Eight Reasons Enterprise Social Software Makes Sense: #7 Intelligent Activity Streams

In today’s digital age, the art of personal efficiency is constantly evolving. Day planners and palm pilots have become nearly obsolete, replaced with faster, sexier tools that encourage rapid information consumption, utilization and sharing.  Everyone wants to know what’s happening NOW and what will be happening 10 minutes from now.  Needless to say, it can be hard to keep up with what’s important and act on what needs to happen. 

Using a social software feature like activity streams is an important part of tracking what’s happening NOW – in your business, with your colleagues, in consumer social media…but keeping track of it all is a fluid affair.  You can literally consume every minute of every day processing the information.  How do you pick out the important bits to use or share?  Fortunately, NewsGator Social Sites 2010 can help in a number of ways. By implementing intelligent routing, filtering and visualization, and recommendation engines, NewsGator cleans up your activity feed – based on your filters and settings - delivering only the information you need.  Just as useful are recommendation engines and intelligent routing. By analyzing your online behavior, in particular, the content you are reading and searching most often, recommendation engines organize and prioritize posts specifically for you, while intelligent routing makes your network more efficient and adaptable.  Keeping your activity stream lean and relevant ultimately improves your productivity. 

After all, who needs just another tool adding to the confusion?  Don’t we want to simply remain current and share relevant information with colleagues?  Leave the passé, wannabe gadgets in the closet; just clean up your activity stream.

Subscribe to the countdown via e-mail, RSS, or Twitter. Or, keep watching for next week's #6. Ask a Social SharePoint 2010 question and we may feature it in our next post.

A Special Thank You to Strategic Knowledge Solutions

The 2012 NewsGator Collective User Group Meeting took place a little over a week ago. The entire agenda was jam packed with case studies, networking opportunities, and hands-on learning experiences and it’s been wonderful to hear the continued positive feedback from attendees about how much value they were able to take away from the event.

New to the Collective this year was a full-day Social Boot Camp - a highly-engaging, interactive workshop focused on turbo-charging attendees’ social initiatives. The workshop was facilitated by Dr. Mike Prevou and Mike Hower of Strategic Knowledge Solutions using a participant-centered, wisdom-of-the-crowd approach.

Social business software is as much about people as it is technology. However, many companies that decide to go social to encourage collaboration end up conflating their business goals with technology requirements and parameters. This workshop placed a particular focus on helping attendees address this balance by determining and refining their business goals separate from the technology.

Prevou and Hower have a combined 30+ years in knowledge management (KM), organizational learning, and professional development. With their guidance, the Boot Camp covered a lot of ground: collaborative exercises, group discussions, and Q&A on social business use cases, governance, risk and compliance, measuring social success, best practices for community management, and overcoming challenges and barriers.

Feedback we received showed attendees found the interaction with peers to be invaluable. They were able to exchange and learn best practices that could be implemented immediately within their organizations. In addition, the real-world experiences shared during the Boot Camp helped attendees develop strategies to help identify the social business value within their own companies. You can’t ask for more than that from a hands-on workshop!

Suffice to say, Mike and Mike did a wonderful job and we’d like to pass along our sincerest “thank you” for a job well done!

Eight Reasons Enterprise Social Software Makes Sense: #8 Fluid Conversations & Problem Solving

NewsGator is counting down the top 8 ways Social Enterprise Software will enhance business in 2012 and beyond with our blog series dedicated to enterprise social software.

Enterprise social software takes the “hallway conversation” and brings it into the 21st century as new ways to connect people continue to evolve every day, helping to facilitate collaboration and innovation in ways not previously possible.

“Enterprise social computing, at its core is about working differently and making better use of all the people and ideas in a new way. What NewsGator brought was so much creativity and so many new social tools that made it easier for us to connect our people.” – Steve Brantner, Manager Learning & Communications at General Mills

#8 Fluid Conversations & Problem Solving

Allowing people to ask and answer questions within a community of skilled professionals is one of the quickest ways to drive the value of cross-enterprise collaboration - by helping people solve problems in real-time through ‘simply smart’ collaboration.

As an example: imagine you are a designer integrating multiple elements from marketing to IT to sales and need clarity on a new element’s functionality. With business collaboration software, you’ll be able to quickly tap into your colleagues throughout the organization to see what others are doing and how your solutions will impact their needs. This is how smart collaboration is increasing performance for organizations.

Once a question is posed, notifications go out to community members who can then provide answers. With Social Sites from NewsGator, you can:

 

• Ask a question via email
• Participate using mobile devices (no need for Internet connectivity)
• Launch a poll
• Attach files to questions and include files in responses
• “Like” comments to provide quick feedback
• Utilize IM, video and audio conversations with available co-workers
• Create communities or Spheres to gather like-minded collaborators
• Manage your social business network in real time with easily accessed dashboard tools

The world of work has evolved. Integrating social software for the enterprise into your systems will help transform your business into a more productive and efficient organization that’s ready to compete on a global scale.

Subscribe to the countdown via e-mail, RSS, or Twitter. Or, keep watching for next week's #7. Ask a Social SharePoint 2010 question, and we may feature it in our next post.

NewsGator Social Sites Activity Streams with Vizit Connector

You are here – Social Sites Activity Streams

GPS for the car is a vast improvement over printed maps. Both give you directions, but the GPS on (or in) your dash delivers the information visually, in context, in the moment. It’s actually similar to what NewsGator’s recently announced integration of Social Sites with Vizit does with social enterprise activity streams

Vizit’s NewsGator Connector lets users socialize documents in SharePoint; highlighting key passages and adding social footnotes that guide collaborators to important information, enabling productive, focused discussions. This creates amazing efficiencies when deployed through Social Sites Activity Streams.

Traditionally, resources linked into an activity stream simply pop a user out to another application and the wilderness of what may be a lengthy document. Like a scrawl of directions next to a printed map, it’s up to the user to figure out where the relevant sections are. Enterprise social is supposed to be more efficient than that and with Vizit integration into Social Sites, it is.

Vizit-socialized links posted into Social Sites activity streams not only allow the documents to be viewed within that same activity stream, but also direct users to particular paragraphs called out or footnoted by the original poster. This has two obvious benefits:  first, it keeps the collaboration activity streamlined and focused in one environment, rather than forcing participants to other applications and inviting inherent communication lags common with tools such as email;  second, it keeps the collaboration and comments focused on information deemed most relevant in the moment by the poster of the link. In this way, all people active in the stream can be sure they are not just on the same page, but the same paragraph.

Vizit’s ability to tap into over 300 different types of document formats and provide previews of their contents also gives Social Sites users a leg up when it comes to discovering information. Those visual previews mean no more blind-clicking into document after document in search of the right information — kind of like that GPS in your car giving you an easy way to see the nearby food and fuel options without leaving the highway.

Enterprise social is a vast and ever-expanding landscape. Social Sites and Vizit make it easier and more efficient to see where you are and where you’re going. How about you? Spending much time in the social breakdown lane, clicking and closing poorly organized document archives in search of the right information to share?

“8 Steps for Achieving World-Class Collaboration” Webinar Recap

In NewsGator’s webinar with Bob Hackett, VP of Information Services at Weston Solutions, we take a look at how WESTON’s Vision 2015 aligns with John Kotter’s 8 Step Process for Leading Change and achieving world-class collaboration. If you missed the complete webinar, click here to watch the on-demand version.

Step One: Create Urgency

For change to happen, the whole company has to want it. For WESTON, this includes building collaboration as a key element and participating in the World Wide Intranet Challenge benchmarking survey.

Step 2: Form a Powerful Coalition

It’s important to convince people change is necessary by encouraging strong leadership and support from key members of you organization—like WESTON’s Overall Steering Committee (including CEO, CIO, CFO & Senior VP Marketing) and Portal Advisory Group.

Step 3: Create a Vision for Change

A clear vision makes it easier for everyone to understand why you’re asking for their participation. WESTON’s vision involves the Portal being the first stop personalized gateway to all people, information, tools, and applications by 2012.

Step 4: Communicate the Vision

For best results, the vision should be communicated often and powerfully, in order to keep it fresh in everyone’s minds. WESTON’s communication includes a Senior Leadership Presentation, Annual Leadership Meeting, and continual intranet and e-mail updates. Bob says a powerful message to employees included “stressing the benefits of commenting, liking, and building a repository” within the portal.

Step Five: Remove Obstacles

After creating a structure for change, remove obstacles that inhibit empowering the people you need to execute your vision. For WESTON, this meant exploring solutions for native SharePoint 2010 and integrating NewsGator. Training for team sites is a significant part of removing obstacles. Bob says “training requirements include about two hours for site owners and six hours for site admins.” Bob also explains the importance of communicating with offices in ‘Taiwan, China & India” to ensure everyone knows what important acronyms like APAC and LAM means.

Step Six: Create Short Term Wins

Have results your staff can see within a short time frame. WESTON’s Early Adopter Program led to 1,000 profiles in the first 90 days.

Step Seven: Build on the Change

Real change runs deep. For WESTON, long-term change came with the two month “Anchoring the Portal”, community outreach, and portal minutes. In encouraging users to utilize microblogs, Bob said “If users see value in it, they will do it. We continue to try and show them this value.”

Step Eight: Anchor the Changes in Corporate Culture

Change should become a core aspect of your organization. WESTON utilized Quick Start Guides, webinars and employee incentives to make this happen. When asked about culture change in document management, Bob said the most important elements were “getting people to use SharePoint instead of their hard drives, sending links instead of putting information in e-mails, keeping documents current and relevant, and storing information in one location but linking as needed.” This also included some customization of the SharePoint 2010 portal, including “placing a global header on every page.”

Now that you have a good overview of how WESTON applied Dr. Kotter’s 8 Step Process for Leading Change to their social initiative, check out the on-demand webinar for a much richer explanation as well as a helpful Q&A session at the end.

Enterprise Social Networking Objections and Objectives in 2012

Over at InformationWeek’s terrific Brain Yard site, David Carr has an interesting piece looking at “10 Enterprise Social Networking Obstacles.” The article builds off 2012 predictions made by business strategist Dion Hinchcliffe, specifically that social would still be facing an uphill struggle in the enterprise this year. David does a nice job of keying in on objections and issues that we at NewsGator, as a pioneer in truly enterprise-scale social computing, have a wealth of experience in overcoming.

While individually interesting, the objections David lists tend to break down into a couple of categories: cultural and technical.

On the cultural side, objections break down to management perception issues and concerns centered on user adoption. Businesses tend to be top-down hierarchies seeking to drive productivity and improve overall business performance. Given this, there would seem to be little inclination at the management level to introduce technology that would reconfigure established reins of control or, worse, introduce a potential time sink that took workers off task.

But look closer at that management imperative. The real goal is not control, but productivity improvements that drive the bottom line. Smart businesses understand this and have learned from past technology adoption cycles – think of the early days of e-mail or instant messaging in the enterprise – that an earlier embrace is ultimately better for the bottom line. We’re seeing companies focused more on a “how do we do this right?” approach to social, rather than dawdling on “do we need to do this?”

The management-level question, “how do we do this right?” draws out a number of worker level issues and objections that made David’s Brain Yard list and we spend a fair amount of our sales and implementation cycles walking prospects and customers through them: How do keep a handle on how this thing runs? How do we organize and manage communities and their creation? How do we ensure this doesn’t become a gold-plated cyber ghetto all but ignored and abandoned? Conversely, how do we ensure that this doesn’t become a distracting time sink? Given the number, variety and size of our customer implementations – from small government agencies to large, multinational Fortune 50 firms – we have a wealth of experience to draw on, but it’s important to emphasize that the people asking these questions are typically looking for answers in order to advance, not derail, their social efforts.

On the technical side, again, the objections have a familiar ring. Business and government have been burned in the past by a rush to The Next Big Thing that leads first to an expensive integration nightmare and then to a fragile spider web of often duplicative and ill-fitting, maintenance-heavy “solutions.” Further, in today’s world of Internet-enabled business, the questions on data controls, governance and compliance go directly from legal to IT.

David’s fifth point – SharePoint – hits right where we live and thrive. He notes that Dion singled out SharePoint as a factor that has “often slowed down the move to more social tools for big companies in particular”. At NewsGator, we’ve been seeing more and more of the opposite effect and here’s why: SharePoint is a terrific platform for social. With the addition of NewsGator Social Sites, SharePoint becomes a seamless, leading edge social tool that checks off the list of objections cited in David’s piece, both cultural and technical.

SharePoint was built from the start as an enterprise system. Social Sites was designed from the ground up to run as a native managed service application on top of the SharePoint and Microsoft stack; no busloads of integration experts needed. This tight integration imbues Social Sites with SharePoint’s true enterprise scale feature sets that address other key technical objections to social such as control of data access, identity, scalability and connection with other enterprise systems. Other “more social” tools that started life as stand-alone, quasi-consumer point offerings focused in a single area, say, group chat, present a more complex path to these capabilities. Complexity is expensive.

In turn, Social Sites lets organizations easily turn their existing SharePoint investment into a highly manageable and productive social business solution with a feature set rivaling any other on the market. Because it seamlessly integrates with the day-to-day Microsoft tools that people already use to get their work done, Social Sites on SharePoint presents a lower barrier to entry for adoption right out of the gate. Its leading-edge, constantly expanding social feature set – from microblogging and activity streams to expert discovery, badging, and video sharing – help ensure that end users find their social enterprise experience as engaging as their Facebook time.

The past is often prologue. In social business, as was the case in the adoption of so many other enterprise technologies, organizations are looking to reduce complexity, increase value from existing investments and drive productivity to increase profits. We see these fundamentals pushing past lingering resistance to the move to the increased adoption of social business technology and putting solutions like Social Sites in an even stronger position in the coming year.

Lucky Eleven

NewsGator closed out the year with tremendous momentum! We were delighted to see our predictions for the market bear out, as more and more large enterprises moved to deploy a social fabric at global scale to drive innovation and competitive advantage. Our enterprise-class, lowest total-cost-of-ownership solution has become the enterprise social standard for the Global 2000 on the Microsoft stack.

Here are our Top 11 accomplishments for 2011:

1. We added 1 Million new paid enterprise seats worldwide.
2. Our fourth quarter was roughly as large as all of 2009.
3. We significantly exceeded our revenue, bookings, and profitability targets.
4. Yes, we’re profitable. 
5. The list of Fortune 1000/Global 2000 companies we added as clients with 10K+ seats is phenomenal. The NewsGator team could not be more excited about our global partnerships!
6. We more than tripled our Channel and Alliance partner eco-system.
7. We are Microsoft’s 2011 US Partner of the Year.
8. Global 2000 clients added from South Africa, Turkey, France, the U.K., Singapore, Indonesia, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Kuwait, Australia … to name a few beyond the U.S.
9. Six new NewsGator babies added!
10. Spotlight and Video Modules; Dynamics, Lync integrations; Glassboard launched; > 4 major releases of great, enterprise-class software throughout the year.
11. A gabillion awards won!

Enterprise social has emerged; we are extremely proud to be at the forefront, and are committed to continuing to delight our clients and partners worldwide. 

Happy New Year, and we hope to see you at our 2012 Collective in March!

 

PS – Check out how to join our rock star team!

When They Say It, It’s Worth Listening To

McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm is a trusted advisor to many of the world’s leading businesses, governments, and institutions, and, now more than ever, an advocate of social tools. McKinsey takes seriously, “telling the truth as they see it.” A truth they’ve recently documented concerns the real value organizations gain by going social.

In 2010, McKinsey analysts found that the ability of companies to engage in more collaborative internal ideation enhanced organizational productivity. This year, their fifth annual survey asked over 4,200 global executives how organizations deploy social tools and the benefit they provide. The survey findings once again underscored the value of social tools, stating they “continue to seep into many organizations, transforming business processes and raising performance.”

The McKinsey survey reveals, “levels of reported benefits not only remain high when respondents’ organizations use social tools for internal purposes but have also increased among those that use them for communicating with customers and for integration with partners and suppliers.” Executives at internally-networked organizations seem to note the highest improvement in benefits from interactions with employees, while externally networking organizations gain most from customer outreach, according to the survey report.

However, despite this great potential for social in enterprises, there continues to be lingering resistance toward becoming fully networked; towards adopting both internal and externally facing networking tools. As 2011 ends, companies can still stand to improve their use and mastery of social technologies. Moreover, while the use of external (customer facing) social tools seems to have increased slightly over the past year, internal tools continue to suffer from neglect.

At NewsGator, we’ve seen our customers benefit from deploying internal social tools, providing capabilities that streamline collaboration and expertise discovery to create a more productive working environment.

How does NewsGator Social Sites increase internal collaboration?

NewsGator’s Social Sites 2010 allows for faster and more collaborative search integration, increased adoption among stakeholders, streamlined communication, improved employee recruiting and retention, and improved overall productivity. First, Social Sites Activity Streams collect an aggregate flow of relevant events, content, and activities from within the system, providing users with the right information faster. And to eliminate information overload, all streams can be easily filtered, enabling users to sort for specific sources or opinions for a given assignment.

Next, to streamline expertise discovery, Social Sites builds on existing SharePoint profile data, and rather than just making it easier to “mine expertise,” provides ways to cast a wide but focused net to a specific audience using familiar social tools such as hashtags.

Use a particular hashtag in a microblog post, and your comment will automatically show up in the Activity Stream of any colleague who has included that term on his or her user profile, making it easier to collaborate with the right people faster.

And for more focused collaboration, Social Sites communities provide an interactive setting for internal and external stakeholders, letting users convene around communities of practice and interests for projects, ideation, new initiatives, or even fun things at work.

Finally, with Social Sites Expertise, scoring can be based on what you DO, in addition to what you SAY you do. Drill into a particular topic and a graphical representation shows exactly who has the most knowledge, based not just on their self-stated areas of expertise but, also on an assessment of their behavior and other users' reactions to them. This capability enables increased confidence in collaboration across all ranks of the organization. Try and recognize these strong performers using Spotlight – a badging, recognition, and expertise discovery module. This value-add module is driven by meaningful, measurable participation, and allows users to shine as subject-matter experts and earn merit-based, electronic badges, while letting organizations quickly locate, recognize and motivate top performers.

The McKinsey survey reports what we at NewsGator have known for some time now: “When adopted at scale across an emerging type of networked enterprise and integrated into the work processes of employees, social technologies can boost a company’s financial performance and market share.” Moreover, “many believe that if organizational barriers to the use of social technologies diminish, they could form the core of entirely new business processes that may radically improve performance.”

At NewsGator we’re telling organizations to get on board now; make the move to social, and watch your organization transform in employee satisfaction and profitability. If you’d like to discuss how your organization can benefit from our enterprise social computing solution, please contact us today!

Remaining Attendee Questions from Recent eBay Webinar

To follow up on our recent webinar with Ramin Mobasseri of eBay, here are his answers to the remaining questions we were not able to get to during the webinar Q&A session. If you missed it, click here to check out this on-demand webinar!

Q: How has ESN affected the productivity of eBay’s workforce? Has time dedicated to ESN decreased time dedicated to actual work? Have you seen an increase in employee engagement and retention since the solution was implemented?

Ramin: It is too early to determine that but we do have our benchmarks and metrics through the Employee Pulse Survey. Next year we will hopefully do a comparison. There are, of course, other quantitative ways to do this, such as measuring the number of blogs, profile changes, microblog, #tags, etc. The key is to correlate such information to key areas like user adoption, increased productivity, and decreasing attrition rates for instance.

Q: Are you applying standards to community design? Do you enforce/promote standardization?

Ramin: Yes, we have branded the communities the same as the Hub with designated master pages and styles sheets.

Q: How many dedicated resources took part in your project?

Ramin: Seven.

Has NewsGator complicated your migration to SharePoint 2010? Do you see it as a complication going forward?

Ramin: Not at all. We upgraded first and then applied NewsGator to our environment. But remember, we also had NewsGator in our DEV, QA, Sandbox, and Staging environments. I think we practiced enough to know if something was going to go wrong. We also carried out an extensive performance and load test before and after, and all the indications were that NewsGater had not affected the environment negatively.

Q: How has ESN impacted the utilization of email?

Ramin: It's too early to tell.

Q: Where in the organization was this initiative sponsored?

Ramin: Global Corporate Technology and Operational Excellence

Q: If you could offer just three words of advice to other companies just starting to roll out enterprise social computing what would they be?

Ramin: I can give you three phrases instead: start small, test & learn, and focus on user adoption.

Q: Can you provide a few examples of how you encouraged executive sponsorship and user adoption?

Ramin: Executives want to and need to get closer to their groups, and sometimes, simple newsletters are not enough. So suggest building a CIO, CTO, and/or CFO Corner where people can connect to their leaders directly. They can share and learn from all the suggestions and questions they receive.

Use real-life scenarios, for example, a day in the life of a Project Manager, or a day in the life of the Learning & Development Team, HR, Legal, etc.

Also, apply the Find an Expert scenario within various functional groups. Sometimes finding an expert is an extremely costly initiative. So why not find those experts within your own company.

Use the benefits of social to lower costs by reducing travel and emails. Imagine when someone goes on vacation and when they come back, they will need to go through so many emails; however, if there was a community for them, they could simply browse through the community and find out what has been going on.

Q&A with Guest Blogger, Mike Hower of Strategic Knowledge Solutions

Q: Tell us a bit about your background.

Mike: After graduating from the Air Force Academy, I spent the first half of my career doing space engineering-related things like tracking satellites and space junk from a command center buried a mile deep inside Cheyenne Mountain. An organizational leadership development program at The George Washington University introduced me to Dr. Nancy Dixon, one of the key players in today’s knowledge revolution, who taught me the value of “social” and the potential of conversation to change the way organizations learn. I’ve spent the last 12 years following that path – as an Air Force commander, leadership instructor, and researcher – focused on changing the way organizations and individuals learn and lead through social learning and professional networking. After retiring from Air University in 2011, I connected with Strategic Knowledge Solutions, the organization behind the US Army knowledge management effort. I’m now the SKS Chief Learning Officer, responsible for bringing our work in organizational learning, knowledge management, and leadership to a broader audience.

Q. How did you end up creating, introducing, and leading an online community?

Mike: In 2004, I was the commander of an Air Force unit at Thule Air Base, Greenland, a small base about 750 miles from the North Pole. I was a relatively junior officer, and, as such, I didn’t have an opportunity to attend the Air Force command and staff school prior to assuming command. There were five other people in the same boat as me, all at other small Air Force units around the globe. We created an informal community to help each other get through.

When I returned home to attend the Air Force command and staff school, I participated in a research project building a formal Community of Practice (CoP) to support Air Force commanders – folks like me –all around the world. We called the program “Commanders Connection” and modeled it after the Army Professional Forums programs at Ft. Leavenworth and West Point. Within a year of launch, we reached 1250 commanders, out of a possible 2500, proving (to me at least) the power of social computing to improve learning across the enterprise. The program grew into a social learning and professional networking research project which I directed for the next five years, focused on creating social best practices to improve the way individuals and organizations do business.

Q: How did your military training and experience inform your approach to structured online collaboration in the military?

Mike: The military is incredibly hierarchical. Knowledge flows rigidly up and down the chain of command as doctrine, regulations, manuals, and corporate directives. At the same time, the military is replete with informal networks: inside career fields, at bases around the world, in groups of people working together to achieve goals under the most inhospitable of conditions. Some argue these informal networks are the way the real work of the military gets done.

My task at Air University was to tap these informal networks on a global scale, providing just enough structure and control to keep the chain of command happy, while still providing for a flexible, trusted environment where our members could dialogue informally and share ideas. We implemented, and then improved, a series of tools over the course of the project to meet the needs of both constituencies and produce some really great results.

Q: You invented an e-learning paradigm? Can you briefly explain?

Mike: Well, invent is a pretty strong word. We actually built upon work started by our partners at West Point and Ft. Leavenworth.

One of our challenges was to build a learning system that could achieve graduate-level results that fostered critical thinking and decision making in our students using social tools. We had a great model to follow from the team at West Point.

Working with NewsGator and my current company, the organizational leadership and learning team at West Point developed an interactive learning system using vignettes to promote cognitive development. Called Leader Challenge, students would watch a scenario, respond to a question or series of questions, and then see how all the other participants answered the challenge. After viewing the responses, they could dialogue with the responders. The results were pretty spectacular, often with hundreds of responses spawning thousands of separate conversations. That's pretty powerful stuff; social learning at its best.

At Air University, we took this to the next level, prototyping a system for social courseware and assessment, where students could work their way through a structured series of formal and informal materials, Leader Challenges, templated dialogues, and peer evaluations which we hoped would lead to higher-level learning with little or no instructor interaction. I retired from the Air Force before this research was completed, but I'm continuing to pursue it through private sector channels.

Q: Can the private sector use the Leader Challenge paradigm?

Mike: Absolutely! Leader Challenge is available today as an add-in for both your NewsGator Social Sites and Tomoye products. We also hope to present our work on social courseware and assessment sometime before the end of next year.

Q: Now that you are working in the private sector, what surprises you about social computing in business?

Mike: Business seems to be stuck between the world of the social web and the world of social business. The social web, of course, focuses on customers, marketing, and feedback. Social business, on the other hand, is all about organizational development and productivity. Comprehensive strategies, taking into account both areas, are lacking at many companies that still equate knowledge and social with IT. Of course, this is where SKS, my current company, comes in—we help organizations assess the knowledge environment ™, develop knowledge strategies, partner with the right technology vendor(s) for implementation, and provide education and training to bring everything together.

I don’t think I’ll be out of work any time soon.

Q. What are the biggest trends you are seeing in enterprise social computing?

Mike: The biggest trend I see coming in social computing has to do with social as part of a comprehensive knowledge strategy. Companies know that if they don't do social, some upstart that is more agile and innovative will come along and steal their business. Over the next few years we will see organizations fully integrate social and knowledge management into comprehensive knowledge environments focusing not just on people, process, and technology, but also culture, organizational processes, and organizational structure energized by effective knowledge leadership. Integrated systems like NewsGator Social Sites and Tomoye are perfect platforms to build this environment upon.

Q: We hear you are the MC of the NewsGator Collective User Group Meeting this coming March 2012. What are you most looking forward to during that event?

Mike: This will be my second time at the NewsGator Collective. Last year, despite extremely unusual arctic-like weather in Denver, the event was absolutely outstanding. This year the preliminary program looks even better with the addition of workshop sessions and even more interactive presentations. What I’m really looking forward to, however, is another opportunity to connect with today’s social learning and professional networking professionals. I absolutely love seeing what people are doing to improve the way organizations learn and gain advantage using social tools. Last year I left the Collective with dozens of great contacts and ideas on how to improve our own knowledge environment. I’m sure this year’s 2012 Collective will be even more exciting.