Business process advice for using Ideation in Social Sites 2.6

The most recent version of Social Sites has some significant upgrades to how it handles Ideation.  Lots of great new features around: using  a marketplace model for voting to give people olnly a certain number of votes; making the UI very attractive; trending ideas and people; open and closed ideation spaces; and more.

As we get ready to help introduce these capabilities to early adopters, I put together a short video of things to think abouot when rolling out Ideas in Social Sites 2.6.

 

Posted by Eric Sauve

Social Makes Employees Smarter, Faster

Posted by Eric Sauve

Social Talent Management

A little experimentation with Infographics - let me know your thoughts!

Posted by Eric Sauve

Crowdsource your most important work

For the millions of us that watched the Giants up end the Patriots in the Super Bowl, we were also there to watch the ads. Well, this year was a little different than most in that of the top 10 most liked ads of the Super Bowl, 3 of them were crowdsourced from loyal customers of said brands. The number one most liked ad was created by a fan of Doritos – who netted $1-million for the work.

There are a few notable elements of the Super Bowl ad experience: 1) customers AND ad agencies can make great ads; 2) companies are investing significant prize money to encourage their customers to make commercials for them; 3) companies are seeing success in using game mechanics and contests to engage their audiences; and 4) once again, that the top ad was done by a customer and not an ad agency.

For the Social Enterprise, these notable elements can also be part of our approaches. Why not
enlist our employees to solve some of our most important problems? This is at the core of crowdsourcing innovation. Why not invest in game mechanics and competition as a way to incent desired behavior and creativity? Employees CAN come up with better ideas than SMEs. Finally, why not try something innovative and different? It was the crowdsourced ad that was number 1, not the one produced in the traditional way.

Crowdsourced and #1:

 

Posted by Eric Sauve

Innovation in community – thoughts for the day

Social and communities have a real opportunity to leverage ideation across a broad base of individuals
at a relatively low cost. Often though, it is hard to know how to get the rhythm going. Here are some ideas:

- Always be Open -

Blend ideas into communities in order to keep the conversation going year round. Ideas come when
a person has them – a community is a great context to harvest those ideas on an ongoing basis.

- Negative Feedback is the Seed of an Idea -

Negative feedback is often something easy for people to give and when done constructively
can help characterize the problem that an idea could solve.

- Campaigns, Campaigns, Campaigns -

Whenever you have the opportunity to build ideation and feedback into a product design or process change effort, just do it, it is a great way to engage your stakeholders and have people feel engaged and ownership over the result.

- Ideation is Conversation -

Engage your audience and their ideas to help cultivate and refine them. People feel rewarded when their ideas are genuinely considered in a thoughtful way.

Posted by Eric Sauve

Why Social is Better than Email

I was talking with a customer the other day and he asked me if I could write up something short and sweet (obviously he doesn't know me well yet) about the benefits of using social tools over email.  I find the topic coming up quite a bit so I thought I would share with you what I wrote and see what else you have to add.

1. Email is where knowledge goes to die¹.  If I have a question and email the person who I think knows the answer, I may get an answer from that person, but I'm the only person who benefits from the answer.  Odds are that the person who answered the question, being a SME, has to answer the same questions quite frequently.  If, instead of asking the question via email in a 1:1 situation, I ask the question in a community, the same SME can answer the question once, everyone in the community can benefit from the answer at the time, and future community members can benefit from the answer later because the knowledge has been captured and becomes searchable and findable.  In contrast I can't search anyone else's email box.
2. I broaden my scope when I ask a question in a community rather than via email.  I can only know so many people.  So when I ask a question via email I'm limiting myself to potential experts.  Often times the two people I send my email to don't know the answer and so they pass it on to two more people who pass on to the three people who are able to answer my question.  That takes time.  By asking a question in a community I automatically broaden my scope of potential experts and can get a faster, potentially better answer than I would have received via email.
3. Attachments.  How many times have you started iterating on a document someone sent to you via email only to find out it's not the latest version?  By always saving the latest version in the proper community, editing it there, and getting notified of edits via your activity stream you no longer have to worry about multiple version of docs floating around out there.
4. The multiple tree branched email.  Someone starts an email with a long distribution list.  Someone hits reply to all and responds.  Someone else hits reply to all to the original email.  Thus starts the genesis of the multi-branched email thread where you have to track which version of the email you've read and which ones you need to respond to.  By keeping the conversation in a microblog conversation or discussion you keep it single threaded and always know to what you are responding.  Better yet, you get updates in your activity stream so you don't have to check for when there's something new.

 

What else would you add about why social is better than email?  Let's get a Top 10 list going.

_{1This is a quote from Bill French in a 2003 blog post about portal technology and is still one of my favorite quotes.}

It's #SocialFriday y'all

 

At first blush it can seem funny to me that NewsGator, an enterprise social computing software vendor, has one day of the week designated as a "no email” day.  Why not every day?  As you would expect we are power-users of our own stuff.  You’ll often hear this called “Eating our own dog food”.  (I’ve often wondered why it couldn’t be something like “Eating our own pizza” or “Using our own software”, but I digress.)  Anyway, like many organizations there are certain departments that tend to be more active participants than others.  And as we continue to bring new team members on board we need to make sure they see how deeply ingrained social is in our organization.  We are very social at NewsGator, however the point of #SocialFriday is to eliminate all email unless it is external or truly confidential.  It’s just a matter of showing benefits in order to get people to break the email habit that has been beaten into us for 20+ years.

The genesis of #SocialFriday happened at a customer site.  Ronnie Gilbertson (NewsGator PM extraordinaire) and I were onsite working with the customer project team which included Vinicius and Ryan.  As an exercise we walked through Vinicius’s email inbox to see how much was truly confidential and how much would have benefited the larger community.  About 90% of his email could have been eliminated.  Some of the discussions still would have needed to happen but by happening in a community there would have been more transparency.  Other discussions would have been simply eliminated because Vinicius may not have cared about that particular message and would have chosen not to follow that community / channel.  The other portion of email that could have been eliminated was because there were multiple branches growing from an original email root and it was hard to tell which ones he needed to save in order to stay on topic.  We started talking about ways to get people out of email so that the knowledge would be shared and captured for current and future employees (think project status or an answer about the best temperature at which to melt cheese).  Ryan had the great idea of turning on his internal Out of Office message in Outlook and forcing people to communicate with him in the activity stream/microblogging.  Since the customer hadn’t deployed at that point it was just at the brainstorming phase for them.

Well Ronnie, NewsGator PM extraordinaire, took the brainstorming session to heart and started turning on his Out of Office message on Fridays.  Many of us soon followed suit.  Here’s my OOO message:

 

It’s #SocialFriday y’all.  I've purposely turned on my out of office for internal emails.  We are THE social computing company for the enterprise and I want to utilize our product in a way that sets an example for our customers.  For this reason I will be participating in an activity to help dramatically reduce email and relies more on our product.  This will also increase transparency with what's happening in our accounts and in the solutions consulting organization.  If you need me, don’t expect a response via email today unless your message is truly confidential.  You can target me @christys in your activity stream.  If this is customer-related please target the customer community as well. 
I hope you join me in the Social Friday effort!

 

It’s at the point now that many people’s OOO messages just say something very Zen like “Find me in the stream”.

I may not turn on my OOO the other days of the week (in fact I may stop altogether) but if I do get an internal email I’ll often answer it in the activity stream, targeted at the person who asked.  The increased transparency benefits everyone.  A couple of weeks ago I received an email from one of our sales reps about how we were using a certain product feature at a customer.  Instead of answering via email I answered in the customer community and targeted the sales rep.  Lo and behold our VP of Product saw the comment and chimed in that we are about to release a new feature and if we made a small tweak it could benefit the customer in the use case I had described.  Did I think the customer would use it?  Yes, please!  If I had simply responded to the one person in email it would have ended there.  Instead we are making a customer happy with a new feature I didn’t even know was in the works.  That’s pretty cool.

So yeah, we started our “SocialFriday effort to eliminate the majority of internal email at NewsGator but it’s turned into #AllSocialAllTheTime.  It just goes to show that a little reinforcement never hurts even in the most socially savvy organizations.

 

What about you?  Any tips to share on how you are changing behaviors to take advantage of social business in your organization?

Our move to SharePoint / Social Sites 2010 Part II

In Part I of “Our move to SharePoint / Social Sites 2010” I wrote about steps 1 and 2 of our migration plan from a business perspective.  In this post I’ll cover steps 3-5.  To reiterate, here are the steps we took:

 

• Step 1 - Work with the lines of business to understand their needs. 
• Step 2 - Evaluate the current communities, review statistics, and combine, close, create where it make sense.  Set expectations with community managers on content clean up.
  • Step 2 ½ Get user feedback
• Step 3 - Write governance plan.  We were a startup and our intranet kept growing without any planned structure, roles, or responsibilities except for some internal volunteer work on the technical side.  If we put a better structure in place it should take us much longer to make a mess of things.  (We have an added challenge in that we do testing of alpha and beta code on our intranet.)
• Step 4 - Work closely with our technical resources.  They have done great work on supporting our intranet but a key to a successful E2.0 deployment is having IT and business work together.  One without the other is like peanut butter without jelly.
• Step 5 - Educate and communicate.  Have you heard the one about the cobbler’s children having no shoes?  NewsGator employees often run around barefoot when it comes to what we are doing on our own intranet.

So here we go, starting with step 3:

Write governance plan.  Like many customers I work with we had no governance around our internal instance of SharePoint or our Social Sites communities.  So it was a bit like the Wild West – some sites were popular saloons and others were deserted streets with tumbleweeds rolling through.  We put in a community / team site request process with a 1 business day SLA.  The only reason a community request is turned down is if it is a duplicate or if it violates our employee code of conduct.  For us it has greatly reduced the number of duplicates and well-intentioned but orphaned communities.  Once the community is created the requester is the community manager and there’s no big brother oversight but we do have a community curator role to nurture community managers within the organization and perform a quarterly audit for inactive communities (after 6 months of inactivity the community will get archived).  I was curious to see how our organization would take to moving from self-service community creation to community requests and frankly there has been very little resistance (I only heard one objection).  Everyone I talked to seemed to understand the trade off for a cleaner community experience and was glad for it.  There’s more to the governance plan but for us the most important piece was managing the community creation process.

Work closely with technical team.  I can’t emphasize enough how important it is for the technical side and the business side of the migration team to keep open communications during this process.  You can’t expect to simply migrate what you have and be successful.  More planning needs to occur, business decisions need to happen, and neither side can make decisions in a vacuum.  If those of us on the business side made decisions without having technical representation in on those discussions we’d decide to do impossible things.  (“If I can say it, we can do it, right?”)  If the technical folks made all of the decisions without business representation in on those discussions things might work but they might not fit business flow.  And no one would know about what had been done.  How many times have you heard “IT just throws this stuff out there and doesn’t ask us how we would use it first?”  So anyway, we made sure that tech and business worked closely to understand what we were working on in order to make the best decisions we could.  This also came into play with communicating to the end-users.

Educate and Communicate.  Let’s break this down into a few areas:

• Communications – We had been talking about the migration at a very high level in our town halls for about a month leading up to the actual migration so that people weren’t surprised.  Then the week prior to migration we ran an Ideas campaign to rename our intranet.  (Our 2007 version had simply been called Home.)  The day of the migration a message went out letting everyone know that Home would be in a read-only state overnight and that as soon as the 2010 intranet (now named Hal) was live we would send out the announcement.  The announcement email went out the next morning with a link to the new intranet, a link to the Help and Feedback community (see next section), and a link to the video snippet  “How to ask a Question about Hal” (see next section).
• Help and Feedback Community – We created a Help and Feedback community as a place for people to target microblogged questions, review documentation, see video tutorials, and review a list of previously microblogged questions and answers.  I mentioned above that in the announcement email we included a link to a short video snippet “How to ask a Question on Hal”.  Asking a question is easy but our Help and Feedback community was new as was @targeting so we wanted everyone who wanted the extra help to be able to ask questions when they had them.  We had about 5 people pressed into service to get automatic notifications whenever someone microblogged a question targeted at the Help and Feedback community.  Whoever could jump on the question first with an answer would.  It is a great way to handle support of any application rollout.  We were able to address functionality and process questions in a way that a support desk can’t (and usually they are only tasked with technical issues anyway) and after a while we started to see peer-to-peer support happening.  I highly recommend this as a great use of community.
• Educational sessions – We held two different types of sessions:  “Community Managers – What you need to know” and “What’s new on Hal”.  The community managers needed to know more detail than the typical end-user and so we talked with them about some clean-up and enhancements they could make to their communities.  For everyone in the organization we offered the “What’s New” session to highlight some of the new capabilities available to them with our new SharePoint / Social Sites 2010 intranet.  I’m known for offering cookies, wine, beer, and other food and beverage related bribes to get people to these types of sessions.  I decided to offer zip to see how many folks were genuinely interested in the new things they could do.  I had about an 80% attendance rate.  That tells me people will generally make the time to learn if you just make the sessions available to them. Afterwards a recording of the session went in the Help and Feedback community.  I plan on offering the “What’s New” session for every major release.  The people have spoken and we are finally listening.

 

Key takeaways?  Take advantage of this opportunity to do some clean up, apply governance (it doesn’t have to be heavy-handed), and make sure business and technical are working hand-in-hand.  We may have had a couple of fails here and there (my launch email was too long – most people didn’t get to the part about the “How to ask a Question about Hal” video) but in general I’m happy with the way things worked out.

There are many people just starting to work on their 2010 migration plans.  Have you completed your migration and have some lessons learned to share with the rest of us?  We’d love to hear them.

Our move to SharePoint / Social Sites 2010 Part I

So I’m a little late in writing this.  NewsGator officially flipped the switch almost three months ago from SharePoint 2007 with Social Sites to SharePoint 2010 with Social Sites.  (For those of you out there that don’t use SharePoint or Social Sites, don’t worry – I may use some product specific terms but a lot of the concepts will apply no matter your collaboration platform.)  In my last post, “You Are not Alone”, I wrote about the steps we were taking in our migration planning.  Here are the steps as we had them planned:

 

• Step 1 - Work with the lines of business to understand their needs.  Were they being met before or are there things we could do better?  If they keep existing team sites we will set expectations and deadlines on content clean up.
• Step 2 - Evaluate the current communities, review statistics, and combine, close, create where it make sense.  Set expectations with community managers on content clean up.
• Step 3 - Write governance plan.  We were a startup and our intranet kept growing without any planned structure, roles, or responsibilities except for some internal volunteer work on the technical side.  If we put a better structure in place it should take us much longer to make a mess of things.  (We have an added challenge in that we do testing of alpha and beta code on our intranet.)
• Step 4 - Work closely with our technical resources.  They have done great work on supporting our intranet but a key to a successful E2.0 deployment is having IT and business work together.  One without the other is like peanut butter without jelly.
• Step 5 - Educate and communicate.  Have you heard the one about the cobbler’s children having no shoes?  NewsGator employees often run around barefoot when it comes to what we are doing on our own intranet.  We will run a number of lunch ‘n learns to cover the new 2010 capabilities and any restructuring we’ve done of the site.  In addition we’ll keep everyone updated as we release new features.

In this post I’m going to share how we accomplished steps 1 and 2 along with another piece that I threw in at the last minute that I can’t believe I almost skipped – user feedback.  These three steps helped us re-imagine what our new intranet looked like and how the users interact with it.

Talk with the Lines of Business regarding their existing team sites.  In our company (and what I see at almost every company with SharePoint) team sites are typically departmental in nature and are a place to go to get authoritative resources.  They are not by nature collaborative spaces where everyone can contribute.  There is a need for a place where you know that all of the content is authoritative.  Can you imagine an HR collaborative community where anyone can contribute their own version of the employee policies guide?  So my technical counterpart, Jason, and I met with the different departments to discuss their current team sites.  How are they using them (are they using them), does a team site continue to make sense or does a collaborative community make more sense, do they have stale content on their site that should be cleaned up, are there any changes they’d like to make before our migration?  We ended up moving some team sites to communities, doing away with others, and keeping about half of our existing team sites with some guidelines to the owners for cleaning up stale content.

Evaluate current communities.  (By communities I mean NewsGator Social Sites communities.)  Because we had an open community creation model and continue to have a fun, open culture at NewsGator, we had a lot of communities.  They tend to run the gamut from customer-based communities to the wine-lovers community.  Every quarter I run an audit of communities and inactivate those with no members, no recent activity, etc.  For migration we ended up purging half of our communities (about 150).  We wanted to migrate only clean, current data and sites (community or team site).

From an end-user perspective our integration of Social Sites within SharePoint has always been key because it means our users have always had ONE intranet.  That means just one place to go, which we all know is an important part of adoption.   But within that intranet we had siloed our team sites from our communities.  If you wanted to go to a community you navigated one way and if you wanted to go to a team site you navigated a different way.  So what we decided to do was simplify navigation so that users wouldn’t have to remember if they are going to a team site or a community, they navigate to that “place” they need in the same way.  We also activated a feature so that all the activities from a team site would flow into the users’ personal activity streams in the same way that activities from their communities would.  I thought this was a fabulous idea – why do the user need to remember if a place they need is technically a team site or a community?  This was a big change from our 2007 implementation as well as a big change from a traditional intranet.  So we decided to hold a focus group of our users to confirm this was a good idea.

In this focus group we showed them a mockup up of the new, simplified combo navigation and it was a hit.  But what I hadn’t thought about nor did I expect was another key piece to navigation.  Almost unanimously the users wanted the landing page of our new 2010 intranet to be their My Newsfeed page.  With the addition of NewsGator Social  Sites the My Newsfeed page is where the user microblogs, sees his activity stream, and navigates to all of his places (be they communities or team sites).  I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it but it made a lot more sense to have people land on an individualized page rather than a more corporate landing page.  Our users certainly see more value and as a result I’ve seen higher usage rates.  Holding the focus group was an important step for us to take in order to make sure we were designing the user experience for our users rather than what the migration team (a mix of business and IT) had built out in our heads.  I almost missed it by not holding a focus group (pressed for time you know) but I’m SO glad I didn’t.

In the next blog post I’ll talk about how we handled the other steps involved with our migration.  The steps I just wrote about were so key to our migration and I see them skipped much of the time.  Too many companies (and I see more and more planning their migration to SharePoint 2010) are strictly looking at migration from a technical aspect.  Don’t forget to take advantage of this opportunity to clean up and re-imagine the way you are doing things and serving your internal customers.  I look at it like when you have to move homes.  Not many people like to move.  But, it is a great chance to go through all of your clutter, get rid of it, and have a fresh start.

What have you done as part of a migration process to ensure a fresh start for your users?

You Are not Alone

Sometimes it feels like I am the only one who has the problems I have.  I know many of you have the same feeling – you are the only one with this or that problem.  It could be that your husband drops his socks right IN FRONT of the hamper instead of INSIDE the hamper.  (I mean really – he’s standing right there – how difficult is it to put his socks IN the hamper?)  Or it could be that your current intranet or portal is out of control.  Over the years team sites have over-bred and been abandoned, other sites exist but aren’t used, communities could be put to better use, and there’s a lot of stale content that takes clutter to the nth degree and makes it difficult for your end-users to find anything.

I know, after having talked with girlfriends, that I am not alone in having a drop-the-socks-just-in-front-of-the-hamper husband (who rocks in every other way, btw).  I also know, after talking with customers, that I am not alone in wanting a better organized, searchable, easy for end-users intranet.  At NewsGator we are mid-migration in taking our intranet from SharePoint 2007 with Social Sites v3.2 to SharePoint 2010 with Social Sites 2010.  I’ve talked with many customers who are planning for their migrations and they all feel like they should do some clean up in advance of migration but are not looking forward to the work.  In many cases they feel like they are alone in having a messy intranet that grew out of control because they didn’t have governance in place, their governance was loose, or their intranet was in use for so long that things just happened.  This is when I tell them “You are not alone”.  I also talk with them about what a wonderful opportunity they have on their hands.

Think about it.  Ask anyone who is in charge of the content on the intranet (often times this is Corporate Communications or is farmed out to the individual lines of business) and they can immediately list out 5 things they would like to do differently.  In my case I’m talking about SharePoint and Social Sites migrations but the same theory applies to any intranet / portal migration.  I’m excited about the opportunity to make our intranet sing.  For our migration I have a 5 step plan: 

• Work with the lines of business to understand their needs.  Were they being met before or are there things we could do better?  If they keep existing sites we will set expectations and deadlines on content clean up.
• Evaluate the current communities, review statistics, and combine, close, create where it make sense.  Set expectations with community managers on content clean up.
• Write or update your governance plan.  We were a start up and our intranet kept growing without any planned structure, roles, or responsibilities except for some internal volunteer work on the technical side.  If we put a better structure in place it should take us much longer to make a mess of things.  (We have an added challenge in that we do testing of alpha and beta code on our intranet.)
• Work closely with our technical resources.  They have done great work on supporting our intranet but a key to a successful E2.0 deployment is having IT and business work together.  One without the other is like peanut butter without jelly.
• Educate and communicate.  Have you heard the one about the cobbler’s children having no shoes?  NewsGator employees often run around barefoot when it comes to what we are doing on our own intranet.  We will run a number of lunch ‘n learns to cover the new 2010 capabilities and any restructuring we’ve done of the site.  In addition we’ll keep everyone updated as we release new features.

  So for those of you who have been feeling alone in the messy intranet syndrome - know that you are not.  Carpe diem.  Don’t just move over what you’ve got; use this time to think through your information architecture, work with IT, and take full advantage of your do-over. 

Anyone who’s migrated recently please comment and share your experiences and lessons learned.