We’re Riding a Big Wave and Loving It

In case it wasn’t clear before, the release of Forrester Research Inc.’s first ever August 2011 “The Forrester Wave™:  Enterprise Social Platforms, Q3 2011” report further cements what we at NewsGator have been experiencing first hand – enterprise social is not a niche, fad, or point solution, it is the future of work in the enterprise and that future is now.

NewsGator is positioned solidly among the handful of Enterprise Social Platform leaders, all selected, “due to breadth and depth of functionality and long-range strategy.” That last part is key. We were early into the social computing revolution and our close relationship with Microsoft gave us an inside track on delivering social capabilities to the enterprise as a global platform capability – not just a siloed, point solution.

When we first partnered with Microsoft and began building what would become Social Sites, it was with a goal of targeting the entire enterprise, infusing it with a new connective tissue for communicating, collaborating, and working.

As the particular features and functionality of enterprise social collaboration have emerged and matured in the market, that broad original vision has proven a valuable edge – both for us in the marketplace and for our customers in the real world of work.

Companies adopting enterprise social computing are both tempted by the real world benefits of the technology (e.g. better communication, higher productivity, increased innovation, easier expertise discovery) and challenged by today’s economic times. They must make the most out of existing IT investments while avoiding the type of integration expeditions that were legendary in the cash flush dot com days.

Built directly on top of SharePoint, our Social Sites 2010 product gives companies the advanced social collaboration benefits they want, enterprise-wide, with no fuss, no drama. And our agile development focus on pushing what’s possible in social ensures their platform investment will always be kept at the forefront of what’s new and best.

The enterprise social computing wave is growing and we’re glad to be out front riding it. Congratulations to the NewsGator team for this great accomplishment!

More accolades, More Inc.

If you’re looking for hope amid dismal job reports, collapsing 401(k)s and stagnant home prices, take a break and savor some good news: The Inc. 5000 has created 370,592 jobs in the last three years. We’re grateful to be a small cog in that massive job creation engine, and on the list for the third year straight.

The Inc. 5000 for 2011 came out yesterday, with private US companies ranked by their documented growth rate over the past three years. We’re at 1,057 on the list, up from 1,358 last year. Our revenues have soared by 286 percent over the three-year span. And during a period of devastating job loss, we’ve added over 30 jobs ourselves. Considering we have only 94 employees and like to be lean and mean, that’s a healthy number.

What our rise on the Inc. ranking tells us is that during a time of economic contraction, our customers are looking to us not as a “nice to have,” but as an essential strategy for becoming a more productive business. Social computing is about efficiency – in innovation, collaboration and knowledge sharing – and efficiency is a key survival strategy when the economy weakens.

Rather than being a discretionary expense, we are indispensible when times are tough. When you’re sick, you buy medicine. When the economy’s sick, business gravitates to social computing. And if you think social computing helps now, wait till you see what it does when the economy recovers.

Managing Remote Employees With Enterprise Social Software

Years ago when I worked at Sun Microsystems, we were ahead of the times as 40% of the workforce was part of what we called the iWork program. Largely seen as an employee benefit, folks were able to telecommute at the discretion of management. But telecommuters didn’t always have the same career opportunities and some leaders just couldn’t get over the stigmatism of ‘working from home’. Granted while leading many a conference call, I am convinced that I heard folks snoring and even taking bubble baths – but that’s a whole other topic.

The number of employees working remotely has increased dramatically in recent years, a trend that brings with it challenges ripe for a social solution. Research at Cornell University’s Center of Advanced Human Resources (CAHRS) has revealed that the most rapid growth in remote work arrangements (a segment previously owned by contract workers) is now being seen among full-time and part-time employees. In short, the researchers note, “remote workers no longer represent the fringe but rather a sizable and growing segment of today’s workforce.” When I came across this study, I was also struck by the fact that four of the nine companies participating in this research are NewsGator customers - Charles Schwab, CitiGroup, General Mills, and JPMorgan Chase – all pioneers in the enterprise social software revolution.

Managing remote employees offers a host of potential benefits to both the company and the employee, including increased productivity, lowered costs, higher employee satisfaction and retention rates, increased flexibility, and improved work-life balance. These benefits don’t come without challenges. Companies that support remote work agreements must equip virtual employees with the technology to connect them to the business, to prevent professional and personal isolation, and to promote equity between virtual and non-virtual employee. Effective uses of enterprise social software tools offer one way to meet these challenges.

Microblogging, video conferencing, activity streams, online communities, and other social tools on corporate intranets can help virtual employees maintain constant communication with their colleagues. This contact replaces the day-to-day informal communication of the physical workplace, augments formal work processes, and decreases the opportunity for virtual employees to feel disconnected. Employee contributions are captured seamlessly and exposed in transparent work streams.

Of course you can conduct corporate training and change management initiatives to displace the archaic notion that remote work is less valuable to the company. But you can also incorporate progressive social technologies like badging and recognition on your corporate intranet to effectively promote equity between virtual and non-virtual employees. Since these merit-based rewards are independent of location or rank in the company, virtual employees have the same opportunity to be recognized for their work as their non-virtual counterparts. In this way, virtual employees can see the impact of their contributions to the business without actually being physically present in the office. When managing remote employees, you can use enterprise social software as a means to connect with and successfully manage virtual employees. We’ve heard repeatedly from our customers with large workforces that providing a welcoming and supportive online environment is key to the collective success of their globally dispersed knowledge workers. 

While enterprise social software tools provide an effective means to make remote working arrangements work, companies should understand that enterprise social tools by themselves are not a sufficient solution. Virtual employees need self-discipline, excellent communication skills, and an uncanny resourcefulness. Provided that your virtual employees possess these character traits, enterprise social software tools will make your remote workforce flourish regardless of where they choose to get their work done. Do you agree?

My Social Sites Summer

Guest blog post by Luke Skarzynski, Marketing and Competitive Analysis Intern

The sun is shining on what looks to be another beautiful morning in Denver. Hard to believe today is my last day of work interning at NewsGator.

The past ten weeks have been a blast. I still tell everyone that NewsGator received Microsoft’s
2011 US Partner of the Year Award thanks to my contributions—we heard that we won just two weeks after I joined (surely there must be a connection there). But truth be told, the pieces were all in place long before I came onboard.

The driving force behind our US Partner of the Year award is, of course, our flagship product, Social Sites. Since Day One of my internship, I have gotten the chance to experience and review this product firsthand. Ten weeks in, I am still discovering new and exciting ways to use it. As I prepare to return to Middlebury College in the fall, I look back on the top five memories of my Social Sites Summer:

1)    Which way’s the beach?

Lots of new hires worry about asking stupid questions. As I began my first summer away from home, my biggest concern was not missing my family, meeting new people, or finding a place to live. As a collegiate athlete who needed to stay in top shape, my biggest concern was, “Where’s the gym?” Although my new colleagues expressed their willingness to answer any questions I might have, I had an inkling that my question was not what they had in mind.

My first search on the Social Sites-based NewsGator intranet was “gym.” Lo and behold, I quickly discovered a document entitled “Gym Stuff,” complete with information about NewsGator’s corporate discount at the local gym. Oh, the subtle benefits of content repositories. From that moment on, I knew Social Sites and I were going to be friends. My primary concern alleviated, I breathed a sigh of relief and dove into my real work as a Marketing and Competitive Analysis Intern.

2)    Project Panther: How to lead when you’re not qualified to do so

I learned early on in my competitive analysis research that one of the difficulties of competing in the enterprise social space is that vendors all seem to market themselves in the same way. I can’t think of a single vendor I looked at who did not claim to “boost productivity and efficiency,” “increase collaboration,” or “revolutionize internal corporate communications.” This plague of marketing rhetoric poses an obvious problem. Namely, how do we convince the world we have a kick-ass product when everyone else is saying the same thing?

Our marketing team determined that in order for prospects to make an educated decision about competing enterprise social products, we needed to move beyond rhetoric and create an environment in which prospects could interact with Social Sites. Enter Project Panther.

Project Panther, so named for Middlebury College’s mascot, became one of my core assignments for the summer. Along with NewsGator’s other marketing intern and fellow Middlebury student, Emily Bennett, I was entrusted with creating the business and functional requirements documents needed to launch the site. Despite the confident nodding and assurances I offered my superiors, I had never written a formal business or functional requirements document in my life. Like any smart NewsGator employee caught over his head, I promptly turned to Social Sites for the solution.

The first step Emily and I took was to create a Project Panther community and invite the people we needed to get the job done. Project managers provided us with templates to construct the requirements documents. Software engineers fleshed out how to envision and describe the more technical capacities. Marketing/sales managers kept us focused on Project Panther’s business goals and providing a valuable consumer experience.

Social Sites empowered us to quickly put together a team with collective talents and expertise far greater than our own. We were also able to create a dedicated environment in which our team could work, ensuring that everyone was kept up to speed with the project’s latest developments. As of this blog post, Project Panther is well on its way and I look forward to following its impending release.

3)    Twitter Leads

One of Social Sites’ more subtle features that I find to be incredibly useful is its ability to bring external information into the company feed. By listing “competition” as an interest in my Social Sites profile and integrating my Twitter account, with which I follow all of NewsGator’s significant competitors, I’m able to keep abreast of everything our competitors are doing. Any time one of them announces a new product release or major acquisition, I am able to immediately see and share that information with the rest of the company.

Additionally, the integration of my Twitter account serves as a tool for new lead generation. If a person tweets asking about NewsGator or expresses frustration with his or her use of another vendor’s software, that tweet is captured within my Social Sites Activity Stream. I can choose to “Share” this tweet with anyone in the NewsGator network, allowing me to forward the new lead on to our Sales Team. With minimal effort on my end, we now have a new prospect. Pow!

4)    Price Checker

Not all social software vendors release their pricing information—less than ideal for an intern conducting a comprehensive analysis of the competition. Obviously, pricing is one piece of information I couldn’t do without.

Fortunately, Social Sites provided a quick fix to this dilemma. I @targeted (a form of direct messaging) the entire NewsGator Sales team in our Activity Stream asking for intel on pricing and historic deals for the 12 companies I was analyzing. Each sales person received a notification on the NewsGator network as well as a notification in their Outlook inbox with my plea for help. Within half an hour, I had all the information I needed.

5)    Scoring Badges

By nature I am a pretty competitive individual. Doesn’t matter if I’m playing hockey or a game of “Go Fish,” my goal is to compete and win . It should come as no surprise, then, that I was really drawn into Social Sites’ Badging and Recognition capabilities, a system that rewards employees for meaningful participation on Social Sites.

Realistically, I was probably not going to surpass NewsGator CEO JB Holston for “Top Contributor” in the NewsGator network. But that’s not to say it was going to keep me from trying! Anytime I needed to communicate with a NewsGator employee, I always questioned whether that communication could go into the Activity Stream. In almost all cases, the answer was a resounding yes.

Within two short weeks, I had already amassed a gallery of badges and caught the eye of people around the company, including our CEO. As an added bonus, I found that by posting my queries to the Activity Stream, I often received the response I was looking for sooner from someone outside of my intended audience!

I used Social Sites in a variety of different capacities throughout the summer—all without any prior experience with the product. Since Social Sites works so similarly to the consumer social tools with which I was already familiar—tools like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook—I found that, even without ever having seen Social Sites before, I already knew how to use it. That may have been the most pleasant discovery of all - how well Social Sites and I got along without even trying. Thanks to Social Sites, my summer was a highly productive breeze.