Blog Posts From Jive Talks Tagged With enterprise

Buh-Bye, Email?

ben.kiker@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:12:27 GMT

I couldn't resist but think of the classic clip from Ellen Degeneres' stand up act when I was jotting down ideas for this blog. While I realize we may never completely say "farewell" to email, it's fascinating to see questions on the future of email make their way to center stage.

Back in October, Jessica Vascellaro of the Wall Street Journal started an online firestorm with her article, "Why Email No Longer Rules," generating a heated debate among readers, with 200 people commenting about whether or not email is in a death spiral.

Fast forward just a few months, and now Gartner weighs in on the subject in their Gartner Predicts 2010: Social Software is an Enterprise Reality report which leads with this little bombshell:

By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.

Here's the "wake up and smell the coffee" reality: Social Business Software is much better equipped than e-mail to handle the rich business conversations that are a reality of today's flattened world. And SBS is an incredible tool for leveraging the right people at the right time to help you work better. As we're fond of saying at Jive, "reply all" is no way to collaborate. The report went on to say, "social networking will prove to be more effective than e-mail for certain business activities" and that changing demographics "will lead 20 percent of users to make a social network the hub of their business communications" over the next four years.

Social Business Software is an enterprise reality, but it’s not all unicorns and rainbows. Gartner also notes that IT-led efforts to "bolt-on" social features to existing platforms will result in a "more than 70 percent failure rate." No doubt that you will hear a lot about trying to make big IT implementations "more social," but it takes a lot more than adding a Facebook-ish interface or opening a support case from a tweet to make business social. Jive has built a native SBS platform over nine years of working closely with some of the largest - and most innovative - companies in the world. Companies who have their sights set on big outcomes, and are using Jive SBS today to achieve those outcomes.

If you're looking to move beyond "reply all," give us a call. We'd love to share more on how the world's #1 rated Social Business Software solution can make an immediate impact on your business.

Unlocking the Extended Enterprise - Part 2 of 3

dawn@fastwonder.com — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 15:00:10 GMT

In the first part of this series, Chris elaborated on a number of categories that represent the kind of framework we're using to connect Clearspace and CSX. This helps us visualize how the whole company can become better integrated with not just customers and partners, but also other industry thought leaders. In the short term these connections may be light, but we can see it maturing into something really powerful that speaks to the true value of Social Productivity.

In the second part of this series, I will elaborate on how these six areas can map to several scenarios for connecting people inside and outside of an organization allowing businesses to become more productive. Let me point out that the mapping is not an easy 1:1 between each internal company function and your external community. Would you want to participate in a sales or marketing community for a company so that they could sell you stuff or market to you? Probably not. However, as a satisfied customer, you might talk about a company's products to other community members (sounds like something sales and marketing types might want to see)!

Products and Services

Product management has always been listening to customers and engaging with them to determine product requirements and get feedback that drives product development, but we shouldn't stop with product management. Wouldn't it be great if your engineering or development team could see the feedback directly and ask questions to get clarification to make sure they are satisfying the customer with the technical solution? Social productivity tools, like Clearspace, just make it easier to gather input from your customers in an interactive, collaborative environment. In a community setting, your customers can have an open exchange with your employees about new feature requests, ideas, issues with existing functionality and more. By having this discussion in an open, social setting, we can have honest and ongoing discussions with our customers and use it to more productively set product development roadmaps and drive product decisions. These types of feature discussions have helped Jive engineers and product managers engage productively with our external community.

This is also a perfect place to step in with solutions and services to allow customers to embrace the solution and help them solve the issues that come up when talking about product requirements and feature requests. Some individual customers will always need a particular feature that cannot be provided in the product. By having development, product management, and services all involved in the community, your company can make better decisions about which requests should be in the product and which ones can be more quickly provided by the services group.

According to Jeremiah Owyang:

The opportunity to build better products and services through this real-time live focus group are ripe, in many cases, customer communities have been waiting for a chance to give feedback.

Robert Scoble also touched on the value an external community has to product marketing, development, and services in an interview he did with Search CIO, stating:

>We used blog-search engines to find anyone who wrote the word "Microsoft" on their blog. Even if they had no readers and were just ranting, "I hate Microsoft," I could see that and link to it, or I could participate in their comments, or send them an e-mail saying, "What's going on?" And that told those people that someone was listening to their rants, that this is a different world than the one in which no one listens. It was an invaluable focus group that Microsoft didn't have to pay for.

In the future business landscape, connecting customer feedback within the organization may not be a competitive advantage, it may be a requirement. Claudio Marcus and Kimberly Collins of Gartner quantified the advantage in the B2C market in an interview for Influence 2.0 as such:

>...by 2007, marketers that devote at least 50% of their time to advanced customer-centric marketing processes and capabilities will achieve marketing return on investment that is at least 30 percent greater than that of their peers, who lack such emphasis

Support

Support organizations can also benefit from social productivity software while supporting customers. When customers and support staff can collaborate in an online environment, both groups get value out of the exchange. Not only can customers search the site to get answers before engaging support, but they can also help troubleshoot issues and provide advice to other customers. Since you are also in the community along with the customers you can quickly correct any misinformation while reinforcing accurate information. In some cases, your customers will come up with solutions, workarounds, and ideas that your internal team would never have considered without this external source of collaboration.

The tech industry has known about the value of a support community for some time. Forums have long been the tool of choice for facilitating such a community. However, as Chris pointed out in the first post of this series, "...traditional Communities (like forums) fall short because they are basically dependent on people in the enterprise getting onto the external community to participate." A common platform that extends on both sides of the firewall, such as Clearspace, bridges the chasm between the external and internal, which is what it takes to deliver on the support community value proposition.

Evangelism and Reputation Management

These helpful customers mentioned above who proactively help other customers, can also become evangelists for your products. I've seen these enthusiastic community members step up and speak out on behalf of a company when other community members are being unfairly critical. In fact, John points out an example of a Dell customer that has posted and helped 20,452 times since 1999. A response to criticism that might seem defensive when coming from an employee may be seen as more genuine when coming from a customer. Marketing groups should be courting and talking to these community members and do what it takes to keep them happy. Engaging in this social and open collaboration between internal employees and external users also gives sales and marketing a place to provide information about products and best practices / thought leadership for your industry to keep the customers energized. Managing your reputation also becomes much easier when you can provide information and collaborate in a socially productive environment.

I wanted to start here to lay the foundation for how external communities bring value into the organization. Next week I'll share some strategies for how to grow and shape your external community so that it accomplishes the value I described in this post.

I'll leave you with a quote from Anne Zelenka at GigaOM:

If the promises of social productivity tools prove out, companies deploying them should see improved customer responsiveness, more successful products, more enthusiastic user communities, and better financial results.

Unlocking the Extended Enterprise - Part 1 of 3

chris.morace@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 18:53:25 GMT

Social productivity is all about getting stuff done through visibility, influence and engaging those people that you do not normally work with everyday. As work is introduced, stakeholders from diverse backgrounds and experiences can chime in to provide valuable insight and move the work efficiently along. These could be people you know within the company, people retained by your company, customers, or partners working outside of your company. Connecting people within your firewall has a host of challenges. Connecting people outside your firewall to those inside of it can be downright daunting. But, what if you could unlock the bottleneck and connect the external community activity in intelligent ways to the same activity inside of the enterprise? When I can reach out to engage with customers to make important product decisions I need relevant customer comments to find their way to me without me looking for them. It would be great if "approved" thinking from the inside the company could be exposed to customers who might find it interesting or helpful. When these things happen that's when I realize the benefits of social productivity.

The epiphany here is that traditional Communities (like forums) fall short because they are basically dependent on people in the enterprise getting onto the external community to participate. The sad reality is that in most companies' communities are "owned" by one person in one department--sometimes they even have a specified title like "Community Manager". In most companies that means one of two things: 1) There is a community manager trying to beg people in the company to get involved in the community, or 2) Enterprising employees who see the value have to get into the community just like a customer and then sift through everything to find out what is going on. It's a lot of overhead and a lot of work with only a little value if you're casually engaged.

With this on my mind I stumbled across a blog post that John Eckman of Open Parenthesis did about a month ago on Josh Bernoff's keynote from the Forrester Consumer Forum. John raises some interesting points about buzz & technology being short lived and the imperative to solve real problems, but the part that caught my eye were his objectives regarding

the Community aspect of the equation.

I "added some value" to (shamelessly modified) his thoughts by swapping some categories and adding some of my own. I saw the external community engagements relating to the internal functions like this:

The value proposition for connecting external community within the enterprise

John provided examples, which are:

Function	Engagement	Value Example
Marketing	Talking	Adidas drives 4 million impressions with their soccer page on MySpace and it cost them $100K.
Sales	Energizing	How eBags energized their sales with rating and reviews. Empowering customers and turning them into evangelists to recruit other customers and catalyze sales.
Support	Supporting	Dell has a user who has posted and helped 20,452 times since 1999. The only thing I think is cooler is connecting this straight into the official support org.
Services	Embracing	I thought his example here was better for "Satisfying". In my mind, Services plays a leadership role in enabling our customers to embrace the solution. They are solution leaders, and help fit square pegs into round holes.
Product Mgmt	Listening	Gives the example of Salesforce.com and the idea of working with customers to create and prioritize features/products. I use this example all the time in speaking with people.
Development	Satisfying	I think giving Development direct access to see what customers are talking about and the problems they are having is the best way to create a great product. Let's face it no one understands how the products really work better than development, and there are no better people to create something that truly satisfies customer's needs.

These categories aren't new or revolutionary, but I think they represent a the kind of framework we're using to connect Clearspaceand CSX. It starts painting a story of the whole company being integrated with its customers and partners, not just the "community manager". In the short term these connections may be light, but I can see it maturing into something really powerful that speaks to the true value of Social Productivity. Within each of these functions there are really 3 meaningful forms of interaction in the short term:

See content from the outside
Share content from the inside
Engage the right people in the community for feedback

If you believe like we do that when we succeed in connecting internal and external communities on a common information exchange platform then we can realize social productivity, then watch for the next two posts in this series:

Tactics for connecting outside communities with internal functions
Organizational strategies for growing communities that support your goals