Every lock has a key. For enterprise content management and social collaboration, hashtags are that key. Hashtags (#) mark important keywords or topics and make microblogs and questions & answers more visible, discoverable, and relevant in the activity stream. Hashtags unite users around common interests, topics, and projects, and encourage meaningful discussion and collaboration within an enterprise.
Ok, so hashtags are great, right? But what happens when you get an overzealous tagger or someone who tags nothing? Wouldn’t it be nice to have some smart suggestions? NewsGator’s latest “Hashtag Assistant” feature for Social Sites 2010 makes it easier to tag the right terms quickly. Social Sites Hashtag Assistant suggests tags from the Enterprise Metadata Service as the user types. Click on a suggested hashtag and it is automatically added to the post or question. To keep it simple for users and to ensure system performance remains high, only single-term hashtags are suggested — and of course, a user can still choose to create their own relevant hashtags as desired.
To find out more about how NewsGator’s hashtag suggestions feature can increase the visibility of important content within your organization, please visit www.newsgator.com.
Just in time for the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 launch, NewsGator now offers full support for the latest version of the data platform. We’ll be providing more details next week about our support of SQL Server 2012 in conjunction with our participation at the DevConnections Conference in Las Vegas. Make sure to swing by the expo hall and visit us at booth #321 to learn about our SQL Server 2012 announcement and get a tour of the latest and greatest features of Social Sites 2010. We’ll be at the event starting Monday, March 26th through Thursday, March 29th.
And, if you haven’t yet registered, use discount code: DEVCONVB100 to save $100 off a full conference registration. This event will cover most of the Microsoft stack with sessions specifically focused on Visual Studio, ASP.net NET and Silverlight, SharePoint, Exchange and Windows, in addition to SQL. It should be a great event - we hope to see you there!
Activity streams for business are increasingly busy places, so it’s a good thing they’re becoming smarter at driving content to the people who can best use it. Although access to information provided through activity streams is wonderful, users shouldn’t have to wade through oceans of information to find what’s important to their job. That is why NewsGator has taken a fresh look at activity streams with Social Sites 2010 and added some clever filtering and sorting options. Rather than rely on traditional filters that are simply based on keywords, Social Sites 2010 Top News incorporates a truly intelligent filter that uses a learning algorithm to review your activities and understand what information is most relevant to you. Based on what it learns from your activities, the filter selects and promotes to the top of your stream those Top News items - bringing the most relevant data to the forefront.
Social Sites 2101 also adds smart sorting to the activity stream to help users stay current. While it is great to have things filtered properly so the most relevant posts are listed prominently, it is even better when the most current update to the stream is moved to the top of the conversation. So now, not only is information filtered for relevance to each user it is also sorts by the time it was posted.
There is no better way to gauge the pulse of an active company than through activity streams for business. Every department is buzzing with projects they are working on and sharing rapidly–expanding volumes of information. With these new features NewsGator Social Sites 2010 is continuing to make sure employees can easily harness the power of the social enterprise – helping to boost their productivity and drive real business results.
Do you get overwhelmed keeping up with the activity stream? How do you cope?
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?
In every organization, responsibilities pile up. It can seem impossible to prioritize everything and get it done on time. Anyone in a business organization can derive real value from improving their workflow and collaborating to get a message out. Enter NewsGator’s latest “ghostwriter” feature for simplifying social enterprise collaboration on blog posts.
In many organizations, an employee may be asked to draft a blog post for someone else. The writer will likely create a draft in a desktop-based word processing tool and ask the requester to review, edit, and approve the copy. This exercise typically involves working several revisions of the draft through company email—opening and closing the publishing software over and over, weeding through several strings of messy email comments and tracked changes to enable organizational leaders to express their views in a timely fashion.
NewsGator’s ghostwriter feature simplifies this process. When this feature is enabled, users can choose to save blog posts on behalf of another colleague. When the draft is done, a notification email is automatically sent within the activity stream event to the appropriate person. This feature tightens workflow, letting organizational leaders, or approvers, quickly access relevant blog content, voice their opinions, and make productive edits directly in the system. Once approved the post goes live as written by the approver so that employees see the content as coming from a notable voice in the organization.
This ghostwriting capability also makes blog posts and associated comments more accessible to all colleagues, increasing social enterprise collaboration and commenting on content throughout the entire organization. Adding a comment on a blog post creates an event in the activity stream, enabling users across all parts of an organization to easily view and interact with it.
NewsGator’s latest ghostwriting features make it easier for business leaders to provide timely input on company activities, while facilitating an interactive and content-driven social organization. To learn more about how NewsGator’s social enterprise collaboration ghostwriting features for Social Sites version 2.5 can help build and better engage your workforce, please visit www.newsgator.com.
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.
As many of you know, the Android mobile operating system has exploded to be the second leading OS in the US (according to NetMarketShare).
If you have an Android phone, wouldn’t it be great to get direct access to NewsGator Social Sites 2010 from your handset – and without the frustration of a mobile Web browser?
Well, now you’ve got it! Meet our new Android Client, a native app for Social Sites 2010. This new app lets you fully participate in your familiar enterprise social computing environment 24x7 (but hopefully not while you’re driving!).
If you use a different type of smartphone, we’ve got you covered there as well with Social Sites 2010 Mobile Clients for the iPhone, iPad, and BlackBerry®.
Android App Features
The new Android app lets you work in Social Sites 2010 almost as if you were on your office PC. You can:
Keep up to date with updates from your colleagues
Update your status from anywhere
Comment on or like someone else’s status
Upload photos
Get notifications about activities related to you and your interests
See a history of your recent activity
Browse colleagues and get their contact info
See the latest activities from any community in which you participate
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.
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.
Please tell us a bit about your projects – The Community Roundtable and The Social Organization.
Rachel: I started blogging at The Social Organization in 2007 when I was an analyst at IDC because I started to see the huge potential to re-invent organizations in a way that improved peoples’ experience with them and profoundly changed the value chain. I remain very excited about the opportunity of networking and communications to align organizations internally and with the markets they serve.
In 2009, Jim Storer and I started The Community Roundtable because while technology adoption was growing quickly, there was not a lot of focus on the management element of what we now call ‘social business.’ We see community management as an emerging strategic discipline of management, not just the day-to-day activities of online engagement. We run a peer network for community and social business leaders that is focused on sharing best practices and learning from each other and experts we bring in for discussions. One of our goals is to educate the market, so we publish a lot of content and speak widely. We have also been working with companies in an advisory capacity to help get executives on the same page regarding the opportunities and risks of moving forward in a ‘social’ way.
Community management has certainly evolved as E2.0 has been more widely embraced in the business world. What are the top 2-3 trends you are now seeing as you consult with community managers?
Rachel: It is an interesting time in the market because attention to community management has increased dramatically, in part because of a greater understanding of its importance in making social business successful. A few trends that I see include:
Companies focused on internal use cases are realizing that they need community managers and it is not just an external facing role.
Organizations are starting to understand that their community team is the human experience (whatI call the HX) that needs to parallel the user experience (UX) of their technology.
Organizations are beginning to understand that community management is strategic and critical because they are seeing early movers like SAP, CSC, and Dell use community management teams so successfully.
What are the top 2-3 concerns?
Rachel: The top concerns/myths that I see – and believe are important to address methodically – are:
Extending the ability to communicate broadly across an employee base. Social networks can expose a lack of alignment in ways that other communications tools do not and can bring up a lot of HR hiring, training, and cultural issues, which can be significant.
Adding another tool and requirement to already strapped employees. While this tends to be a common concern, if thoughtfully implemented and managed, social networks should relieve rather than add to information overload.
Social networking will just enable wasting time. This concern comes up less often but we still hear it. The truth is that chitchat is often how we build relationships with people we don’t know well. That is an important first step on the road to cross-functional collaboration. Understanding the role of socializing to foster collaboration is critical for managers.
What is your perspective on Google+ in the enterprise?
Rachel: Google+ is a really interesting tool. My favorite feature by far is the Hangout feature, which enables a close-to-real-life meeting across global geographies. That is game changing for the development of relationships. The circles and privacy features are also interesting but they come with a high overhead for managing them at the individual level. I think Google will work on solving that issue but I think there is a lot of potential in the architecture of the product. Google+ as such may not be the solution internally for large organizations because of security and privacy issues – it is a little too easy to publish to the wrong stream right now.
With your years of experience you have probably had direct experience with SharePoint (and clearly so have we!). What have you heard from community managers about SharePoint and/or NewsGator as far as community building since SharePoint 2010 was announced?
Rachel: The biggest issue that I hear that comes up with regards to SharePoint is that there are too many ‘dead’ sites within organizations. Functionality NewsGator helps with that but it’s also the lack of any community management in traditionally-deployed SharePoint contexts. Early on, IT groups got SharePoint for free so the business case was often not well developed and there was no funding for oversight of the tools. This has changed as people have realized that a lot of those initial efforts at collaboration failed.
What advice do you have for managers trying to build communities internationally? Any cultural or other issues they should keep in mind?
Rachel: Culture eats strategy for lunch, especially internally, so managers need to build strategies and plans that respect the culture and satisfy goals that fit within that culture first. Once comfortable with the online environment, you can start to stretch people’s comfort level and introduce them to new ways of working but trying to introduce too much, too quickly typically doesn’t work well.
What is the #1 use of communities you’ve seen in your career?
Rachel: The best uses of communities are when members are isolated but have a high need to connect and learn. So some of the most compelling examples I’ve seen is in health-related communities in terms of value to the members. For instance, health-related support groups have emerged to help and connect individuals who would have otherwise never met and turn into a daily networks of connections. I’ve also seen really compelling use cases about sharing expertise internally in a way that drives huge cost savings across an enterprise.
How many communities do you belong to?
Rachel: Good question but that is a really hard question to answer. There are a few communities that take up more of my time, and they are closely aligned with the work I do. So obviously TheCR Network is one, but also the Enterprise 2.0 Conference community and a handful of related online groups that are closely aligned. But then there is my personal life and things that I’m interested in or are a bit further afield professionally, there are 20 or 30 different communities I keep an eye on and occasionally participate in. One of the recent ones that I’ve been participating in is a running community because I am just learning how to run – and the need to learn really drives my engagement.
Clearly you have a lot of information on the Community Roundtable website for helping community managers with best practices – but do you have 1 or 2 favorite recommendations you believe help the most when building a successful community?
Rachel: We’ve built resources for people who are new comers into this space or who need to educate others within their organizations:
For many of these resources, social tools and approaches are old hat but we forget that others need to start at the very beginning. We also do a podcast series with community managers which is a great way to hear the experiences of others: http://community-roundtable.com/category/podcasts/
Lastly, what’s the most curious or funniest community you’ve ever come across?
Learn more about community management from Rachel – check out this on-demand webinar where she discusses “Community Management 101” with Eric Sauve of NewsGator.
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JB Holston, President and CEO 
Laura Farrelly, VP of Microsoft Alliance 
Brian Kellner, VP of Products
Melissa Risteff, SVP of Marketing & Corporate Development
Eric Sauve,