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Understanding social messaging concept and tools

April 1, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary :enterprise social messaging is much more complex to understand that a simple enterprise Twitter. It’s about articulating flows, value creation, usage in a very constrained environment. While there are lots of solutions providing social messaging functionalities, the concept is still hard to get for organizations that still lack keys for understanding. A situation that may change with the recently published study from N:Sight Research.

At first sight, social messaging is a very simple thing. A tool allows people to publish status updates and follow updates depending on the publisher or the topic. In short, that’s enterprise Twitter.

Beyond this shortcut that simplifies the concept, relies a complexity that organizations are still struggling to get. Behind principles that look quite simple relies the need to articulate all these things with business goals, workplace constraints, make it support usage scenarios that make sense. At the end, organizations find themselves having to choose between a large number of solutions with using criteria that are not only functional but may take into account the articulation of functionalities and sense and a business context.

N:Sight recently issued a comprehensive study on social messaging. It consists of a very clear analysis of business needs, what it means in terms of usage and functionalities and ends with a benchmark of 14 vendors based on these criteria.

This study will help organization to understand what it’s all about, determine their assessment criteria and benchmark a wide range of solutions.

Here’s a management summary. The full study can be purchased here.

Management summary social messaging vendor study

View more documents from N:Sight Research GmbH

Filed Under: Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: enterprise software, microblogging, social messaging enterprise-social-software, software, twitter

What is a social intranet or an intranet 2.0 ?

January 28, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

Summary : Everybody’s talking about social intranets or intranet 2.0 but none have a clear idea of what it can look like. Between the myth of intranets being replaced by social networks and traditional owners of the intranet fearing the end of the top-down model, ideological and functional debates may last for long. A social intranet does not mean that social networks will assume the whole power but that the elements of a traditional intranet, information, people and business applications, will be socialized. It’s not about adding new tools but generalizing new services and functionalities across all the components of the intranet. And, at last and even before all, it’s a work tool that’s here to serve a corporate vision. Changing the intranet is useless unless work, internal and external relationships as well as the related behaviors and positions are revisited.

Many organizations are rethinking (or thinking or rethinking) their good old intranet that is obviously affected by the weight of years and wonder how to integrate the famous “2.0 layer” in what is supposed to be a social intranet (or intranet 2.0). But, even if the word are in every mouth it does not mean that the idea of what it exactly mean is clear. There are many options depending on the maturity of the owner of the project, the realistic nature of the roadmap he’s assigned, and the change tolerance of the organization. Depending on the context, some of these options will be more or less relevant.

In the previous paragraph I mentioned the “social layer”, what states that the 2.0 side is a new dimension of the intranet and not an isolated bubble. So, it’s not about building an intranet on the one side and a social network on the other side. Why ? For 90% of employees, using a social network at work is not a reflex and it the network is not close to the center of gravity of their work environment, there are lots of chances no one will use it. Moreover, social activities need stimulation and stimulation often comes from a corporate information, a business related data…in fact from sources that are usually on the traditional intranet.

I suggest that such an intranet relies on some pillars that are. :

Socializing information

What I mean by socializing information can take one many forms :

- allowing users to choose the sections of the intranet he wants to read in particular and display them on his home page or a dedicated page.

- allowing users to share any content of the intranet with colleagues (via their internal “twitter”, in a community etc…) with respect of rights and authorizations. (But let’s be honnest = today, even without such tools, secret information circulates by email).

- allowing users to share external content and bring them in the internal flow, and let rating and curation mechanisms make it climb to the head of the organization or spread horizontally.

- allwing users to react to any content either where it’s published or by pushing it to a blog or a community to start a conversation.

- allowing users to promote any content by rating it, approving it (“like”) to make it more visible on the homepage or share it through one’s activity stream.

- allowing any corporate department to deploy on-demand microsites (with predefined templates) what makes corporate communication more granular and close to employees.

It’s the least any enterprise can do, most of all because it’s in the scope of the traditional top-down communication that will not disappear but needs serious improvements to become more user-centric and interactive.

Socializing people

Sharing, reacting, discussing and collaborating are good things…but knowing with whom is even more important. Of course, there are people we know and who’ll quickly join our “network”, but there are also all those we don’t know today but we will need one day. So, before telling users to connect and do things together we should make it easier for them to find and identify one another.

Everything starts with a rich profile like those we can find on any social network. It will made of official information from the traditional IT systems (position, hierarchical belonging, competencies…), employees being free not to display all of it, but also of information provided by its owner (past experiences, topics of interest) and even bu his colleagues (endorsements, tags…). Of course, the owner validates anything others want to put on his profile. Last, the profile also includes employee’s social activities : communities, blogs, wikis updates, shared bookmarks…

This information constitute a stream other users can subscribe to to follow the activities of one person in the same way they can follow a specific section of the intranet or the corporate communication. Anyone can choose what appears in his one’s own stream.

This rich profile should not compete with the official directory : it’s the directory. To be more precise, it’s were the directory is accessible to users. (Note to IT people : don’t forget to choose solutions that can sync with several directories at the same time : it’s very useful when there’s not a single directory and it shows a unified view of all your directories even if your standardization project is late…)

Project Management needs social signals

October 8, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : It’s obvious that in many cases traditional project management methods need to become more agile. That’s not without bringing new issues due to the need to keep eveyrone informed of the status of a project that is continuously being re-designed. Social media are very good at addressing the need of narating a project beyond the traditional quantitative indicators of traditional tools. But there’s still something missing in the enterprise social media offer : even if some niche players offer project socialization features, most of generalist social software vendors don’t while it would make a lot of sense next to the conversational spaces that are the heart of their product.

In more and more fields it’s becoming obvious that agile methods are becoming the most relevant to manage any project and this approach, that used to be restricted to IT projects is nom being used in more and more areas. The reason is quite easy to undersrtand : in a world where cycles are becoming shorter and shorter, plans that aims at delivering something in 2 or 4 years are not relevant. Proceeding step by step, having functional deliverables that comes progressively and continuously redesigning the project in order it meets actual current needs instead of delivering something that meets what was needed years ago but is irrelevant to the current context seems to be wiser and more efficient way of managing a project.

When, during a projet, some specific expertises and resources have to intervene on certain specific parts, it brings an added complexity. In a classical project, anyone knows what to do and when because the project follows a well defined path. In an agile project, where the roadmap and the specifications continuously evolves, resources are often lost because they don’t know how things have evolved from the original project. It’s a matter of awareness.

Business awareness : the social signal without relationship

September 28, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : Everytime we talk about social media we focus on rich relationships and exchanges, conversations, community feeling, what are very heavy and complex things to make happen. That’s forgetting that there’s a lighter and at least as productive way to use social channels : a short, factual social signal that aims at informing hand helping people to visualize their environment without engaging too much. Social media can be awesome “business awareness” tools without needing strong interpersonnal relationships.

The assumption is easy to get : social tools bring more intensity and flexibility in the way people and information behave, get organizaed, interact and thats makes it easier to invent new way of collaborating within any organization or between a business and its ecosystem. Social networks that provide lots of tool to support interpersonal relationships has become the incarnation of these approaches to such an extent that they’re often shown as the solution to any problem.

But is the monolithic vision of social networking that comes with social media relevant.

1°) Does a social network need to be conversational

It started with a conversation I had with a friend about a general public tool on the web but it can also apply to enterprise tools. We were talking about foursquare and a friend told me : “why do you use foursquare ? xxxx is much better and more engaging”. My answer “Humm…I’m not convinced”. “Yes Bertrand, on foursquare people usually check in to say where they are while on XXXXX they say things, share their state of mind, share photos, have conversations”. “How to say…In fact I don’t care at all about all these things”.

Let me explain : what I like in such tools is that I can know who is where. Everything else ils superfluous and pollutes the signal. On Foursquqre I’m looking for location information and not digressions about moods or the state of mind of M. So-and-so. There are other channels for that.

These tools are “ambient awareness” tools : they have to send short and low signals (not aggressive or intrusive), coming from my ecosystem and too much information and conversation kills the signal, making it hard to hear.

That reminds me off the conversation I had years ago with Reid Hoffman about what he called “Business Intelligence for People”. Today, I’d rather say “business awarness” but the fact remains : being social does not always mean having lots of conversation and engaging a lot but receiving / sharing a clear and short signal in order to visualize / help others to visualize what is their informational context, what’s happening in their relational environment.

So there’s a wide part of the social activity that has not to be conversationnal, rich in terms of content and interaction, and where, in fact, interactions are rather the exception than the nom. What matters there is to improve people awareness about something (business in this case) with a a clear and not overloading signal.

2°) Do social networks need to be bijective and global ? No. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: ambient awareness, BI, business awareness, business intelligence, microblogging, signal, social computing, Social Networking, social signal, twitter

A world in 140 characters ? Really ?

August 20, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : Are we linving in a 140 characters world ? Not at all. 140 characters is only the signal that points at something bigger and without which no signal would exist.

Sometimes we need symbol to show how our world is changing, to what extent a tool is leaving its mark on an era even if this era is only a few months long. Today’s trendy tool being Twitter, it’s a commonly used reference to describe the world of instantaneousness, of spontaneity, of mobility we’re living in. As a consequence we’re asked to rethink our life, our work, how we communicate in order not to be outdated in a 140 characters world.

A word in 140 characters ? Why not. Time is speeding up, messages and thoughts are divided up. “Now” is more important than what lasts, reaction and context than content and capitalizing. When everything’s fast, the only way to understand the future is to have one’s two feet in the moving present, and information above 140 characters is useless since it will be outdated before having been used.

Sorry, but I don’t buy it.

If we take some time to look at twitter and how people use it, if we try to understand what we really find valuable, it appears that we’re facing :

- the expression in 140 characters of an information relying on a larger amount of previously acquired knowledge put into context.

- a summary of a larger content with a link to it.

When talking about information or knowledge, we must understand there’s a difference between substance and signal. We’ve been struggling to indentifying and mobilizing the right substance because of a lack of signal for decades but, now we have efficient tools to deliver signals, we must not focus on it and forget the sunstance and the fact we still need to create and improve it.

We communicate, stimulate, react in 140 characters but to do so we still need to think in more than 140 characters.

Our world is not and won’t be a 140 characters world and neither will enterprises. On the other hand these 140 characters will wake all our knowledge more easy to harness to decide, act and adapt faster. Forgetting that the signal needs something to feed it, something to point at may have detrimental consequences.

Filed Under: Web & Usages Tagged With: ambient awareness, information, microblogging, signal, twitter

Do organizations have anything to learn from Foursquare ?

May 7, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Every year (if not every half-year) a new service becomes the main topic of conversation on the web. The buzz comes, of course, at a so early stage that’s it’s impossible to guess at this time how perenial the success will be and if the service will be able to find a sustainable business model, but this does not prevent experts to imagine it as a pillar of new usages on the intranet that will, at last, make enterprise 2.0 mainstream in the workplace.

In these early months of 2010 the pretended “next big thing” is called Foursquare and many things have already been writen here and there about its future brilliant success in the workplace. Let me also mention Gowalla, that’s more recent but has many interesting features and Whrrl that is not “officially” working in France at this time.

So, is it one more craze or the future next big thing ?

What’s that ?

To keep it simple, let’s say these services allow you to “localize” where you are to tell your network “I’m there” or tells any of your contact going something “x… whas here and he even let a tip/recommandation about the place”. You can tell me that it may quickuly become boring and even pointless. That’s why some funny things have been added to keep the interest up.

The person with the most “check-ins” in a given place becomes the “mayor” of this place. This is an honorific title but some businesses already try to make things to pay more attention to the customer who owns the mayorship of their place. People may also win “badges” when they accomplish things like cumulating x check-ins, x airports, 3 Apple Stores….there is no limit to what can be invented to create new badges…

Everything is, of course, opt-in : one share only what he wants with whom he wants.

What benefits for users ? ?

Here things get more complicated. It stimulates a kind of funny competition within one’s network, most of all when these people do a little bit more than home-transportation-work every day. It’s always funny to go to a new place and to know that a friend of yours was theis months before and let a message about things to do, to see, specials if it’s a retaurant….

Now let’s be honnest and pragmatic. Except this funny competition side (I sometimes like these kind of pointless games), the vague feeling of being closer to other since we can know who is where, who’s around…I can’t find any tangible benefit at this time. Maybe I once appreciated a “since you are there, xxxx recommands such restaurant that’s one block away” but nothing more. Humm..I was forgetting one point : when I’m at a conference abroad it’s always useful to know who is where, attending such track in such room, is at the airport, is at such restaurant to be able to micro-organize all together without spending our time calling each other on the phone.

I’m afraid that’s all.

We used to live very well without that in the past. Let’s also admit we can say the same about mobile phone…

Let’s admit that it does not look that a business killer-app. But is there a part of this new paradigm that may bring any benefit in a business context ?

Social media and ricocheting benefits difficulties

April 13, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

To convince peope to start using social media in the workplace it’s important to demonstrate quick personal benefits. And that’s not alsways that easy

Let’s consider profiles for instance. What’s my interest in filling in a rich profile where I’ll share many informations about me and know that the more socially active I’ll be the more this profile will refine according to my readings, my activities, the tags I use etc ? I’ll help who needs someone like me to find me, of course, but that’s not what we can call a direct personal benefit. Of course, if others do the same, I’ll be able to find my “saviors” and that’s an actual beneif. But the lofgic that will make make me fill in my profile hoping that it will gave others the idea to do the same is so nebulous that the average user may not understand the direct benefit. More, since as anyone I’m more than very busy, I don’t have time for such a thing. So I’ll update my profile later…maybe…

Since microblogging is becoming a trendy tropic, its “quick and direct” benefit is also being questioned. One may be “give others visibility on what I’m doing to avoid answering endlessly to the same questions”. Ok…the benefit seems more direct…but we can go one step further.

In a team, other often makes decision that have consequences for us. They overestimate our availability, decide to take an action without knowing if it’s coherent with what we’re doing etc… and, at the end, we have to explain, do things we didn’t plan or want, keep up appearnaces. Well used with scenarios that fit the needs of teamwork, microblogging help others to make better decisions and, most of all, avoid us suffering from the impact of decisions made regardless of the context.

Does the fact that information sharing through social media produces a benefit that’s not direct but ricocheting inspire you anything special regarding to social media adoption ? Is it something that’s been neglected or underestimated ?

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Web & Usages Tagged With: adoption, decision-making, Enterprise 2.0, microblogging, sharing, social computing, social media

Hey ! I’m your ERP and I’m talking to you !

January 19, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I’d like to share some thoughts about what our work environment may look like in a close future if what I think being two main trends manage to reach maturity.

The first is “ambient awareness”. a word I find more relevant than microblogging which is only its embodying in terms of toosls. That’s the ability to continuously capture weak signals from one’s environment in order not to behave like an isolated player but as a player into an ecosystem, allowing to make the actions of both one and the other more coherent.

The other is “activity-specific social application” or social software 2.0.That’s a new kind of enterprise social application that do not put the social activities out of peoples workaday work (over the flow) but enrich the process tools they are built around (and are often a component) (in the flow).

Il s’agit d’un nouveau genre d’applications “sociales” d’entreprise qui ne positionnent plus la dite dimension sociale hors du travail quotidien du collaborateur mais viennent enrichir les outils de process autour desquels ils sont construits (et dont ils sont souvent une composante).

Before all I’ll start with an assumption : people always try (and will always) to automate everything that can be automated. That’s the human nature and, most of all, the organizations nature. The rise of people-centric theories is rather the acknowledgement that not everything can be automated today that a real will to focus more on people and give them more recognition.

The power of enterprise 2.0 tools is that they give people the ability to make every kind of information accessible, either in a proactive way or by answering to a question, a stimulation. This allows to run problem solving and ongoing improvement processes that integrate the workaday flow and improve the reactivity and quality of everyone’s work while building a hudge mass of searchable, usable and improvable information. The contribution of microblogging is to bring a real time dimension that is the perfect complement to traditional asynchronous web 2.0 tools.

One of the best use of these new tools and practices is “bottle in the sea”. The famous “who knows ? Who has any information about ?”. Notice that there are also implicit bottles, those we don’t throw consciously and that are in every status update, despite of us. For instance when we say “going to meet such prospect”, we don’t expect anything back. But someone can answer “I know them well / I already worked on similar cases / etc…”. In brief, a status update can also be seen as an implicit question, adressing the sphere of the “unknown unknown” that sounded quite funny in Rumsfeld’s mouth but that is not so far from our concerns.

The efficiency of the practice relies on another assumption : someone will read, answer, or push my message to someone who’ll be able to answer. This implies that the information exists, and that its owner and / or a “connector” is available in a synchronous fashion when I send my own message. Possible on the web because of its wide scope, more difficult in an organization simply because there are fewer potential answerers.

Information can be of twi kinds. It can be either formal and tacit, so it can only be shared and told by its owner (except if the owner already formalized it on any social space), or structured, codified and classified in one of the many information systems that crowd the organization. In this case, if search is too tedious, or if I ignore the very existence of the tools that may help me, I need one of my peers to direct me to this information which existence and location he knows.

Maybe you see what I’m coming to : if information is in my colleague’s head, they have to be available, but if it’s elsewhere how not to loose the opportunity to find it if the “connector” is not avaiblable, can’t read my message ?

From Social Media to Social CRM : a recent experience with airlines

January 11, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 13 Comments

I already wrote many posts about social CRM on this blog and I recently had the (unfortunate ?) opportunity to add a real life experience to my thoughts. Those who’d prefer to pass over the narative of a long story may directly go to the bottom of the page to read the conclusion.

The situation

A simple holidays week. The discovering of an airline I never took before and, on my trip back home, the experience of very bad weather conditions that made thousands of people strand in many airports.

The background

I have many topics of interest outside of enterprise 2.0. Among them are travels, airlines industry and planes. I’m following and reading some specialized blogs and twitter accounts (airlines, professionals..) as well as some people who share these passions. Some of my “friends” and “followers” are also frequent travelers, ranked “Elite +” by their favorite airline and, like me, they consider that it’s more than a means of transportaion : it’s a true passion. Discussing with these people has a real added value when I need a piece a advice about an airline, a place to go, an aircraft, an airport… better ask it to people who fly more than 60 000 miles every year. Mind you, this is also true for many other fields…but I’ll discuss that later in this post.

Of course I follow the twitter account of my “usual and favorite airline”. They use twitter to broadcast more or less the same things that can also be found on their site or their newsletter, mainly advertisement about promotions. No discussions nor “retweets” of any message coming from a third party (clients or other professionals). The account is not very active and is mainly a one-way channel, with a very weak community side.

For instance, when the “community” live tweeted the delivery of their first Airbus A380 that was broadcasted in video on the web (btw that was a great idea…) and asked some questions to the airline about the plane or wanted to know if the videos would be available for reuse on blogs…no answer, no interest. No more sign of life when I took the time to bring my personal blog back to life (I rarely have time to blog on it) to share the experience of my first flight on their A380. A position that is, a priori, neither bad or good and must be the consequence of a well-though-out strategy.

So, this is the state of my social media experience with “my” airline. Quite frustrating when you’re both an “Elite” and passionate passenger, but the community is large enough so I can share this passion even without the airline. Of course there are many opposite examples (no need to mention Southwest…), but I’m only considering my own personal experience.