How did you brand your internal social enterprise solution? What words did you use to describe it to employees? I know that the word "social" is a negative in many organizations, so I'm interested to learn what language, what brand, worked for you, and why, if possible.
You are going to hit us all up for are secrets...lol. I know the term internal collaboration goes over pretty good.
We branded ours EMC|ONE
ONE was an acronym -- the "online network of EMC'ers". The context is important though -- our senior management was selling the idea of "one EMC" -- one company, one set of goals, etc ... we did not try too hard to over-brand, though -- we wanted it to appear safe, predictable, legitimate, etc.
Worked well for us.
Thanks John! I have customers who are really focusing on the social networking aspects, though, which in many cases, is a precusor to effective collaboration. Also, I'm really, really, really tired of that word. :) But hey, if it works, it works.
Chuck, you said the magic words: "senior management was selling the idea of..."
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.
That is a question we are working on right now. We had a solution for CoPs called one thing (MindShare) and called the forums tool from Jive (JDForums) so now we are combining both of these into one enterprise collaboration tool, which will be used for several purposes. We want people to be able to identify the tool, but not by the name (e.g. Clearspace) or not be confused by the old brand (MindShare). I am meeting with our Corporate Branding deparment to get some ideas.
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"
Where I used to work, outside of the main portal, certain subcomponents tended to just be called by the name of the product...Sharepoint parts were "Sharepoint". That gets confusing when a vendor changes the name of their product though (Quickplace, Team Workspace, Quickplace, Quikr).
At Corporate, The collab stuff isn't running anything Jive and tends to be called ShareCenter and there's a MediaWiki-based wiki called ourWiki. I think they're still working on a more cohesive system since it's a little disjointed but I don't have anything to do with the workings of it so it's only my opinion.
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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.
The trial I set up for Clearspace at work I called "thoughtpool" - the idea being to convey the sense of a place for sharing ideas and thinking, AND to get away from the technical solution that was currently selected. The intranet is also branded as "Thirst Online" (Thirst being the dead-tree employee publication, and us being a drinks company).
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.
Sounds like a wiki! Are their any social networking capabilities? In my opinion, those are more aligned to my idea of a social enterprise. Admittedly, this phrase is lame, and it's fruitless to try to shove what is really a culture description into two words. When I think "social" I think "make it easy for people to find each other and their content, and create trusted relationships with one another"... KM, to me, is more about "make it easy for me to find the content of subject experts, whoever they may be, and I might not necessarily want to create a relationship with them."
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 are an association of airports. Ours is called The Airport Link (the Link for short). Basically it was the first name we came up with that my boss didn't change his mind on right away.
Ha, that's hilarious! By the way, do you like to be referred to as Daniel-Robert, or something else?
Hello Gia,
You question includes the adjective "internal" but if you are also interested in "external" (i.e. community for channel partners) then I am happy to share. In our case (Intel Channel Partner Program) we came up with the simple name of "Chanel Voice". The implication, in this case is that the channel partners already know they have exclusive access to this "private" (SSO entitled) community. So the real value is in the use of the word "voice". Of course, the implication is that the channel partner (of which we have 200k) will have a "voice" in this community. Thus the brand promise (essentially) is that "we want to hear you, and talk with you and share"--so to speak. As many of us know, customers have been very frustated with the 'one way" nature of corporate web sites and often the extreme difficulting "to be heard". In many case "contact us" information is buried or un-responsive. So, the community is an attempt to bring back the "two way" nature of a business "relationship" with our valued channel partners.
That said, we are also creating many smaller "private business communities" all of which could include a literal and descriptive name that sits within the larger "Community Voice". As it turns out, we have found tremendous value in creating small private communities for small partner segments that can share with each other and with Intel.
So ultimately the main brand name is Channel Voice but we will continue to add small sub communities (private business communities) for specfic partner types to ensure they have the tools they need to succeed in business.
Hope this helps a bit.
Scott
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.
We're about 6 months into our Clearspace implementation, and our branding is still evolving. I can tell you that I really really wanted a clever, catchy and intuitively obvious name... and I failed on all three counts to get what I want. For whatever reason, people predominantly called it "the wiki" and after a while it was like spitting into the wind to try to name it something else. So, my advice to others is, pick a name before the masses pick one for you!! Or you'll be stuck with the lowest common denominator
(Yeah, yeah, I know, Clearspace is much more than a wiki... and no one cares, it's just the wiki.)
I am trying to come up with a clever, catchy and intuitively obvious tagline and logo, though. I don't give up easily! We've got a contest going for both and have invited people to submit their ideas. So many creative and appealing options that I'm not sure how we'll settle on just one. Maybe we'll rotate through different taglines and logos... for "the wiki."
Pure dead brilliant. I LOVE "Oomph" - using this next week as an example during one of my workshops with a UK-based client.
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