoint site, users can search for content, information, and experts, build communities, and build ‘composites,’ which the company defines as “no-code solutions on the premises or in the cloud, a rich set of building blocks, tools and self-service capabilities.” For its latest version, all of the collaboration solutions have been integrated into SharePoint, allowing for a more agile way of scaling “up and out quickly,” according to company lit.

Lotus Sametime
IBM’s Lotus Sametime Standard is a space where IM, e-mail, Webconferencing, and optional audio/video are all part of one package.  Lotus Sametime Advanced one-ups Standard by creating a knowledge-sharing paradigm, wherein finding experts in a particular field – even people you don’t know and who aren’t in a preexisting contact list – can be accomplished. Users can also subscribe to chat rooms and follow topic discussions, using ‘persistent group chat.’ Advanced also lets you share your desktop using a screen share function and allows for some curious ‘geographic location services’ where users can track the physical location of others.

Wave
This is a new offering from Google and as with any Google product, it made quite a splash. Currently in beta, Wave creates a “wave” – a shared space – that allows users to share and collaborate on rich data, including documents photos, gadgets, feeds from other sources on the Web, and others, but many of which are currently not functional. It looks like a dressed-up Gmail program, and some in the blogosphere have noted that Wave may be good for short-term collaborative needs, but not for anything particularly robust. But Google docs have become a defacto collaborative tool for many low-level users, so expectations for Wave are pretty high.

Original Source: Dell uses social media to gather employee ideas, Ragan Communications, Andrew Analore

EmployeeStorm allows employees to submit company ideas, speak candidly

When it comes to internal communications, global technology giant Dell may have hit on the perfect storm: a social media platform, dubbed EmployeeStorm, which culls ideas from all of its business units and fosters discussion among employees.

Launched nearly a year ago, EmployeeStorm allows Dell’s worldwide community of more than 80,000 employees to post and discuss ideas on topics ranging from product upgrades and innovation to critiques of company policies, facilities improvements and benefits.

“It’s about anything or everything to do with Dell,” says Ellen Rich, Dell’s HR communications manager.

Powered by Salesforce.com’s IdeaExchange engine and integrated into Dell’s intranet, EmployeeStorm allows users to vote on ideas and highlight those they’d like to see implemented. Communications and leadership team members can join the discussion, keeping EmployeeStorm posters abreast of the status of the ideas they submit.

Launched in June 2007, EmployeeStorm is an offshoot of IdeaStorm, a brainstorming and discussion platform launched by Dell to get feedback from customers.

“We don’t want employees submitting ideas externally. We want to keep those internal,” Vida Killian, manager of the IdeaStorm platform, told Ragan.com.

Ideas submitted by employees through EmployeeStorm are segmented into those for customers, such as new product ideas, and those for employees, such as suggestions for new cafeteria menu items. They are then routed to the right departments for consideration.

Killian’s staff periodically gives out prizes, awarding highly rated and implemented ideas and activity on the site, as a way to boost participation.

Killian says Dell sees the internal communication tool to be an essential complement to its external communications push.

“It’s easier to go internal before you go external. There’s less fear, and also you are engraining your culture with the culture of social media and Web 2.0 and where it’s taking us and how important it is to listen,” she says. “And that’s why we came out with EmployeeStorm as quickly as we did.”

Winning ideas

Some of the ideas floated on IdeaStorm and EmployeeStorm have already made their way into Dell’s product stables. Killian says that Dell has implemented nearly 200 of the 10,000 or so ideas that have been posted on IdeaStorm.

For example, when customers suggested that Dell develop a product with a backlit keyboard that would make night computing easier, the company responded by making backlighting an option on some Latitude notebooks. Also based on discussions on IdeaStorm, Dell decided to offer laptops with the Linux and Windows XP operating systems—instead of Windows Vista—preinstalled.

Meanwhile, a discussion on the EmployeeStorm site led Dell to release a laptop with design and features specially tailored to fans of the online game World of Warcraft.

Both of the brainstorming platforms fit into a theme. Both internally and externally, Dell has positioned itself as a company that listens, a message that is touted often on its Web site with banners that detail product changes or new deals with the slogan, “You talked. We Listened.”

Broadening reach

One of the questions confronting companies that implement communication technology is how it should be deployed. Some companies take a narrow approach, developing and implementing tools for specific business groups, such as engineering or sales, which are seen as having the most direct influence over products and revenue.

Dell took a broader approach, implementing EmployeeStorm enterprisewide. “We actually made sure it was available to everyone in the company,” Rich says. “When you are looking at innovation, ideas do not come from those on top of the organization. You get them from everyone in an organization.”

That implementation strategy helps Dell tap the expertise found in its different business group—job shifting at the company means, for instance, that some sales people or call center managers might have engineering or product development experience, for example.

It didn’t take Dell’s employees long to get up to speed on the system. More than 700 ideas were generated during EmployeeStorm’s first week of life. On a typical day, about 45 percent of Dell’s workers participate in discussions.

“We get some hot ideas out of this that generate quite a bit of debate,” Rich says, adding that the site relies heavily on “community policing.”

Be prepared

So what lessons should you take from Dell’s experience with EmployeeStorm? Preparation, particularly for the volume of participants, matters, Rich says, emphasizing that this is especially true if this is the first interactive social media tool your audience has been given. It’s also important to have the backend response team ready, so users don’t feel as if they are sending information into a vacuum.

Culture is another important consideration. For an internal communication system to be effective, employees must feel they can speak candidly about their concerns without jeopardizing their jobs. Dell Employees have to use their real names when they post on EmployeeStorm. The company’s communications team quelled those fears through early discussions in its blogs.

And Dell has established other routes, such as a company ombudsman, that employees can use to communicate about sensitive issues.

“When employees are given an active voice, they are going to talk a lot about programs and policies that they want changed,” Rich says. “So HR needs to be on its toes.”

I just came across the social media policy that Wendy Harman at the Red Cross has been hard at work creating, and it is too good of a document to not pass along.  The purpose of the strategy is to encourage Red Cross staff and local chapters to participate in social media and helps them create a strategy for their particular chapter.  The document outlines the goals and objectives that the Red Cross has from a national perspective and provides high level considerations for local chapters interested in creating a social media presence.

Overall, the organization of the content is excellent. The strategy is based on 12 steps:

1. Getting Social Media Savvy – get familiar with social media tools and know how to merge a business and personal online presence.
2. Learn the Our Philosophy – use social media tools to execute the Red Cross mission to create an empowered community of Red Cross supporters.
3. Listen - Pay attention to the conversations that are already occurring and respond to them as appropriate.
4. Engage with National – understand the Red Cross online presence from a national perspective, building credibility and leveraging tools for local chapters by sharing content and photos.
5. Learn from Existing Chapter Social Media – study what’s working / not working for chapters who have an existing online presence.
6. Evaluate Organizational Tools - make sure that the social media tool’s fit within the goals / objectives for the local chapter.
7. Create Your Social Media Strategy – define goals and objectives and make sure they align with the social media strategy.
8. Choose Your Tools – establish an online presence through social media tools such as a blogging, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
9. Let Us Know What You Are Up To – share the local chapter online presence with National for cross-promotional opportunities.
10. Implement Your Plan – socialize the online presence to local supporters.
11. Measure Your Successes and Challenges – create a baseline from previous local chapter activities as well as from what other local chapters have seen. Use that baseline to measure the success of your online presence.
12. Send Your Links and Measurement Data – provide measurement information to the national Red Cross for recognition.

Original source: The Three Spheres of Web Strategy –Updated for 2009, Web Strategy by Jeremiah

I hope this is one of those resources you print out pin to your desk, and share with others. This is the core theme of this blog, the balance needed for successful web endeavors in organizations.

I originally posted this diagram in 2006, then updated it in 2007, and it’s time to revisit the core structure of the goals and challenges of a Web Strategist, especially as I reset as I change roles.

Who’s a Web Strategist? In a company, they often are responsible for the long term vision of corporate web properties. At a web company where their product is on the web, they’re often the product manager or CTO. Regardless of role, the responsibilities are the same, they need to balance all three of these spheres, and make sure their efforts are in the middle of all three.
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1) Community Sphere

To be successful, the Web Strategist must understand (by using a variety of techniques and tactics) what customers and prospects want. Stemming from, ethnography, analytics, brand monitoring and primary and secondary research the end result should be a web experience profile and mental model.

Specific skills needed: Ability to understand and implement research, strong understanding of user experience which would include usability, information architecture. Ability to synthesize content from a variety of real time locations such as web analytics, customer feedback from support and surveys and communities, and an ability to be empathetic to customers. Above all, this strategist should be able to predict where customers will be in coming years -not just understanding of previous or current states.

Key Recommendations for 2009-2010: Focus on brand monitoring of customers in the social space. We’ve seen an increase in consumer adoption of social technologies which has caused a shift in where customers make decisions (not just on your corporate website). This is an opportunity to quickly identify who they are, what they want (and don’t want) and understand the language they use in order to reach them.
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2) Business Sphere

Yet understanding customers alone isn’t sufficient, the Web Strategist must be able to achieve measurable business objectives. This leader must be able to first identify key stakeholders within an organization, capture their needs, prioritize, and balance into a plan that meets both their needs and the community. This delicate dance requires the strategist to balance the needs of a variety of internal teams, offset daily fire drills, yet meet the needs of the company. Many Web Strategists fall short here, they meet the goals and objectives of internal stakeholders yet fail to balance the needs of the community. The end result? A website where users rarely visit, and go elsewhere to make trusted decisions.

Specific skills needed: Ability to communicate within a company, understand and prioritize emphatically the needs of multiple business stakeholders and prioritize. This leader will also need to be a mediator and must defuse the assertive business stakeholders will cool logic and business acumen, as well as ensure the web team operates in an efficient operation. Management skills are critical here: project management, human relations, communication, and the ability to define clear concise goals based on dates for content and technical teams. Lastly, the core of the role includes skills in marketing leadership, advertising, media, product management and marketing.

Key Recommendations for 2009-2010: In many cases, the recession has clamped budgets down to operations with budgets coming from campaigns and business units to innovate. Where budgets are limited, learn how to use inexpensive technologies like community software, blogging, or status update tools internally -yet have a long term plan for how they work. On the external front, provide guidelines and resources to internal teams to use social before it cascades to many areas of the company without common framework -fragmenting the customer experience and wasting business resources.
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3) Technology Sphere

Lastly, the Web Strategist should be an expert in their own realm of internet technologies. They’ll need to know the capabilities and deficiencies of their current arsenal of tools as well as adopt new technologies that are ever emerging. Leaders in this space often become complacent configuring current systems and forget to plan into the immediate roadmap new technologies that widen the breadth and width of what can be done. If the Web Strategist is performing the Community sphere correctly, they are already watching how the use of customers technology adoption is changing.

Specific skills needed: Ability to understand the workings of web architecture in the internet field. While they are not technical experts they should be able to understand the impacts of these technologies to the business and community. They should also be watching for emerging technologies and devote a percentage of resources to research and development for new technologies -never falling behind. The strategist should demonstrate skills of innovation, and experiment and practice with new technologies as they emerge first hand -but by keeping a focus on long term business objectives.

Key Recommendations for 2009-2010: Web Strategists need to prepare for a new set of connected devices that are quickly emerging. While social caught most companies off guard, mobile technologies within and outside of your company will impact how information is quickly shared. Start by analyzing related applications and mobile social networks in rich mobile devices such as Blackberry, iPhone, and Palm Pre.
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To be successful, the Web Strategist must balance all three of these spheres. Becoming a master in each of these spheres requires incredible dedication, so the leader must rely on their team for input, actively seek out education, attend workshops, and read books on the various subjects.  Also, if this helps to shape your career, or you’re a hiring manager for this role, I hope it helped to define what to look for.

Internal Social Networks are starting to appear inside some organizations. Early adopters are finding positive business results by helping employees connect through “internal Facebooks.” By effectively harnessing these new networks, organizations are seeing positive impacts on internal brand building, as well as employee engagement, satisfaction and motivation — which leads to higher levels of productivity, revenue, and profit.

But the world of the internal social network is the opposite of command & control. That said, reasonable guidelines, a group of informal influencers, and a posse of community managers who help keep the dialog lively and the network on track.

It’s clear that no matter where your company is on the social media ladder, social networks and Web 2.0 skills are becoming a part of today’s work landscape. All businesses need to be aware of how to deploy networks for higher ROI, collaboration, innovation and customer service.

Oracle’s Connect: An Internal Social Networking Case Study

IdeaFactory

Connect began in July 2007 as the IdeaFactory. We were collecting ideas from teams in Applications Strategy, and none of the usual ways (email, spreasheets, wiki) worked for a team whose sole purpose was to (ahem) innovate.

So Rich built the IdeaFactory in 24 hours using Rails and LDAP. You can see the legacy of the original IdeaFactory in Connect today by paging through Ideas.

Here’s a taste of what it looked like:

Connect 1.0

Ideas were great and pretty successful, but we’d always planned to add social networking into the mix. Aria has always been the corporate directory, and we love it. We wanted to add a dash of social though, so in August 2007, Rich debuted Connect, which was IdeaFactory plus social networking and some other nice features.

Traffic went through the roof. We quickly realized there was strong demand for networking inside the firewall, and with Connect 1.0, we were off and running.

Here’s what the first version of Connect looked like.

That 1.0 version underwent several UI makeovers. The next version added the short-lived Connect logo and removed the AppsLab branding and centralized the navigation a bit, teasing features to come.

The last 1.0 UI went from gray to white with a more Oracle standard logo and look/feel. I think Connect 1.0 had this UI for the longest amount of time. People were really accustomed to it.

Connect 2.0

After a long break to build and start up Oracle Mix, we turned our attention back to Connect, armed with even more ideas that had sprouted from Mix. Connect 2.0 went live in June 2008, adding SSO integration and a fully revamped architecture and infrastructure.

The big new feature in 2.0 was Groups, which we had built into Mix first. Now people could collaborate in ad hoc ways for work or personal interest.

The blue was a shock to many, and we got more than one negative comment about it (as compared to the white/red).

Connect 3.0

So far, the new UI has been a big hit; several people have commented positively. Connect topped 10,000 pageviews on the day it launched.

Profile Page:

Enhanced UI — The UI has changed from blue back to white, and the main navigation is now on the left, versus on the top.

OraTweet integration –  when employees update their status in Connect, they can also send tweets to their networks, groups. Each tweet that appears in the Activity Log includes a link to the tweet that opens in a new tab/window.  If you want to reply, you can click through to see the tweet and reply. Or you can share links to useful information, communicating info much more effectively (and less intrusively) than an email could.

Pages – a new feature for groups where each group can have any number of pages editable by its membership.

Connect 4.0

Our main goals for this release were:

Put the focus on people, not on objects
We set out to emphasize the human element of the network, i.e. focus on who contributes, not on what is contributed. Twitter proved the value of this model, and Facebook has gone the same route. Now, you can scan the activity log and immediately recognize people you know, which in turn can help you find interesting content.

Make it dead simple to share anything
Rich built the posting widget as we’re calling it to make posting a snap. In the last version, you could only post your status on the home page and post ideas, questions and blog entries on the group pages.

Now, you can share:

• Your status.
• A note. Notes are a catch-all for blog posts, messages, announcements, events, pretty much anything that’s not an idea or a question.
• A link.
• An idea. Since ideas have been part of Connect from the beginning, we have a soft spot for them.
• A question. Questions have been around in Connect since 2.0.
• Some media. Media provides a shortcut for posting videos, podcasts and images, just provide the link, and Connect does the rest.

Aggregate information by supporting multiple sources
We’ve borrowed FriendFeed’s import a feed capability and now you can pump all your feeds into a Connect group for collaborative discussion.

My hope is that people will use the feeds generated by blogs (in/outside the firewall), wikis, forums, news sites, other Connect groups, portals, enterprise search queries, etc. to aggregate useful content into a single place for discussion.

Provide intelligent filtering for easy viewing
Making it easy to share and aggregate information necessitated excellent filtering. People frequently asked for better filtering in the old Connect, and we knew this version would really need it. So, we now offer you three filters in a widget: Viewing (what post types), From (what time period) and Sorted by (how new or popular).

Consolidate output of the information we aggregate
We are already working on an email this post feature, which should drop soon, and beyond that, we’re thinking about a Posterous-style feature that’s dead simple. We’re infatuated with email integrations, and this would give everyone a blog without even knowing it. Posterous is super cool, by the way.

Give groups a more independent experience
When you navigate to a group’s main page, the navigation changes to focus on the group, rather than keeping the group bottled up inside the Connect navigation.

The search box moves down slightly to indicate its context is group search. Constraining search to include only a group’s content was an enhancement requested by several people. Also, the main navigation is replaced by the group’s about, which now includes a group home page and email address and will eventually include linkage to an OraTweet group.

Sources:

• Is there an Internal Facebook in Your Organization’s Future? A Brief History of Oracle’s Connect
• Connect’s Third Version Launches

Original Source: Inside IKEA’s Human Intranet Approach, Paul Chin, Intranet Journal

I do a little, you do a little, and together we do a lot. This is a concept that’s deeply embedded in the business model for IKEA, the global home furnishing giant with over 270 stores in 36 countries. The strong sense of teamwork, community, and collaboration expressed in this simple principle forms the basis of IKEA’s organizational and operational culture. It means as much to those working in HR, Sales, and Marketing as it does to consumers who buy the company’s flat packed furniture that they assemble themselves.

A strong corporate culture, however, doesn’t always translate into effective information systems. In fact, when done poorly, the latter can be a detriment to the former. There’s always been an unfortunate disconnect between technology-based systems and the people they’re meant to support. But IKEA’s humanistic, people-focused approach to its business naturally carried over to the development of its intranet.

Rather than forcing its corporate culture to bend to accommodate a technology-based system, IKEA used its firmly established culture as the foundation for its IT solutions. It’s an approach that garnered IKEA North America’s intranet, IKEA Inside, much praise when it was recognized as one of the world’s ten best intranets of 2008 by the user-experience research firm Nielsen Norman Group (NNG). It’s an approach that enables IKEA to keep all its employees up-to-date with everything going on within the company. And it’s an approach that defines the true purpose and spirit of an intranet: To bring people and information together.

Connecting people with technology

Since their inception, intranets have been used to manage large repositories of content and to share this centralized information with a company-wide user community. This goal hasn’t changed much since intranets first came onto the corporate scene, but an intranet is worth more than the sum of the bits and bytes that make up the system. Although the technology has gotten much more elaborate, a clear shift in focus has emerged.

The results of NNG’s eighth annual intranet design competition highlights a development shift in today’s top intranets, emphasizing access to people rather than data. It’s a trend that corresponds with IKEA’s business model: A perfect marriage of corporate culture, business imperatives, and the technology that supports the two. For IKEA, the implementation of technology-based tools was a natural progression of its already strong sense of corporate community and teamwork.

“In the past decade, I believe we have seen our American workers adopt technology at an amazing rate in their personal lives,” says Beth Gleba, Internal Information Manager for IKEA North America. “Of course this has an impact on how people come to expect similar tools in their workplace.”

But IKEA’s adoption and integration of technology wasn’t done at the expense of the human experience. All too often information systems fail within organizations when technology itself becomes the sole focus and reason for development. This type of technology-driven development perpetuates and widens the gap between the tool and the user. It’s an unnecessary gap that prevents users from accepting a technology-based solution as a true business tool.

“We are a people-based company,” explains Gleba. “Face-to-face time is very important. We’ve built our intranet to complement this. We don’t want people to feel technology replaces but enhances our connection to one another. Working with our culture, not against it, has been key.”

IKEA Inside, IKEA North America’s intranet

Technology is a means, not an end

The importance of using technology to strengthen and support an established corporate culture was not lost at IKEA. The company understood that information systems are meant to support people not technology. IKEA realized that it can’t allow technology to define, or redefine, its culture. A technology-based tool should never negatively impact an already strong organizational culture, or force users to make concessions to tools that aren’t elaborate enough to support the finer nuances of the human experience.

“Before, during, and after [intranet implementation], our culture is our culture,” says Gleba. “We like our culture and don’t want to change it. Instead, we recognize the power of what we can do together when we use our culture to guide how we act, make decisions, and work with one another. Our culture gives us a framework as we implement new things like technology.”

Creating the right tools for the right job

A strong culture alone, however, doesn’t guarantee success. Digital solutions can sometimes become a hindrance to activities people are accustomed to doing in an analog world — especially to those who aren’t very tech savvy.

“Simplicity is part of our philosophy,” says Gleba. “Technology can feel complicated, or at its worst, it can be implemented in a complicated way. For our success, it’s important to keep governance and structure simple.”

The primary goal of IKEA’s information systems, explains Gleba, is to provide employees with the tools they need to do their job, when they need them, and wherever they need them. The company’s intranet is a key component in delivering that goal. Over the past decade, the company replaced much of its manual- and paper-based business processes with automated and digital equivalents, allowing the company to accomplish more in less time while keeping its operational costs low.

IKEA Inside, the company’s intranet, is used to fulfill a wide range of needs — from applications such as Web-based email, discussion forums, online surveys, online training, and filing of expense claims to housing detailed information about IKEA products, warranties, company news, supply and inventory management, marketing material, schedules, customer feedback, and the organization’s strategic goals. The company’s intranet also bolsters its sense of community by sharing “IKEA Stories”, a video collection of employee interviews.

But IKEA didn’t stop at its physical work facilities. The company believes that a lot of its valuable information should also be accessible by off-site IKEA employees. In May of 2008, IKEA launched a secured external-facing system, called icoworker, that’s exclusive to US employees (although it’s completely separate from its intranet, with no crossover in content or applications, icoworker is referred to as an “extranet” even though it doesn’t technically fit the description).

icoworker focuses on “the people side of IKEA” and houses information on employee benefits, IKEA’s culture and values, and its humanitarian initiatives with partners such as UNICEF, Save the Children, the World Wildlife Fund, and American Forests. The system also acts as a virtual self-service human resources center. It contains applications that allow employees to access their online paychecks, request time off, and manage their retirement plan (401k).

“Within the last year, we’ve had over a million page views on this extranet and estimate we’ve saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars because we’re helping co-workers find what they need on their own instead of calling our HR Call Center,” says Gleba.

icoworker, IKEA North America’s extranet

Understanding your culture means understanding your solution

Combining culture, business processes, and technology into a unified whole doesn’t happen overnight. “You can’t just wish for an intranet that delivers respect from top leadership,” explains Gleba. “Instead you have to build something that makes an impact, test it, grow it, make mistakes, and try again. And we’ve found you need to help people as they develop their own understanding. This takes time, commitment, and patience.”

Every IKEA employee, regardless of technical skill level, is given basic orientation and training on intranet and extranet use. Computer kiosks were also strategically set up throughout IKEA work areas to provide equal access to employees who don’t have their own computer at work. All of these steps to get everyone in the “IKEA family” involved have paid off. IKEA North America’s intranet saw monthly hits jump from 800 in 2001 to 1.4 million today.

“We have made the move from an intranet that was not aligned or regarded as a business tool to one where our business leaders recognize its strategic importance in connecting co-workers to information they need to do their job,” says Gleba. “The cultural challenges that we faced as we evolved our intranet were connected to the very things that make us a great company. Where we’ve had success in evolving is when we’ve leveraged our own organization’s strength and worked with the culture.”