The 2.0 Adoption Council and MIT’s Center for Digital Business will be co-producing a series of case studies that explore the modern dynamics driving the 2.0 phenomenon in a sampling of large enterprises. We’ve identified the following themes that are present in most initiatives:
* Innovation: Leveraging collaboration and social activity to spur discovery, idea generation, and breakthroughs for the organization or customers
* Time-to-Market: Accelerating the time to bring products/services to market by collapsing artificial silos/boundaries and time zones
* Cultural Reinvention: Using the philosophies of 2.0 to reshape the organizational DNA, embracing transparency, collaboration, trust, and authenticity
* Visibility: To provide a real-time view into operations and business process by connecting people and ideas.
* Cost Reduction: Substituting more agile, lightweight tools for connecting and sharing that are easier to manage and significantly reduce operational cost.
* Knowledge-sharing: Harvesting institutional knowledge of the enterprise for the purposes of retaining it, exposing it and providing easy access to it.
* Expertise location: Indexing and surfacing hidden and known talent in the Enterprise.
* Productivity improvement: Providing socio-collaborative tools to the workforce for measurable gains in productivity.
* Talent Retention: Providing tools that add to workplace satisfaction and positive employee work experience, especially germane to retaining GenX and GenY talent.
Gautam’s post also has implications for how we think about designing communities in general. Basically, Gautam says that communities can be designed to enable four types of communication:
1. From few to many: Blogs
2. From many to few: Ideation platforms
3. Between few: Wikis
4. Between many: Forums and social networks
It’s easy to see that the relationship between the host company and the community members is dramatically different in these four contexts and the choice of a platform will define (and limit) the relationship. It is true for employee communities, but it is also true for customer and partner communities. Fascinating.
Larry Hawes (@lehawes) wonders what is the right balance between simplicity and functionality for enterprise micro-blogging tools:
Early adopters of web 2.0 software in the enterprise appear to value simplicity in software they use. However… that may not be true for later, mainstream adopters… Having adequate features to enable effective, efficient usage is also necessary to achieve significant adoption. Later adopters need to see that a tool can help them in a significant way before they will begin to use it.
Alan Cooper in ‘About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design’ says that all users start as beginners, then become perpetual intermediates, while only a few become experts. So, software should be designed to quickly convert beginners into intermediates, but also provide for hidden-away high-end functionality for experts.
In the context of enterprise 2.0 software, it means that tools like Socialtext or Salesforce Chatter, which introduce users to collaborative software through easy-to-use activity stream features, but quickly move on to more advanced functionality, will win over Yammer, which is too simple, or traditional enterprise software, which is too complicated. Your thoughts?
My colleague Gautam Ghosh (@gautamghosh) on rewarding employee contributions in enterprise communities –
Behaviors like sharing and collaboration are organizational citizenship behaviors – and are a product of employee’s engagement with the organization. This discretionary effort is not like one’s work behavior – and needs to be rewarded not monetarily – but psychologically.
Psychological rewards will impact only a very few of employees, and that is okay. Highly engaged employees who would indulge in organizational citizenship behaviors follows the power law – much like social networks’ law. In that a minority will create and curate the majority of the content.
I mostly agree with Gautam. However, the problem with assuming the 1:9:90 rule (that only 1% of the community members will create most of the content, only 9% will curate it, and the rest will be lurkers) in enterprise communities, and especially employee communities, is that such emergence doens’t scale in a team of 15, 50, or 500. So, the challenge in enterprise communities is to turn the 1:9:90 rule into something like 10:20:70. Your thoughts?
The primary way in which pilots projects will become visible to other people the organization and adapted to new issues is through the personal networks of the pilot team members. Strong personal networks within organizations emerge through both personality, organizational role, and work history (e.g. having worked in multiple divisions or locations). In most organizations networks are fairly strongly correlated to longevity in the organization, meaning that recent recruits are unlikely to have strong personal networks.
Two weeks ago on TechCrunch I posted “The Facebook Imperative,” which posed a simple question, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” It was the next iteration of the question I asked in 1999 that spawned salesforce.com, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com.” If you have read my book, Behind The Cloud, you are well aware how that one question launched a company, and a movement.
I agree with Marc Benioff that enterprise 2.0 needs to become people-centric, instead of being document-centric or task-centric. I also agree that Salesforce Chatter is likely to be a big driver of this shift.
Companies should create a “Mayor” concept for the company where enterprising employees earn the right to become departmental or functional Mayors.
In other words, create content or knowledge experts that are socially elected by their peers based on the frequency and quality of the knowledge shared.
So in addition to expert search, you create an environment where experts self-proclaim – motivated by social recognition.
In my interviews, I talk about how the social media marketing scene in India is maturing –
:: Tell us about the use of social media by businesses in India.
About 5% of Indians have access to the Internet and 35-40% have access to mobile services. These numbers may seem small but actually it means 30 million users. For several businesses such as Pepsi and Reebok these 30 million internet users are sufficient because they are urban, educated, and upwardly mobile. For other business this number is not enough. Eventually we need to analyze who the target audience are for businesses. Hence, not everyone needs or wants to use social media at the moment. Further down the line, this might change.
:: Could you give us a brief comparison between the Indian and the U.S. market? Read More
Gaurav and Gautam collaboratively wrote this blog post on a wiki. This is the first in the series of blog posts where we will explore how social technologies, when used effectively within the organization, can create significant business value for Indian firms.
A TYPICAL CONVERSATION
Ever since Gautam joined 2020 Social three weeks back, we have had several interesting conversations with Indian firms of all shapes and sizes on how to use social technologies within the workplace.
The typical conversation starts when someone fills the “Ask Us How” form on our website: “I am excited by the possibilities of using social technologies within our company and want to explore what these technologies can really help us with.”
During initial discussions with Gautam, it becomes clear that the client faces a business problem, but she is not able to make the connection between how “the business being social” will help her solve her problem.
In the first post in this series, we have outlined three typical business problems several Indian firms are struggling with. In the next three posts, written over the next week, we will share scenarios for how social technologies can be a part of the solution. Read More
I have a big announcement to make: Gautam Ghosh has joined 2020 Social to build the enterprise side of our Social Business Strategy practice. Gautam will join Dave, Upasana and myself in the core 2020 Social consulting team.
2020 Social is presently working with clients to leverage social technologies to achieve five types of strategic business objectives — increase revenue, decrease cost, design better products and processes, enable stronger relationships and increase productivity.
Instead of focusing on specific tools and technologies, we use a structured methodology to tap into the power of the five underlying value systems embedded in social technologies — user generated content, conversations, collaboration, community and collective intelligence.
Finally, we architect effective solutions in the form of community platforms, social applications, social commerce marketplaces, social CRM programs and enterprise collaboration programs.
Gautam will use his organizational development experience to help our clients think about the organizational culture and governance aspects of using social technologies. Specifically, here are the three questions Gautam will be working on –
1. What are the new challenges face by the customer-facing functions in the organization (sales, marketing, product and customer support) when the boundaries between employees, partners and consumers blur? How do organizations respond to these challenges? Read More
Slide 1: The ideas in this presentation will form the core of my first fellowship paper. So, if you understand micro-finance, or ICT4D, better than I do, do share your feedback with me. I’ll be grateful.
Slide 2: I see the development process as an hourglass. At the top of the ‘development hourglass’ are the more privileged societies and the challenge here is to build engagement in the development process. At the bottom of the ‘development hourglass’ are the less privileged societies and the challenge here is to enable access to the development process. The challenge in the middle of the ‘development hourglass’ is to connect the top with the bottom via an institutional infrastructure and enable flow, a role that has been traditionally performed by development aid agencies.
Slide 3: Technology can be a vital enabler in the technology hourglass. Web 2.0 and mobile 2.0 tools can help create engagement in the more privileged societies. Community telecenters and mobile phones can help enable access in the less privileged societies. Enterprise ICT and enterprise 2.0 solutions can help the institutions in the middle connect the top to the bottom in a more effective and efficient manner. Read More
Some, like Gaurav Mishra, the Indica brand head, use their personal brand – created over years of blogging – to promote the brand they work for. “My blog benefits because my real-life experience gives credibility to my posts, and my offline avatar benefits because my online presence makes it possible to meet and build an impression on people who wouldn’t have known of me otherwise.” Lately, Mishra has promoted a new ad campaign for his brand on his blog and Facebook account.
A serious concern for employers could be what their employees say publicly on such sites. Says Mishra, “I ensure that my entire web presence is squeaky clean so that even if I put it on my resume, it can hold up to close scrutiny.” Read More
I build and nurture online communities as CEO of 2020 Social. In my previous avatars, I have studied at IIM Bangalore, held senior marketing roles at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University as the 2008-09 Yahoo! Fellow, and co-founded election monitoring platform Vote Report India.
3. Ask me how2020 Social can help you build and nurture online communities to connect your customers, partners and employees, catalyze collaboration and innovation, and drive loyalty and advocacy.
