You are going to hit us all up for are secrets...lol. I know the  term internal collaboration goes over pretty good.

Don't have an official brand name yet. We have gone down the WoC route by starting an internal naming suggestion box with marketing dept. having the "Lincoln vote." Will post back here once we have it finalized.

We've just installed this as a beta program for a very large corporate UK client. We wanted to fundamentally differentiate it from traditional 'tools' that emerged from their (rather large & MS dominated) IT department. After a lot of internal debating about names that tried to state what it did, how it worked etc etc, we just called it Oomph for testing. It's a kind of power/speed term here in the UK (and also a rather bizzare german band).

And that's what everyone is calling it now.....

In terms of explaining it, these are the words that employees recieve in the invite email:

"Hello x

This is an invitation to join a very special group of people helping to launch Oomph, x company's new approach to sharing knowledge across the business.

If you've used Facebook, you'll love Oomph. If you haven't used Facebook, you'll love it even more. You can blog, create discussions, share documents with colleagues, ask questions (and get them answered fast), create groups around areas of shared interest and a whole lot more.

We could bang on about how brilliant it is all day, so why not give it a whirl yourself? You're going to be one of the key testers of Oomph before we release it to the entire company in September, so we'd love to see how useful you find it.

Yours

The Oomph team"

Our company is GTS and we labeled ours GTSX - short for 'exchange'.  During our 'promotional' time we talked up that this is a place for everyone to exchange ideas, thought, information, learning, etc.  We wanted everyone to be involved.  It also connotes, to a degree, that no one really owns an exchange of information, but that everyone does.

For a masters degree class I did a research study on the use of Jive within our company and how and why it was used.  One of the major things I found was that some people, but not everyone, felt they owned the information if they created it.  That means that they were territorial over 'their' information and left alone 'others'' information.  That defeted a main purpose of ours.  We didn't want this to be just a repository so we have worked hard to brand this environment as ownership free yet ownership pervasive.  We all own it, yet no one person (or a few people) own it.

I also noticed that as far as a pure brand goes, we needed something flexible.  This was because from the first month until now (and ongoing) the usage changes slightly.  That comes from the fact that at first everyone was not quite sure how to use it.  Every month it gets better and better because they experience it and really understand how it can help them.  The first month and this month have different messages and focuses to help people engage.  So from that point our branding (something that in traditional marketing would drive a tagline) changes.

We stayed away from 'social' not necessarily on purpose, but we just let that part of the environment happen.  It was a natural part of it.  If we do it right and employees use it correctly (whatever that means for them) the 'social' end of things will take care of itself.

Well it's not branded ISES (Internal Social Enterprise Solution).  While it certainly has some social aspects to it, I'm not sure I would even describe it as an ISES.  Our tool is branded Knowledge OnLine or KOL as we refer to it internally.  The tool contains many of the same features as Clearspace, knowledge objects or documents, discussion forums, and news articles that are organized by community.   Each community has a moderator or knowledge manager. There is a greater focus on knowledge sharing culture than on the tool itself.  Knowledge OnLine is an enterprise repository, it is internal, it is a solution, and there are social components to it. So, I suppose we can call it an Internal Social Enterprise Solution.

Not a Wiki (although, I would like to see some wiki styled authoring and revision tools bolted on).  While not designed as a social enterprise solution it does indeed aid in connecting subject matter experts.  The other thing it does it spawns new work relationships.  It has been fun to meet people face-to-face after you have already established a relationship through content provided in the knowledge system.  It is much like our dialogue here, the more I post here and you consume, you gain a better appreciation of my views.  I can read other things you have posted (outside of your profile) like this, and learn more about your views and thoughts.   I might even be able to view your history (is that a feature?) and learn about what other topics you have been reading or may have an interest in.  Clearspace isn't making the connection, I am or you are.   Whether "tagged" as KM or Social Enterprise, these tools help people make connections.

We call it PeopleConnect.  For a long time, our most heavily trafficed intranet site was PeopleFinder, a simple web front-end to our LDAP directory.  We wanted to use its "White Pages" equity and extend it into more of a "Yellow Pages" type of directory that not only let you find people (based on more than last name look up), but then also gave you the toos to connect with them, either via the content they've shared or the connections they have with others.

This branding eased the transition for those who didn't think Facebook or MySpace were appropriate for work.  Linking its equity to a tried and true solution will definitely ease our transition.

Ours is called Matrix (not "the Matrix") and per Ted's comment the name was not put up for debate or vote from users after the launch of the tool. It was the name the impelementation team chose and while our exec sponsors could have nixed the name we also didn't ask for their approval/sign-off on the name either.

Chosing a vendor-agnostic and product-agnostic name also came in handy when Clearspace was rebranded to Jive SBS earlier this year...

We aren't a customer yet but so far we are calling out POC Life Line (company name is Life Technologies)

We have an internal naming system for our apps, in case we want to swap vendors or vendors swap names (SBS...).

We call our ERP system i:Manage, we call our help desk ticketing app i:Support, etc. So we had to come up with a one word name to follow i:

Gia didn't like this much; nor did she really like what we lit upon. The implementation team didn't have to clear it with anyone, though there was the possibility that senior mgmt would overrule it.

We thought of i:Share, i:Collaborate, i:Work, and a few others, rejecting them for one reason or another. We settled on i:Connect; it implies networking and is just vague enough to be inclusive of both social networking and collaboration. The name has caught on quickly and has been positively received. We've been kicking around some ideas for visually reinforcing the theme within SBS, and our move (today!) to 4.0 will make this easier to implement with updated layouts and widget options.

We call our internal community NetApp Live.  We are looking to change the label "community" and the new, even more meaningless for managers, Spaces, to a term that matches a current corporate goal.  We want to make sure using communities as a tool to support and accomplish an important goal provides the hook.

Mike

LOL!  Gia, you crack me up.

I think we're sticking with our well known intranet name:  Main Street

I ran a poll to see if employees thought we should change it to reflect the new collaborative nature.

Here's what we got >>