Intranets

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

ThoughtFarmer: A lesson in excellent blogger outreach

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Just today, I’ve received half a dozen pitches by email. Some are nothing more than press releases without even a passing effort at personalizing the pitch. Others make nothing more than a passing effort. So it’s a welcome relief—not to mention an entertaining and engaging experience—to get a pitch that is personal, creative, and attention-grabbing.

The pitch began with a cryptic email from Darren Barefoot, who asked for my mailing address because he had something to send me. (It helps, when making this kind of request, to already know the person to whom you’re reaching out, which speaks to the importance of having relationships vs. blasting out material to bloggers who have never heard of you.)

A week or so later, a package arrived at my house. It contained what you see in the image below:

• A letter welcoming me as a new employee of a ficititous company called Tubetastic Inc. (slogan: “We make tubes. A whole series of them.” This pitch was going to people who would appreciate the dig at U.S. Sen. Ted Stephens and his famous speech supporting an end to net neutrality in which he described the Internet as “a series of tubes.")
• An org chart showing exactly where I’m situated in the new company (I’m the Tubular Comptroller, part of the Operations department, reporting up through ZDNet’s Dan Farber, Tubetastic’s Director of Tube Distribution.) The org chart also shows me who else has received the pitch.
• A name badge complete with my photo, copied off my website.

There’s no hint in the welcome letter of the pitch behind the package. Instead, Darren (who signs the letter as an HR rep) informs me I’ll be featured in an upcoming edition of the company newsletter, then invites me to learn more about the company by logging into the company’s intranet. The letter includes a username and password. Who wouldn’t log on?

What I found was Tubetastic’s intranet fully loaded with Enterprise Web 2.0 features: Twitter feeds, blog posts, a presence status (like Facebook’s), a newsfeed that updates me on what other employees have been doing (also like Facebook’s), and my profile. This is where the draft of my “interview”—set to appear in the company newsletter—is waiting for my comments as well as an answer to an additional question. The profile also includes links to the latest articles from my real blog along with the ability to edit my profile, which already contains all the information a typical employee directory would offer (title, reporting relationship, mailing address, phone number, email address, etc.).

The top of the home page features a link that will explain everything. This is the pitch: The intranet was created using a tool called ThoughtFarmer. I followed a link to a ThoughtFarmer page that includes YouTube videos, screenshots, and other resources that go into more detail on this “ultimate intranet.” The elevator pitch tops the page:

ThoughtFarmer is the ultimate intranet. Forget the impossibly complex, seldom-used corporate intranets of days gone by. ThoughtFarmer is a simple, social way for employees to collaborate, share ideas and find information.

What’s special about ThoughtFarmer? It combines the best of wikis and social networking. It’s an intranet for intranet-haters. Plus, it sits behind the firewall, just where your IT manager wants it.

At this point, I was spending a fair amount of time noodling around both the faux Tubetastic intranet and the ThoughtFarmer site. I must confess, I was pretty impressed with ThoughtFarmer, which includes a slew of features ranging from single-signon and polls to inline tagging and image galleries.

What I didn’t see is any reference to the kinds of resources that reside on the old intranets that are still important: benefits enrollment, work-related online applications, database access, requisition forms, new-hire recruitment tracking, payroll stubs and the like. Most employees use intranets to complete tasks, so these are important. My guess is that you would continue to host these resources right where they are and link to them from tabs you’d create, such as “Human Resources” and “Work Tools.” Maybe someone from ThoughtFarmer will confirm that in a comment here.

But the point is that I spent time with this product site—and wrote about it—because the pitch was compelling. If I had received yet another press release introducing ThoughtFarmer, it would have gone where all the other press releases I receive go—into my email trash. So, what did Darren and the ThoughtFarmer marketing team do to stand out?

• They made the pitch personal. They made it clear they knew who I was and that I wrote about intranets with some regularity.
• They piqued my interest by asking for my mailing address without giving me a hint about what I’d receive. I only accepted this offer because I knew Darren.
• They sent the pitch to me in the regular mail in a package that cried out to be opened.
• They spent time and effort to create something different. While mock intranets have been around for more than a decade, this is the first one I’ve seen that listed me as an employee.
• They made the pitch interactive. I really can modify my profile and get engaged with the intranet at a number of levels.
• They actually had a compelling product to show off.
• The personalized profile, the name badge, and the other personalized elements are cool, but none of it feels even remotely close to a bribe.

Now that’s blogger relations.

Monday, March 31, 2008

Social media, intranets, and tools

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I’m getting a little tired of the chorus of voices that suggest companies take a step back from integrating social media into their intranets because, after all, social media are just tools. We need, the authors of these opinions insist, to focus on strategy in our internal communications.

I am a huge proponent of strategic communication. The approach taken to any communication challenge should be designed to meet measurable objectives. Those objectives need to support a broad strategy. And you should devise the strategy to reach a business goal. I always chuckle when I hear that a social media consultant on his first visit to a client, without any research to support the assertion, blurts out, “Your CEO should be blogging!”

But the wholesale rejection of social media from the enterprise because, well, they’re just tools misses a bunch of points. Most employees use social media for knowledge and information exchange with one another. The fear that democratizing publishing will somehow produce an army of citizen journalists all reporting reactive news just hasn’t materialized in the companies that have adopted social media. Meanwhile, most communicators that have integrated social media into their formal communications have, believe it or not, embraced a strategic approach. The tools of social media just work better than older tools for some communications.

There’s more: IT professionals surveyed by Forrester Research have found that social media do add add value through such measures as improved productivity. Employees will use it whether it’s formally introduced or not because it’s better for collaboration than existing resources.

But what bugs me most is the idea that a tool has no power. Taken individually, each social media tool probably should be viewed as “just a tool.” Collectively, though—and in the context of the conditions that led to their adoption—social media are turning communication models on their heads. Companies ignore the fundamental changes to communication at their peril. Conversation has become more important than message delivery, for example. In an interview John C. Havens conducted with Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz for our book, “Tactical Transparency,” Schwartz said that building a community of customers turns the company’s products into community assets. “Somebody who feels part of a community is going to be a much more aggressive evangelist for our products than someone who just paid $29.95 for it at a big-box retailer,” he explained.

And, of course, Sun is using social media with evangelical fervor, along with more conventional community-building tools.

Internally, social media engages employees in conversation more easily than older tools, which is likely to make them much more aggressive evangelists for the company and its plans than someone who gets a company magazine, regardless of how proactive the reporting is.

Besides, and correct me if I’m wrong, isn’t the printing press “just a tool?” Yet if you could ask anyone from Martin Luther to Thomas Paine about the power of print, they would most likely suggest the printing press, while just a tool, also changed history.

Social media are having just that kind of impact. They are tools, but they are also much, much more. I hate to throw out a cliche, but restricting our view of social media at work to the realm of “just tools” is a classic case of missing the forrest for the trees.

Thursday, February 28, 2008

JotSpot is back as Google Sites; should Microsoft worry?

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I’m in the process of preparing a press release (both conventional and social media versions) that needs input from a few organizations as well as some individuals who aren’t affiliated with these organizations. Rather than attach a Word document to an email, I set up a secure one-page wiki at PBwiki, where each of the players is able to jump in and revise to their heart’s content, each one seeing what the previous one has done.

That was yesterday. If I had set up the wiki today, I probably would have done it at Google Sites.

That’s not a slam at PBwiki, which offers a terrific service. But Google Sites, which launches today, is the reincarnation of JotSpot, a feature-rich wiki service that Google bought back in October 2006. While it has taken a while for Google to integrate JotSpot into its Google Apps suite, I’m looking forward to kicking the tires. Neville Hobson and I wrote our book, ”How to Do Everything with Podcasting, on a JotSpot wiki, which is also where we coordinated everything from the contract to revisions with our agent. It worked exceedingly well.

Google has done away with the term “wiki,” seeking to make the service more attractive to the non-geek crowd, and shows on its site the various uses to which Google Sites can be put, including intranets, team projects, and employee profiles. It’s a bit of a stretch to suggest a hosted wiki could substitute for a robust intranet, but Google Sites could certainly provide a small company with a simple means of getting an intranet up and running, especially given the features that can be included. Any other Google product can be integrated into a Sites page, such as YouTube videos, Picasa photos, Google calendars, and Google docs.

Google’s idea of what a Site intranet would look like appears below:

Most of the commentary so far suggests that the addition of Sites to the Apps suite is a direct assault on Microsoft Sharepoint. Maybe, but it’ll be a long, long time before a hosted service eats into Microsoft’s market share. The key issue in most organizations is precisely the fact that the service is hosted.

A typical IT response to the notion of introducing social media tools to the intranet focuses on the time and expense involved in testing new applications to ensure compatibility with existing software. If you suggest that the social media tools can be hosted offsite, the odds are pretty good that you’ll be told the information those sites would contain is too sensitive to risk maintaining it outside the firewall.

(This excuse is pretty lame, given that every single one of the US-based companies that has raised this concern in my experience also maintains its employee 401(k) data on a hosted server.)

One reason Sharepoint is so popular these days is that the 2007 version includes social media functionality—blogs, wikis, social networks, RSS, the works. These tools—while not the best looking or most flexible in the world—can be activated simply and without risking any kind of conflict with mission-critical software already running behind the firewall. Organizations like Wachovia—the fourth-largest bank in the US—are relying on Sharepoint to get their Enterprise 2.0 tools up and running quickly.

Others are turning to vendors offering suites of social media tools for the enterprise, like Traction Software and Awareness Networks. A Forrester Report issued earlier this month suggests that smaller vendors—many offering hosted solutions—are able to provide companies with what they want right now, while IBM and Microsoft are offering bits and pieces while still building complete solutions.

In the report—“Web 2.0 Pure Plays Might Be The Right Answer For Your Organization”—author Rob Koplowitz and his team point out:

The fact that Web 2.0 firms are smaller does not mean that they don’t understand what it takes to provide solutions to the neterprise. There are a number of vendors in the enterprise WEb 2.0 space...that not only understand security, privacy, policy management, and integration requirements of enterprises,but they also are ready to demonstrate that their offerings can exceed the new needs of enterprises.”

These services can also do a lot more than Sites, such as integrating employee blogs and enterprise-level RSS into the mix...as can Sharepoint.

All of which means that there are a lot of options out there. The fact that Sharepoint is already inside many organizations means it’s likely to remain a strong player—most organizations are loathe to dismiss such a considerable investment just because better or coolers alternatives emerge, which is why Lotus Notes still runs in so many companies—and there are other options that address the security and integration issues that are top-of-mind for IT departments. If Google is making a run at Sharepoint by introducing its wikis-not-called-wikis, I doubt it’ll enjoy much short-term success.

Not that Google Apps couldn’t do the job, just that IT departments want more than what Apps offers. Still, I’m delighted to see JotSpot return in its new form and I’m sure I’ll be using it again as soon as the need arises.

I expect to see more small organizations and non-business entities using Google Sites.

Other coverage:

• C|Net
• Webware
• Information Week
• Tech Radar
• Web Worker Daily

Friday, December 14, 2007

Internal social networks not worth the money?

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Gartner analysts are warning companies to be wary of investing in internal social networking. With Facebook poised to license its developer platform and several companies offering proprietary intranet-based social networking applications, Gartner’s analysts caution that social networking isn’t mature enough to warrant status as a critical business tool. VoiP and instant messaging are more beneficial, they say.

Over at IBM, the Blue Pages were an early stab at social network-like profiles. While you couldn’t actually socialize with other employees through the Blue Pages, you could find other employees without actually knowing their last names. A search for somebody who coded in C and spoke Tagalog would reveal a list of employees whose profiles matched those criteria. Adding the social networking element means you can now create networks of people who share common expertise, are engaged in similar work, or serve the same customers.

Communities of practice are a great idea but have been a bitch for most organizations to actually create. In a community of practice, people in an organization who do the same kind of job for different business units are able to share knowledge and network with one another. Think about, for instance, regulatory affairs. Distinct business units in large companies each have regulatory affairs professionals. They work alone or with incredibly small staffs. A community of practices makes it easy for all of these people to share ideas and seek counsel rather than work in isolation.

A social network would make it a breeze for those regulatory affairs professionals (or, say, organizational communicators) to form a group and stay connected.

Meanwhile, the news feeds would keep you up to date with the goings-on of colleagues (the equivalent of “friends” in public social networks)—what conferences they’ve been to, what projects they’re working on, when they’ve been promoted or moved to a new assignment.

While there are challenges to implementing social networks on intranets—like getting employees to populate their profiles with useful information and keep them current—the software tends to be low-cost and the benefits could be huge. In any case, they’re certainly more valuable than existing employee directories, which require you to know the name of the employee you’re searching and the information you get back is limited to phone number, mail stop, email address and maybe a reporting relationship.

Gartner’s got it wrong on this one.

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

FIR Interview with Microsoft’s Paolo Tosolini on Academy Mobile: Dec 4, 2007

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In July 2007, Microsoft introduced Academy Mobile, an internal social computing initiative aimed at creating a knowledge sharing environment among employees through the use of videocasts and podcasts.

Academy Mobile is the latest in a series of online learning initiatives developed within the Enterprise Partner Group at Microsoft where employees can create, watch, listen and share videocasts or podcasts with peers; subscribe to specific search queries, presenters or tags; and download content onto their mobile devices.

In this FIR Interview, Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz talked with Paolo Tosolini, New Media Business Manager at Microsoft, about Academy Mobile including discussion on its objectives, how the programme was developed, aspects about the platform on which it runs, and communication and organizational challenges in rolling out such a programme globally.

About our Conversation Partner

Paolo Tosolini is a New Media Business Manager at Microsoft responsible for a new internal corporate initiative called Academy Mobile (description and video). Funded by the Microsoft Enterprise & Partner Group, Academy Mobile is a social media platform available to all Microsoft employees to share knowledge and best practices using podcasts.

Prior to this role, Paolo worked in several other groups at Microsoft, including MSN and Office, where he managed the Office 2007 partner early adoption program that resulted in more than 500 partner solutions developed at launch.

Paolo is also co-author with his wife Francesca of a blog, podcast and e-Book called Italy From The Inside, where they share travel and cultural tips about Italy using new media.

Download the 34-minute conversation here (MP3, 15.8MB), or sign up for the Interviews RSS feed to get it and future interviews automatically. For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a such as the free Juice, DopplerRadio or iTunes, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon. To receive all For Immediate Release podcasts including the twice-weekly Hobson & Holtz Report, sign up for the full RSS feed.

Listen to this podcast now:

If you have comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future interviews, email us at fircomments@gmail.com; or call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America) or +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe); or Skype: fircomments; or comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR; or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Podsafe intro music - On A Podcast Instrumental Mix (MP3, 5Mb) by Cruisebox.

Monday, November 12, 2007

Intranets in trouble

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Intranets are in trouble. These internal versions of the World Wide Web have held huge promise. After all, if people can simplify their lives using the Web, why shouldn’t the same technology simplify work? But typical corporate activities have conspired the make the intranet just one more mismanaghed resource in many organizations. Lack of funding, restrictions on who can post content, clutter, poor navigation, the absence of useful content, bad search engines, outdated material, inaccurate information—all if it leads employees to find alternative sources for the information and tools they need.

The situation was driven home by the results of a study from the Irish Computer Society. The 2007 Intranet research report found that significant percentages of employees find their companies’ intranets inneffective and not useful for their regular work efforts. The study’s results may be limited to Irish workers, but based on my experience with intranets in a number of companies, I’m certain the results would be mirrored elsewhere if the same questions were asked.

The study—which questioned 180 participants from Irish companies with intranets—produced the following results, according to a report from PublicTechnology.net:

Nearly half say they don’t use the intranet to support their everyday work

Nearly one in three say the intranet does not help with daily work

Half find their intranets’ search engines to be ineffective and 80% think both navigation and search need to be improved

35% of respondents cannot access the information they need on their company intranet

The study also finds that accessing staff and personal contact deteails like phone diretories is the most common and useful activity on intranets. However (again, based on my own experience), these directories are often woefully out of date. I worked with one company where an underground paper version of the directory could be had by those who sought it, since it was more accurate than the online directory.

Intranets can still transform the way work gets done in an organization, but only with appropriate care and feeding. Most, sadly, are neglected.

Posted by Shel on 11/12 at 05:53 AM
Intranets • (3) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

We love social networks…no, wait, we hate them…no wait…

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• Social Web

• del.icio.us
• Digg
• Furl
• Netscape
• Yahoo! My Web
• Technorati
• Google Bookmarks
• Newsvine
• BlinkList
• reddit
• Blogmarks
• ma.gnolia
• Windows Live
• Tailrank
• Mister Wong
• StumbleUpon

There seems to be a case of split personality going on in a lot of companies. On the one hand, the blocking of social media sites continues apace. On the other hand, the adoption of social media in the enterprise is also on a growth spurt.

McAfee, the security company, is out with a study that concludes that one-third of bosses block employee access to music downloading sites like iTunes to dating sites. A quarter block access to sites like YouTube. More than half wish they could block access to social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, but only 20% have taken the step. McAfee suggests the rest have resisted because the sites are actually used for work-related communication. Kudos to McAfee Avert Labs Security Strategist Toralv Dirro, who tossed off this wonderful quote:

The lines between work and play are blurring… but putting fair-usage policies in place and educating people on how to be safe on these sites is the most realistic option.

That’s pretty enlightened for a security software company. It’ll be a cold day in hell before we hear similar quotes from the fearmongers at Websense.

According to surveys from Barracuda Networks, two-thirds of companies plan to restrict access to the Net over the next year, an increase of nearly 23% over this year. About half of the company’s customers already block access to social networking sites (25% block just MySpace, 6.3% block just Facebook, and 19.3% block both).

Meanwhile, the prospects for adoption of social media behind the firewall as part of a company’s intranet seem to be gaining momentum. SocialText secured $9.5 million in venture capital from its existing investors concurrent with the arrival of former Adobe and Cisco exec Eugene Lee as the company’s new CEO. (Founder Ross Mayfield is sticking around as president and chairman.) Ferris Research analyst David Ferris told InternetNews.com, “There is a strong interest in wikis in corporate environments, and most tools don’t give you the features Socialtext offers, like access controls, which are really important in the corporate space.”

There’s more: The Radicati Group has projected the market for “business social software” at $920 million this year, growing to $3 billion in four short years.

At some point, companies are going to have to come to terms with the fact that networks cross organizational boundaries and that open access—governed by clearly-communicated policies—will produce benefits that far outweigh the costs and risks. Companies that understand this sooner—like Serena Software, which has embraced Facebook as a resource for employees—are likely to gain a competitive edge over those businesses too busy quaking in their boots over the bogus issue of lost productivity.

Posted by Shel on 11/07 at 01:12 PM
Facebook • Intranets • Social networks • (3) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

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