Facebook for the Enterprise – Part 1

Although Facebook began as a social networking site for college students – a site where they could upload pictures of their friends and write on one another's wall – it has quickly evolved into a wildly popular social network for high school students, professionals and everyone in between, with a valuation in the billions. As its popularity has skyrocketed, users have come to realize that Facebook has several very attractive collaboration and networking attributes including:

• Rich user profiles

• Easy discovery of friends to build a social graph

• Easy creation and joining of groups

• Easy content generation

• Intuitive display of updates based on social graph

Today, many businesses are seeing employees apply these social elements of Facebook to their jobs, forming Facebook groups around work projects and job interests. Looking to take advantage of this high-level collaboration and the power of the social graph, companies are now bringing Facebook-like features behind the firewall.

Over the next few weeks, we'll discuss the ways in which a Facebook-type network for the enterprise benefits both businesses and workers, and what the important distinctions are between Facebook and a social network built specifically for the enterprise, such as NewsGator's Social Sites (to get a brief summary of the latest release, here’s a brief Computerworld article that gives a good introduction). We'll cover the various aspects of social networks including the profile page, the home page, groups, news feeds, privacy features and sharing, and how these elements can support effective business communication and increased productivity.

The Facebook profile page contains information about a user that can be viewed by their friends and people in their network. Facebook users can customize their profile pages to include photos, favorite movies and books, interesting articles or videos from across the Web, and career and education history. The Facebook profile page also includes a mini-feed that shows recent activity and links to a user’s friends and groups.

Similarly, NewsGator Social Sites’ profile page contains information about a user that people in their company can tap into in order to get a sense of who they are and with whom and what they're working on.  

 

The Social Sites profile page includes a person’s photo, interests, work and education history, work communities, favorite subscriptions, and clipped articles.  The profile page also shows the user’s most recent activity within the company’s intranet/portal (i.e. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007).  And notably, although the page is customizable, much of the content is automatically generated through a user's daily authoring, tagging and reading, so he or she doesn't have to update information constantly. When users are given easy access to information about what someone in a certain role is reading, what they're interested in and what they've done most recently on SharePoint, further connections and collaborative relationships happen effortlessly.

One of our clients, CME Federal Credit Union, provides banking services to 26,000 members from multiple branches located throughout Ohio. With a highly distributed workforce, it was often difficult for CME’s branch personnel to find and connect with other employees. CME implemented Social Sites profile pages to facilitate collaboration and make it easier for branch employees to find subject matter experts.  This enterprise application of social networks, combined with other social computing features, enabled CME to improve productivity and realize a time savings of 30 minutes per day per employee.

The bottom line is that social networks in the enterprise enable people to find one another through shared connections and interests that they otherwise wouldn't know they had in common. And when minds come together to tackle a common problem, the business benefit is great indeed.

Learn More About Social Sites With This Podcast

Many of our users only know NewsGator for its many RSS feed readers, desktop and web-based, for Windows, Macintosh, Inbox and Mobile clients. But RSS has become an important tool in helping businesses and companies better leverage their workers by encouraging collaboration and building communities so everybody gets the information they need to better do their jobs.

NewsGator’s Social Sites 2.0, which works with Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2007, does all those things and more. Brian Kellner, NewsGator Vice President, Products, talks about why companies are moving to social software and how it increases a company’s chance to be more competitive and productive, in a podcast.

Didja Hear About our New Application for OpenSocial?

The blogosphere (and the mainstream media) has been buzzing about Google's new OpenSocial platform. OpenSocial is a programming model in which developers get a set of common APIs to which they can write against and then distribute their applications across multiple Web sites and applications. It is Google's latest, and most significant foray into social computing. The APIs haven't been released to the public yet, but NewsGator was invited to be one of the early developers in the program. This morning, we announced our first application for OpenSocial, called Didja Hear!?.

Didja Hear!? leverages our feed database and the editorial controls of our Widget Framework to present the images and videos that are most compelling and enjoyable for users to pass on to their friends.

An example of how this works within the Orkut (Google's social networking application) environment is shown to the right.  As Brian Kellner, our VP of Products , notes on the Enterprise RSS Blog, Didja Hear!? is kind of the Web 2.0 equivalent of a water-cooler chat with a great conversation starter. We recommend content across a lot of different  categories like movies, music, sports, celebrities, television, and gadgets. Users them send them on to friends or reply to videos and podcasts shared by their friends.

We're leveraging our database of nearly two million feeds and seven million articles per day to select great content, and we leverage the user's social network to highlight the content that is most compelling to them.

This is another illustration of how our core RSS platform can be extended to provide powerful services beyond RSS aggregation. Included in that list is our recent Social Sites (for Microsoft SharePoint Server) release and our NewsFriends (for Facebook) application.

We'll keep you posted as to when you can get your hands on Didja Hear!?. In the meantime, here are some links to stories that provide additional perspective:

Mashable: NewsGator Joins OpenSocial
Between the Lines: OpenSocial Developers Speak Out
GigaOm: OpenSocial, Google's Answer to Facebook

Technorati Tags: didja hear!?, rss, NewsGator, Web 2.0, Social Networking, OpenSocial
 

New Webinar: "How to Increase Sales and Field Effectiveness with Web 2.0"

Over the course of the past two years, we've frequently discussed the topic of interesting use cases for RSS and Web 2.0.  I've often mentioned that I hear new and exciting use cases every day. But over the last two years, I've also seen certain use cases appear more frequently than others. When we see a trend, we like to offer educational Webinars to make people aware of them.

We are doing just that with our latest Webinar, "How to Increase Sales and Field Effectiveness with Web 2.0." The event features Forrester analyst Liz Herbert, and Brian Stern, NewsGator's VP of Sales.

If you think about Web 2.0 tools, particularly RSS, they are often used as alternative communications and/or collaboration mechanism. Communicating with field employees (sales, service, support, agents, financial advisers, etc;) is difficult for many companies. E-mail and portals are challenging enough for employees at headquarters, but given that many field-based employees are often not or their desks or in a position to go check internal Web sites, it's even more difficult for this cohort.

That's where RSS comes in handy. It provides an alternative for e-mail, is accessible from mobile devices or disconnected laptops, provides notifications when content is added or updated on portals or other internal systems and even offers a way to provide time-critical alerts to users who don't have e-mail access. In addition, sales and field personnel can also get a big productivity boost by reducing the time they have to spend doing research on a customer or prospect prior to a meeting, installation or account review.

Liz will provide insight and analysis with regards to the challenges of communicating with field and sales professionals and discuss why RSS can be a good compliment to traditional methods. Brian will follow and offer a more in-depth discussion of RSS and walk through several examples of where it has been used successfully.

If you in sales management, sales operations, field/branch/agent operations, or have responsibility for communicating with sales and field employees, this Webinar is for you. You can register by visiting: http://www.newsgator.com/Enterprise20/saleseffectiveness/saleseffectiveness_6.aspx.

Technorati Tags: enterprise rss, rss, NewsGator, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Sales Effectiveness, Forrester

Making SharePoint Server 2007 More Social

This morning we announced the general availability of NewsGator Social Sites, an add-on to NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES) that encompasses site templates, Web parts, profiles and infrastructure for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 (Both MOSS and WSS).  We've worked very closely with Microsoft to help enhance the social computing capabilities of the wildly popular SharePoint platform. When you combine NGES, Social Sites and SharePoint Server, you have a fantastic platform for Enterprise 2.0 collaboration across departments, divisions and entire companies.

For those who remember our beta announcement back in June, we've added a ton of extra functionality in the latest release. At a high-level, NewsGator Social Sites allows you to:

• Bring outside content into SharePoint- One of the big issues with portals over the years has been the lack of updated and relevant content. We make it easy to bring in content automatically.
• Take content out of SharePoint with one-click0- This gets around the chicken and the egg problem of people having to check for new content and then not checking again when they expect not to find anything new. With one-click, users can subscribe to a list, blog, wiki or workspace feed and get notified when updates are made.
• Provide a great experience for SharePoint users- There are multiple benefits here. Items and articles from lists, blogs, news feeds and other sources can be marked read by individual users, solving the problem of keeping content fresh. But users also have the ability to tag items and filter their views by tags. Finally, we created a Social Sites "rollup" page that shows feed trends, active users and tag clouds, providing an easy content discovery mechanism).
• Connect people with content- In the area that is potentially the most exciting, Social Sites lays the framework for building communities through social networks. If a user clicks on a link for a content author or tagger, they can see that person's profile, which contains contact information, feed reading habits, recent contributions and recommended feeds. This is a great way to discover people with specific areas of expertise and also subscribe to beneficial content.

One of the companies using NewsGator Social Sites is Spencer Stuart. They are one of the premier executive search firms in the country and a longtime NGES customer. They are taking advantage of Social Sites to keep their Search Consultants and research staff better informed and connected. As Trapper Markelz, the firm's senior application developer notes, "NewsGator Social Sites will significantly enhance the value of our SharePoint sites. It will allow us to present both internal and external information in a single team site with greatly enhanced navigation. Social Sites will also increase the visibility of these resources through notifications that drive users back to the lists that are most valuable to them."

As I mentioned at the outset, we are working very closely with Microsoft from a marketing, sales and development standpoint around SharePoint Server and Social Sites.  In our release, Derek Burney, SharePoint GM for Microsoft says, "We built SharePoint as an extensible platform, one where our existing features such as social networking can be augmented by our partners. NewsGator Social Sites enhances SharePoint’s very popular and successful social computing and enterprise search capabilities. We are excited about our continued collaboration with NewsGator to deliver value to our mutual customers.”

I've included some screen shots below of various capabilities including

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, NewsGator, Enterprise 2.0, Social Sites, SharePoint, portal,

RSS- Saving Corp Comm Pros Everywhere from Heartburn (and worse)

Is life for the average corporate communications head so insane that they keep a bottle of Pepto Bismol in their desk? Hopefully not, but in a new video we posted last night on YouTube, it certainly is. Go to http://www.youtube.com/user/NewsGatorTV and check our two newest videos. You'll want to watch the Before RSS one first as that shows life in corp comm without RSS and then check out the After RSS one.

These are meant to be tongue-in-cheek and if your work life is really as rough as that of poor Paige in the first video, I certainly feel for you. Nonetheless, they definitely illustrate the challenges of internal communications in today's environment. While the second video is also a slight exaggeration, we have definitely seen how RSS can make our customers into rock stars.

This production was my screen-writing and directing debut. The actors were all NewsGator employees (and I think it's clear that Dave Keller (playing the role of head of sales) and I (playing the marketing head) should keep our day jobs), there were Oscar-worthy performances from three stars (Christy Schoon in the lead role of Paige, Craig Lachman, playing Nigel, the head of Europe and Jeff Hathcote playing Don the CEO).

Technorati Tags: enterprise rss, rss, NewsGator, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Internal Communications, Corp Comm

Three Upcoming Webinars

As the weather starts cooling off and everyone's nose is back to the grindstone until Thanksgiving, why not take a break from the daily routine and get a jump-start on thinking about the Web 2.0 projects you want to tackle later this year and early next year? NewsGator can help!

We have three FREE Webinars scheduled over the next 10 days that will be of interest to the regular readers of the NewsGator Daily. If you can't make the scheduled time, go ahead and register anyway and we'll send you a link to the archived version after the event. Note: All Webinars are one-hour long and run from 2-3 PM EDT.

• Friday, Sep. 21st, "Improving Internal Communications with RSS" (Features Shel Holtz, a well-known consultant, blogger, author and speaker, who is sure to entertain. I've also created some very hilarious tongue-in-cheek videos that are worth the price of admission)
• Wednesday, Sep. 26th, "Widgets and the Future of Advertising" (Features NewsGator CEO J.B. Holston and Mark Silva, the Founder and Principal of Real Branding. Even if you are thinking about widgets for non-advertising purposes, you'll want to catch this event"
  
• Thursday, Sep. 27th, "RSS, Blogs and Wikis in the Workplace" (My counterpart at SocialText, Jeff Brainard and I are teaming up on this event and we'll discuss the benefits of thinking about solutions that address the content (blogs and wikis) and the delivery vehicle (RSS) together.

If none of these float your boat, you can see a full list of upcoming and archived Webinars by going to our Webinar page.

Enterprise 2.0 ROI

A couple of weeks ago, Oliver Young from Forrester Research, who is one of the top analysts following Enterprise RSS and Enterprise 2.0 in general, released a document called IT Will Measure Web 2.0 Like Any Other Applications. The document (which also happened to show that RSS had the highest reported business value of any Web 2.0 application), found that 63% of respondents (IT decision makers at companies above 500 people who are using/piloting at least one Web 2.0 tool) will use traditional value metrics like ROI and IRR for measurement.

A number of articles have come out on the heels of that report, the latest being one by Heather Havenstein of Computerworld. Her story, IT Execs Seek New Ways to Justify Web 2.0, shows that while companies are still turning to ROI as a measurement technique, the definition of ROI is changing. William Hayes of Biogen, a NewsGator Enterprise Server customer, notes that IT is "going to be qualitative." He continues, "If we get interactivity and usage of the tools, and we get better communications within the company, then we will consider it a success." Later in the article, he also points out that Web 2.0 projects can be done easily without sign-off from the highest levels of the company. Hayes points out, "We can essentially do [Web 2.0 projects] in somewhat stealth mode as pilots and prototypes. It’s a lot easier to roll things out in a small fashion and allow them to grow in a grass-roots way.”

The article is definitely worth reading as it notes similar stories for getting Web 2.0 tools in the door and quickly demonstrating value. In addition to Biogen, Web 2.0 projects at the Los Angeles Fire Department, the BBC and Northwestern Mutual, another NewsGator customer, (who is using a NewsGator-powered RSS service provided as part of their blogging solution from Awareness (formerly iUpload) are highlighted.

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, NewsGator, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, ROI,

The Power of Enterprise 2.0 for Healthcare Delivery

Government-run health care providers aren't usually the type of organizations that embrace emerging technology, but the ones that do often see tremendous benefits. The National Health Service (NHS) of the United Kingdom (the world's 4th largest employer) is one of those.

The trigger was an unfavorable report that was delivered on the state of internal communications at NHS' Orkney division. At roughly the same time, a senior executive was furious at being unable to retrieve his e-mail while on the train. The problem? A 9MB e-mail, loaded with personal photos, was sent to all staff. Faced with a long download to his PDA, the executive abandoned the download and was cut-off from office communication and rendered unresponsive during a long ride.

To address this challenge, NHS Orkney had to move away from e-mail as the primary communications and collaboration vehicle. Simply moving everything to a portal wasn't the answer since they already had one in place and it was poorly utilized. The solution to the problem was an Enterprise 2.0 solution, namely blogs and wikis for content creation and collaboration and RSS feeds for notifications of updates.

The health care provider chose Traction TeamPage (a hybrid blog and wiki platform) and NewsGator Enterprise Server (Enterprise RSS platform) for their solution.

On the blog and wiki side, employees start with a Front Page that rolls up activity in 4 sections: Clinical, Organization, Classified and Personals, and Recent News and Information (a catch all). The source content may have been posted to any one of 11 projects visible to all employees, or from additional projects that require permission. The projects range from Clinical Services to HR, IT and Personals.

The NHS Orkney staff use NewsGator Enterprise Server  to subscribe to internal feeds from Traction. Traction feeds for the most important tags are provided by default, and users can create their own feed based on any search. In this way, incoming information gets filtered and differentiated before they see it, making at-a-glance prioritization possible. In the NewsGator Enterprise Server Web reader interface, feeds from Traction are parsed in a manner that will satisfy the interest area and urgency requirements of a wide variety of readers. As an example, the Clinical Services > Red Alert feed parses out pages in Traction which are tagged Red Alert. The Red Alerts may be monitored carefully by all employees, while other channels are browsed in a a more casual manner.

How have internal communications improved at NHS Orkney? The volume of "corporate spam" has dropped substantially, to the point where they are on the cusp of turning off "all-staff" and other large group mailing lists. The range of information on the blog continues to expand and more staff are starting to use it to work collaboratively and NewsGator Enterprise Server to keep track of updates.

You can read the full case study from Intranet Journal here. Screenshots from the implementation are below.

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, NewsGator, Enterprise 2.0, Traction

New Webinar from NewsGator and Forrester

Next Tuesday, July 31st at 2:00 EDT, we'll be holding a free Webinar called "Adding Value to SharePoint with RSS." It features Rob Koplowitz of Forrester Research and Greg Reinacker, our CTO. If you have deployed Microsoft SharePoint 2007 (either Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) or Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS)) or are considering/evaluating the product, you'll want to check this event out. As Rob will note in his presentation, SharePoint is a great platform for collaboration, but Microsoft is relying on partners like NewsGator to add value with products like NewsGator Social Social Sites.

Rob and Greg will talk about why companies are so excited about MOSS, how companies are taking advantage of the platform and why it's important to think about how RSS fits into the deployment strategy. Greg will also walk through a quick overview of NewsGator Social Sites, share a sneak preview of what's to come and talk about some different use cases.

You can sign up for the event here.

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, NewsGator, Enterprise 2.0, SharePoint, portal,