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Enterprise 2.0 Featured Articles

ROI as ‘Risk of Ignoring’

I rather liked Mediaphyter, aka Jennifer Leggio’s blog in ZDNET yesterday, 10 Fortune 500 companies doing social media right.Here, she lists out comments from the movers and shakers in 10 American giants. My favourite quote is from Polly Pearson (no relation) of EMC:

“I tend to think of ROI in this case as “Risk of Ignoring.”  If you are a high tech company that prides itself on innovation, being responsive to customers and providing its employees the freedom of a start up with the brand strength of an industry leader, are you supporting that identity by avoiding social media?  I believe the real measure will be in opportunity lost.”
Polly Pearson, vice president of employment brand and strategy

While there’s a long term consensus amongst the bloggers that says ‘avoiding 2.0 = business loss’ it’s interesting to see this chime with comments from within the big corporations. And OK, so whilst EMC have some very large offices down the road from where I live, I wonder how long it will be before we can see a FTSE 100 list with the top half dozen, and I also wonder which industry sectors we will see them in.

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Enterprise 2.0

Google is after SharePoint

Another interesting move from Google spotted here by Rob Diana http://regulargeek.com/2009/09/27/google-sites-goes-after-enterprise-collaboration/ and following on from my points about their desktop notification API as an internal comms engine: http://theparallaxview.com/2009/09/google-internal-comms/

As Dion Hinchcliffe tweeted they’ve got some way to go but a clearer picture of their longer term strategy is getting a lot less fuzzy. In the long run, Google are after the market space of SharePoint

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Enterprise 2.0

Has Enterprise 2.0 ever gone really badly wrong?

I liked Dion Hinchcliffe’s response to Andrew McAfee ‘s prognosis of revolutionaries in the body politic of the corporation. Dion urges caution arguing that:

Nevertheless there are control issues that can emerge as departmental, project, and organizational barriers intentionally become more porous, information flows increase, and control can be accidentally or intentionally usurped — for better or worse — by whomever is willing to work together and collaborate.
Going beyond the hype: Identifying Enterprise 2.0 best practices

This has got me wondering. Are there any nightmare, absolutely lost control again scenarios of Enterprise 2.0 going seriously wrong? I can think of plenty of social media marketing type ones, plenty of corporate own goals and disasters there. But E 2.0 – what’s the worst it has ever got?

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General

D’Oh!!! Comments – Open!

D’oh, unbeknown to me the Discussion settings on this blog had been set to ‘Require Login’. I’ve now deselected this so all comments welcome. Well OK, all nice comments welcome! 😉

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Featured Articles

Who will buy Adobe?

A lot of waffle today on the wires and especially on Twitter about Adobe acquiring Omniture. But I wonder who will acquire Adobe?

This is the Battle of the Cloud. And these are the 3 contenders:

1) Microsoft – ‘we own the software and the operating system’

2) Cisco – ‘we own the network and want that to be the operating system’

3) Google – ‘we own you online and you will be the operating system’

Adobe are small fry in this fray. Who will buy Adobe?

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Enterprise 2.0 Featured Articles Intranet

Intranet Bounce Rate

Of late I’ve been spending some time looking at the Intranet Bounce Rate on an enterprise social media project I’m working on for a large multinational. And by Bounce Rate, (rather than Intranet Bounce Rate), I’ll take the definition found on Wikipedia today:

It essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.
The formula used to calculate bounce rate is: Bounce Rate = Total Number of Visits Viewing One Page ÷ Total Number of Visits

The metrics produced by Google Analytics look quite good to me, at least bythe usual  industry standards:

Bounce Rate

As the Wikipedia article cites, this is very good indeed:

Google.com analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik has stated:
“It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.”

But is this good for an intranet bounce rate, or enterprise social network site? A high bounce rate on a large corporate intranet might mean that users are happiest when they bounce away quickly as they’ve found what they want. Here high Bounce Rate = Good? On an enterprise social network site, well what does intranet bounce rate really mean?

Both Bing and Google offer nothing on this that I could see. Indeed when I search for ‘Intranet Bounce Rate’ on Google, it kindly asks – ‘Did you mean Internet? ‘!!

p.s. One interesting point – Saturdays generate the high spikes.  Why?

p.p.s. Some excellent resources from my old colleague at Derby Uni, Dr Dave Chaffey to mull on. Bounce rates in Web design articles

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Analysts Enterprise 2.0

McKinsey: 75% say Integration = E2.0 Success

An interesting report from McKinsey Quarterly How companies are benefiting from Web 2.0: McKinsey Global Survey Results(requires free registration). Enterprise 2.0 benefits most seen in $1Bn + companies and with companies in India and North America claiming the most benefits. Companies that are most networked and showing the most network benefits with time to market, knowledge management and employee satisfaction coming through as top benefits and some claim, increased revenue.

One of the most striking finds in the global survey was the unanimity that 2.0 works best when integrated into the workflow:

See also Bertrand Dupperin’s blog on this report.

Categories
Communications Featured Articles

PushmePullYou Comms

And following on from my post on Google’s potential internal comms engine, the question here is push and pull. Users, those consuming information want to have information pushed at them (broadcast) and pulled by them, (selected and chosen).  Those sending information want to broadcast, to propagate their ideas, to propagandise.

The broadcaster wants to know that their message has been delivered, even if to deaf ears. A broadcaster can be happy knowing that the leaflet is disappearing into 10,000 recycling bins. It’s the shout mentality. Send more, speak louder, make more hullaballoo and some will get through.

Of course the problem inside the corporation is that we have a captive audience. That audience doesn’t want to be deluged. They want to be kept informed and to choose. They want this as easliy as possible. They want PushmePullYouComms.

Over-egg a Desktop Notification system, send too many e-mails, even fire up too many RSS feeds and the audience is lost.

So how to achieve the mix, how to create a PushMePullYou Comms structure? Two things are needed I believe. One is an effective internal comms system with a central point of truth that is able to stay independent of PR and HR (both will sway the message). The second is social media. Only if the comms ecosystem can be filtered through a social medium will the balance be made.

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Communications Featured Articles

Google Internal Comms Machine?

Who noticed Google’s new ‘Google Internal Comms Machine’ announcement last week? No, we’re not talking about Wave this is far more fun. Google announced news of its Desktop Notifcations API.

Now for many many years I managed something ultimately very similar, (albeit with video) which needed very strong governance to work. Problem was these notifications could be bloody annoying. Net result was that around 20% of users switched them off (aka sabotaging their desktop image).

Nonetheless, around 50% saw the notifications we sent and about 35-40% watched the videos. This left a very grey areas of those not seeing the notifications. What was happening?

The word on the ground was system failure – or ‘sabotage’, the messages weren’t getting through. In reality thought they were. The truth was that people weren’t interested enough to watch the exec videos but were too wise or embarrassed to say so.

Which takes me back to Google. If their Desktop Notification isn’t going to go the way of Microsoft’s very helpful Mr Paperclip it will need very strong management from whoever uses it to send the notifications.

Who/How will that be managed? Have Google even thought about this? One wonders and waits…

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Enterprise 2.0 Featured Articles

The sweet data of Enterprise 2.0 success?

I for one, have thoroughly enjoyed the argy bargy over why Enterprise 2.0 projects fail and whether it’s a crock or not, plus the risks of not doing anything at all. What’s absent from all this is that interminable and incorrigible bogeyman, Mr. Hard Data, who cries. “Show me the money, or lack thereof.”

The debate is about analysis and perception, but what if (as some actually has done) someone says well actually yes, I’d like to see the money, or at least some real hard data. Anecdotes are not enough and while there might be shrill cries if the whole thang were turned off “may be valid, but a bit cute and begs question of against what.”

So let’s step back and look at what we might be aiming for. Here’s Mike Gotta on the imperatives:

•  We need to connect people globally.

•  We need to address generational shifts.

•  We need to break down barriers.

•  We need to “know what we know.”

•  We need to collaborate better.

•  We need to innovate from the bottom up.

•  We need to learn differently.

How can we apply hard data to any of these? Can we apply indices or benchmarks on collaboration and innovation such as the sociality of the networks and new widgets leaving the factory gates as a result. Maybe, but where are the numbers, and real numbers at that, not internal anecdotal ones?

Now I recall on a previous project discussing the absence of decent metrics for a wide range of comms tools in an organisation that ranged from none to completely pukka to hideously complex. The task of getting anything meaningful from the morass seemed a complete conundrum.

I discussed this with someone who had no insight into the specifics of online comms tools but a great deal to say on marketing comms and metrics. Her point was simple in the absence of decent metrics or data, don’t give up or try to boil the ocean, but start from somewhere, even if it doesn’t even begin to really address the issues.

With that aim in mind I’m going to start to throw some ideas into the pan in my next blogs on Enterprise 2.0 success factors and metrics.