New SVP of Sales, Board Member, Forrester Wave and Scoble video

dave@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 06:07:22 GMT

We just finished up one of our best quarters ever, and 2009 is kicking off with a bang. A few very noteworthy items to share with you.

First and most importantly, we formally announced that John McCracken has joined Jive as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and that Bill Lanfri has joined the Board of Directors. John is a hugely talented sales leader who has worked with most of our other execs during his time at Mercury (as well as Tony Zingale on our board, the former CEO of Mercury). Bill Lanfri is a very seasoned leader who has seen the technology growth curve many times, and has already made a big impact as an advisor. Both have the experience we need to continue building Jive into a great company and I'm thrilled to have them on board.

Secondly, this past Friday Forrester Research released its WAVE report on Community Platforms. We are excited to be named a leader in the space and we encourage you to read the full report if you're a Forrester client. Jeremiah Owyang, senior analyst at Forrester, is thorough and insightful. It’s an honor to be included with the other vendors and the report is a feather in the cap for the Social Business Software market.

Also worth noting, in the first week of January, Jive’s CMO Sam Lawrence, sat down with Robert Scoble and talked a bit about the company’s plans for the year. He provides a great overview of Social Business Software and really captured the essence of what Jive is working to accomplish. Sam also gives a few hints about what you can expect from Jive in Q1.

All in all, a great start to the year. But there's more to come soon.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Ladders of Participation at Jive

dave@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 15:00:24 GMT

We're knee-deep in a lot of "success" work these days -- that is, tying collaboration metrics to project/company success based on the client's goals. It may sound great that a company is seeing a 50% increase in question resolutions in a given week, or a 15% increase in blog posts, but what does that mean if your goal is brand awareness versus project completion time? Ultimately, this will lead to a lot of different outputs, such as whitepapers, deployment methodologies, benchmark studies and other blogs on the subject. In the meantime, I thought it would be fun to share a couple of interesting tidbits.

One of these metrics to track is the types of people participating in these communities. Forrester has provided one way of looking at this for external communities called the the Ladders of Participation, which is based on general public usage of social tools.

Forrester's take is an interesting slice into usage models and works well for most social networking sites, I'm sure. However, it breaks down a bit if you try to apply it to different scenarios since it doesn't take into account the different types of communities, of which there are many. And most of our customers aren't trying to set up social networking sites. Patrick Lambe provides a great breakdown of these types of communities in this interesting video (communities of interest, communities of circumstance, network of practice, community of practice, learning community, etc.).

For us to take advantage of a model like Forrester's, it needs to be considered in light of the business goals of each client. For instance, here's how one of our customers (a business community concerned mostly with knowledge-sharing/Q&A) looks when the model is applied. This is more of a "network of practice" according to Lambe's breakdown.

It's interesting, but weighted at the extremes, which means it's not going to be as telling, but it's still useful. Even more useful if you can set goals around it. For instance, since this particular site is interested in leads, we might want to track not only the breakdown of spectators, but set goals for conversion to collectors, where you now have more of a dialogue open with the user.

And as you would expect, this model breaks down when applied to internal communities. The types of users no longer make sense inside a company, which is typically more concerned with how fast people get answers, how much content is being created/reused, how much faster projects are completed and decisions made, etc. Out of curiosity, we decided to see how Jive's internal Clearspace instance would play out on the Ladder model:

Again, weighted at the extremes. I think the roles I would like to see for our own usage scenario would include things like:

experts	answer lots of questions, highly ranked
helpers	participate in lots of discussions in different categories
thought leaders	weighted on blogs, lots of users subscribe to them
content-creators	responsible for reusable content
processors	weighted on docs, use workflows
churchmice	lots of subscriptions, little voice/content

And I would remove the "fun" communities from the sample set -- needless to say, some folks are highly active in things that aren't mission critical :).

So, the main takeaway is that different communities have different circumstances that tie them together and therefore have unique Ladders of Participation. In order for businesses to determine if they are earning the promised value of increased productivity through social participation, we need to start defining these usage models more discreetly.

Blog Posts From Jive Talks Tagged With forrester

New SVP of Sales, Board Member, Forrester Wave and Scoble video

Ladders of Participation at Jive