11/24/2009

Where to Learn about Enterprise 2.0

Lately a number of customers have asked me for a list of resources for people in their organizations who would like to learn more about Enterprise 2.0.  Here’s my first swipe at it.  The presentations section includes some videos and Slide Share presentations.  In the books section I only listed a few (because they are recently published and very good) although there are other good books out there.  Ditto with the reports.  Lastly I included some blogs I subscribe to and people I follow on Twitter in order to keep up with what’s going on in the Enterprise 2.0 world.  If you are giving this list to an E2.0 newbie I would only have them start reading the blogs after they have read through some of the other resources.  Otherwise the blogs can be a little overwhelming because they definitely assume some knowledge of E2.0.

I put this list together pretty quickly today with the first resources that came to mind. If I’m missing something that you think is helpful in getting people ramped up on Enterprise 2.0 please do share in the comments.  I look forward to hearing back from you!

 

Presentations

 

Books

 

Reports

 

Blogs and their RSS URLs

Twitter

Posted at 01:08 PM in Web/Tech | | Comments (0)

11/19/2009

Education vs. Training

Education (formerly known as training) is an important piece to any Enterprise 2.0 adoption strategy.  The reason I say “formerly known as training” is that training has received a bad rap in the E2.0 world.  I’ve heard a common theme from some pundits as well as customers who listen to those pundits that a good E2.0 solution should be so intuitive, like it is in the consumer world, that training isn’t necessary.  I don’t agree.  First of all, I consider myself savvy but when I first started using Twitter I had to actively search out what RT and hashtags were.  That wasn’t intuitive yet it is a widely used consumer tool.  Secondly, a large part of your organization has never used any of the consumer Web 2.0 tools and so many of the concepts behind communities, microblogging, tagging, rating, etc., are completely new to them.  That segment of your audience needs to learn the concepts before they can figure out an intuitive interface.

 More important beyond the concepts and clicks is the WHY.  If I work in sales WHY would I care to change the way I work to start using this new collaboration platform?  If I work in R&D how does it benefit me to start following another researcher in my organization that I’ve never met before?  Sell me before you tell me.  If you don’t get buy-in from your users before you show them a few things about where to click they will never use your system (except for a certain percentage of early-adopters).

 

I’ve found three main types of education to be important:

  1. At the launch of your new platform.  It's a no-brainer to promote your new platform and educate people on what they can do with it.
  2. On-boarding.  As you bring new employees into the organization don’t forget to educate them about this great resource you are providing them.  I prefer to have the hiring manager take the employee on a quick tour of the platform.  The reason the hiring manager should do it rather than a training person with the entire group of that week’s new hires is the hiring manager understands that person’s role and exactly which areas of the platform will be most useful and the use cases that the employee will benefit from the most.
  3. Ongoing as you iterate.  Yesterday I co-hosted a webinar with Ross Dawson about implementing Enterprise 2.0 and he said you are never completely done with implementation.  He’s right.  Look at microblogging – it didn’t exist in many enterprises a year ago and now everyone wants it.  You will regularly be adding to and refining your E2.0 platform based on new capabilities and employee feedback.  As you iterate, educate your users on what’s available to them and how they might make use of it.  HOW to use it might be obvious but WHY they should use it might not be.

 

Lastly, this isn’t a formal education initiative and so I’m not including it in my list of three, but make it easy for employees to share their successes.  Let them educate each other about new ways they’ve found to use the platform to save time, find info, innovate, etc.  Peers trust peers (look at Yelp) and so they may be more likely to try something recommended by a peer rather than by their managers or IT.

 A little education about what’s in it for them can go a long way to driving adoption of Enterprise 2.0 within your organization.

Posted at 03:59 PM in Web/Tech | | Comments (2)

11/03/2009

What I've Learned about Press Releases

Can I act a little dweeby and tell you I’m excited there’s a press release coming out today about this blog?  Knowing our VP of Marketing, she’ll also ask everyone at NewsGator to RT it on Twitter and update their statuses on Linked In and Facebook.  I will admit (even though it means I’m not cool) that I think it’s kind of fun.

 

The press release process was interesting.  Evidently press releases are not supposed to be novels.  Who knew?  So my long-winded reasons for starting this blog became much shorter and the word obfuscate was used.  Good word.  Though not a word I would use, especially about a blog where I talk about wanting to use everyday language.  (Granted, I did approve the release before it went out so it really means I wish I could use words like that.)

 

I think I was a poor subject for the patient folks at our PR firm.  Some of our conversations went like this (it may be slightly exaggerated for dramatic effect):

 

               PR:  “Tell me about your background.”

               Me:  ”Let’s pull up my LinkedIn profile as a reference for our discussion.”

PR:  “OK, I’m looking.  Hmm.  Anything you’d like to point out?”

Me: “I started out my career at InfoWorld when the Internet was just starting to get commercial use and we were trying to monetize it.”

               PR:  “Yeah.  Hmm.  I see you went to University in France.”

Me:  Oh good, am I finally becoming interesting to him?  Is this going to be in the press release?  “Yes, I was a French major so I spent some time studying in Nice.”  Should I tell him I met Prince Albert of Monaco while I was there?  Would that make me more exciting?

 

OK, enough of my dramatic writing skills.  I fear it was like pulling teeth for them.  Everyone at our PR firm is very nice but I have to think that when you are in that business announcing a blog is not the highlight of your day.  That’s OK, it’s the highlight of mine.  Thank you Beaupre.

 

The reason I bring this up is that I did give our PR firm “4 Tips for Getting Started with Enterprise 2.0” to include in the press release.  Because my writing style isn’t suited to a press release they cut them to 3 and made them more succinct.  I thought I’d share my original list and reasoning with you here.

 

  1. Read Ross Dawson’s book Implementing Enterprise 2.0.  It’s a straightforward guide (without the typical buzzwords) that will help the everyday business person understand what they are undertaking.
  2. Read the Nielsen Norman Group study, “Enterprise 2.0: Social Software on Intranets” (http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/social/).  The cost is $298 for a single report or $598 for a site license and it is completely worth it (no, I don’t get a commission).  If you don’t know people at other companies who have already implemented Enterprise 2.0 solutions, this is the next best thing.  The Nielsen Norman Group talked with 14 companies who have implemented E2.0 solutions and then reported back on their drivers, strategies, tactical steps, and benefits.  Every single one of the 168 pages is a worthwhile read.
  3. Of course there’s something better than reading about the subject and that’s talking with someone who has already gone through or is going through an E2.0 implementation.  The 2.0 Adoption Council is a collection of managers in large enterprises that are charting the course for E2.0 adoption in their organizations.  Membership is limited to large organizations but if you are in a large organizations check them out at http://www.20adoptioncouncil.com/Blog/.  Being able to bounce ideas off of other people in similar situations can be invaluable.
  4. Lastly, and this will sound self-serving I know, get professional help.  You will save time and money in the end if you have someone who can help you set your strategy and steer you past the pitfalls to keep you on the road to success.  Ultimately, the sooner your E2.0 initiative is deployed and being used, the sooner you are meeting your business objectives – reducing costs, increasing productivity, whatever your goal.  Working with someone who has done this many times before is going to get you to that goal sooner rather than you having to figure it out on your own.

Posted at 06:49 AM in Web/Tech | | Comments (4)

10/30/2009

Pimp My Site

My second blog post and I’ve already used the word Pimp.  My Mom would be so proud.  Just to put this into context, do you remember the MTV show hosted by rapper Xzibit called “Pimp My Ride” where the crew would take an average ride and turn it into a shiny, happy car?  Not only did they shine up the car with a custom paint job and new upholstery but they always added some extra bling inside – I’m talking a chocolate fountain, a baby grand piano, or an aquarium with live fish.

 

Where’s this going, you ask?  Well, believe it or not, this ties into driving Enterprise 2.0 adoption.  I know, you saw this coming.  As we all know, there aren’t many companies out there that have been actively using E2.0 technologies enterprise-wide for more than a year, much less two years.  NewsGator, because we happen to make an E2.0 solution, has been using it for about two years now.  (NewsGator Social Sites is integrated into our SharePoint intranet.)  Like many other organizations we would like to see a higher rate of adoption.  It feels like because we are who we are, everyone in the company should be on our intranet for a certain amount of time every day.  It ends up that’s not the case and we decided to find out why.

 

The first thing I did was survey the employees.  I asked things like how much time they spend on the intranet, what they do there, if they don’t use it very often why not, and the list goes on.  The results were interesting and my biggest lesson was that we are guilty of the classic act of the cobblers children going barefoot.  We spend so much time working with our customers that we haven’t paid much attention to our own internal customers.  One of the biggest pieces of feedback we got was that when new employees start no one gives them any training on our intranet.  By training they didn’t mean where to click and when, what they really wanted was to be shown which resources are there that will help them and tell them why they should care to participate.  So a new training plan was born, including an on-boarding piece for new employees and the above mentioned “Pimp My Site” session.

 

I wanted to attract not only the employees that actively said “I’d like to know more about what I can do” but also those who said “I might use it more if I knew more but I’m not actively going to seek out more info”.  Two motivators drove a large percentage of the company to the inaugural “Pimp My Site” session:  Fun and Beer.  Well, maybe those are one and the same.  Our company culture is very casual so I can get away with serving beer at 4 PM on a Friday just like I can get away with putting something on the calendar with the word pimp in it.  If I were doing this for one of our F500 customers I would probably do it as a lunch and learn (bring in pizza if the budget allows) and call it “Bling My Site”.  Anyway, I was surprised at what a great turnout we had.  Even some of our power users were there to see if they could pick up some extra tips.

 

A quick warning before we move into details - I mentioned before that NewsGator Social Sites runs on the Microsoft SharePoint platform.  That doesn’t mean this concept I’m writing about won’t help you if you’re not using SharePoint, but some of the specifics may be a little fuzzy for you.

 

The My Site in SharePoint is a private personal page.  NewsGator Social Sites enhances this personal page with an activity stream, Microblogging, a profile builder, and some other useful web parts.  My end goal for this session was to make sure everyone understood how they might use the different capabilities in a business context and the benefits they might see.  I also showed them how to remove web parts they didn’t need, how to move things around so that the page is useful to them as individuals, and then came the final and most important piece - how to add the aquarium.  I promised everyone up front I would show them how to add a widget for a world clock, a stock ticker, or even an aquarium with fish swimming around, a la Xzibit.  If that’s what makes their My Site more personal and therefore more visited by them, why not?  I realize not all companies will allow the external content, but if you do it can be a fun way to get people interested in their My Sites and then once they are there they start to see the value and keep coming back.  (For instructions on adding external widgets to SharePoint go to http://www.scribd.com/doc/8456926/Adding-ThirdParty-Widgets-to-Your-Share-Point-2007-Site.  You can find a ton of free widgets at www.widgetbox.com.)

 

My everyday application of this?  Offer a number of lunch and learn “Bling My Site” sessions, keep them fun, and make sure to sell the users on why they care before you start talking about where they should click.

Posted at 08:23 AM in Web/Tech | | Comments (1)

10/29/2009

Everyday Enterprise 2.0

I work with customers every day who want to know how to roll out an Enterprise 2.0 solution.  In my case, it’s specifically NewsGator Social Sites for SharePoint but the same concepts apply no matter the solution.  These customers want to know what other companies have done and they want to be told exactly what steps to take.  There are many informative blogs out there (that I read and appreciate) that take a 10,000 foot view of what enterprise 2.0 is or isn’t.  Those discussions are important to have and I'm often in awe by the thoughts put forth. 

There's also a need for an "in the trenches" view because what I hear from my customers every day is they don’t want to philosophize – they need to do.  So I’m going to write about everyday Enterprise 2.0 from my perspective in the trenches.  I’m working side by side with the E2.0 champions at F500 companies.  We are making things happen together step by step.  Every day I’m learning a new lesson – adding a new arrow to my quiver.  I’m going to share my everyday “aha moments” and tips and tricks with you so that hopefully you can benefit and apply an everyday tactic to your E2.0 initiative that makes you, and ultimately your company, more successful.

Posted at 04:43 PM in Web/Tech | | Comments (0)