‘Distributed co-creation’ – we’ve been doing it, now it’s hot

Lists of things you desperately need to know are a dime a dozen in tech. But we always snap to attention when they come from the thinkers at McKinsey, whose insights always resonate and who just released a compelling list of 10 tech-enabled business trends to watch.

Their first item – “Distributed co-creation moves to the mainstream” – hits us right between the eyes.

“…[T]he ability to organize communities of Web participants to develop, market, and support products and services has moved from the margins of business practice to the mainstream,” reads the article co-authored by Jacques Bughin, Michael Chui and James Manyika of the McKinsey Global Institute.

Wikipedia and open source software projects were pioneering examples of co-creation, according to the article. Emerging, more mainstream examples include:

• customer support communities like Intuit’s, where power users solve tech problems for fellow customers of the company’s financial software – at 10 percent of the cost of traditional call centers;
• word-of-mouth marketing initiatives like Procter & Gamble’s Vocalpoint network, where mothers share product experience with their social circle, sometimes doubling product revenue.
• product development, like Facebook’s recruitment of 300,000 users to translate the site into 70 languages.

These are shining examples, but not exceptions. Seven out of 10 executives say Web communities regularly create value for their organizations, according to McKinsey.

This matters to us, of course, since our very reason for being is enabling organizations to create communities (internal, external and hybrid) that transcend traditional corporate boundaries for better performance in product development, marketing, support and many other operations.

Importantly, for such Web communities to succeed, we’ve found that you need more than just a platform, people and browsers. You need what McKinsey calls “the up-front research needed to identify potential participants who have the right skill sets and will be motivated to participate over the longer term.”

We understood that early, which is why NewsGator Social Sites already helps identify key players for a project. Social Sites users create extensive capability profiles and identify their expertise through both narrative descriptions and searchable keywords (called “tags”). Users also tag content (their own and others’), and any contribution can be rated. Meanwhile, Social Sites is continuously crunching enterprise social network activity, including “likes” on microblog posts. Profiles, tags, rating and activity streams together help identify the smartest and most engaged experts on every topic in the enterprise. If this sounds like a lot of data, it is. But it’s all rolled up in graphical maps like these:

 

This makes it easy to assemble a great team for any co-creation project.

We believe deeply in co-creation both as an ideal and an emerging reality. We see it on the ground every day among our more than 2.5 million enterprise paid users. We’re committed to helping organizations create and foster their Web communities for more powerful co-creation for decades into the future.

If you’d like to discuss how your organization can benefit from co-creation, please contact us at insidesales@newsgator.com. 

Congratulations to NewsGator customers CA Technologies and Bryan Cave on being named CIO 100 winners!

Last night at the prestigious CIO 100 awards ceremony held at the Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, CA, NewsGator customers CA Technologies and Bryan Cave were each honored for their innovative E2.0 solutions within their companies. The 23rd annual award program recognizes organizations around the world that exemplify the highest level of operational and strategic excellence in information technology (IT).

Receiving a CIO 100 award is an impressive feat as hundreds of companies vie for the attention of the CIO 100 judges and ultimately the distinction of being named an innovator by CIO Magazine, one of the trade’s most respected IT publications. The recipients of this year's CIO 100 awards were selected through a three-step process. First, companies filled out an online application form detailing their innovative IT and business initiatives. Next, a team of judges reviewed the applications in depth, looking for unique practices and substantial results. Finally, CIO editors reviewed the judges' recommendations and voted on the final 100.

Below are brief descriptions of each winning project.

• CA built on its Microsoft SharePoint platform to revamp its corporate intranet. The new platform uses a Facebook-style interface to allow employees to construct their own profiles and quickly sort through those of others to find someone with the expertise they need. It also offers wikis, workflow management, and document management and version control, which has changed the way CA employees write and edit documents. CA plans to extend the platform to share information with its customers.
  
• Bryan Cave, a law firm with 1,000 lawyers, developed a global knowledge exchange that uses social media tools to makes it easier to develop, use and re-use attorney's work. Since eCave2 was implemented, more than 90 knowledge communities have sprung up within the workforce, addressing such questions as the intricacies of art law, best practices for corporate finance and model language for legal documents. By making 2,000 success stories more accessible to clients, the system is also partly responsible for more than 10 successful large engagements, the law firm says. At last count, more than 1,600 employees were using the system every day, and more than 600 were contributing content.

A big shout out to our NewsGator teams for helping to make these E2.0 success stories happen and to our customers for leading the charge internally at their respective companies. There are likely many more CIO 100 caliber companies within our customer roster – don’t be shy - drop us a line as we’d love to promote your success story!

We got bling!

Well sort of. It’s time for us to brag! But hey, if you won awards all the time, you’d probably want to tell people about them too! NewsGator was honored not once, not twice, but three times within the past week.  We are very excited and would like to recognize ourselves for being named as one of Lead411’s Hottest Colorado Companies, having Social Sites be named (again) as one of KMWorld’s Trend Setting Products and being named by Inc. Magazine as one of the 5000 fastest-growing private companies.

You can learn more about any of the honors mentioned above, or check out the full list of winners for each award by clicking on the following links:

• Lead411’s Hottest Colorado Companies.
• KMWorld’s Trend Setting Products of 2010 
• Inc. 5000’s List of Fastest-Growing Private Companies.

Not only is winning awards awesome, but this just furthers the notion that everyone is starting to realize, and appreciate, the power of social computing. Our products are helping enterprises, government agencies and other organizations by making SharePoint social. We are thrilled to be recognized by these types of awards and look forward to receiving more as we continue to grow. Congratulations to everyone here at NewsGator, we earned it!

NewsGator named one of Lead411’s Hottest Colorado Companies!

Lead411 has been scouring press releases and business articles to find the fastest growing companies in the United States. Separated by geographic region, the “Hottest Companies” awards began with a list of over 700 companies and it was eventually narrowed down to just 39. Out of the 39 winners, NewsGator was the only company to be awarded that focuses on enterprise social computing—furthering the notion that enterprise social computing is becoming more relevant.

Among the rest of the winners, NewsGator Development Partner, GNIP also made the cut. You can check out the final list of Lead411 winners here.

In order to qualify, potential award winners had to be operating in the Software, Wireless, Internet or Media industry. They also had to be privately held organizations, within the state of Colorado. In addition, each company had to meet one or more of the following requirements:
    ** 100% increase in revenues over the past 3 years; or
    ** Over $1M in funding in the past 2 years; or
    ** 2X traffic gains to their website in the past 12 months and over 1M unique visitors a month.

A big congratulations to the NewsGator team, we are one hot company!

Merck, Communities, Mafia Wars, and Reducing the Risks of Social Media Tools

Merck is one of the most successful life sciences companies out there – and they are doing great things in the Enterprise 2.0 space. In a series of social media interviews with Bob McGuire, the Executive Director SBS, Enterprise Portal & Support Services at Merck, we wanted to share a couple of interesting things that Merck is doing – socially speaking.

Use Mafia Wars to teach community values

“One of the things I really struggle with is that people don’t get communities – and so I use Mafia Wars.” - Bob McGuire

In an interview during the E2.0 Conference in Boston in June, Bob discusses an innovative approach of getting people to understand the value and behavior of communities by having them try out Mafia Wars – and “the reason it works is because your power is driven by how many connections you have.” It’s clear that something like Mafia Wars can help people understand how to work in a community – a group larger than what people are traditionally familiar with. Bob goes on to mention other dimensions of why this is of value – in teaching reciprocity: “you can’t accomplish tasks unless you trade gifts.” Clearly, this is another great approach to help people understand and feel more comfortable with social collaboration inside the enterprise, especially for digital immigrants and older generations who would not explore and experience these tools on their own. The interview ends with a very funny anecdote where Bob is talking with some of his colleagues about the game when someone blurts out “You pimped your mom out.” This apparently made his mom happy because as a result, she got a boost of a few levels in the game. To watch the whole video, visit http://vimeo.com/12641317. 

Provide social media tools inside the firewall to reduce legal risks

“Employees are going to go out and use social media tools. If we don’t provide them social media tools that meet their needs, and we don’t provide them in a way that allows us to archive, allows us to set policy, enforce policy, and monitor what is going on, then what is going to happen is we get into trouble either with information privacy laws or with legal issues that pop up that relate to regulatory rules, or even some of the litigation that we might get involved in.” - Bob McGuire

This is clearly a situation that most organizations are currently facing. Their staff is using social media tools on the web and they are sharing information that can be potentially damaging to a company. Not only that, but this information disclosure could create regulatory compliance issues, depending on your industry. Merck has faced this issue straight on and what seemed like it was going to be an internal hurdle to overcome (e.g. the legal issues of having social media applications in-house), it turned out to be positive for the company. Implementing social computing tools in-house carried much less risk than employees using them on the Internet or with third-party tools that the company has no control over.  Further, Merck has taken this a step further, not only viewing social computing as a risk to mitigate, but embracing it as a way to create an engaging, collaborative workplace for their employees. “Hopefully over time, we begin to create this sense of community where I do my work,” indicates Bob.

Check out this full interview with Bob and also learn how Merck is using NewsGator: http://aiimcommunities.org/e20/blog/conversation-mercks-bob-maguire-onemerck-and-one-place-work

Skate to where the puck is going to be

I’ve seen a few versions of Wayne Gretzky’s famous quote, but its essence is that anticipating, deciding, and moving quickly allows great players to make great plays. Like lots of good advice, it sounds pretty obvious when you hear it; but, if you’ve ever played a sport, you know that it’s often quick and chaotic when you’re on the actual field (or rink) of play.

NewsGator has many of the same challenges—we’re trying to deliver the right enterprise social computing features at the right time to SharePoint customers. We need to have software that fills specific gaps in SharePoint ready for the market right when the market needs it. Granted, SharePoint releases don’t move at the speed of a star NHL defender, but NewsGator can’t build Social Sites quite that fast either. Just like Gretzky, we need to anticipate, decide, and move quickly.

See the open ice:
In order to anticipate (something that Newsgator probably finds easier than an athlete), we have to consider what’s happening around us. The primary signals come from consumer solutions and Microsoft direction. The consumer social computing market moves at lightning speeds, and the ideas that are created in this space get tested and refined quickly. If a feature has utility in the consumer world, it’s likely that some form of that feature will also work well for enterprises.   

In addition to tracking consumer market developments, NewsGator also anticipates by improving our understanding of what Microsoft will do in future SharePoint releases. To do this, we work as closely as possible with Microsoft at all levels, and we participate in every early access program. Microsoft adds features to SharePoint in every release, but not at the same pace as consumer markets. You can see great improvements in wikis and tagging, for example, in SharePoint 2010. Both of these improvements are big steps forward, but enterprise needs often go further. Continuing with the sports metaphors (I grew up in Minnesota but I never actually played hockey), it’s more like watching a lot of videotape on a player, rather than being inside their head, but it still gives us a pretty good “jump on the ball”.

Become a playmaker:
Unfortunately, even having a good idea of where to move doesn’t really matter if you can’t decide. At NewsGator, decisions happen quite quickly and collaboratively. We work on four-month release cycles— we plan the next release in the final month of a cycle, learning as we go through a release and adapting it as necessary to meet market and customer needs. 

Decision-making happens at all levels. Testers are free to push back on developers if a feature doesn’t make sense; developers have a lot of freedom to innovate; and product managers get daily input from sales, marketing, and support. Finally, our software is pushed to an in-house production environment during the early stages of release cycle, and then it’s updated daily during the later stages of the release. This way, the feedback we receive from internal users has tremendous impact on how the features work. 

Utilize the power play:
Lastly, every quick decision needs a quick action to make it count. If Gretzky couldn’t skate, it wouldn’t matter if he knew exactly where the puck was going to be. At NewsGator, this means we rely on extremely talented people who can quickly build and test products with minimal guidance. It’s a beautiful thing to see a developer run with a concept, pull together other developers for an on-the-fly design session, get feedback from a tester or a group of internal users, and then iterate on the feature—all within one day.  This just wouldn’t be possible without great people who work well together.

This speed of action radiates out to all levels of the organization: the Services and Support teams have weekly cross-training with developers, product managers, and each other; the Marketing team quickly updates our capabilities and works to share customer stories rapidly; and the Sales team participates in product betas and trains on new features. This whole-company commitment to promptly and continuously enhancing our products continues all the way up to the top—just ask me someday which one person gives the most internal product feedback.

And, the post-game, locker room wrap-up…
As I’ve alluded, playing competitive sports is demanding. Modern professional athletes seem to train and practice non-stop. That’s what it takes to have the anticipation, decisiveness, and speed to get to where the puck is going to be. That’s also what it takes to continuously deliver the right enterprise social computing software to the SharePoint market at the right time. I’m proud and honored to be a part of the NewsGator team that also continues to have the anticipation, decisiveness, and speed to deliver a great product that fills key customer needs.

Make WSS Social

No matter how far along your organization is on the SharePoint maturity cycle, NewsGator is available to support you. For those of you who are currently running the free version of SharePoint (WSS/SharePoint Foundation), you know that it makes a great file store and document repository with some support for discussions, etc. 

How about Social though? Not so much. No personal profiles, no expert location and no communities. Does it have to be this way? We say no.

Behind the scenes, NewsGator has been working on an application to help users deployed on the free version of SharePoint get social as well. Now you can take advantage of profiles, expert location and communities, all within the familiar SharePoint look and feel; helping you get social within your budget.

Profiles – give users a way to add people to their professional network so they can follow their work through activity streams; empower microblogging and status updates for users either online or through a mobile interface; share bookmarks and blogs on SharePoint list items; store and share personal files.

Expert location – roll all this activity up into a global roster of helpful, active, and most networked users in your enterprise – all these people are now searchable.  Have people add their LinkedIn profiles and index those as well through the expert search.

Communities – create communities around professional disciplines to create Centers of Excellence.  Questions and Answers, Videos, Blogs, Wikis, Ideas, and more are all in there and included.

Afraid that going social might limit you if one day you wish to expand on these capabilities? Don’t worry about that either. Not only is NewsGator available to introduce you to social, we can help you further integrate it into Microsoft SharePoint, if you decide to go that route, as well. We have a killer migration path in place to help all of our users that are interested in making the switch from the free version of SharePoint to the paid version. 

Interested in learning more? Get a sneak peak of this new application and join the growing number of SharePoint enterprises going social by registering for our upcoming webinar: Make WSS Social, taking place on August 18, 2010 at 2:00 p.m. EST.

Mobile User Survey: Give Us Your Feedback – Win an iPad

NewsGator wants to know how you use mobile technology throughout your workday. Please give us your feedback by taking a few minutes to fill out our short eight question survey.

To further inspire your participation, we are giving away a brand new Apple iPad to one lucky survey respondent! To be eligible for the drawing, please fill out the short form at the beginning of the survey. Your personal information will be used for contact purposes only, and the winner will be notified by July 31, 2010.

NewsGator values your input and uses it to continue to innovate and delight our customers. It will only take a few minutes, so please click here to start the survey: http://bit.ly/aoDQAQ

Thank you for your time!

PS – Feel free to pass this survey along to your peers and colleagues!

Vote for NewsGator at E2.0 Santa Clara!

Session voting for the E2.0 Santa Clara conference has already started. With five NewsGator related sessions on the chopping block, we need your votes!

As a socially savvy company, NewsGator acknowledges that anonymous contributions don’t mean squat.  Therefore we understand why E2.0 Santa Clara is requiring each person to register before voting.  Not only is it important to see the total number of votes for each session, but it’s also beneficial to see just who exactly is voting.  So go register now and be proud to have your name associated with NewsGator by voting for all five of our E2.0 conference sessions. 

The first four NewsGator sessions are being hosted directly by NewsGator staff.  And the fifth session is coming to you straight from one of our own clients.  NewsGator is proud to announce that Kurt Jones, of Charles Schwab and Co., will be presenting on how they use NewsGator Social Sites to improve their service representatives’ expertise.

Vote for each of the sessions now by clicking on their titles below:

• Driving Social Adoption in the Enterprise, presented by Christy Schoon
• Governance in Social Computing, presented by Eric Sauve
• Mobile – It’s how we work, so what’s the hold up? presented by Brian Kellner
• Social Insights: Connecting People, Content & Communities, presented by JB Holston
• Schwab reaps big returns on social investment, presented by Kurt Jones of Charles Schwab and Co.

NewsGator prides itself on the fact that we like to keep it real.  As a company that values authenticity, we submitted these sessions with the intent that they would be valuable to practitioners and thought leaders alike.  For every NewsGator session that is selected, we promise to let our customers’ stories do the talking. We’ll round up our most informative client stories, and then we’ll take them to the big stage with us.  This way you can learn first-hand about the successes and challenges of social computing. Please help spread the word by sharing this post with others.

Click on ALL of the NewsGator sessions listed above and get voting!  Voting ends on Friday, July 16.  Thanks for the support!

Happy Social Media Day!

Happy Social Media Day! 43% of Online Americans addicted to social networking; http://bit.ly/bK08pI . Gartner predicted today that 3 bill facebook members worldwide by 2020. Got both of those from my #newsgator SocialSites app on my BlackBerry. One big enterprise software company has 1200 employees working on the category. 'nuff said?