Viva Microsoft SQL 2012!

Just in time for the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 launch, NewsGator now offers full support for the latest version of the data platform. We’ll be providing more details next week about our support of SQL Server 2012 in conjunction with our participation at the DevConnections Conference in Las Vegas. Make sure to swing by the expo hall and visit us at booth #321 to learn about our SQL Server 2012 announcement and get a tour of the latest and greatest features of Social Sites 2010. We’ll be at the event starting Monday, March 26th through Thursday, March 29th.

And, if you haven’t yet registered, use discount code: DEVCONVB100 to save $100 off a full conference registration. This event will cover most of the Microsoft stack with sessions specifically focused on Visual Studio, ASP.net NET and Silverlight, SharePoint, Exchange and Windows, in addition to SQL. It should be a great event - we hope to see you there!

Enterprise Social Networking Tools to Increase Employee Engagement

The trend in today’s workplace is towards “becoming social”— leveraging the right social tools to increase customer retention and streamline company productivity. Social computing systems are increasing employee engagement, boosting collaboration, and facilitating more widespread recognition of success and ability. However, while research clearly demonstrates that all companies can benefit from enterprise social networking, old ways die hard and there’s reticence to leaving established methods behind and embracing the innovation of the latest social wave. Interestingly, there seems to be a reverse correlation between the degree of need and the level of demand—organizations that need social computing the most, typically the largest and most influential, are slow to embrace larger social adaptations, while social adoption among smaller companies is expanding at a rapid pace.

Big companies need social networking tools
Weighted beneath massive information databases and internationally distributed employee populations, large companies have much to gain by going social. Internally, enterprise social computing solutions let large organizations weed through the clutter in mammoth flows of information, filtering out the noise to hone in on relevant data or efficiently locate a subject matter expert for a given task. Culturally, enterprise social solutions facilitate more widespread engagement through collective ideation and brainstorming, helping to bring more coherence to a very large organization which can often feel disjointed to employees. Externally, social tools such as Twitter and Facebook are bridging the gap between companies and customers, enabling large organizations to stay in tune with changing user demands and perceptions.

Why do large organizations neglect social networking tools?
Despite the real need for social networking tools in large organizations, big business often suffers from social media neglect. While it’s difficult to get hard numbers on internally-facing efforts, their slow-paced adoption of externally facing social media efforts is telling. When it comes to blogging activity, Facebook page management, and Twitter activity, large organizations are falling short; less than a quarter of the nation's top Fortune 500 companies use public-oriented blogs and only 62 percent and 58 percent take advantage of the Twitter-sphere and customer-oriented Facebook pages. Similarly, the most influential global organizations have been cautious about shifting their internal infrastructures towards incorporating social computing tools.

By contrast, smaller corporations - specifically those included in the annual Inc. 500 listing of America’s fastest growing companies - have a strong command of enterprise social networking. In fact, these companies host twice as many blogs as their large enterprise counterparts and a full 71 percent of the Inc. 500-listed fasted growing companies have fully functioning Facebook pages. Unlike enterprise giants, small companies realize they have much to gain from social tools, and a lot to lose by not getting on board as fast as possible. Their willingness to adapt to social allows growing companies to facilitate more open communications with customers and more collaborative work across all ranks of the organization. This means that, as our fastest developing new companies gain momentum and become the “enterprise giants” of the future, the next line of influential companies will be inherently more social. The perception of the modern workforce is changing, and large organizations need to get on board.

How is NewsGator helping to bring social to larger companies?
At NewsGator, we recognize that this social lag in large organizations is a potentially critical problem—that larger enterprises greatly benefit from both external and internal social computing solutions to maximize profit potential and establish a more customer-centric working environment. This understanding shows up clearly in our customer base, which includes global enterprise giants such as Deloitte, Accenture, and General Mills. General Mills, for example, a 33,000 employee strong global company touting well known brands like Betty Crocker, Pillsbury and Cheerios, looked to NewsGator for a social networking approach to internal collaboration that would overcome the challenges of having a large, geographically dispersed employee population. Since integration, NewsGator Social Sites has helped General Mill's employees to better collaborate, streamline innovation and bridge the communication gaps across geographic and functional silos. To learn more about how NewsGator fuels enterprise collaboration at General Mills, check out the following video:

And that’s not an isolated example – it’s something we keep seeing time and time again with new customers. At NewsGator, we’re telling large organizations to stop hesitating—join the social wave and watch your organization transform in both efficiency and client satisfaction.

An Interview with Guest Blogger: Rachel Happe of the Community Roundtable

Please tell us a bit about your projects – The Community Roundtable and The Social Organization.

Rachel: I started blogging at The Social Organization in 2007 when I was an analyst at IDC because I started to see the huge potential to re-invent organizations in a way that improved peoples’ experience with them and profoundly changed the value chain. I remain very excited about the opportunity of networking and communications to align organizations internally and with the markets they serve.

In 2009, Jim Storer and I started The Community Roundtable because while technology adoption was growing quickly, there was not a lot of focus on the management element of what we now call ‘social business.’  We see community management as an emerging strategic discipline of management, not just the day-to-day activities of online engagement.  We run a peer network for community and social business leaders that is focused on sharing best practices and learning from each other and experts we bring in for discussions.  One of our goals is to educate the market, so we publish a lot of content and speak widely. We have also been working with companies in an advisory capacity to help get executives on the same page regarding the opportunities and risks of moving forward in a ‘social’ way.

Community management has certainly evolved as E2.0 has been more widely embraced in the business world. What are the top 2-3 trends you are now seeing as you consult with community managers?

Rachel: It is an interesting time in the market because attention to community management has increased dramatically, in part because of a greater understanding of its importance in making social business successful.  A few trends that I see include:

• Companies focused on internal use cases are realizing that they need community managers and it is not just an external facing role.
• Organizations are starting to understand that their community team is the human experience (whatI call the HX) that needs to parallel the user experience (UX) of their technology.
• Organizations are beginning to understand that community management is strategic and critical because they are seeing early movers like SAP, CSC, and Dell use community management teams so successfully.

What are the top 2-3 concerns?

Rachel: The top concerns/myths that I see – and believe are important to address methodically – are:

• Extending the ability to communicate broadly across an employee base. Social networks can expose a lack of alignment in ways that other communications tools do not and can bring up a lot of HR hiring, training, and cultural issues, which can be significant.
• Adding another tool and requirement to already strapped employees. While this tends to be a common concern, if thoughtfully implemented and managed, social networks should relieve rather than add to information overload.
• Social networking will just enable wasting time. This concern comes up less often but we still hear it. The truth is that chitchat is often how we build relationships with people we don’t know well. That is an important first step on the road to cross-functional collaboration. Understanding the role of socializing to foster collaboration is critical for managers.

What is your perspective on Google+ in the enterprise?

Rachel: Google+ is a really interesting tool. My favorite feature by far is the Hangout feature, which enables a close-to-real-life meeting across global geographies. That is game changing for the development of relationships. The circles and privacy features are also interesting but they come with a high overhead for managing them at the individual level. I think Google will work on solving that issue but I think there is a lot of potential in the architecture of the product.  Google+ as such may not be the solution internally for large organizations because of security and privacy issues – it is a little too easy to publish to the wrong stream right now.

With your years of experience you have probably had direct experience with SharePoint (and clearly so have we!). What have you heard from community managers about SharePoint and/or NewsGator as far as community building since SharePoint 2010 was announced?

Rachel: The biggest issue that I hear that comes up with regards to SharePoint is that there are too many ‘dead’ sites within organizations. Functionality NewsGator helps with that but it’s also the lack of any community management in traditionally-deployed SharePoint contexts. Early on, IT groups got SharePoint for free so the business case was often not well developed and there was no funding for oversight of the tools. This has changed as people have realized that a lot of those initial efforts at collaboration failed.

What advice do you have for managers trying to build communities internationally? Any cultural or other issues they should keep in mind?

Rachel: Culture eats strategy for lunch, especially internally, so managers need to build strategies and plans that respect the culture and satisfy goals that fit within that culture first. Once comfortable with the online environment, you can start to stretch people’s comfort level and introduce them to new ways of working but trying to introduce too much, too quickly typically doesn’t work well.

What is the #1 use of communities you’ve seen in your career?

Rachel: The best uses of communities are when members are isolated but have a high need to connect and learn. So some of the most compelling examples I’ve seen is in health-related communities in terms of value to the members. For instance, health-related support groups have emerged to help and connect individuals who would have otherwise never met and turn into a daily networks of connections.  I’ve also seen really compelling use cases about sharing expertise internally in a way that drives huge cost savings across an enterprise.

How many communities do you belong to?

Rachel: Good question but that is a really hard question to answer. There are a few communities that take up more of my time, and they are closely aligned with the work I do. So obviously TheCR Network is one, but also the Enterprise 2.0 Conference community and a handful of related online groups that are closely aligned. But then there is my personal life and things that I’m interested in or are a bit further afield professionally, there are 20 or 30 different communities I keep an eye on and occasionally participate in. One of the recent ones that I’ve been participating in is a running community because I am just learning how to run – and the need to learn really drives my engagement.

Clearly you have a lot of information on the Community Roundtable website for helping community managers with best practices – but do you have 1 or 2 favorite recommendations you believe help the most when building a successful community?

Rachel: We’ve built resources for people who are new comers into this space or who need to educate others within their organizations:

Getting Your Feet Wet in Social Media
http://community-roundtable.com/getting-your-feet-wet-in-social-media-community/

For many of these resources, social tools and approaches are old hat but we forget that others need to start at the very beginning. We also do a podcast series with community managers which is a great way to hear the experiences of others: http://community-roundtable.com/category/podcasts/

Lastly, what’s the most curious or funniest community you’ve ever come across?

Rachel: I think that has to be the Thumb Wrestling Federation:
http://twf.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Community

Learn more about community management from Rachel – check out this on-demand webinar where she discusses “Community Management 101” with Eric Sauve of NewsGator.

Transparency in the Workplace: The trend toward collaboration and company goal management

Our New York readers may have noticed the Domino’s Pizza billboard ticker in Times Square. Since July 25th, Dominos has been running unfiltered reviews submitted by customers on its Domino’s Tracker website. The bold move, which coincides with new Domino’s TV spots, represents a dramatic shift for a company that in 2009 faced a huge PR backlash when a graphic video made by a few of its employees while on the job went viral on YouTube. That video made national headlines and prompted a video apology by Domino’s CEO Patrick Doyle.

The Domino’s Times Square ticker highlights a broader business transparency trend. Instead of striving for the almost unattainable goal of crafting brand image through traditional, top-down marketing campaigns, companies are turning to social media as a way to engage with their customers, partners, and other key audiences.

Adopting an enterprise social software platform can apply the same principle of transparency and engagement to the entire business ecosystem. In doing so, companies position themselves to reap the benefits of improved collaboration and knowledge sharing, aligning employee and company goal management, and more. In the words of Sharon Allen, Deloitte LLP’s Chairman of the Board, “This seemingly simple strategy is the ultimate key to building a productive workforce.”

The first way transparency builds a productive workforce within a company is by breaking down information silos, which, in turn improves collaboration and knowledge-sharing. Instead of keeping information trapped and, perhaps overlooked, in an overloaded inbox, enterprise social software fosters transparency by exposing information to the entire company network (check out this video of our joint NewsGator-Colligo solution for email management + social). In reviewing his own email use, Vinicius de Costa, former Associate Director for Collaboration and Social Business with Kraft Foods, found that more than 90% of his email could be made public without suffering any security or confidentiality repercussions. He then asked the question, “Why keep all that information locked up in the first place?” By transitioning to NewsGator’s Social Sites enterprise social platform, Kraft Foods has “transformed the way people operate” at the company and helped employees achieve higher productivity.

Making work transparent through enterprise social tools also promotes the alignment of employee and company goals. At Unisys, for instance, executives publish everything from their monthly status reports to highlights of a recent client visit to their blogs. Aside from encouraging adoption of the social platform—employees need to have a presence on the Unisys intranet to read the reports—Unisys’s policy “gives senior management a more transparent, and immediate, way of seeing what is going on in key areas of the business rather than waiting for email status reports.”

And these types of policies are just the tip of the business-benefits iceberg. The incorporation of analytics tools will give companies and employees the opportunity to track and interact with their goals in real time. Maybe the Sales Team is focused on delivering $100 million in revenue this quarter. Analytics trackers in the Sales Community could show team members how close they are to achieving this target, along with breaking down how each salesperson has contributed to that effort. Team members can receive instant feedback on their performance, as well as analyze how other star performers in the company are achieving their success. Such alignment of employee and company goals is a boon, as it encourages employees to not only be productive, but to be more effective, engaging most intensely in those tasks that drive the business forward.

Engineering a shift in company policy to greater transparency can be unsettling for some executives. While certain security concerns and requirements may limit the amount of transparency that takes place in some companies or certain parts of the business, business leaders should seek to challenge and redefine what those orthodoxies may be. When Procter & Gamble Co. Chairman Alan G. Lafley set a goal for his organization to source at least fifty percent of its innovations from outside the company in 2001 (up from roughly 10% at the time), he challenged the orthodoxy that the company’s innovation pipeline must be fueled from within. The company has since been able to bring hundreds of new products to the market that had their genesis, in whole or in part, outside P&G. And what about our friends at Domino’s? Only two months after starting their new Times Square campaign, the Domino’s Pizza Tracker received and published nearly 7,000 reviews with an average rating of about 4.25/5 stars. Looks like transparency is working out pretty well.

Business Longevity – Why Microsoft Will Still Be Relevant in 20 Years & Why That Matters to Your Enterprise Today

Good to Great and Built to Last are two of my favorite business books. Within the in the business analyses, one thing stands out very clearly – it’s very difficult for a company to stay relevant over long stretches of time. Companies like HP, which is featured in Built to Last, demonstrate that staying ahead in the world of technology is probably even more difficult than in other markets.

Microsoft, however, has the business longevity to last and in twenty years, it will still be a daily force in the lives of most people who have access to technology.  Just looking at the current Microsoft BUILD Developers Conference provides some pretty clear support for making this prediction. As a person who creates software products, I think I have a keen understanding of what will give a technology company staying power. I look at business momentum, business confidence and collective intelligence as the key predictors for staying relevant.

One key challenge to staying interesting in the long term is getting a significant enough footprint. With a significant user base, you get good feedback and you get the opportunity to introduce new versions and new offerings with less resistance. This is what I mean by business momentum, and Microsoft has more than anyone. Currently, there are over a billion PC’s in the world. Steve Ballmer told the BUILD Conference attendees that there will be 350 million new Windows devices sold this year.

The story is similar in enterprise products. The last Radicati report I saw showed Exchange handling over 300 million mailboxes and projected to cover nearly 500 million by 2014. Microsoft SharePoint 2010 has over 100 million seats in the market. While the press and the stock market seem to favor rapid growth numbers, these numbers tell you about the staying power of Microsoft. That’s business momentum – and it gives Microsoft the ability to make pretty big changes over long periods without having to worry too much about the short term results of those changes. But in the world of technology, having a big position today doesn’t guarantee ongoing relevance unless you’re willing to adapt.

Business confidence comes into the picture when you need to make changes. From a product perspective, every time you change something someone is going to be unhappy. It’s also risky and difficult to make new products. Every new product either fulfills a need that people didn’t know they had (it’s truly a new thing) or does something well enough that they are willing to switch from how they did it before to your new way of doing it. It’s no wonder that a lot of products don’t succeed. When you’re a company the size of Microsoft, the bar for success is pretty high.

The easy thing to do would be to just keep doing the “safe” things – just keep making small changes to Windows and Office.  Instead, Microsoft goes beyond by creating new products and making significant changes to existing ones. Those things don’t always work, and when they don’t Microsoft gets heaps of criticism. Looking at what Microsoft is doing with Windows 8, Azure, and Office 365, it’s clear that they have the business confidence to continue looking at where they must succeed to stay relevant and are making significant investments in those areas.

Having a company with strong and confident leadership gives it the opportunity to act differently than officials elected to short terms. Companies like Microsoft can choose to go down roads that will be bumpy for several years. Business momentum will help your company survive that journey and Business confidence will give you the courage to stay on it. Furthermore, the company’s collective intelligence has to be strong enough to pick which roads to travel in the first place.

A company with business intelligence is able to take in all the information about what is happening across many markets and choose where to make investments. I’m fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with a lot of people at Microsoft. One thing I can say about all of them – they’re smart. They ask good questions, they want to see the data and they think well on their feet. This isn’t a temporary thing. Microsoft hires smart people - it’s part of their process and integral to their culture.
 
This isn’t to say that other companies don’t hire smart people, but Microsoft seems to make it a focus.  The one thing that is most certain about companies staying relevant over the next twenty years is that it will come down to making good decisions. And that requires having smart people and an environment where they can apply their collective intelligence to make the necessary shifts in strategy.

The point of this post is not to heap endless piles of praise on Microsoft. It would be impossible for a company the size and scope of Microsoft not to make mistakes or have things go wrong. What I want is to convince business enterprises to determine how confident they are in their strategic vendors – will they stay relevant for the long haul?

Switching vendors for significant parts of how your company operates creates real risk and cost. If you can count on your vendors to stay focused on adapting and adding value, you can feel more assured about the long-term proposition. This creates a small paradox because the company needs business momentum to be viable in the long term while simultaneously maintaining the flexibility to deliver solutions in rapidly evolving markets.

Microsoft appears to answering this in two ways. First, they update their solutions at a fairly rapid pace (handing out Windows 8 tablets to developers less than two years after Windows 7 shipped is quite quick for an operating system). Second, Microsoft integration can maintain an extensive partner and developer ecosystem to add value on top of Microsoft technologies. For instance, an enterprise social computing software company like NewsGator can use SharePoint integration to build a product like Social Sites and enhance Microsoft SharePoint 2010.

Microsoft continues to demonstrate the business momentum, business confidence and collective intelligence to stay relevant for the long haul. The message from both the Worldwide Partner Conference and the BUILD Developer Conference is that Microsoft understands executes the key themes it needs to continue to be a force in computer software. That matters to partners like NewsGator, and it matters to the people who buy Microsoft’s products.

In the technology space, I think it’s pretty rare to be able to confidently be able to point out companies that will be major players for decades to come. But based on what I’ve seen, Microsoft is built to last.

Social Tools & Collaborative Thinking – People Are Social Animals

People are social animals. This is widely understood, at least on a superficial level. The extent to which our social interactions structure our behaviors, however, remains, in a large sense, a topic unknown and misconstrued. Paralleled by the rise of a modern computing environment in business and society, new research from cognitive science, social psychology, network science, and education, is displaying deep-seated beliefs about social cognition. The powerful take away — we are much more social than we think.

In NewsGator’s one-hour webinar with Stowe Boyd, a leading advisor in the social tools, and JB Holston, President and CEO of NewsGator, we take an incisive look at why social tools and technologies make us smarter, why adding smart people to smart project teams doesn’t improve performance, and why friendliness in the workplace atmosphere leads to real business results.

“Social” has taken hold of all of us. Already, more than 100,000,000 people use social networks to interact with one another, in a space for more collaborative thinking and more mutual support. Social technologies thrive, in a large sense, due to their collaborative nature, because they allow us to effectively feed off of and learn from the input of other people. “Everything we learn to do in the world, we learn from other people.” Without social as an impetus for innovation, our collaborative thinking is hindered by a more limited and enclosed sense of individualistic thinking.

Having people use social business to share their work and progress with one another makes them smarter, leads to the sensation of time flying, and increases happiness. The end result—a more satisfied workforce and improved performances across the board.

Didn’t have a chance to tune in? We know one viewer did! We’d like to thank Trisha Liu for keeping readers in the know with her live tweets throughout the webinar, and for putting social networking to good use! Here are some of the key points she posted from this webinar:

mor_trisha Trisha Liu: Everything we learn to do in the world, we learn from other people.

mor_trisha Trisha Liu: In business, adding people w/high IQ does *not* make team perform better. Adding people with social sensitivity does.

mor_trisha Trisha Liu: Working in an unfriendly environment is deadly. Risk of stroke and heart attack is higher.

mor_trisha Trisha Liu: When employees throw out manual and solve problems together. happiness, knowledge and better performance follow.

mor_trisha Trisha Liu: Social gestures that people do online pass along same feelings of trust and caring that touch (oxytocin) brings.

Thanks again to Trisha for her helpful tweets, and make sure to check out the webinar yourself to continue our evolving discussion on social cognition!

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.

Zuckerberg’s Law of Sharing

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is no stranger to exponential growth. Since Facebook’s launch in February 2004, the world’s largest social networking site has gained over 750 million users—and counting. While Zuckerberg expects the growth of Facebook’s user base to continue its meteoric rise and reach the one billion users mark in the near future, he’s also watching another trend develop at an even faster rate.

That trend is sharing.

During a product annoucement earlier this month, Zuckerberg highlighted a trend that has since become known as the “Law of Sharing.” He explained that the average Facebook user shares about twice the amount of content today that he shared the previous year—and one year from now, he will probably be sharing twice as much as he is today and so on.

If Zuckerberg’s Law of Sharing holds, it will likely have important repercussions not only for Facebook, but for the Internet at large. First and foremost, we will be looking at an unprecedented amount of information. How users connect to and dissect this information will ultimately determine whether the growth in information becomes a blessing or a curse.

The danger—one which Zuckerberg fails to address—is that as the number of “shares” exponentially increases, the marginal value of each additional “share” could exponentially decline. For the business user, this lurking danger is especially troublesome. We’ve already seen our email inboxes become infested with irrelevant information. If the Law of Sharing comes to reality, not only for consumers but business people, will enterprise intranets become today's dreaded inbox?

It could happen. The key requirement then, in the hyper-sharing world now and in the future, will be to ensure that information pushed to employees stays relevant. Most social software packages equip companies with the tools to do this. With NewsGator Social Sites, “Top News” is automatically elevated to the front of the Activity Stream. Company managers can also control the level and type of external information that is brought into the internal network. For their own part, employees can custom tune their Activity Stream filter, weeding out over-sharers and other sources of distracting or unecessary information.

Smart companies will combine all of these practices, exercise a certain degree of administrative control if need be, but also nurture a culture in which employees promote only the most meaningful information to colleagues. Unisys's experience is a prime example. Company executives determined it was important to develop Content Posting Guidelines to govern all internal and external practices within their internal collaboration network. At the same time, they granted employees a strong level of autonomy within the network and have plans to begin surveying the workforce to determine additional use cases, time savings and other benefits that will result as adoption continues to grow. To learn more about how Unisys is utilizing social collaboration, check out the full case study from Microsoft.

Time alone will prove or disprove the validity of Zuckerberg’s Law of Sharing. In the meantime, companies can arm themselves with the tools necessary to make sharing an accepted part of the company culture.

It’s a Wrap! What We Learned at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference

NewsGator had an awesome time at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in L.A. last week.  There are almost too many highlights for us to list:

1. Jon Roskill (Microsoft Corporate VP for Worldwide Partners) talked about NewsGator US Partner of the Year award during his Day 3 Keynote speech featuring me and our great customer Kraft Foods. Jon proceeded to wrap up his keynote by saying “Let’s all be NewsGator’s!” to the 16,000 partners in attendance! Check it out below:
   
   
   
   
2. I sent a picture of me on Kobe’s huge Staples Center screen to my kids, who texted back “Yeah, but are you gonna go to the Espy’s?”
3. We deepened our integration and go-to-partnerships with other key players in the $580 billion Microsoft Enterprise Social ecosystem. This is a huge competitive advantage - integration with partners like AvePoint, Cardinal Solutions, Infusion, and Nintex create soup-to-nuts stack augmentation offerings that will drive social as an enterprise class solution. Aggressive go-to-market partnerships with companies like Ascentium, Aspect, Avanade, Pariveda, PointBridge, RDA Corp, Slalom Consulting, and Unique World bring our lowest TCO solutions to market faster than ever.
4. We participated in innumerable meetings with the Microsoft field teams, industry vertical teams, product groups, BDM/marketing teams, Microsoft Consulting Services, and the management team (including Steve Ballmer) for 100% strategic alignment between NewsGator and Microsoft for their 2012 fiscal year and beyond - including O365 and the Cloud.
5. As part of the Partner of the Year (POY) ceremony to kick off Day 3, Laura Farrelly, VP of our Microsoft Alliance, carried in the US flag representing NewsGator and our US POY award. As Laura reports, “I always have wanted to be Olympian but with my lackluster VO2 max this is as close as it gets. The coolest part was meeting some of the winners from other countries. For example, the person who represented the Country Partner of the Year Winner for Algeria traveled 14 hours on four different planes in order to participate in WPC and accept his award for his company and country – there was so much dedication and excitement!”
6. So many parties, so little time to actually sleep. One of the great venues was for the Azure party – on top of the Standard Hotel in mid-town L.A.  We all felt like we were rocking out in Shanghai in the 1930s… or some William Gibson novel in the not-too-distant future. 

What did the conference tell us about Microsoft overall?

1. The event was extremely well-organized. Huge props to Jon Roskill, who took over as Corporate VP for Worldwide Partners a year ago. Tweetsville is filled with encomiums to his team’s work organizing and running the event.
2. Microsoft is fun! The social events were at great venues, and terrific music was to be found throughout. The last night’s fireworks were amazing! Two things I particularly remember are:
        a.    During the Smash Mouth concert, the lead guitarists’ pick landed on my smart phone while I was tweeting.
        b.    A gentleman next to me at the concert had his laptop open on his head throughout the show as he Skype’d the concert back to his kids in Israel. 
3. Buy their stock. Ironically, Microsoft didn’t have a lot of splashy new technology to announce this year (last year they rocked the house with Kinect). Nonetheless, the incessant impression throughout the event was of relentless competitive progress by the company. The past is a prolegomena; it sometimes takes them a few iterations but they do not stop coming at you, and they ultimately get it right enough to leverage their market position to win with the new, too.  Kinect and Xbox are accepted successes now but weren’t too long ago; Google as a threat in the enterprise has waned considerably; Bing and Windows Phone won’t stop gaining; Microsoft has become the most-trusted provider to IT (remember when they were enterprise pretenders years ago?); the cloud is the single biggest investment Microsoft has ever made; and Microsoft continues to invest more in R&D than anyone else in the industry. The capital markets don’t like to like the story, but this year signaled more significant competitive progress on all fronts for Microsoft than I’ve seen in years.

NewsGator is immensely proud to be Microsoft's Partner of the Year for the U.S. We're focused on extending the social ecosphere so that we're Partner of the Year for the Entire Galaxy in 2012!

We must be doing something right

Last year, NewsGator was honored by Lead411 as one of Colorado’s hottest technology companies. As a great testament to our success over the past year, NewsGator has made the list again for 2011, and we couldn’t be more proud.

For companies like ours, who are building innovative enterprise technology businesses outside of one of the usual US technology cities, winning this award is quite an honor. NewsGator is truly on a roll and it’s terrific that Lead411 has continued to keep an eye on us and our progress. For 10 years, Lead411 has been tracking fast-moving companies for their customers, and felt it was important to recognize these growing brands publicly. To be considered for this award, a company must be in the software, wireless, hardware, internet, or media industry, it must be a privately held organization, and it must be located within Colorado. From there, each company must meet one or more of the following requirements: 100% increase in revenues over the past two years, or $2M+ in funding in the past two years. So needless to say, NewsGator fits the bill.

This past spring has been very busy for NewsGator on the product front with major updates to our flagship platform, Social Sites 2010 and exciting new modules that help customers tailor the Microsoft SharePoint social experience to match their needs. And the customers keep coming. Even in what are generally seen to be tight economic times, Fortune 50 businesses are seeing the value in going social and are choosing NewsGator to make socializing SharePoint simple.

Our goal is to continue pushing the boundaries of Enterprise 2.0, and it is paying off; we are being recognized for our hard work and success, not only in Colorado but throughout the globe.