First published on CloudAve.com

I have a friend called Jennifer (name and details changed, obviously). At school she was a loner without many friend who, as loners often do, overcome loneliness by bullying smaller kids in the playground. Jennifer managed to gain “friends” by doing this, although they weren’t really friends, rather individuals who were scared that they’d become the target unless they joined in with Jennifer’s shenanigans.

Well, luckily for her schoolmates, Jennifer grew up, studies and entered the workforce where she was forced, at least to a certain extent, to forego her bullying behavior in the interests of fairness, due process and the common good.

Until today that is…

You see the advent of social media in its various guises has given Jennifer the opportunity to once again throw her weight around and make life difficult for others. Involved in a part of an organization that makes extensive use of social media type tools, Jennifer has a wide following in her vocational field and uses this following to bully others the way she used to use her heft to do so all those years ago in the schoolyard.

Now my enterprise friends will tell me bullying in the work place has always existed but social media and enterprise 2.0 tools have extended the reach an individual can communicative with – this is an unquestionably great thing when it comes to collaborating on specific projects, but it’s also a dangerous thing when used inappropriately.

I’ve spent long time talking with Enterprise 2.0 practitioners, attending enterprise 2.0 events and hearing about the barriers to adoption. Generally we’re grasping to find either good case study examples of enterprise 2.0 being put to work or fixes for the oft mentioned barriers to adoption – none of however 9at least in public) are prepared to front up and tell the stories of Enterprise 2.0 gone wrong and used for ugly purposes.

And in this we run a real risk – by burying our heads in the sane and not “outing” the dark side of social media, we play into the hands of those who view the blogosphere, Twitter and social media generally as a complete waste of space. If we don’t tell the stories, and develop ways of avoiding the pitfalls these tools enable, they’ll use the same tales to discount E20 outright.

So here’s a plaintive call to those using social media generally and Enterprise 2.0 tools more specifically: Don’t hide the use-cases that feel uncomfortable, rather use them as case studies, develop solutions and show that like a community of old, so too can a virtual community stand up and police its own.

Everyone would be a little happier if we did that…

Today (9/15 Eastern), Jive Software announced the first of what will be a series of insight and analytics announcements that will comprise the next version of its popular social computing platform, Jive Social Business Software (SBS) 4.0 to be announced later this fall. Today’s announcement, Jive Market Engagement, offers state-of-the art social media monitoring for Jive’s customers managing large external communities. In partnership with leading social media monitoring tool Radian6, Jive is offering real-time listening across the social web including blog posts, videos, photos, forums, mainstream online news sites, as well as social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed. Where the platform provides unique value, however, is in its ability to combine data into “containers” or secure areas Jive refers to as a “Market Space” where appropriate action and decision-making can be taken on the brand conversation.

The Jive Market Engagement announcement is the first Enterprise 2.0 announcement of its kind blending traditional social media monitoring and measurement with a leading enterprise social computing platform. By integrating the data into the Jive collaboration platform, analysis becomes actionable and improves a brand’s ability to respond to time-sensitive challenges or market opportunities. Additionally, the Jive platform enables the company to store and categorize trending data that can be useful when measuring the success or ineffectiveness of marketing campaigns by geography or other market segments.

Jive’s focus on delivering actionable detailed analytics on internal and external community behavior is a healthy sign of progress in the Enterprise 2.0 sector. Jive announced a similar agreement last summer at the June Enterprise 2.0 conference to integrate SAP BusinessObjects into its SBS platform. With a real-time view of customer and operational data, a connected enterprise is more agile in its ability to share, discuss, and collaborate on key data, thereby yielding more accurate and timely decisions.

Cross-posted from CloudAve by Ben Kepes.

The three keys to adopting of community sites? Simplicity – Ease of use – Engagement.

How to meet privacy requirements across different geographies and jurisdictions? Obviously much easier for inwards facing communities but even then there are different privacy requirements in different countries. Have a base level of information and make further information optional – Genentech allows users to change their own profile pictures and this has created additional buy in. Keep official directory of records and social networks separate – allow employees on social networks to represent to each other how they see their role, this is different from a formal employee record where job titles and descriptions are more formalised – the comparison gives users some useful context.

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Initially posted on CloudAve - home of specialist cloud computing and SaaS commentary

From the program - Social media is all the rage in the consumer world and with some of the world’s leading consumer brands. Now businesses of all types and sizes are exploring the use of social media both for internal purposes and as a communications conduit to the outside world. But do the same principals and lessons learned from the consumer world apply to businesses? It’s time to get serious about social media adoption in business and ask the tough questions. What are we trying to achieve? Can social media possibly scale for enterprise consumption? How has social media proven effective and how are we measuring its effectiveness?

Peter Kim, Senior Partner, Dachis Corporation
Ben Foster, Strategy and Content Manager, Allstate Life Insurance
Greg Matthews, Director, Consumer Innovations, Humana
Morgan Johnston, Manager Corporate Communications, JetBlue Airways

Social media sometimes is a tool to solve a problem that doesn’t exist – a cure chasing tool. Allstate has department called and for social.. and feels a need to use the tools to partner with organisations to asses where problems lie. Social media is a great tool within Jet Blue for;

• Real time “taking the pulse” of the feeling of the community
• Engaging with the community
• The ability to inform (730k Twitter followers helps!)
• Humanising the company

Humana is trying to reinvent themselves as a health – company more than just a healthcare company – social media and marketing helps them to innovate and find the bleeding edge ideas that will help transform the company. They created a site to gather some ideas – most of which will never see the light of day but some that might.

How do we incentivise and enable collaboration within an organisation? How to make it part of the fabric of the company? Enterprise 2.0 helps with this, embedding the tools that enable the cultural shift within an organisation – give the tools to the staff and stand back ie not try and control the use of them.

Two emerging areas where enterprise 2.0 stuff matters: customer service and innovation/new product development. Tension between top down and bottom up – also a company like Humana needs to be very aware of privacy with regards customer records so approaches it more by creating separate externally facing tools that don’t connect directly with internal data.

In development their is always tension between IT and the social media evangelists – need to get people in the same room to talk about their relative perspectives. It’s hard for IT given that as soon as something goes wrong they get nailed – and in a modern, social media driven world rapid development doesn’t sit particularly well with the traditional IT perspective (scope, develop, test, release) – need to deal with the concerns from both sides.

Things are merging – IT conferences talk about social, PR conferences talk about social. Social media is becoming the hub around whic

I had the opportunity to interview Lee Bryant, CEO of the UK-based consultancy Headshift, and the result was a somewhat long, but extremely interesting series of insights based on his work in many enterprises.

Some of the topmost insights:

• The Economy — “People are still living on last year’s budgets,” so a lot of the momentum now is still based on last year’s decisions. He expects a point of decision for many companies in the near term, which could lead to the tail-off of earlier projects. “Paradoxically, the worst you are hit [economically] the better you come out of it.” Lee suggests that those that who accept the new economic realities quickly are the first to adapt, and may get a leap based on that.
• ROI — Some shell-shocked companies are continuing to fund large, expensive, and perhaps not that beneficial projects, while requiring highly detailed ROI analysis for a $50K experimental project, which is choking off innovation.
• The Rise of the Social Web — Lee has a great historical sense, and suggests that we are at a turning point, like the start of the industrial era. “We have our own railroads, our own telephone system,” meaning the social web, and we have a chance to reorganize our economy around new sorts of scale, new kinds of efficiency and prodcutivity. This is going to be disruptive, but will lead to an new economy.
• Change Management and Culture — Lee makes the case that the meme about people being resisting change is a bit off the mark. People are open to adopting new things if they actually help, and will resist various vacuous arguments about ‘you need to change ot die’ or psuedo-mystical mumbo-jumbo about emergent values and so on. He has found it best to position these tools in the simplest most straightforward and business-oriented way.

I found myself wishing that the conversation could have gone on longer, even though it ran over 20 minutes. Lee and I will be overlapping at several conference in the next month, and I will be sure to talk to him again.

Jeremiah Owyang, a leading social media thinker at Forrester, took some time with me to share observations about the state of practice and the future of enterprise 2.0.

A few highlights:

• Jeremiah recently found that 53% of surveyed marketers are going to increase spending on social media, despite the downturn. Companies are starting to think about the extended enterprise: “People will begin to connect more with colleagues outside the comany, and get work done with them.”

• He quoted John Schwartz who predicted that firewalls would be extinct in the near future. Legal, personal, and true secrets may be locked down, but more and more people will be using open solutions.
• Jeremiah maintains that crowdsourcing support, and other functions, will be a fruitful area. If he were still the intranet manager at Fujitsu, a former role for him, he’d be looking at that now.
• Looking at Forrester itself, Jeremiah revealed that only 18% of the company is active in one project, the in house use of Yammer as a microstreaming platform. They are seeing good productivity paybacks from remaining connected, asking questions, and getting responses in real-time. Still, it will take a while to get real support from senior management.
• Regarding microstreaming (Yammer, et al), Jeremiah thinks they are more natural to business people than blogs. He very naturally transitioned from that into a discussion about mobility and presence, which I have long considered the killer aspect of IM. He seems to think it is a killer side of microstreaming apps, as well.
• The speed of social technologies adoption has been enormously fast, and will become ubiquitous in five years, and in ten years, we won’t use the term Enterprise 2.0 anymore.

I found Jeremiah’s naming names of products to be quite exceptional: generally specific products haven’t been mentioned much. Notably, the ones we hear the most are Twitter and Yammer.

The entire experience with Jeremiah was informative, and I certainly plan to speak with him again, as we develop some deeper analysis of the sector, to get his feedback.

Most marketers have a To Do list. Figuring out their brand’s social media strategy is undoubtedly somewhere near the top. The expansion of a marketer’s choices in media has lead to some confusion. There are no experts in this newly emerging space and trial and error won’t always create success stories.

What are the best tactics to use? How do I measure the effectiveness and ROI? What are the best sites and tools? How do I derive business prospects and leads from social media? With no metrics or analytics (yet) to measure one’s spend, who to turn to? Why, ourselves, naturally.

Instead of relying on one person to answer these questions, Michael Stelzner turned to 900 members of the marketing collective to get their feedback on how they manage their brands. By embracing this crowdsourced approach, the results of Michael Stelzner’s recent White Paper provide clarity and perspective as the push for brand strategy turns marketing on its ear. Here are a few highlights from the White Paper:

• Nearly 88% of those asked are using social media to market their business, but 72% have been at for less than a few months.
• 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week
• Top social media tools in preferred order: Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook

These stats along with more interesting findings can be found in this engaging Social Media Marketing Industry Report; I’d also recommend checking out the below video highlighting some of the White Paper’s findings with Michael moderating.

Great videos in plain English…

What is social bookmarking?

What is Twitter?

What’s the business value of social networking? What do you want to accomplish by deploying it? And how do you get people to use Web 2.0 tools within the enterprise. This is just a few of the questions posed by moderator Chris Brogan, Vice President, Strategy & Technology, CrossTechMedia and the audience to the panel of Katie Delahaye Paine, Founder & CEO, KDPaine & Partners, LLC, Maggie Fox, Contributor, Social Media Group, and Rob Howard, CEO, Telligent.

First issue with social networking in the enterprise is the difficulty for businesses to articulate what is it they want. When posed with the question, “What is the business problem you’re trying to solve?” they respond with answers like “Someone told me we should do this” or “We want to get our feet wet.”

Social media requires you to be agile. Enterprises are trying to be agile, but they can’t. Unlike the individual or small business, Fortune 100 companies can’t turn on a dime.

Once organizations can show the value of what they’re trying to accomplish, IT gets involved very quickly. And the business side gets very interested once they see the mounds of internal and external data that’s generated.

Often organizations think they need training wheel steps to getting on, and so they limit their launch to only internal. If you do start only internally, you won’t see any of the pain points that will result from outside criticism.

Blogging is a status symbol unlike email. When you publish externally its this public face you want to share. But even though you’re public, you’ll still want a space for an internal dialogue, where you can ask dumb questions and make mistakes. It’s important to have that internal safe harbor. When you’re a public company blogger, you don’t want to bust the perception that they’re an expert externally.

Launching an enterprise social network requires investment in a socialization plan. The “we will build it and they will come” attitude doesn’t work. State Farm learned that hard fact when they launched an internal blog and nobody came. They stepped back, and put in another effort to form a socialization plan to get people interested and involved. The step they took was to place tent cards at every State Farm office around the world. And that alone is what got morale and engagement to increase.

When you’re developing a socialization plan, look to develop a solution that taps into the self interest of the user. You have to figure out what you’re going to do for them. You want to create a situation where once they use it, they’ll quickly see the value.

Socialization is ongoing. It’s not just a first step that requires a grand announcement. You have to keep people engaged, and as users become more savvy, they’ll need additional functionality to stay interested.

One socialization example is to put up information that can only be found on a wiki. And then play a game with employees, like “Who wants to be a corporate millionaire?” If they want to play the game well, they’ll have to research the wiki for answers. It’s just a way to retain your users.

Socialization is a change management effort. You have to create a budget item. Think about forgoing funding for technology investment for a socialization program.

For millenials and Gen Y, social networking is not a fad. This is the way people will expect to work when they come to your organization. When they graduate and get into positions where they can make decisions within the organization, these are the tools they’re going to use. One panelist argued that this won’t be a revolution. Millenials won’t turn a company upside down. But like the transformation from voice mail to email for leaving messages, millenials and Gen Y will view email as being too slow and opt for social networking tools.

Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 in Boston.

Sean Dennehy and Don Burke of the CIA showed off the structure of Intellipedia which is foremost a wiki for the Director of National Intelligence. The CIA was the pilot customer for Intellipedia and Burke and Dennehy are two of its leading advocates.

Intellipedia is a closed knowledge management system with three levels of access ranging from top secret, to secret, to sensitive but unclassified. But beyond just a wiki, Intellipedia has also become the brand name for a suite of other common Web 2.0 tools such as bookmarking and video. No need for me to go on and on explaining it. Dennehy and Burke posted all the information (and more) explaining it on the Enterprise 2.0 community site.

It wasn’t easy for them. Some saw their desire to create an intelligence information and social network as traitorous. Luckily, they were able to show that a government intelligence community with a wiki was possible for the intelligence community and its partners to answer the burning question of “What did you know, and when did you know it?”

Make sure you watch my video interview with Burke and Dennehy.

Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 in Boston.