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.

NewsGator Named to Deloitte's 2011 Technology Fast 500 in North America

We are so proud to announce that NewsGator has been ranked number 192 on the list of Technology Fast 500 for 2011—Deloitte’s ranking of the 500 fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, and clean technology companies in North America! Congratulations to all who put forth so much effort this past year to keep up NewsGator’s momentum and ensure the best possible product releases for our fantastic customers!

Inclusion in the Technology Fast 500 award program is based on percentage of fiscal year revenue growth from 2006 to 2010. During this period, NewsGator has made serious headway, expanding revenue with advanced 2.0 software releases, adopting new mobile capabilities, and working with new Fortune 1000 customers to elicit real business results and attain positive customer accounts. Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 program recognizes the companies that innovate, overcome obstacles and systematically defy the odds, and NewsGator has proven to embody these criteria time and time again.

This award reaffirms what we have known for some time now; people are social by nature and look to social tools to enable widespread communication and more collaborative knowledge sharing. Alongside the rapid immersion of new technologies and diverse social platforms, people have begun to share exponentially more, to collaborative more readily on questions and topics, and engage more on highly interactive tasks and projects. And the high demand for social extends easily into the workforce, where employee collaboration and combined ideation is absolutely critical to the productivity of any organization.

At NewsGator, we push the boundaries of enterprise social with our award-winning business software solutions. Our Enterprise 2.0 software, Social Sites, boosts any organization’s performance with the power of social computing, innovation management, collaboration, and knowledge sharing, and all within the familiar and secure infrastructure of Microsoft’s SharePoint platform. Our agile software team is at the forefront of a revolution in the world of work, in which enterprises of all sizes adopt social computing to drive innovation internally and externally. Customers seeing real results include Accenture, Adidas, Deloitte, Ericsson, General Mills, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Kraft Foods, Merck & Co., Unisys Corporation, and the US Army.

Congratulations again to all at NewsGator for this tremendous accomplishment! Looking to get social? Visit us at www.newsgator.com to learn more about our latest software solutions and value-add modules.

Social Sites – The Enterprise Standard for the Activity Stream

That’s what our customers are telling us. 

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is well-established in the enterprise and is a likely springboard for coordinated social collaboration across sales, marketing and support. Salesforce.com, a pioneer in the Software-as-a-Service CRM revolution, socialized its offering with the launch last year of Chatter, a microblogging tool. This was good news for Salesforce.com users at the time, but with social computing being so prevalent throughout every facet of the enterprise a bit more breadth and reach is still needed according to several industry pundits. “Even when CRM technology has social components, the information generated isn’t optimized if it’s still siloed,” stated John F. Mancini, president of the AIIM information management industry group. “The organization needs to share that knowledge readily with anyone in the company who can use it to their advantage.”

Since NewsGator Social Sites 2010 is built into SharePoint - the enterprise collaboration platform – Social Sites is a perfect way to bring cutting edge social computing capabilities to any enterprise-wide effort. For example, we recently announced Social Sites integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and now, we’re announcing support of Salesforce.com Chatter.

This integration funnels Chatter users’ updates into the Social Sites enterprise activity stream, creating a single, centralized, powerful social business experience for users across the company no matter what their function.  Once the Social CRM information is in the central activity stream, Social Sites users can view and interact with timely updates on sales opportunities, leads, campaigns, events, contracts and more. Social Sites creates one centralized social space – allowing users to stay more focused, efficient, and effective – without having to switch from application to application in order to stitch together disconnected conversations.

A client of ours recently commented about having a number of potential activity streams in their company – stating that NewsGator is the enterprise standard for the activity stream and that they simply won’t support competing streams. Built-in and effectively designed options like NewsGator Social Sites for SharePoint 2010 result in secure, scalable, enterprise class solutions that co-exist within your existing IT infrastructure and meet the needs of today’s information workers. Our integration with CRM systems like Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce.com’s Chatter validates this fact and gives our customers one more reason to make Social Sites the activity stream standard.

Q&A with Rob Dallenbach: One of NewsGator’s Microsoft Gurus

Q: Tell us a bit about your background and what brought you to NewsGator.

Rob: I’ve been in the software industry for roughly 15 years. Years ago, I went to work for a Microsoft Gold Partner startup, which was developing a product on .NET 1.1 Beta. It was the advent of the web services era and I lead their B2B integration/security team.

For a number of years after, I operated my own Microsoft-based practice, contracting with a top consulting company focused on the Media & Entertainment vertical. That combination of experience was a perfect fit for the position I took at Microsoft as a SharePoint Technical Specialist, within the Communications Sector. In that role I worked with many Partner ISVs, NewsGator being one of them. I saw that Social Sites was filling an important need within SharePoint and realized there would be many mutual benefits for us to work together.

Q: Your experience at Microsoft is obviously beneficial to NewsGator customers and partners – how have you been able to leverage this experience since joining us?

Rob: It has been beneficial in a number of ways. From a structural and operational standpoint, Microsoft can be a black box to many on the outside.  Having someone with key relationships to the field and Redmond, who can navigate the various roles, is a win for both NewsGator and its customers. Having delivered many different types of customer engagements while with Microsoft, I’m also very familiar with the programs, licensing, EA benefits, funding sources, and MTC offerings that might be available to customers. Specific to product technology, my depth in the SharePoint workloads and breadth across how that fits into the larger Microsoft stack story is seen as an enormous help to our customers. Plus, it helps to have someone who can decrypt the myriad of Microsoft’s acronyms.

Q: When customers/prospects are thinking about making the investment in NewsGator how do you recommend they analyze our value vis-à-vis other E2.0 offerings?

Rob: Most current E2.0 offerings deliver on some common core capabilities, targeted at predominate use cases. Differentiation in how value is extended from that expected feature base can take many forms such as more specialized uses cases, UI/UX, administration, integration, reporting, cost, etc.

I usually encourage customers to step back and look at a more macro viewpoint of the E2.0 offerings on the market. First, we need to embrace that information workers process their work streams differently. Thus, providing an engaging experience across those modalities is essential. One of the many differentiating strengths of Social Sites is the number of ways I can participate even as my mode of operation changes throughout the day/week (e.g., browsers, direct from email clients, desktop applications, mobile apps). Secondly, the fact that Social Sites exists as a first class citizen within SharePoint, it elegantly handles many otherwise precluding enterprise issues. This is very clear to customers who have chosen SharePoint as a strategic platform, and increasingly so as they move higher within that maturity model. Governance, identity management, authorization and security trimming, content management, and search strategy are just a few of the big ticket integrated value-adds.

Q: Clearly we have a very close relationship with Microsoft (another plug for our recent Partner of the Year honor!) – what advantages does this relationship offer customers in your opinion?

Rob: Having worked closely with the Partner ISV/SI ecosystem while at Microsoft, I can say winning Partner of the Year is truly an accolade worthy of congratulations - a job well done by the whole NewsGator team.

It surprises me, on average, how little seems to be known about the Microsoft Partner landscape. NewsGator is at the Depth Managed level, which doesn’t mean a lot to many because it only applies to about 2-3% of the partners worldwide. Benefits at this level are numerous, and include things like earlier disclosures, inclusions to roadmap meetings with product management and a conduit to executive leadership. This has direct value for NewsGator customers, as they can be confident NewsGator is active in Redmond through the full development cycle. With those benefits of the relationship, there is no overlap of features and NewsGator is ahead of the curve at RTM (release to manufacturing).

Q: When customers are trying to assess the total cost of ownership (TCO) of both NewsGator and SharePoint what recommendations do you offer to help them do this?

Rob: While of course the hard figures are essential to a value computation, I too recommend that customers include the potential for soft and sometimes unquantifiable costs when calculating TCO. This goes back to the overarching SharePoint tenets and stack value proposition. Reduce application silos, reduce administration/management and associated resources/training, and rapidly respond to the needs of the business at all skill levels through common UIs and tools, etc. 

When these types of themes are recognized in reducing TCO, and SharePoint is seen as the vehicle, it will be clear that NewsGator is in alignment with those ideas. As I began to mention before, issues like identity management, duplicate profiles, security trimming, compliance, custom search connectors and ACLs, governance, and integration/development all (should) become cost considerations as you ponder supporting an enterprise need outside of your enterprise investments.

Q: You work closely with customers during implementation – what are you seeing as the more popular use cases for our software?

Rob: Most all customers have a basic social requirement around more transparent, cross-organizational collaboration. Breaking down the walls of emails and distribution lists for better knowledge capture/transfer is of peak interest.  Closely related too, are the explicit and implicit ways to target and mine that expertise.

Onboarding is another one that comes up quite often, and is certainly related to the first. How does a day-one employee jump in and start adding value faster? Equally important, how fast can they feel they are making valuable, visible contributions?

I hear an increased amount of customers who have identified that replicating a functional area of their business is a common process.

Q: If you were talking with a Global 50 company about going social for the first time what would be your first three questions to the prospect?

Rob: I always want to know where a company has been and where they are today, in terms of enterprise applications and how people get their work done. How do people collaborate today? What is the search experience/strategy?  What does content management look like? Answers to questions like these are very informative conversation starters, which lead to more focused questions, and help tremendously in understanding the company profile. What are the key use cases you’ve identified that have pushed a social initiative/imperative? How will you be measuring success?

Q: Any final thoughts for readers on maximizing their SharePoint/NewsGator investment?

Rob: My advice for maximizing the combined investment starts with standalone SharePoint; adhere to deployment best practices. Have the difficult up-front conversations. Understand architectural considerations. Conceptualize the Information Architecture. Write a governance plan; include IT and business stakeholders where possible. Plan for compliance. Have a communication and training plan. Etc. The Social implications always lead back to these core principals, and will directly affect overall uptake and adoption.

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.

Winning for the Right Reasons

I’m glad that we aren’t becoming jaded or blasé about all of our industry recognitions, especially with this latest accolade. Frost & Sullivan, a global research firm with a 50 year track record of keen market insight and a unique approach to sorting the players and finding what works for business, has awarded NewsGator its 2011 North American Customer Value Enhancement Award in Enterprise Collaboration Solutions.

Why? Because, social in the enterprise is taking off big time but companies want the least amount of disruption – to their budgets or their employees – and the maximum benefit. After some serious scrutiny, Frost & Sullivan’s analysts determined that that Social Sites 2010 hits that mark dead center.

We know Social Sites 2010 delivers the goods on a technical level. We’re constantly evolving its raft of social collaboration features – from microblogging to expertise discovery and native mobile clients for all the leading platforms – to keep it right in step with the times. What this award underscores, however, is something that makes Social Sites, and our vision for it, unique in the market – unparalleled value.

As the Frost & Sullivan team noted when they evaluated Social Sites, companies today are faced with two realities: on one hand, their workforces are more dispersed and mobile than ever and social enterprise computing and collaboration can power a new way of working that keeps teams cohesive and boosts productivity and innovation; on the other hand, times are tight and budgets are under constant scrutiny. Going social has to be a “no drama” event that takes advantage, to the fullest extent, of existing assets. For a very large number of enterprises, that means the journey to social starts at SharePoint and for a growing number it ends with NewsGator Social Sites 2010.

Why? For the reasons Frost & Sullivan noted: Social Sites 2010 runs as a native service directly on SharePoint. An existing investment in SharePoint and all of its enterprise-spanning capabilities becomes a no fuss, no drama upgrade to leading edge enterprise social with Social Sites. No extraordinary IT heroics, no data duplication or specialized systems. This leaves our customers free to focus on best practices in rolling out just the right approach to social that will return the maximum benefit for their organization.

Maybe that’s the best way Social Sites 2010 delivers customer value in social enterprise computing – by letting them focus on the social and not the technology.

The Globalization of NewsGator Social Sites

Though many of our customers are based in the United States, organizations around the world are increasingly using the software localization tools offered by NewsGator Social Sites 2010 to improve their business performance. Playing a major role in this growth is André Bonvanie, general manager of our international business. André is based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Q. Where are we seeing companies implement NewsGator Social Sites 2010?
Andre: In a few places you might expect, and in a few that might surprise you. Because of our robust software localization services NewsGator customers have implemented Social Sites 2010 in a dozen countries: Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.

Q. Who has recently joined the NewsGator Social Sites family?
Andre. Off the top of my head, there’s adidas in Germany, BNB Paribas in France, Borusan in Turkey, Bouyges Telecom in France, the Kuwait Oil Company in Kuwait, MTN Telecom in South Africa, Nokia Siemens Networks in Finland and Germany, and an equal number of companies who are keeping their activities secret!

Q. There are three telecom companies on that list… is that a pattern?
Andre. No and yes. No in that their overarching use case is not so different from any large organization that must keep its customers happy. Enterprise social computing improves all of their operations, including sales, marketing, R&D, logistics and more. Yes in the sense that you will not find a customer with a more sophisticated mobile user base than a telecom company. Because we offer so many powerful ways to leverage SharePoint and NewsGator Social Sites via a mobile device – iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android – Social Sites has strong appeal for a company with a focus on mobile computing.

Q. There is more than one German company on your list as well. That is surprising given their strict privacy laws. Can you explain?
A. Yes, aside from being a country that understands product quality like few others, Germany has strict data privacy laws that require company data to be managed on premises. Since we have a very powerful on-premise solution, we are a great fit for these companies. Plus, we offer many of the benefits of a hosted solution, including ease of ownership.

Q. What else is new outside the United States?
A. Our software localization services are expanding to five new languages in the next couple of months. Stay tuned! 

An Interview with Nick Harris - NewsGator’s Resident Apple Expert

NewsGator Social inSites (NG): Have you seen a big increase in demand from your user base for Apple device support?

Nick: Yes. Apple devices are as popular as ever, and we're seeing more and more enterprise IT departments "officially" allowing iPhones and iPads within their organizations to access internal resources.

NG: Do you believe Social Sites users are more apt to use their iPhone or iPad to access Social Sites remotely?

Nick: Our main goal is to make the mobile experience the easiest way to use Social Sites remotely so I hope we are succeeding! I find myself catching up on company activity in situations where a laptop would be inconvenient – such as waiting in line for an elevator or something. It helps make time like that more productive.
 
NG: Security is a big issue with mobile device use – how do you ensure Social Sites info accessed via a mobile device is not compromised?

Nick: We follow all of Apple's security guidelines as well as enabling extra security features that Apple provides. Apple wants these devices in as many hands as possible so they know very well the concerns people have with security. They spend the time, money, and research to make sure they get it right and we keep up with their technological advances in each release of iOS.
 
NG: SharePoint 2010 is limited in its mobile device support so the fact users can access SharePoint on the iPhone and iPad via NewsGator Social Sites seems to be a significant option. What are your thoughts on this?

Nick: Absolutely! Accessing your shared documents from SharePoint 2010 is a fantastic and unique feature of Social Sites for iPhone and iPad. This capability allows you to quickly and easily access your files wherever you are and share them with others. We're just getting started with this integration, so there is so much more we can do! Look for better integration in future releases.
 
NG: Are there any user limitations when using Social Sites on the iPhone or iPad?

Nick: We're focusing our mobile strategy on solving the problems people face most when they are mobile - for example, keeping track of a conversation, sharing a photo or a link, or just having easy access to a colleague's phone number. In that regard the mobile experience doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Social Sites, but we have made sure to focus on solving the problems people face when they are away from their desk.
 
NG: Do you believe mobile is just the new way of work or are people still using desktops?

Nick: Desktops are still the number one way to be productive. Mobile devices right now are only filling the gaps in between the time you're not at your desk. It will be exciting to see how the trend develops over the next few years as more iPad-like devices make their way into enterprise environments.
 
NG: What’s your favorite iPhone or iPad app?

Nick: Social Sites for iPhone or iPad of course! ;-) But aside from work, I'm a fan of Pano. I've taken some great panoramic photos with my iPhone 4.

Today is Social Media Day!

In honor of the global celebration of technologies that have enabled people to collaborate world-wide, we’re celebrating Social Media Day today – and every day! At NewsGator, we’re realizing more than ever before that social media is the future of the way we work. We are delighted to be Microsoft’s US Partner of the Year for 2011, further validating that social media is an evolving, powerful force in our global business world. By bringing social tools into Microsoft SharePoint, we are connecting employees like never before – regardless of their location or role.

Started by Mashable founder Pete Cashmore, Social Media Day is intended to connect fellow enthusiasts through Social Media Day Meetups. To learn more about how to participate in your area, please visit the Mashable Meetup Everywhere page.

Get involved and stay social! That’s what we’re doing.

The Merit-Driven Enterprise

If Enterprise 2.0 does nothing more than electronically mimic everything in Enterprise 1.0, making the old ways of working just a little bit faster, where’s the revolution? No, the exciting thing about Enterprise 2.0 is its ability to transform.  While email simply made paper mail electronic, microblogging and activity streaming transformed information sharing to make it fluid and transparent.

A similar transformation is now occurring in the traditional business hierarchy, the chain of command.

Now, when the traditional business hierarchy works, it’s a beautiful thing. It’s good for order and accountability. But it’s not perfect. Its weaknesses reveal themselves in various forms: when employees are discouraged from working across departments and divisions; when the CEO’s visibility is obscured by his direct reports; when employees advance because of their assertiveness rather than their competence; when individualism squelches team play; and when good ideas die on the vine only because they came from the rank and file.

So, are you ready for a transformation?

‘Like’ the myriad ways social can improve the way we live (and work)? I do.

Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have transformed interactions with friends, family and business contacts. Employees expect the same staggering level of communications efficiency in the workplace. As they’ve started to get that efficiency, in the form of social computing tools, silos are falling down, knowledge hoarding is fading out of vogue, and the hierarchy is flattening out. Suddenly, wonderfully, merit matters more today than yesterday. Welcome to the Merit-Driven Organization.

The Merit-Driven Organization transforms the chain of command into a web of contribution. Trust, reputation, and career hinge less on self-promotion and more on what the leadership team really needs to see – tangible contributions to the greater good.

Consider a leader trying to select members of a project team for a business initiative. In the traditional hierarchy, project leaders select people they know through their direct experience. In a Merit-Driven Organization, deep collective intelligence is at your fingertips. Searching the enterprise social network for candidates, the project leader discovers rich social profiles and expertise maps (like those in our new Spotlight solution package for NewsGator Social Sites 2010).

Both verbally and graphically, these maps reflect skill and experience, revealing a different view of the org chart – based on talent, not title.  The social network has captured each employee’s activities, content contributions, peer ratings, self-described expertise areas and connections.  You can see who is working closely with whom, whose ideas are most valued, and what you might learn.

Understand the value of social currency in driving employee satisfaction.

Social gaming, too, has a lot to offer the Merit-Driven Organization. Foursquare’s popularity proves it’s fun to earn an electronic badge for an achievement, even if it’s swilling coffee at Starbucks day in and day out. Why not put these badges to work in the workplace?

That’s what we thought, so we made badging another new Spotlight capability. At first glance, electronic gold stars may not seem like the kinds of rewards a serious business would distribute, or that a serious employee would seek. The key is to reward value, not mere activity. Everyone should take pride in an achievement aligned with an organization’s mission. It means you’re contributing to the greater good and, presumably, advancing your career. Some examples of badges are Salesperson of the Quarter, Hero of the Day, Community Leader, Most Valuable Contributor (MVC) and the Edison Award (for innovative ideas, of course). It all depends on what your specific business wants to encourage.


To be effective, badges must be timely – earned and granted – yet scarce enough to distinguish the recipient. Badges should be equally available to all employees. Universal badging allows for the possibility of an intern and the CEO to win the same badge, a nice way to inspire both to keep learning and participating.

Several software solutions automate badging. Organizations should demand flexibility in defining badges, with an ability to set rules, weight criteria as they wish, and override the system to manually deny or grant badges. As this technology evolves, one can foresee badges becoming increasingly solid credentials by which project leaders can make real business decisions.

It’s important that a badging environment integrate with third-party applications, e.g., accounting, ERP or CRM. If a marketer runs a wildly successful campaign that generates 1,000 hot leads, that event should show up in the organization’s central activity stream and be tracked in the badging application. Maybe that achievement warrants a Marketing Master badge.

‘Friend’ the social, merit-driven organization.

Expertise maps and recognition badges are just a few of the ways that social computing has given rise to a model that, like the chain of command, may be imperfect but can reinvigorate a business with a shock of positive energy.

Imagine younger, newer, and perhaps timid employees introducing fresh ideas that for the first time will be given a truly equal hearing, as if they were in the top third of the organizational chart. This model is better for innovation, better for morale, and better for the selection of future leaders.

Imagine a new kind of leadership and the emergence of a culture willing – no, eager – to share valuable information.

That would have some merit. And be a true transformation.

PS – If you are going to the E2.0 Boston Conference next week, stop by the NewsGator booth (#419) to see a merit-driven organization in real time!