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Why Agencies May Accelerate the Mainstream Development of the Virtual Business World

Over the past few months, I’ve written extensively about the inevitable trend toward virtualization. And by that I do not mean the virtualization of hardware – the domain of companies like VMware, my alma mater – but rather the virtualization of work environments, the virtualization of tools for working in those environments, and the virtualization of the larger world of business so that companies can easily navigate those environments -- and import those tools -- for a seamless work experience. The future of business, as I see it, will usher in a new era of architecture. But this time the buildings and structures will not be made of stone, steel, and plastics. And they will not be designed by people with degrees in architecture, civil engineering, or landscape design.  Those buildings and structures will be virtual, and they will be designed by businesspeople, like you and me.

But like every other design revolution, not all people and businesses will be favored at the start. There is, in fact, one general category of business that may be strongly favored because of where it sits in the virtual business world. As the new “middlemen” (more on that relentlessly disparaged term in a moment) in the vast and interconnected ecosystems that are emerging, agencies – advertising agencies, PR agencies, interactive agencies, business consultancies -- have a unique opportunity that we can all learn from and emulate.

I. Virtual work environments Already this is happening. The phenomenon is called Enterprise 2.0: businesses around the world are building virtual workspaces optimized for more effective communication and collaboration, inside and outside the enterprise. Why are agencies at an advantage here? Three reasons (at least) …. First, because they are in the business of acting as proxies for other companies (the definition of “agency”), they may have a greater need for these workspaces. More clients, more workspaces, to put it simply. Second, the nature of the agency requires a finer sense of architecture than the average business. The agency – the PR agency, for example – may have the need to architect both private and public workspaces for each and every client. (In the PR world, imagine a public room -- for every client -- for press briefings, alongside a private room -- for every client -- to prepare and vet the content for those briefings). Third, the agency itself is a near ideal environment for innovation in collaboration. They were among the first adopters of technology in the early days of Enterprise 2.0. They will be among the most active adopters as Enterprise 2.0 crosses into the mainstream.

II. Virtual tools

Here’s where it starts to get interesting. These virtual workspaces that businesses are now building are packed with any number of cloud-based, virtual communication and collaboration tools. Soon we will see enterprise computing applications integrated into those environments. In the meantime, the very fact that we are beginning with communication and collaboration tools – blogs, microblogs, wikis, video, bookmarks, to name just a few – favor communication agencies. Not only are these tools so well suited for people in the communication trade; people in the trade in fact are in a great position to develop new tools that foster communication and adoption. At the extreme end, expect a few agencies to actually invest in the development of new technologies (for example., The Dachis Group and nGenera). But in the magic middle of the market, expect agencies to collaborate and co-create with tech companies as they begin to grasp that this is a world in which tech and the trade can easily meet.  That's where we are investing, with our distributed consulting community, Clearvale SecondFloor.

III. The Larger, Virtual World of Business

Speaking of the middle, there’s a bigger point I’d like to make about agencies: where they sit in the larger world of businesses makes them uniquely qualified to jumpstart the inevitable Enterprise 2.0 revolution. It’s not just that they serve as proxies to so many businesses all over the world, a point I make in section I. It’s also the talent that they bring to this new world as it’s being constructed. They are not just middlemen – a role that I expect will win new respect as the business world begins again to appreciate the people who facilitate relationship building – but MadMen as well: creatives who give shape, purpose and meaning to the campaigns that drive business in the larger, virtual world of business. As I note in an earlier blog post, not all such talent resides inside agencies or any company for that matter. But agencies enjoy a surplus of that talent, and I expect that they will rush forward as others in the market ponder the possibilities.

Because of the topic -- and because I am so busy -- I will make this post brief.

There's an interesting article in Information Week, citing a study that shows that people feel overwhelmed when they have more than 50 emails in their in-box.

This used to be a problem for a small class of people -- information junkies who couldn't understand why they got so much email every single day.  Now it's a problem for most of the working population.  But the problem, I suspect, results from the same cause today as it did years ago.  It's not the information junkie in each of us that's creating the problem.  It's the information pusher.  And you, my friend, are very likely a pusher.

Consider -- how often do you use email when:

--a quick phone call would have done the trick?

--IM might have been more effective?

--a ping to your social network would have been faster, smarter, more responsive?

Of course, there are issues with each of the above.  Sometimes, the phone feels too much like a burden (for the caller and the call-e).  And not everyone is on IM or social networks.  In the end, email overload might owe a lot to the simple fact that it has such a wonderful user experience that we cannot help but use it, even when it's not appropriate.  That's an interesting challenge to the vendors of communication tools, and we should expect more innovation from them.  In the meantime, to get less email, try sending less email.  And when you get the results, call me.  I use BT/Ribbit, which will transcribe and forward your voicemail to me in text.  As I said, the phone can be a burden.  But put a nicer UI/UE on top of the phone, and the whole thing feels so much better. 

There's an old programming joke about what "C++" actually means in the C++ language. It means "increment C, but use the original value". What makes this funny (well, as funny as a programming joke can be) is that this was exactly the way many people used C++ - just like C, ignoring most of the features C++ added.

The software industry has often been guilty of presenting old ideas with new names to try and generate excitement for them. So one of my continuing worries about the "Enterprise 2.0" movement (I hate all that putting-2.0-after everything) is that Enterprise 2.0 is actually Enterprise++ - same old intranets, same old collaboration, with a nice new shiny "social" label.

This has set me wondering, what is the difference between "1.0" collaboration software and "2.0" social software? Are they the same thing? We collaborated before social software; we communicated before social software. So what does social software add? If social software just helps us communicate and collaborate better than we did before that implies that it is simply a better mousetrap. No, there has to be more to it than that.

"It's people-centric, not content/process-centric" is an explanation I often give. But hang on a moment... why isn't e-mail classed as "social software"? E-mail is the ultimate people-centric, person-to-person (or person-to-people) communication tool. Yet e-mail is often characterized as the antithesis of social software.

I've read a lot of definitions of social software and one recurring theme is that social software "aggregates the actions of networked users". What does that mean? I believe it means the difference between old-style collaboration software and social software is not who is involved in the collaboration; it's the fact that everyone else can see that the collaboration is going on. It's not just helping groups work together better, it's also about giving the rest of the community visibility about what they're doing.

This applies equally outside an organisation as in it. What makes Social CRM social? The fact that a customer's issues are being addressed in a public forum where everyone else can see. And it also helps answer why e-mail is not social; if you're not on the to or cc list of an e-mail message, you don't know it exists.

So while it's not a definition, perhaps that's the difference between social software and collaboration. Social software is... never having to tell your the rest of the company what you're working on, because they already know (or at least could easily find out).

And that genuinely is something new and different that previous generations of collaboration software lacks.

Ever since I joined the company, I've been finding myself answering the same question over and over. "Why did you go inside?"

Depending on who's asking the question, it can mean, "why are you giving up consulting, and going inside a company"? Or it could mean, "why are you going to the 'private' side of social media after so many years focusing on the 'public' side."

Truth is that I haven't exactly given up consulting. Helping to develop BroadVision's professional services strategy (e.g., Clearvale SecondFloor) squarely keeps me in that world. Nor have I been spending all my time on the public side of social media. At least half my social media engagements as a consultant were on projects that could have been called Enterprise 2.0.  I didn't call them that, but I could have.

But the "inside" question resonates on both levels for me -- I truly wanted to go inside a company, and lately I've been thinking that the in side of social media is the place to me. There are at least three reasons:

1. The workplace is the new social place. There was a time -- not too long ago -- when the Web2 world began to recognize that marketing was moving to the edge of the network. Jeremiah Owyang was a big proponent of that idea, and it got a lot of attention. And it made sense -- with the rise of social media, people were making their own media, creating and finding their own places, so marketers had to go where people go. Practical implications here. One: it was no longer enough to create your own place (the corporate Web site). Suddenly, you needed a strategy to connect with people in other places ... and a huge market -- consultants, practitioners, adopters, complainers -- kicked in. But something happened along the way. Folks began to recognize that the digital/social workplace was a good place to connect from and to the edge of the network. After all, a giant swath of people on social networks spend big chunks of time each day jumping back and forth from their enterprise desktop apps to their non-enterprise social networking apps. The big trend in enterprise 2.0 these days? Integrating the edge (social media applications) into the enterprise social network. In other words, the edge is now inside.  The preferred way to connect with places outside the enterprise is to integrate with platforms inside the enterprise.

2. The workplace is where things get done. And there's an app for that.  It's called enterprise software. Another big trend? The minituarization and integration of enterprise apps into the enterprise social network. It's probably the most interesting conversation in the market today, and I'd argue that it is not overhyped. If you accept the premise that the digital/social workplace is the place to be, then it follows that enterprise apps -- which theoretically can have a far bigger audience in social environments -- will need to be there, too. Already a lot of activity in this area (search the following:  Enterprise 2.0 and workflow and business processes -- you'll find lots to read), and we (my company) intend to make this a priority.

3. The inside view cares about things like privacy and security -- things that are sometimes disincentives for public social networks.  But they matter to every single person on the planet. The Facebook privacy debacle taught us at least one thing: for networks like Facebook, privacy features can certainly be a disincentive -- it can interrupt the torrid pace of network growth. But for social media companies toiling on the inside, it had better be in their DNA to care about these things. And if it's not in their DNA, they had better hire for it (and from the looks of recent hires at Enterprise 2.0 companies, this appears to already be happening).  That will be good for everyone, inside and outside the enterprise. But from I sit, I can already see that the action -- and innovation -- will be inside/out. Happy to be here, and I'll be sharing more about what we are doing as we move along that path.

Mobile Telecoms around the world are pressured by new big players like Google and Apple who have changed forever the business model in the mobile consumer market.

There is no doubt that charging consumer for data traffic, sms and minutes, is not going to be a sustainable business for years to come.

While Apple iTunes and App store (to name the most famous) have taken away a good chunk of profit from Mobile Telecoms, there is still a huge opportunity to service their enterprise customers and deliver new generation, mobile, social, agile applications to the business segment.

BroadVision has recently announced a partnership in this direction with Softbank Telecom, a large Japanese telco player and sole distributor of iPhone in Japan (press release)

Softbank understands  these challenges and is ready to tackle the Enterprise 2.0 market. Softbank realizes also that in order to do this, they need first to embrace the new business paradigm as a company and eat their own dog food.

Can other Mobile Telecoms, in Europe in particular, do the same?

I have done a small research on how the main mobile players in Europe are embracing Enterprise 2.0 to change the way the interact with customers and employees.

Here is a summary of what I have found out. I have limited this blog to 2 countries that I think can paint a picture that is not too far from the situation with the other large population European countries.

Italy

TIM: Tim Cafe This is probably the worst example. Here TIM has tried to create a Facebook like Consumer Social Networks by creating its own consumer community. The result is at least debatable. Last time I checked there where 400 users online. What is the value of that?

Vodafone: Vodafone Lab This community is the closest thing I have found to a Social CRM among the various Telco operators in Italy. It is a mix of fun and useful tips but it is far from having any real valuable impact for Vodafone's customers. There is no real integration with the main support site where users can see their accounts and bills. It is a completely separate environment that shows that Vodafone is just playing for now with the idea of Social CRM.

Of these 2 operators, only Vodafone Italy has any meaningful presence on Social Media. The Vodafone Italy Facebook page has 500.000 fans. All others are negligible.

Twitter presence does not go beyond 3000 followers.

UK

O2: O2 Forums This is a typical set of discussion forums aimed at allowing customers to exchange informations on a variety of technical issues. With 100.000 users it is barely a drop of the total O2 subscribers. Most of all, O2 has little involvement in moderating these forums, and the result is a long list of customers ranting about poor quality of customer service, like this example

It looks like they have a blog too. Once again an example of a very disjointed approach.

Orange:  Unless I missed something, Orange has no initiative worth mentioning in the Enterprise 2.0 area.

Vodafone: Vodafone's eForum introduces some concepts that are typical of an Enterprise 2.0 approach: different types of members (administrators, advanced members, member, newbie), a personal profile page with your posts, highest area of activity and reputation. The only have apparently 2 different groups where users can belong to: administrators and members.

With 90.000 registered users and no more than 60 users online at a given time (half of which probably administrators), it is clearly not a strategic channel for Vodafone. The lack of integration with the CRM/call center, makes it an isolated place.

3: The 3Blog, is a shy attempt at communicating with a young generation of customers. It is a one way communication channel where 3 employees present new products and services as well as daily work impressions. You can really just leave a brief comment. Not impressive in any way.

Vodafone leads again the Social Media presence with a tiny 187000 fans on Facebook. Twitter presence does not go beyond 3000 followers.

This assessment is far from being exhaustive and has not been conducted with a scientific approach. Nevertheless the conclusion for these first two countries I have looked at is that there is still a long way to go before we can say that the Telecom market has finally turned the attention to the new way customers around the world demand to interact with their vendor.

This means that we are probably even further away for these players to be able to address the opportunity that is presented to them by an ever increasing move to cloud computing combined with mobile access.

Enterprises around the world will be moving faster and faster into the cloud. They will be hungrier for mobile cloud based services for their workforce and for their respective clients.

It will be interesting to see if the Telecom operators leave this field to the likes of Google and Apple without putting up a fight, while they remain worried with how much they should charge for data plans...

In an article published last year titled Convergence Technical Communication: Strategies for Incorporating Web 2.0, Nicky Bleiel discussed techniques for using Web 2.0 to help make the user experience a better one. The topic of wanting users to have a positive experience is not a new one for technical communicators. As the mediators between those developing technologies and the audience who must use them, we want users to comprehend key concepts in a manner that results in the least amount of effort and the most success. When we prevail, we add value by reducing the amount of support calls received and by helping to leave a positive impression of the organization with the customer. In the best scenario we contribute to a customer’s desire to return and purchase more products or services.

How does Web 2.0 encourage users to comprehend ideas and more easily find success, though? In itself, I don’t believe it can. Embracing a technology without considering user needs can result in wasted effort. For example, using DITA might not be the best choice for a small documentation team with a tight budget and little need for single-sourcing. Similarly, in the Web 2.0 world, creating a corporate account on a traditional social networking site without planning doesn’t seem like an astute move. Applying Web 2.0 technologies wisely, though, can help your team become more valuable to both customers and management. In the article, Bleiel mentions four best practices to employ; below I describe how we apply her suggestions.

Analyze often. Analyzing our needs helps us to determine what types of Web 2.0 tools to incorporate into our documentation strategy. For instance, does it make sense to use several tools so that we can microblog and create a video? Or is it better to use a product designed to deliver information in multiple formats? Enterprise Social Networking tools today offer many features—several of which can assist documentation teams in offering their audiences many choices. Analyzing our needs has helped us to make wise decisions.

Know your audience. For example, before employing the use of videos, we talk to folks and see if it makes sense to use this delivery mechanism based on audience needs. Maybe a short blog about some product updates makes more sense than a video. Sometimes multiple formats can really help users by offering them a choice in the manner in which to receive information. With proper tools, we found that we can use multiple formats easily to better help our audience.

Keep up with trends. This one might be my personal favorite—it’s a lot of fun to monitor what’s going on in technology. However, I’m not instilling any new wisdom when I write that adopting trends depends on your needs. It seems prudent to know what the trends are, though, so that you can effectively evaluate your choices.

Tie your traditional documentation efforts with your Web 2.0 efforts. We found that a cohesive plan can result in a well-rounded documentation selection for users. For example, we still publish some documents in traditional formats—it makes sense for certain products. For other products, we use a combination of help files, blogs, forums, and so on.

When using Web 2.0, we still want users to enjoy a good experience and to encourage customers to return. In fact, during the most highly competitive market in decades, it seems that helping customers to return is a mandate for technical communicators today, not an option. I think that properly selecting Web 2.0 tools can help with this mandate. 

I've been meaning to post a short review on "The Power of Pull" -- one of the most interesting new books in the growing "enterprise 2.0" library -- but I had been debating what exactly to write.  For authors John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison have published a volume that on its face looks like one book, but in reality is actually two.

The first is aimed at the known world of business-book buyers who largely are interested in understanding the latest thinking in business theory or the businesses that exhibit best practices (e.g., "In Search of Excellence"). "Pull" -- which makes an elegant case for why businesses in the post digital/social need to rethink their entire approach to people (their staff, their partners, their customers) -- does not disappoint. The thesis, stated simply -- then rigorously illustrated -- is that "rather than individuals serving the needs of the institutions, our institutions will be recasted to serve the needs of individuals." And rather than continuing to spend massive amounts of energy and capital "pushing" toward individuals, businesses would be better off learning how to enable individuals to "pull."

With so much focus on the power of ever emerging power of the individual -- for which there is probably an historical, economic imperative (the more powerful the individual, the more powerful the business and economy) -- it's no surprise then that "Pull" also wants to fit the mold of an even older type of business book -- the self-help book ambitious business people. The most interesting sections of the book profile some of the tech world's most digitally and socially savvy players, and offer the readers tips on how they can be more like them. At times, "Pull" feels less like a book written by John Hagel and more like one written by Dale Carnegie ("How to Win Friends and Influence People"), but for a hipper, smarter, Web 2.0 crowd.

No matter -- "Pull" is worth the read, and the tendency to veer from big-business tome to self-help book simply belies the tension in this book that makes it so interesting. In a world where the individual is the thing, the individual becomes a worthy object in our search of excellence.  In fact, I see the potential for a post-2.0 book that exclusively focuses on that search.  We can thank the authors of "Pull" for that.  They very convincely make the case that now more than ever, business is personal.

"The world don't move to the beat of just one drum.
What might be right for you, may not be right for some.

It takes different strokes to move the world."

That quote is take from the theme song to Diff'rent Strokes.  Although including this snippet unfortunately reveals something about my age, I felt it was entirely appropriate given the context.

Every Clearvale network is unique.  Their purposes, organization, appearances, and members are individual.  Clearvale may be your internal enterprise collaboration platform, your partner extranet, your Social CRM solution, or any other number of business uses.  How you choose to use Clearvale may be, and probably will be, different than how I use Clearvale.

Based on your business needs, your member use cases will vary.  In some scenarios, such as with a private intranet, it may be beneficial to enable all members to have full feature access because they are trusted contributors.  In other scenarios, such as with an externally-facing support site, you may want to limit certain functionality to a subset of your members.  For example, you may want to restrict community creation and content management to company representatives.

Clearvale currently provides two user types; administrators and members.  In the forthcoming Clearvale release, we shall introduce expanded and enhanced roles that enable you to distribute tasks and capabilities to members.

• Owner: Each network shall have a dedicated owner.  By default, this is the member who created the network.  The owner shall have full administrative privileges, including the ability to manage other administrators and make system changes to the network.

• Administrator: Administrators shall have full administrative privileges, including general network settings, appearance, content management, and member role management.

• Moderator: Moderators shall have full content management privileges, such as the ability to review reported content, moderate posted content, etc.

• Writer: Writers shall have all the privileges as today's "member" role, including the ability to publish content and manage their profiles.

• Reader: Readers shall the ability to read content, post comments, reply to forum topics, vote in polls, and rate content.  However, readers shall not be able to publish content or create/manage communities.

In addition, you'll be able to determine the default role for all incoming members.  We plan to also enable you to specify the individual roles for members added via bulk loading.

Perhaps you will use all of these roles in your Clearvale solution.  Perhaps you will only use two or three of them.  The choice is yours.

"Everybody's got a special kind of story.
Everybody finds a way to shine.
They'll have theirs, and you'll have yours, and I'll have mine.
And together we'll be fine!"

I just came across an article on Mashable today titled "Experts Agree: Gen Y Will Not Grow Out of Social Networking".

In summary, Pew conducted a survey of Internet experts as part of its "Future of the Internet" study, and 67% of those experts agreed with the below statement stating that social networking isn't just a fad for today's digital generation.

“By 2020, members of Generation Y (today’s ‘digital natives’) will continue to be ambient broadcasters who disclose a great deal of personal information in order to stay connected and take advantage of social, economic, and political opportunities. Even as they mature, have families, and take on more significant responsibilities, their enthusiasm for widespread information sharing will carry forward.”

29% agreed with the opposite:

“By 2020, members of Generation Y (today’s “digital natives”) will have “grown out” of much of their use of social networks, multiplayer online games and other time-consuming, transparency-engendering online tools. As they age and find new interests and commitments, their enthusiasm for widespread information sharing will abate.”
You can check out the overview on Pew's website here. There's even a cool graph illustrating the results.

I myself am more inclined to agree with the first statement. I really don't think the current generation's immersion in social media is going to go anywhere -- it's an integral part of how the internet, and our everyday lives, work for us. Sure, things will change and new platforms will arise, providing people with new tools, functions, features...and as the tools become more advanced, we'll run into new privacy issues and have lots of debates. But that's just how it is.

People want to be connected, and as long as there are services allowing them to remain so, they'll accept the risks associated with having online identities. I think individuals may change the type of information -- and how much of it -- they choose to share, but sharing itself will remain a key component even ten years from now. The open, engaging, desire-to-stay-networked state of mind will be passed to the next generation, and we'll see where it goes from there.

Part of the argument for the second statement is that as the current generation gets older, they won't have as much time available to dedicate to social networking; in addition, fears about how oversharing personal information may affect one's professional life and other behavioral changes will also play a role in the movement away from the medium. I can see the validity here, but I don't feel that people will shy away completely. As I stated above, the type and amount of information shared may change, but social engagement will continue. Even today, there are plenty of mothers, fathers and professionals on sites such as Facebook who aren't afraid to maintain their identities in a social space -- they simply do it in a more controlled manner.

What do you think?

When I first became interested in the subject in 2008, I was struck by the feeling that most of what was described as "social commerce" really wasn't very social at all. It was mostly based on product reviews, which while useful, provided little more than the "wisdom of strangers". It was like walking into a store and shouting out "who thinks I should buy this?", or worse, everyone yelling "you should buy this!" at you. You know nothing about these people, they know nothing about you. How do you know whether you can trust their opinion? Yes, it's better than no wisdom at all, but far less useful than the valued opinions of trusted friends and colleagues.

So I felt that for eCommerce to become truly social, it needed to integrate with existing social networks like Facebook and MySpace, or for storefronts to be established on these networks.

Fast forward two years, and there has definitely been a move towards this, but eCommerce is still nowhere near as social as it could (and indeed, probably will, become). On Paul Marsden's excellent blog Social Commerce Today, he defines social commerce as:

Selling with social media - the use of social media in the context of e-commerce

OK, I can live with that, but I do think it's a little simplistic. Just because a retailer is using social media to help sell, doesn't make it social commerce. Dell's use of Twitter to alert customers to offers in their Outlet store certainly uses social media, but it is primarily just a broadcast medium. 1-800-Flowers' Facebook store was one of the first examples of it's kind, but at least initially was little more than an eCommerce widget within Facebook, without taking much advantage of the user's social graph. I would argue that an eCommerce capability on a social network is not true social commerce if it fails to take advantage of the social environment it is in.

Then around a year ago, I came across a hugely thought-provoking piece of work from Jeremiah Owyang, while when he was still at Forrester, and it made me realise how narrowly most people (myself included) had been looking at the subject. He defines social commerce as being the fifth of five eras of the social web, and predicts this starting in 2011, reaching maturity in 2013. Further definition of these eras and the impact on consumers and brands is included in the graphic in this article.

So what are all these social features we see today if they're not social commerce? One commenter on Jeremiah's article observed that much of what passes for social commerce today is actually in Jeremiah's "era of social colonization". In particular it merely enables people to "lean on their peers' opinions to make decisions about products". OK, call it social commerce if you want, but it really only socializes the product selection decision, not the transaction itself.

Some of Jeremiah's predictions for the "era of social commerce" are logical extensions of using social networks for eCommerce.

"work with peers to define the next generation of products; also purchase in groups"

"lean on groups to define products"

Others far more revolutionary and disruptive, such as:

"online groups supplant brands"

"a new PR agency emerges which represents online groups - not brands"

If these happen, a lot of companies are going to have to think very hard about whether they embrace this change or fight it. Maybe we will see more experiments like giffgaff, a community-powered mobile telco, which is actually a subsidiary of O2/Telefonica.

Examples of several of the predictions for this era are already beginning to emerge. Over the last 6-9 months, group-buying companies such as Groupon and LivingSocial have expanded rapidly. LivingSocial opened in the UK for the first time this week, and Amazon acquired Woot.

Last year, Walkers Crisps ran a competition to let people invent new flavours, with the winner not only receiving a prize, but 1% of the profits (it has since been discontinued, not surprising, it was horrible - the customer is NOT always right!). Vitaminwater did a similar thing on Facebook.

Whether all of Jeremiah's predictions come true or not, it's clear that there is a lot more to come in social commerce over the next few years. This may well cause a shift in the balance of power between vendors and customers, and not all vendors will be comfortable with this. Despite what I said earlier, I do think we can count "the use of social media in the context of e-commerce" as social commerce, but we should acknowledge that it is just the beginning. And this is before we've even got on to thinking about what it might mean to B2B eCommerce.

So hang on tight... it's going to be an interesting ride.

Lots of people are talking about Social CRM, and almost everyone has their own definition. I really don't want invent yet another definition, but I do think that even the best definitions need a little explanation.

I've been using Paul Greenberg's definition, which I discovered via Jeremiah Owyang which defines Social CRM as:

a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It's the company's response to the customer's ownership of the conversation.

OK, that's great, but what does that mean in practice? Here's how I explain it:

Customer interaction with a company has typically been through CRM systems and customer services departments

Customer forums are often completely detached from CRM/customer service, if they exist at all:

To some companies, "Social CRM" is simply enabling better interfaction between customer service and the rest of the company, without any direct benefit to the customer:

To others, it means getting customer service to participate in social media sites like Facebook and Twitter:

But to me, Social CRM means integrating all of these to enable better communication between customers, customer service and other company employees, whatever channel is used:

The biggest congregation for HR professionals, SHRM is right around the corner. I was an exhibitor for BroadVision at last year’s show, and although I won’t be able to attend this year, I noticed that a lot of communication and advertising about the event is taking place in the social media sphere, highlighting how new social tools can help HR improve the workplace.

Almost all HR professionals agree that the company intranet is one of the most powerful ways for HR departments to connect with employees. However, IT departments administer many traditional intranets, which often come with large manuals on how you can update your HR pages yourself (and in my experience this usually involved a 50-page binder of instructions). Some IT staff members may very kindly agree to update that important policy for you—but they’re busy people, as all departments are.

A year ago, I became the Admin of our company intranet – BroadVision Connect (BVC) – which is powered by Clearvale. I was assigned to be the Admin because a) I am the HR head and company intranet falls under my belt, but also because b) the platform was designed to be easy to use so even someone like me who has ZERO IT background or training can do it.

Of course, I work for BroadVision. But take the following into consideration:

Imagine an intranet where you, as an HR professional, have control to post an updated policy in a matter of minutes. Moreover, you have the added bonus of posting it with restricted access if you desire. Worldwide organizations like ours have very different policies and procedures. With BVC, we can post them all on our intranet, tailoring the access to each region. No more need to send emails to inform employees of a change in policy; additionally, you have no need to make sure that only the specific region or department that may be affected is included on the email distribution list.

We no longer have to keep policies and procedures on an HR shared drive where, if an HR staff member leaves, we must navigate through a potentially confusing filing system just to find the most current version of a document—and then wonder if it was ever distributed! Instead, our HR team worldwide now has access to all HR documents, encouraging synergy between different regions and styles of working. Now, the department is more streamlined and is able to collaborate much more easily.

Our company intranet is now a tool in our HR arsenal that helps to foster team building and knowledge sharing. When employees can connect to each other and share their ideas—peer-to-peer—natural thought leaders come to the forefront. We have seen leadership skills demonstrated by employees located in remote offices that we had not witnessed previously. Several of our employees have also demonstrated new skills and interests that have led us to re-adjust their career paths, to the immense satisfaction of the employee and with great benefit to the company.

With an ESN intranet like BVC, every employee has a voice, tools for innovation are widely and easily distributed, experimentation becomes easy, and employees become aware that their capabilities are more important than titles.

Some of you may wonder about the extra workload it takes to set up a company intranet. Of course, at the beginning it took us a little time to set up the home page -- choosing the widgets we wanted and identifying contributing staff members to set up and populate a few communities prior to launch. It took less than a week, a few hours a day, for me to organize and populate BroadVision Connect a year or so ago. The site maintains itself now. Honestly, sometimes the hardest part for me in setting up a Community is deciding which logo I want to use!

Like most companies BroadVision has had its share of tough times. Before BVC, it was very hard to keep employees informed and the communication channels between management and employees open. During this period we had a high number of voluntary terminations. As part of our exit interview process we asked employees to let us know which factors contributed to their decision to leave. Not surprisingly, “Lack of Communication “ and  “Culture and Morale” where in the top five selected by every employee.

It’s very hard to hear this, but at the time we had few resources to help us change these sentiments. That was in 2008, and since 2009 we started using Clearvale to build our intranet. As the year progressed I noticed one big difference—we experienced a sharp decrease in the number of voluntary resignations. In fact, they decreased by half. I’m confident that BroadVision Connect was a contributing factor. How can I know this? We conducted the same exit interview on the few voluntary resignations we had, and not one of person listed “Lack of Communication” or “Culture and Morale” as a contributing factor! Now as an HR professional, that’s the kind of ROI that makes me smile.

Oh and one last comment—Self Governance! We have not had to remove or edit one single post on BroadVision Connect since its inception. Not too bad.

So many of you know that we were at the E2 Conference in Boston a couple of weeks ago. Our attendance there coincided with a couple of big announcements -- the launch of Clearvale SecondFloor (CSF), a new global community of consultants, and the debut of Clearvale Nations, our new customer im-migration program.

In addition to Boston being a beautiful city (I'd never been there before), it was pretty great to be at the show promoting Clearvale in the wake of all the exciting things that've been happening here lately. The big Clearvale announcement and media launch/coverage we had back in May, along with the two announcements I mentioned above, have got people talking about us, with us, and we're excited to talk with them too. For all those that I met at the conference last week: thanks for stopping by, and I look forward to connecting with you all again in the near future.

But there's something else I'm excited about -- just this past week, we announced the Clearvale SecondFloor Speaker Series, which is a brand new live event series where we'll hold presentations, Q&A and discussion with thought leaders in the business technology and social media space. Our first session is currently scheduled for Wednesday, August 18, and will feature Charlene Li (yes, THE Charlene Li), founder of the Altimeter Group. The event will take place at BroadVision's corporate headquarters -- on the second floor, of course -- so for those who are in the Silicon Valley/Bay Area, please come join us! Everybody's welcome.

For more info about CSF, the Speaker Series, and to RSVP for the August 18 session, visit our official Meetup group page.

Hope to see everyone there!

I was at the HR Software Show in London for two days last week, and one of the topics I was talking about was employee misuse of social media, something that HR professionals are rightly concerned about. Research by Proofpoint last year showed that 8% of US companies had fired employees for inappropriate use of social media. While the figure in the UK is much lower, there have still been several high-profile incidents over the last year or so. Dixons staff writing on an unofficial (but open) Facebook group described their customers as "stupid" and "arseholes". Similarly, British Airways staff described their customers as "smelly" and "annoying". Virgin Atlantic's employees described their customers as "chavs" (a uniquely British insult - look it up on Wikipedia!) and complained of cockroaches on their planes.

Of course, the initial reaction most people have to all of these incidents is "how could they be so stupid?". But I've been asking myself a question about this - would they have happened if the companies in question had provided a social intranet for informal chat between employees where this sort of discussion is tolerated? Something I often say about Social CRM is that if you don't provide a forum for your customers to express their opinion, don't be surprised if they find somewhere else on the internet to do so in a far less constructive way. It occurs to me that for large companies, the same is true of employees.

But would a large company like British Airways or Dixons really tolerate a forum inside the company which insulted its customers? Very unlikely. But casual expression of frustration at work is something everyone does, and in this day and age, that's just as likely to happen online as offline. So it's really not surprising that this discussion does end up on Facebook.

It's often said that social networking is an unstoppable tidal wave. So maybe companies should accept that this sort of discussion is going to happen somewhere, and therefore it's better to have it in private, where a certain level of control can be exercised and the worst excesses can be prevented. Such an idea would have been laughable 5 years ago, and it would take a brave company to do it now. But it doesn't seem quite so ridiculous as it once might have done.

[ Footnote: no, BroadVision don't have a customer insult forum.... yet! ]

A recent ReadWriteWeb article discusses the massive growth of data on the Internet. It’s a bit astonishing given that, although the Internet’s been around for decades, its popular adoption by the masses is still a somewhat recent phenomenon in world computing history.

As someone who works with content as a technical writer and blogger, I can’t stop myself from wondering what this data proliferation means for my profession. It’s a topic I like to discuss with others and believe is crucial to think about as we manage our workloads and careers in the coming decade. How will our roles evolve? How will we handle this enormous quantity of data when many people today already suffer from the consequences of dealing with an avalanche of information? How do we organize data that is meaningful to us?

Lots of questions, and I don’t pretend to have answers. However, I think that new tools designed for the Web 2.0 paradigm can help with this data explosion. It’s true that Facebook and similar sites have been around for a few years now, but using a product designed for the enterprise that leverages social networking is still somewhat novel; as a technical writer, this is the type of tool in which I’m interested. After using an Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) product for about a year and a half now, I’m a believer that an ESN offers at least some of the answers to the questions listed above.

It’s not just me who believes this, either. A white paper by Sarah O’Keefe titled Friend or Foe? Web 2.0 in Technical Communicationdiscusses some of the challenges that technical writers face today. Near the end of the piece, she has a section where she lists some tips for writers. One that stands out for me is that a “product web site should provide a platform for customer-generated content with user forums, wikis, and the like.” In other words, a site should engage customers. I like this a lot! Customers—whether happy or not—have the ability to post opinions all over the web anyway. I have seen forums where users express their complaints about company documentation in somewhat nasty ways at times. Why not allow these users to give you feedback and also help them to become more satisfied customers? If they become engaged and know that you are as well, everyone wins—and documentation can improve.

However, using an enterprise social networking tool is not just about giving your customers a forum. Using the proper tool can help to organize—and hence help you to synthesize—useful information from many disparate sources. As the data explosion continues, the need to ignore the irrelevant, organize the useful, and then amalgamate what you have into something meaningful to your projects will become harder. Shrewdly choosing tools to help with the process seems like a wise move.

Using a site that leverages the richness of a community in an organized manner—through the use of forums, rating systems, and other features—is an intuitive way to structure both writer-generated and user-generated information. Will an ESN solve all content organization and management issues as data continues to propagate on the web? No way! However, an ESN takes a massive step toward effectively handling data in a dispersed corporate world where those outside of the organization now share airtime with your dedicated content developers.

On June 9th and 10th, Milan has become the Enterprise 2.0 capital of the world.

More than a thousand delegates have attended what many consider the most important Enterprise 2.0 gathering after the Boston E2.0 Conference.

Both conferences share many of the keynote speakers and although the Conference in Milan is of a significantly smaller scale, it confirms that in Europe Enterprise 2.0 is starting to reach mainstream.

The opening remarks by Emanuele Scotti and Rosario Sica, partners at Openknowledge, made an interesting connection between the first Enterprise 2.0 pioneers and explorers of the 15th Century like Cristoforo Colombo. What lies ahead of us is not completely known, but the potential rewards for everyone are very compelling.

The conference was then divided in three main tracks:

HR 2.0 chaired by Emanuele Scotti

Marketing 2.0 chaired by Emanuele Quintarelli

Innovation 2.0 chaired by Rosario Sica

These three tracks map very well with Clearvale’s 3 main ROI areas:

The Hidden Economy

Incremental Business

Innovation

In my opinion, there still some work to do to bridge the gap between the pioneers of Enterprise 2.0 (companies like Barilla who built a new business model using Social Networking interactions) and the followers who still fail to completely grasp the various opportunities that lie ahead of them.

There were many questions on how to change company culture, how to obtain the necessary resources and how to measure the ROI, and some of them remained unanswered.

Among the many interesting cases, the one brought by “Centro Nazionale Trapianti” (National Center for Organ Transplant) is definitely one of a kind.

It provides in fact a very compelling message to all Enterprises and Public Institutions: “It is possible to change the way we do business. It can be achieved with limited resources and an apparently conservative organizational culture”

With a team of only 2 community managers, 1 project coordinator and the assistance of 1 BroadVision consultant, CNT has been able to set up a collaborative network for hundreds of professionals in less than 10 days.

The network aims at creating a collaborative workspace for all personnel involved in the organ donation and transplant process: doctor, nurses, surgeons, volunteers and local staff.

All users of the CNT network will finally be able to meet virtually to exchange ideas, best practices, to standardize procedures and increase the engagement level especially for those more isolated in remote locations.

This project sets a very good example for future initiatives. A clear strategy, realistic expectations, executive sponsorship, thought leader participation to moderate the dialogue and a clearly perceived reward form a very good recipe for Enterprise 2.0 success.

A closing remark for the conference organizers: In the decade of open leadership, knowledge sharing and on-line social interactions, it looks very old school not having a virtual meeting place where all participants can review the keynote speeches, download presentations and follow up with the presenters.

I highlighted this disconnect in my previous blog post, “Events 1.0 to support Enterprise 2.0?” I am afraid it is still there. Fear of sharing too much perhaps? Making future events less attractive when you can find everything online?

I think this too is a cultural change we still need to go through.

Much of the discussion of Social CRM I have seen so far is very consumer focused, with the primary concern of how discussion on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter can be linked to a company's CRM systems.

So if someone writes on Twitter

Hey @Apple, why can't I print from my iPad?

...this finds its way into Apple's support processes (well, supposing Apple had a Twitter presence, which of course they don't).

Many people would argue "that's just dumb... why not go to Apple's web site and ask them?", but there is increasing expectation that vendors come to where the users are, not vice versa. Perhaps I'm showing my age by saying this, so I'll say it quietly, but yes, I find it a bit dumb too.

But does this make sense for B2B Social CRM?

Hey @Boeing, how much volcanic ash can your planes handle?

I can't quite see airline employees asking questions like that on Twitter, however young and "digital native" they are.

The reality is that B2B customer-supplier relationships are significantly more complex than B2C relationships, and therefore Social CRM for B2B needs to reflect this. So the focus should perhaps be less on Twitter integration, more on reflecting the many-to-many relationships which exist between the customer and supplier. I am not fond of inventing terminology and buzzwords, but like to think of this as "Enterprise Social CRM".

So, whereas B2C Social CRM typically has simple relationships between individuals and a customer service department:

Enterprise Social CRM may have relationships between individuals and departments throughout the two organisations:

Yesterday, I discussed this subject with one of BroadVision's major B2B eCommerce customers. They were starting to experiment with a presence on Facebook and YouTube, and I was particularly interested to understand whether their customers (who almost exclusively buy their products for business purposes) would connect with the company through Facebook (which is typically used mainly for personal social networking). Interestingly, although contributions from customers are relatively limited so far, nearly 500 people did become fans quite quickly. The theory is that they have become fans kind of as a "badge of honour" on their profile.

So perhaps much of the B2C model does also apply to B2B. But I don't believe that Facebook/Twitter alone will be sufficient to represent the complexities of B2B relationships, so these can only serve as outposts of an Enterprise Social CRM strategy.

Many of you know that I come from the enterprise 2.0/web 2.0 consulting world, and several of you have pointedly asked, "how can you ever leave the world of consulting?"  As the new CMO at BroadVision -- the first company I have joined since my 2001/2002 stint at VMware -- my first job is to help bring the new product, Clearvale, to market.  But for a number of reasons, the product -- the first "network of networks" for the social enterprise -- cannot be the only focus.  A great deal of talent in the 2.0 world resides in small, nimble, influential consultancies, and for quite some time I have been thinking that a platform for matching customer needs to available talent could have add significant value to the marketplace.

With that thought, this morning we announced our plan for Clearvale SecondFloor, a global community of best-in-class consultants.  I've already spoken with a handful of great consultants who will be joining CSF, but I will take the opportunity to meet with others next week in Boston at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.  We will also be launching a monthly speaker series, starting with July 14t ah Q&A with Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group. She'll be talking about her latest book, "Open Leadership." In the meantime, check out today's announcement for more detail, or go directly to our partner page to see how you might join us.

EXCERPT: The many experiments in crowdsourcing “professional-class creative” have given us something else to think about — the use of the word “creative” is a term that the advertising community has branded and defined too narrowly. As the entire universe of crowdsourcing has demonstrated, the work that people can be tapped to do is the most important stuff there is. For the essence of “creative” is creating, the making of things, without which there’d be nothing (literally).

This post was first published on AllThingsThatRise.

It’s not often I can point to a trend in social technology and get truly excited. The business benefits of social tech have long been established (the effectiveness and efficiency of networked communications), but so have the human costs (distraction and dependency on networked devices). But there’s a trend that’s (a) just beginning to mature and (b) shows real promise to benefit both business and the human condition — really. I’m talking about the many systems and platforms that have been used to “crowdsource creative” — that is, to tap human networks to create new ideas, products, and services. These platforms have been used to create everything ranging from t-shirts, corporate logos, to earnest solutions for world peace. Regarding world peace, that’s not exactly the kind of human benefit I’m thinking about (more about that in a moment). But the range of things that can be crowdsourced — both mundane and sublime — is worth considering. I like to bunch these things in three general groups:

*Platforms that crowdsource the creation of products and services. Perhaps the best known example of this is Dell IdeaStorm, an initiative that’s enabled the company to tap its most avid customers for ideas that contribute to product and service development.

*Platforms that crowdsource the creation of ideas. The idea here is to organize groups of people to innovate, develop new ideas, and solve problems that have eluded organizations that have attempted these things on their own. There are lots of examples of this, from the famed InnoCentive site (most recent challenge: clever solutions for responding to recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico); to the $1 million Netflix competition (which enabled the company to develop a superior recommendations system); to the very recent $1 million Edmunds Toyota Prius challenge (“re-create unintended acceleration in a car and then solve that problem and prove the whole thing to us”), to the many experiments that are being conducted at Ideascale, a platform that “empowers communities to drive innovation” by enabling them to collect ideas from “customers, give them a platform to vote, the most important ideas bubble to the top.”

*Platforms that crowdsource the creation of professional-class content. Of the three general classes of crowdsourcing creative, I find this to be the most interesting, for three reasons. First, most of these platforms tap communities of professional-class (or near professional-class) participants. No longer do businesses need to limit themselves to consumer-driven user-generated content (USG); they can avail themselves to professional-generated content (PGC) as well. Second, because of the professional standing of many participants, they are generally more Web savvy and better connected; a brand that engages one of these communities might get instant marketing at the start of a competition because so many members of the community are likely to publicize their participation. Third, the very fact that businesses have begun to crowdsource actual “creative” — the term that the advertising industry has given to any and all artifacts (design, images, video) — from the creative disciplines has serious implications for traditional business models in the world of marketing, communications, and, yes, advertising. Examples of PGC platforms are Logoworks (acquired by HP) and 99designs, which crowdsource the creation of logos and Web design; MOFILM, which helps brands crowdsource the creation of film and video; Aniboom, a global community of professional-class animators; and Talenthouse, perhaps the most audacious of all platforms, attempting to create a virtual marketplace for the entire “creative” community (art, fashion, film, music, design — and that’s just to start).

These many experiments have given us something else to think about — the use of the word “creative,” which, as I noted, is a term that the advertising community has branded and defined too narrowly. As the entire universe of crowdsourcing has demonstrated, the work that people can be tapped to do is the most important stuff there is. For the essence of “creative” is creating, the making of things, without which there’d be nothing (literally). And, as companies like MOFILM, Aniboom, and Talenthouse are demonstrating, the things we are talking about are potentially great things — this is not the world of amateurs, but a newly organized world of professionals — and people on their way up (e.g., MOFILM has done a great job connecting with students in film school) — who are motivated to work in environments that are less hierarchical and more network-centric. That, of course, has long been one of the promises of the Social Web, but I believe that “crowdsourcing creative” is pushing the outer edges of social technology design and that we can all learn a lot from it. I’ve been watching this market for quite some time (disclosure = Aniboom was a client of my agency a while back), and these are three things I’ve observed.

(1) The best platforms have defined value from the start. As I said, many of these platforms are looking to create important things for which there is a clear and compelling market need (from a cheaper logo for starting a new business, to breakthrough technology that can transform a business).

(2) The best platforms are driven by social design. It’s no accident that many platforms connect with their participants through contests and games. The challenge, always, is to devise the right kinds of incentives for the creative community in question (to put the “centive,” for example, in InnoCentive), and this is where innovators in social technology are spending most of their time. But the bigger lesson for all is just how important “game logic” has become for so many experiments on the Social Web (for a smart look at this opportunity, check out the recent Business Week article by John Hagel and John Seely Brown examining what businesses can learn from multi-player games like World of Warcraft).

(3) The best platforms have found a way to connect with the “out crowd,” the most talented professionals that are too remote, too invisible, too shy to rise inside the traditional enterprise. A colleague of mine recently pointed out that one of the cooler things about “crowdsourcing creative” is the opportunity to engage with someone who for any reason — too shy, too far away, invisible behind the corporate lens — to get noticed otherwise. This, I believe, can have a profoundly healthy effect on both the businesses that recruit talent and the people who have it. Healthy for business, because there’s nothing so vulnerable as a company that depends on a small “in crowd” mentality; better to tap the best talent there is, wherever it is. Healthy for the person who has creative talent, because the making of things is the bedrock of a happy life. Put the two together, and you’d have the kind of organizational culture that’s required to compete in the new digital/social economy. But whether or not that’s too idealistic, engaging and supporting “the out crowd” might make for a happier corporate life. As Freud said, “love and work are the two cornerstones of our humanness.” Solving for at least one of these challenges — shall we start a contest? — sounds like a good thing to do.

[Acknowledgement: Big thanks to Tatiana Josephy and Chris Advansun for their research and insights on companies featured in this post.]

“Going social” seems to be a very popular phrase today in both personal networking and the corporate world. As the HR Director of BroadVision and the main Administrator behind our Intranet, which is built on the Clearvale footprint, I can’t help but notice a lot of changes because of “going social” and what it means in the workplace.

For example, I’ve been receiving some very interesting emails lately from companies trying to promote their HR services, and I’m finding more and more that they seem to focus on Social Media. Here are some selections from emails I received just this week:

· “When you source with social networks, you need to understand the rules of the game.”

· “Social Media - The Most Cost Effective Way to Recruit!”

· “…a fifth of employees would turn down a job if it did not allow them access to social networking sites or personal email during work time.…”

· “Recruiting Through Social Media: How To Find Top Candidates.”

· “Each generation gets jobs their own way. The Great Generation got jobs from their neighbor. Baby boomers got jobs from newspaper ads. Generation X got jobs from online job boards. Generation Y gets jobs from social media.”

· “Employees want to connect with each other, and more importantly, they want to connect with the company and senior management. A study by Towers Perrin found that employees overwhelmingly want to know ’that leadership is interested in them.’”

· “Social networking critical to employee satisfaction.”

One of the quotes mentions Towers Perrin. Towers Perrin conducted a study entitled “Capitalizing on Effective Communication.” The study highlighted Social Media and Networking as a way to leverage effective communication, and the research came up with some findings that we have seen while using our own intranet here at BroadVision:

“Companies that are using social media to engage employees are using these tools to address a variety of topics. The most prevalent topics are collaboration and team building, adapting to change, and promoting health and wellness”

The study also measured the reasoning behind companies not implementing or expanding the use of social media. 45% of participants said it was due to limited staff or resources and 40% due to limited knowledge. It’s an interesting finding because if the market understood more about the ease of implementing and maintaining some type of ESN, and discovered the potential ROI, then concerns about limited staff or knowledge would vanish.

But one of the most compelling findings of the study was a simple one: Successful companies communicate with their employees. Seems like common sense to me, but some companies just don’t interact effectively with their workforce. I think that we used to be rather guilty of this ourselves until we began using a proper tool to help us facilitate better dialogue with staff of all levels.

Improving communication is something that many HR departments strive for, and rightfully so. As the study states: “Companies that are highly effective communicators had 47% higher total returns to shareholders over the last five years compared with firms that are the least effective communicators”. Wow—an impressive figure indeed. And if “going social” helps contribute to the higher return while improving communication within the organization, I for one am all for it.

I came across the newest edition of Mashable’s Web Faceoff series earlier today. This time, they’re asking readers how they get their news…Twitter or the newspaper? This is very much a tie-in to one of their posts from a few months ago, titled “Social Networks Play a Major Part in How We Get News.” If you read that, you would know the following about American news consumption:

-- The biggest source of news is television
-- Internet is the second biggest source
-- Not very many people read newspapers anymore

I myself get almost all of my news from the internet (although I’m a fan of Anderson Cooper). I’m also pretty guilty of the third bullet. It’s not that I don’t like newspapers…on the contrary, I love them. It’s just that online news is insanely accessible and easy. News – and tabloids, which should not qualify as news but for some reason seems be just as if not more popular – spread like wildfire on the web.

I used to read a lot. Print, I mean. Books, comics, magazines, newspapers… it was a hobby of mine. These days, hardly ever. There aren’t too many friends of mine who read print either, and that makes me sad. There’s something about holding paper pages between the palms of your hands that makes reading printed material cooler than just skimming through material online.

You’d think that this wouldn’t really bother me, and it doesn’t. It makes me sad, but it doesn’t bother me. Does that make sense? I view the decline of print as a natural, technological progression – one that is bittersweet yet acceptable. In the eyes of most people today, progress is defined by speed, efficiency, ease, and cost reduction. What’s the quickest way to get from A to B? Then to C and D? And how cheaply can it all be done?

I understand that this is the way the world works, especially when it comes to business. It’s always full speed ahead, and that’s just how it’s always been. But I think what I’m trying to get at is that I don’t believe everyone was really prepared for just how quickly the business world has been changing and is continuing to change. And in today’s world, the speed at which transformation occurs is amplified more than ever before.

Take a look at the question again: Twitter or newspaper? Aside from both being means to deliver messages, they are radically different. Yet, they're being compared. It’s hard to guess what type of platform will come next.

On a related topic, Giovanni just wrote a great blog post on the subject of CEO’s doubting their ability to manage the complexities of changing business. Check it out.

Aaron Kobiln:  Air traffic as seen by FAA

What do CEOs want?  IBM seeks to answer that question in the latest edition of their global CEO survey, provocatively titled "Capitalizing on Complexity." If you are in the enterprise 2.0 business, it's a must-read.  After quizzing 1,500-plus chiefs around the world, IBM summarized the collective angst, sturm, and drang as follows:

1.  Today’s complexity is only expected to rise, and more than half of CEOs doubt their ability to manage it.

2.  Creativity is the most important leadership quality, according to CEOs.

3.  The most successful organizations co-create products and services with customers, and integrate customers into core processes.

4.  Better performers manage complexity on behalf of their organizations, customers and partners.

5.  CEOs can capitalize on complexity by (a) embodying creative leadership, (b) revinventing customer relationships, and (c) building operating dexterity.

Based on what I am hearing -- we sell as often to CEOs as we do to CMOs -- the summary feels correct.  And the emerging enterprise 2.0 market -- tech and services -- seems especially well poised to address much of what matters most to chief executives.  In fact, the market is already responding to those needs.  A lot has been said about the rising tide of "crowdsourcing creative," across and beyond the enterprise (I've summarized some of the innovation in that market niche here).  And even more has been said -- and done -- about co-creation with customers and partners. But one insight captured in the IBM study -- that most CEOs doubt their ability to manage complexity -- deserves more attention.  In the next few weeks, I'll attempt to go deeper on this issue, and I will be asking people in the enterprise 2.0 consulting-and-tech community to weigh in.  I'll try to repost my findings here, as soon as I get them.  In the meantime, please comment here as I try to get this conversation started.

After last week's Clearvale launch, one particularly sharp-eyed observer noticed that Clearvale is derived from Elgg, an open source social network.

At BroadVision, we're very proud of our record of embracing open source software where it makes sense for us to do so. It is something we started to do many years ago in our Portal and eCommerce applications, making use of a variety of Java frameworks from Apache and OpenSymphony. And we have continued this policy with Clearvale.

We feel that commercial software vendors making use of open source software and then adding additional capability on top benefits everyone. Vendors benefit from lower development costs; end-users benefit from vendors being able to pass these savings on to their customers. And the open source projects benefit from the wider usage and additional QA that use in a commercial product delivers.

When we were designing Clearvale, we wanted it to be a social product from the ground up. We had invested a lot of development effort into our enterprise portal product, but this, like most portal software from the last decade, was fundamentally a content- and process-centric application. Clearvale needed to be a people-centric product. So rather than trying to add a "social veneer" on top of our existing product, we looked for an existing open source framework that provided the people-centric basis we needed. And that's what led us to Elgg.

Elgg is a great product in it's own right and powers many social networks, particularly in education. It also provides an extensible architecture which enabled us to add a variety of sophisticated business-focused features, based on our 17 years of experience as an enterprise software vendor.

Some of the notable additions we have made to Elgg are:

- Network ecosystems, allowing several social networks to be linked together, with users able to selectively share content between each. 
- Document storage with version control and audit history.
- Adaptor for integration to CRM applications so that Clearvale can be used for Social CRM.

We've also made a number of changes "under the hood" to improve the information architecture and scalability.

But this is just the start. We'll continue to enhance Clearvale both by adding new features on top of the Elgg framework, and embracing new releases of Elgg itself.

If the hype and potential growth of a market can be measured by the number of conversations that are happening on and off-line, then Enterprise 2.0 in all its forms and declinations is definitely set to be a megatrend in business for the near future.

Millions of tweets are exchanged on this topic, thousands of online communities discuss about it, magazines and newspaper are reporting daily how large corporations are leveraging this new business model to get closer to their customers and employees.

Despite this exponentially growing amount of conversations, the most frequent question I hear from customers and prospects I meet is: "How do I implement this?" Or even "How can I change my company's culture to adapt?". A lot of skeptics do ask: "Is there really a proven ROI?"
And the list goes on. There seems to be a lot of uncertainty about what this brave new world will bring.

Unfortunately a lot of these conversations are still happening only among subject matter experts, Enterprise 2.0 vendors, analysts, gurus and so on. A very small community compared to the millions of users out there.

This is not the rule, but it is very often so.

How do we bring managers and entrepreneur closer to this topic and allow them to voice their concerns without being submerged immediately by a thousands of vendors (I include analysts in this category) trying to sell their solutions/services?
I am not saying that this should not happen (it is my job after all to sell), but I am an advocate for communities and events lead by managers for managers where we (vendors, analysts etc) share our knowledge without fear of disclosing or without the (immediate) intention of selling.

I do not say I have the solution to this, but I firmly think that there is still too little interactivity at most events which are the perfect chance for sellers to bring buyers closer to them.
Most of the time there is a uni-directional pattern where experts are on the stage with very little interaction with users.
Agendas are mostly created by the organizers without much gathering of information from the audience.

Since Enterprise 2.0 is all about people connecting and generating content, why are Events still mostly 1.0?
Users do not really connect before, during and after the event.
They do not really influence what will be discussed. User surveys are good, but definitely not enough, especially if done after the event to plan for something which will happen a year later...

And presentation material? The most simple thing any 1.0 site can do and yet most of the time customers leave with their notes and not much more.

I have yet to come across an Enterprise 2.0 (major) event where the user is at the center and where the user drives the agenda.

Next week, on the 9th and 10th of June, I will be attending the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0  

The agenda will boldly address:

* Setting up the strategy and building the business case
* New organization schemes and leadership model
* Nurturing adoption and cultural change
* ROIs, metrics and business drivers
* Frameworks to manage communities and to engage customers and users
* The impact of Social Media on business processes: BPM 2.0, CRM 2.0, PLM 2.0
* Best practices and lessons learned through national and international case studies
* From marketing to Social CRM
* Social software and collaborative platforms

I trust that users will be given the chance to interact, voice their issues, exchange opinions and specially get in the driving seat to form the agenda of the future event with continuous conversations with other users, vendors and analysts.

The conversation has already started as a thread on the Enterprise 2.0 Community  (ask for permission to join...)

and can be followed on Twitter  .

These are all very good attempts to transform an (event) industry which is still very 1.0.

If users want to get more value they have to join the conversation, share their experience and make sure they are in the driving seat.

Consumers have been doing huge steps forward in influencing the corporate agenda. Enterprise customers should do the same!

Quoting the Cluetrain Manifesto:

"Business is actually about people and conversations"

I will be reporting my impressions during and after the event.

That's all for now!

Clearvale is an Enterprise Social Network that provides streamlined and secure collaboration between your employees, business partners, and your customers; enabling you to socialize across and beyond the enterprise.

There you have my Clearvale elevator pitch.  It’s succinct, punchy, and (hopefully) invites you to ask more questions about Clearvale.  If you’re reading this blog, I assume that you have questions—or at least a significant interest—in what Clearvale can do for you.

As this is my first post on this site, I thought I’d start with something everyone can easily understand: Return on Investment (ROI).

First, let’s start with the investment portion.  Clearvale’s pricing is perhaps the best value around when you compare it to that of other vendors.  Clearvale is a hosted turnkey solution, with zero reliance on your IT or developer resources to get up and running.  Clearvale’s pricing is based on monthly usage, which means no hefty up-front licensing fees.  Your investment is low because BroadVision isn’t a startup company with antsy venture capitalists to appease; we can offer you more for less because we have been in the business for 17 years, have a stable customer base, and have a seasoned team with extensive experience building enterprise-grade applications.

But what about the returns?  What are they?  Why should you invest in an Enterprise Social Networking solution at all?  A few reasons:

• Your Workforce Is Changing
• Your Employees Are Valuable
• Your Knowledge Is Valuable
• Clearvale Can Help

Let’s face it; the average workforce age is getting older as the baby boom generation nears the retirement years.  When they retire, expertise and knowledge will be lost.  Clearvale can help mitigate that loss, resulting in enormous savings for your company.

Consider the cost of losing an employee, either to retirement or to the job market.  In 2006, Ross Blake published an article in which he associated cost estimates with employee attrition.  The replacement cost of a mid-level employee represents 150% of their annual salary.  Replacing a senior staff member costs as much as 400% of their annual salary.  That’s a huge cost.

When you look at reasons why people voluntarily leave companies, low morale, lack of communication, and a lack of personal investment often factor prominently in HR exit interviews.  According to John Dooney, manager of strategic research at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the HR cost alone of losing an average employee is about 40% of the departing employee’s salary.  With Clearvale, you can provide a robust communication and collaboration network within your company to keep employees informed, engaged, and invested in your company.

Retirement is another reason why people voluntarily leave companies.  Some companies opt for costly methods for coping with this loss of expertise and wisdom, such as bringing retirees back in for consulting stints or extending their employment periods as the replacement hires learn the ropes.

Clearvale offers a cost-effective alternative.  You can leave the virtual door open to retired employees who can continue contributing to the discussion, answer questions, mentor new employees, etc.  By implementing an ESN solution before the impending retirement bubble hits, you can begin collecting the knowledge and experience of your senior employees in a single, indexed, searchable place; Clearvale.

Clearly, if you are able to retain more institutional knowledge which new employees can use to get up to speed faster, thereby reducing the learning curve and minimizing productivity lag, you can save a tremendous amount of money.

What about these new employees?  They are millennials, the Web 2.0 generation raised on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.  They are highly adept at using social networking applications for coordinating all their activities.  Providing a familiar, frictionless, yet entirely secure, communications environment for your new employees will enable them to work more effectively and contribute more quickly to the discussions and projects that fuel your company’s innovation and success.

Just when we all thought that socialism has been swept away by capitalism in every respect — even its shadows long buried alongside the bodies of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Chairman Mao — recently reincarnated as Socialism 2.0, it has been mounting an impressive comeback with a vengeance, in cyberspace

A whole host of consumer social media (CSM) have become the hottest Web destinations in the past few years.  Facebook now boasts nearly 500 million registered users — propelling it to become the 3^rd most populous “nation” in the world, next to China and India.  As we watch our kids exchanging their Facebook contacts with each other, as opposed to our “old school” email addresses that my generation has grown accustomed to do, plus the non-stop daily bombardment of various CSM invites — be it Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn — we begin to appreciate CSM’s compelling “long tail” effect and the true power of the “networked economy”.

If you are a C-level executive in a company of any size and do not recognize that a new revolution called Enterprise 2.0 is right around the corner, caused by the same Socialism 2.0 forces sweeping through cyberspace, you need to wake up and take some action immediately.  It is now 10 years after the original Internet bubble, and as all of us have grown older and wiser, this time we all feel, with a much higher degree of confidence, that it’s for real.

What does Socialism 2.0 mean for the enterprise?  What can a company expect when committed to enterprise social networks (ESN)?

I believe ESN will have as profound an impact on how business is done for this decade and beyond as desktop publishing did since the 1980s.  The reason is simple.  Having automated just about everything that can be “proceduralized” in business over the past 30+ years, what is left for the enterprise to address are issues all around the edges — interrupts, exceptions, corporate culture, employee morale, customer satisfaction, public perception, etc..  All such business processes, if there ever were one, share some common traits — random, ad-hoc, tacit, distributed, diverse, etc.  In short, these are age-old people collaboration issues.

People collaboration issues are N² issues, where N is the number of people populated across and beyond an enterprise.  In Enterprise 1.0, we either ignored these issues, pretending as if they never existed, or tried to solve it with either an O(K) (constant), or at best, an O(N) (order of N; i.e.,  “linear”) procedure.  This typically wound up being a complicated and expensive enterprise application designed to be operated by only a small number of highly trained professionals, with the rest of the people simply being passive onlookers.

Web 1.0 is no exception.  For the past 10+ years, we’ve spent huge sums of time and money building web sites and portals, be they inside or outside facing.  Yet, most of them are rarely utilized by the people we intend to serve.  Why?  It’s the same onlooker attitude — most of us feel that those are the company’s business; not my business.

Enterprises can change all that with Clearvale, which empowers everyone to take on the responsibility of running the business via ESNs of any size, and in doing so, becoming more accountable to each other and to the company.  This way, you get an O(N²) solution for people collaboration that’s geometrically scalable in nature.  Bottom line: in Clearvale, setting up and operating ESNs to collaborate work is DIY (do-it-yourself), as easily as creating files, sending emails, and desktop publishing.

However, putting technical barrier and IT cost to bed is only part of the equation.  In ESN adoption, the bigger challenge tends to be cultural — it’s about a management paradigm shift, in every true sense of these words.  If you are not committed to doing the “people business” differently, you will not be able to harvest the huge upside potential afforded to you through the power of N².

Last year, after 9 months into our own Enterprise 2.0 transformation, I wrote a white paper entitled “Socializing Across the Enterprise — Seven Habits for ESN Adoption” (or SATE for short) to highlight this cultural shift and all the lessons and best practices we learned from that experience.  We are still going strong in continuing that journey.

As we formally commence the Clearvale global launch, I thought I’d start a new blog topic on the vision behind Clearvale, under the working title of “CEO’s Survival Guide to Socialism 2.0”.  Consider this as a sequel to SATE, focusing on some of the higher level goals and the ROI model by which these goals can be measured.  We are obviously interested in encouraging everyone to immigrate into Clearvale so that their businesses can thrive, but we want to do it not by “gut feeling” or “blind trust”, but with eyes wide open — use cases, best practices, key performance indices, and ROI dashboard.

I will start by laying some groundwork for your ESN goals.  First and foremost: the 80-20 rule.  Since nothing is 100% black-and-white, we could and should target a reversal from 80-20 to 20-80 in favor of some key areas of improvements.  In the table below, we’ve listed 10 key such dimensions, from IT infrastructure to management philosophy across your entire enterprise, and how you should endeavor to make the change.  I will expand on each of these in future blogs, together with my thoughts on how they could be measured for ROI, to convince you that not only do you need to do it now, most importantly, you need to immigrate and settle into Clearvale, for it’s the most cost-effective way, and place, to get it done.

Before we close on this blog, let me just say that ROI can typically be measured along three axes — cost efficiency, incremental business, and innovation velocity.  With Clearvale, we’ve been able to observe all three in a very short period time.  It’s truly cool stuff.  So stay tuned!

As I’ve been telling lots friends, family and colleagues over the past few weeks, my recent move to BroadVision – announced just a short while ago – was one of the most deliberate decisions I’ve made career-wise in quite some time. I’ve been working on the consulting side of marketing for eight years, and the last time I went “in-house” to work as a staffperson for company was for a little-known company called VMware. If you know the story of VMware, perhaps you will understand why despite the many opportunities I’ve had to join other companies I have been so hesitant to do so. VMware is a tough act to follow. But in more than one way, the new BroadVision – which formally launched today – is an appropriate "next chapter" to my intermittent career as an in-house marketing guy.

First, there’s the general market opportunity. What was once an interesting-yet-sleepy market – Enterprise 2.0 – is now beginning to heat up. Two startups – CubeTree and ScoutLabs – recently got acquired. Another – Jive – is moving to Silicon Valley (our backyard) and talking about an IPO in 2011. More to the point, however, the real market – not just the M&A world – is beginning to respond. Practically every company I am speaking with these days is interested in Enterprise 2.0. Whether it’s because the business case for this category has now been established, or because enough companies have begun experimenting that others feel compelled to follow, the Enterprise 2.0 market has indeed “arrived” and I am thrilled to be entering ranks of technology vendors at this time.

But there’s a second, more important point of comparison – the concept of virtualization. It means many things to different people, but in the business world it has emerged as a catch-all for an approach to doing business that transcends the traditional confines of an enterprise and its assets. In the case of VMware, it was about the assets: servers that have greater utility when they can be sliced, diced and served more efficiently to meet the computing needs of an ever-expanding business market. At BroadVision, it’s about the confines of the enterprise itself: the people who make up the company and its market (partners, customers) and the physical, geographic, and cultural boundaries that separate them. Do something that meaningfully helps a company transcend those boundaries and you will have solved a major business problem. And, yes, you will have met a major business opportunity.

That’s the opportunity in the Enterprise 2.0 market, and why I am so excited. And just to make sure I can continue reminding myself of that singular opportunity, I have decided to brush off an old phrase – the “virtual enterprise” – and see if we can breathe some new life into it. It used to mean something else – the virtual enterprise was a business that wasn’t “real” but stitched together virtually by virtue of broadband networks and communication and collaboration technologies. With the advent of Enterprise 2.0 practices and technologies, the virtual enterprise has evolved into something else. It can now refer to any business that can leverage broadband and communication/collaboration technologies to create virtual spaces that mirror the way that business is done. The virtual enterprise is now “3D” – it’s more like a “place,” less like a thing – where things get done. And that, I will argue, is a profound shift. It has the potential to change so many things, like:

--It might change the strategy that businesses follow to compete in the new virtualized world. To date, the Web 2.0 mantra has been to connect. Going forward, the mantra might be to “create” – that is, to create the new virtual architecture in which their business will get done, inside and outside the enterprise, in public and private places. Which is not to say that businesses should ignore existing places where people on the Web congregate. They absolutely need to go there. But that doesn’t relieve them of the obligation to invest a virtual real estate of their own. With the next generation of enterprise social networks, businesses can do this effectively by providing their stakeholders to create these places themselves. What’s at stake here? A company with a small presence in the physical world might gain a greater presence – with lots of real estate -- in a virtual world. For large companies, this should be a wake up call.

--It might change the strategy that many businesses follow to buy, sell, and deliver goods on the Web. If businesses do begin to virtualize the places in which they do their work, new way to do commerce on the Web will emerge. Think of this as the 3D version of e-commerce, another Web 1.0 concept that’s due for a refresh. And it can be any variety of digital goods, including digital services themselves. With so many productivity, communication, and collaboration tools moving to the cloud, this is already a reality.

--It might alter the technology landscape – especially for players at the platform level. With so many tools moving to the cloud – and with the growth of the mobile-technology device market -- something else is likely to happen: the landscape of technology vendors will change. In this new virtualized, mobile, social world, who is best situated to provide productivity, communication, and collaboration services? Some argue that the incumbents will continue to rule the roost. Others bet on the pure-play cloud giants like Google. Still others think that telecommunication companies now have a fair shot at the market – indeed, they are already in the business of selling mobile computers. Impossible to know, of course, but the market forces that may soon be unleashed will only hasten the rise of the modern virtual enterprise, and all that comes with it.

It is without a doubt that the changes that are happening right before our eyes in the consumer world, are affecting more and more the enterprise world in ways that we have yet to comprehend completely.

The power shift to the end user is clear to (almost) any marketer. Creative ways of leveraging social media are part of the news almost daily.

Corporations have started to realize that it is not a matter of “if” this change has to be embraced as much as “how” and “when” it will be embraced.

In my 15 years of experience in the internet industry with American High Tech corporations, I have witnessed very often a situation where European firms have waited to be in a “comfort zone” before adopting a new technology especially when it significantly changes the way the company operates. There are obviously many exceptions to this, most notably in the mobile space, but as far as internet is concerned we are used to have the US lead the way.

While most of the Social Networking technologies come from the US, the shift to Cloud Based services has significantly lowered the entry barrier for anyone who wants to “bravely” venture in this Enterprise 2.0 new world. The playing field is leveled and Europe (Governments, Institutions and Enterprises) has a chance to set the pace on how businesses are transformed to become the Networks of the future.

There is a good amount of pioneers in Europe among Institutions and Enterprises. My goal in this blog is to talk about them and give my small contribution to accelerating this transformation by sharing news, views and ideas from the Old Continent.

I will start by sharing a case that has become widely popular in the past weeks.

Eurocontrol is an institution that most people are unfamiliar with or simply know their name. For those of you who have never heard about them,

Eurocontrol, the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation, is an intergovernmental organization made up of 38 Member States and the European Community.

This organization has been pushed in the spotlight at dazzling speed when the now famous as unpronounceable Iceland's Volcano started to erupt stranding thousands of travelers across the globe. Until April 15th 2010, only few "geek" travelers were even thinking about following Eurocontrol on Twitter. Ever since THE Volcano erupted, Eurocontrol has gathered more than 10,000 followers and has helped keeping thousand of people informed on the critical situation more than any other media could do.

As a company BroadVision was personally affected by this event as the eruption happened on the last day of our company kickoff in Redwood City, California. By constantly following Eurocontrol and creating an emergency community for all "stranded" employees, we were able to communicate on status, whereabouts, new bookings and itineraries.

While this probably did not get us home much earlier (Social Networks can't yet defeat the force of Nature although they can greatly help learning from it), it definitely helped alleviating the sense of being lost far away from home.

How the corporate Web site has evolved ... and the implications for us all.

(originally published in All Things That Rise).

genus = notebook; species = HP

One of the coolest things about being in the marketing biz is that you often get to name stuff. It’s not an easy thing, but when you get it right it can be gratifying. This is true of both product names and categories. The second is even harder, especially if you are naming categories for the virtual world of online communication and computing. I was reminded of this recently while playing on the iPad. It occurred to me — with the iPad’s look, form factor, and portability, this is the first computer that can be truly called a “notebook.” And if you compare what passed for a notebook in 2000 with the iPad (2000), you will see how the technology has finally evolved to meet the hype of a marketing metaphor (the “notebook”), in a way that more closely resembles what we have in real life. What was invented as a category a while back is now closer to a reality — a virtual reality, yes, but closer to thing in the real world than before.

genus = notebook; species: Apple

I think we’re witnessing a similar kind of evolution with the word “site” — as in Web site.  Consider: what we have been calling Web sites, for oh say 16 years – aren’t really “sites” — in the full sense of the word. From the Latin, situs: “place or position occupied by something.” The standard Web site is not a “place,” and it certainly is not occupied, certainly not by people. But in fact that’s how sites are evolving in the post-Web 2.0 world. The site has evolved into the social network, and networks, as anyone who has spent a lot of time in them will attest, are very much like places. Even their names sometimes evoke a sense of physical place (MySpace, Farmville, many others). And while they are not like real places, they are clearly an advance on the original concept. Once again, technology has evolved to meet the hype of a marketing metaphor (the “site”), in a way that more closely resembles what we have in “real” life. And that, I believe, is the most remarkable thing about online communication and computing. There is an irreversible march toward evolving the objects and tools we use to navigate the virtual world so that they better match the way we navigate the real world.

But unlike the notebook, the evolution of the Web site has implications for anyone in business (i.e., it’s not just HP and Dell’s problem). There was a time when it was understood that every company needed a Web site — it was one’s place on the “World Wide Web.” An entire industry was spawned at the birth of that insight. No such thing has happened yet in the post-2.0 age, unless you look at the corporate blog as an evolutionary advance on the corporate Web site. Perhaps that’s true, but it’s only a small advance compared to the social network. And while practically every company now at least understands the value of a blog (or blogs), very few in comparison understand the value of an enterprise social network. But if you trust the consensus of the market makers in this particular world (I do), it won’t be long before that changes, too. In the meantime, here’s what’s confusing businesses from seeing the horizon ahead:

genus = real estate; species = Trump

We’re confused about the words, but the objective remains the same. Not only does technology evolve, but the words used to describe them evolve, too. The result is that we discard the old words once the technology evolves, even if the old words more accurately captured the technology’s objective. This is true for both “notebooks” and “sites.” No marketer today (certainly no marketer at Apple) would call a tablet a notebook, and no Web strategist would call a social network a “site.” But what was once worth investing in (the standard Web site) no longer has the same value. And what is worth investing in (social networks) goes by such a different name that you wouldn’t know it for the same product. A recent client — a digital marketing executive for one of the world’s large CPG holding companies — confided: “practically all of our brand managers believe that they need to build a $1 million Web site for every new campaign.” He realized that the budget for the old thing was inflated, but he of course needed to clarify what the new thing is before reallocating budget to it. In the meantime, the original objective for the brand managers remained: a place of one’s own on the Web. I’m not talking about the many other places a business ought to be on the social Web (the worldview of “edge marketing”; more on that below). I am talking about a place of one’s own, in addition to all those other places. It’s an objective shared by practically every business today, even though it’s not apparent what that place should be.

genus = real restate; species = virtual

The bad news: we are failing to grasp that “sites” have evolved into “networks.” I’ve heard one argument many times, and it has never been convincing. Goes like this: there can only be one Facebook, so why would any company want a network of their own? Aside from the obvious fact that the world evolves — it’s doubtful that Facebook will reign forever — it confuses the place that Facebook and other public networks have created and the place that businesses can create for themselves. It’s as if only a few businesses grasp that virtual real estate — in the form of social networks — is now a reality. In the meantime, businesses keep building those $1 million old-world sites — sites, which Jeremiah Owyang for years has argued, have no “place” in the new world.

The good news: the emerging world of networks is just that … emerging. The world is changing. We are moving from a site-centric world (”site” in the Web 1.0 sense of the word) to a network-centric world. But it’s a new world with lots of uncertainty. How does a business deal with the fact that Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn have such a great presence in the network-centric world? Ignore them? That would be wrong — just as wrong, in fact, as it would be to ignore the largest players in the real world of real estate. So much has been written about how companies should make their static sites more compelling and relevant by integrating with social networks and other services (again Jeremiah). I agree — in fact, this point of view informed a big part of my consulting practice over the last few years. But a safe bet would be for businesses — and non-profits — to also invest in a little real-estate of their own, create their own networks, and grab a piece of the American dream. There’s a nascent market of “enterprise 2.0” companies (BroadVision is one of them) ready to respond to the market, and already the market is beginning to see the value. I’ll share more as I move along — I’ve been on the job (officially) less than a month. But it’s one of the most interesting and exciting markets that I’ve competed in for quite some time. It’s a great place to be, literally and metaphorically.

Hi everybody.

Not to put a damper on my first post, but I suffered quite the tragedy this past weekend. My beloved San Jose Sharks (the Bay Area’s ice hockey team, for those who don’t follow the sport) were swept by the Chicago Blackhawks in game four of the NHL Western Conference Finals.

To plenty of people, this probably doesn’t mean much. But to me, it was devastating. As soon as the game ended I hopped on my mobile phone and updated the status on my Facebook page…something about wanting to cry, I think. Not surprisingly, a lot of my friends who are fellow fans had posted similar updates, all within mere minutes of each other. I commented on a few pages, a few commented on mine, and we all sulked collectively online.

My awesome grandpa (who is going on 91 this year, bless him) still writes letters to his friends overseas. He’s never used a computer and doesn’t know what email is. I’ve tried to explain it all to him before, and he understands the concepts, but he’ll never be able to wrap his head around the idea of “online space”. It's just too much information and too overwhelming for him to process.

I never really thought too much about how amazing communication via the internet really is, because I grew up sitting in front of a computer screen sending emails and instant messages to my friends. To be honest, I can’t remember much about how I interacted with my friends before the internet gave new meaning to the word conversation, and CHANGED THE WORLD FOREVER. Whoa. (Disclaimer: that link is a bit dated, but it's nice perspective into the immense progression that took place over the last two decades or so).

We live in a world that’s so incredibly connected. It’s pretty crazy, actually. But for the most part, the most advanced connectivity has been on personal levels. Now, over just the past couple of years, the tools and technology that transformed the social lives of people all over the world have made their way into the enterprise. It’s a relatively new take on how to conduct business – it’s more open, refreshing, rather exciting, and has made the adaptation to corporate culture easier and more comfortable for both myself and my peers. Merging our work with these tools that are so familiar to us really opens the door to how we can conduct and shape our businesses.

What I’d like to do with this blog is share what it’s like to be part of an emerging workforce that’s been completely shaped by the advent of social media. I hope you’ll find reading about my personal thoughts and experiences useful…and entertaining, of course.

Welcome to Generation 2.0. I’m looking forward to our conversations.

One of my favourite quotes to describe the objectives of Social CRM comes from Lyndon Johnson, who famously said of J Edgar Hoover

It's probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in

If your don't provide a place for your customers to express their opinion, the internet provides many, many other places which they will do it anyway, probably far less constructively.

But that quote is perhaps not suitable as the title for a professional blog, so another that applies equally is:

Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer

The internet seems divided on whether this is a quote from Chinese military strategist Sun-Tzu in 400BC, or Michael Corleone in The Godfather II in 1974, but anyway, the importance of this is becoming more and more apparent in the context of the growing Facebook backlash.

It's often said that the British hate success. There's a lot of truth in that, but I would suggest that everyone hates too much success and the inevitable arrogance it brings - we Brits just have a much lower tolerance level. Google was cool until it got too big. And now Facebook is the latest target. They are approaching 500 million registered users, but recent behaviour suggests that the backlash has well and truly begun.

The root of the problem is their cavalier attitude to privacy - they are constantly changing privacy functionality, with the default to allow public access and users needing to explicitly change settings to retain privacy. There's a great graphic of this here. I feel it is best summed up by Andrew Brown who notes that we are not Facebook's customers, we are their product. This has led to at least two protests - you can either refuse to log in to Facebook on June 6th, or if you are really annoyed, delete your user id completely on May 31st.

As usual, Jeremiah Owyang has something useful to say on this subject, and has approached it from the point of view of companies/brands. Like much of his other material, this is essential reading, so I won't summarize it here, except to pick up one specific recommendation he makes:

Spread Bets, Bring Community Closer To You. With power diminishing, brands shouldn’t place all their bets in just a few social networks. Instead, conduct socialgraphics to find out where your customers are, then invest in other networks. Furthermore, start analysis on building your own community off your corporate website for customers, advocates, and lifestyle communities. Give customers a choice to interact with others on your own properties rather than relegating to Facebook alone.

This is exactly what I was advocating in the Socializing Beyond The Enterprise white paper - keep your community somewhere you can control it, but provide links to other networks where your customers are. At the time, I justified this based on limited community functionality on Facebook fan pages; now it is clear that lack of control over how this functionality evolves is equally important.

Hello, and welcome to Socializing Beyond The Enterprise.

First of all, let me introduce myself. I am Richard Hughes, Technical Director at BroadVision. While much of the focus on Enterprise Social Networks recently has been how they help companies energize their workforce, my particular interest is in applications of ESN outside the enterprise. Hence the name of this blog.

When talking about employees of a company, it is something of a cliche to say "we're a team", "we're a big family", "we want to work together better". Of course we do. But it always surprising to me how few companies have the same attitude towards their customers. Many companies and their customers coexist in a kind of mutual tolerance. My interest is how social networks can improve this relationship.

There are two main topics that this covers:

Social CRM: using social technology to form mutually beneficial relationships between companies and their customers

Social Commerce: using social technology both to increase companies' sales and to increase a customers' confidence of their purchases.

Of course, there is some overlap between the two, most notably in using Social CRM to drive repeat business, so at times the dividing line will become a little blurred. But let's not worry too much about that.

I wrote a white paper about this in January 2010, also entitled Socializing Beyond The Enterprise, although focusing primarily on Social CRM. In such a fast-moving area, it would probably benefit from an update soon, but I feel it still does a reasonable job of articulating the case for building more social relationships with customers.  There is also a webcast (part 1, part 2) for those of you who prefer to have the white paper read to you.

All of this is not to say that I am uninterested in social technology within the enterprise. I'm particularly interested in how social intranets change the way employees communicate with senior management of a company, and where this moves the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. So I'll also be writing about this.

Finally, if you think I just spelled "behaviour" wrongly, that's because I live in Oxford (Oxford, England, that is. I hear there are others...). And that's how we spell it here.