e2.0 blog

Interesting blog posts around the web previous week:

Future Differentiation of 'Social Media' from Collaboration

"More on that in a moment, but what’s troubling me is the continuing lack of differentiation or understanding between using the internet as a marketing medium, by which any publicity is good publicity, and the very different use cases of modern web technologies to help people collaborate more effectively together in business."

Are big CMS vendors hungry enough?

"I get one-hour responses from most vendors within Australia, and regularly receive demos from them. I’ve had vendor CEO’s showing up to walk through products. But not from the really big enterprise vendors, where it’s consistently hard to even find someone to talk to, let alone to get information from."

 

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Interesting blog posts around the web previous week:

If Enterprise 2.0 is a Crock, Second Life Enterprise if the Stuff That Fills the Crock

"For $50000 you can get yourself a pair of servers dedicated to running your very own Second Life. Apparently, and according to Linden Labs, 2009 is 'a breakout year for collaboration' – funny, I thought it was a breakout year to focus on efficiency, cut costs, get more productive and move away from the kids-on-crack hype."

Framework for 2.0 Adoption in the Enterprise

"We see that Enterprise 2.0 is increasingly relevant to many companies in many industries, in many parts of the world.  It’s not a passing fad."

Help those who want to help themselves

"I’ve seen some powerful ads about drug use on UK television recently. They don’t pull any punches. At the end they advise you to go to a website. Do you know what that website is called? No, not drug-abuse.co.uk. The website is called talktofrank.com. Who is Frank?"

All I Want For Christmas is my E2.0

"For me this reflects my own personal rule of thumb that its not just the size of an organisation that makes enterprise social computing useful, but the structure of the organisation and how these different roles relate to each other."

Beware Social Media Snake Oil

"The goal of Enterprise 2.0, a descendant of the "knowledge management" movement in the '90s, is to reroute the information traveling through corporations, undermining rigid hierarchies."

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During the E20Summit in Frankfurt we talked a lot around the pilot as a way to get Enterprise 2.0-tools up and running.

Oliver Marks discussed (and please correct me if I got that wrong) that the pilot was in some cases a waste of time or the wrong way to start a big social business project.

I beg to differ. The pilot project is in my humble opinion a fantastic way of flying under the radar and to prepare the organization for the social way of working. I want to make the transition as easy as possible and I'm calling it "hybrid SaaS". Just another buzzword? Surely, but let me fill you in on the details.

Let’s say you want to try and set up some wikis and blogs inside your sales department. Well then host it in the cloud and start working on your pilot project. Six months later the board of executives start wondering why your sales department are selling more and seem to work in a more efficient way than the rest of the company.

Should you then abandon all the work that already has gone into the wikis and blogs? Retorical question for sure, but of course you shouldn’t. The hybrid SaaS model is one where you easily download the entire application and database from the cloud and host it inside the firewall (and if you want it the other way around and upload your hosted application to the cloud that's fine as well).

Everybody will be smiling; the IT-guys will have total control, you and your sales department won’t lose anything of the great collaborative information and the management will see that more departments work in a new, efficient way. Thereby money will be made and time will be saved, people.

Catherine Greenfell is an expert at intranets and works at Step Two Designs - an Australian vendor-neutral consultancy specialising in intranets. She has worked with many intranet managers and know how to do it correctly - and of course just wrong. Having exaplained it in numerous articles her teachings can be summarized in a few key points, as presented by Column Two.

• When dealing with the legacy of intranet initiatives that have failed, Catherine says: "You can't undo the past; you can influence the future."

That is true. You can however make assumptions from the failed initiatives. I personnaly think there's more knowledge to be found in your own mistakes than in others' success stories.

• Establishing communication channels and setting expectation when everyone wants everything requires good negotiation skills.

Yes, it does. And you can't make everyone happy. The important thing is that everyone understands the goal and why you should reach it.

• Unlike other managers in the organization, intranet managers deal with staff at all levels. They need to have an elevator pitch about the intranet.

Good idea. Why does the intranet exist and why should you use it? A unique selling point for the intranet.

• Intranet managers need to learn to "let go" of content. They need to empower others.

This is no different from other manager jobs - you can't do everything yourself but have to know how to delegate and trust others. When you deal with content directly you would always find that it's not exactly how you would have done it - but that's still ok!

Interesting blog posts around the web previous week:

Making Money with Twitter
"Twitter Japan is more community oriented than other parts of the world which are all about ‘Me’.  Japanese Twitter users often have different accounts for different communities."

If your customer falls in the forest of your website
"Do you really think those crude, meaningless statistics about page impressions, visitors and hits are anything other than crude and meaningless?"

Enterprise 2.0: How a Connected Workforce Innovates
"Some companies now say: Why stop at lead users? Why not let everyone take a crack at helping us develop a new product, improve an existing one, or solve a vexing problem? They no longer specify who can participate in the innovation process; they welcome all comers. Enterprise 2.0 tools are designed to help with these more open innovation processes."

Who is in the driving seat of Enterprise 2.0 adoption?
"As I see it, what is being changed is WHO is in the driving seat and HOW the adoption is being driven. Instead of your boss being in the driving seat, with you in the back seat, it might be that it is your collegue, or a group of people that you belong to, or your friend who is in the driving seat. People you trust."

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