A couple of posts caught my eye this week, both on the consumer web, specifically Facebook and each all about business performance and the bottom line. From Forbes we had Here’s Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years and from WSJ The Big Doubt Over Facebook.

The latter article went over some old ground namely, does Facebook actually deliver its bang for bucks or as WPP’s* Sir Martin Sorrell put it:

“..clients, for the very first time, are starting to question the measurement issue” [on social media.] “The area is a very sexy area, and clients have gone in almost willy-nilly, because it’s fashionable to do so,” But now that such ad spending has ramped up, he said finance departments “are increasingly starting to look at the value of those investments.”

Time on this will tell. Which takes me neatly to the Forbes piece. In sum, given the pace of change, it asks if the giants of Google and Facebook be around in five years time, or will they be gone in the sense of MySpace gone?

Anyone who has read In Search of Stupidity knows that this isn’t a stupid question to ask. The Road to Hell is filmed with a Kodak.

But then, what of the Enterprise Social Market? Or put another way, which of them is currently selling the equivalent of dBase? Or perhaps more pertinently, what would a newcomer need to completely disrupt and dominate this market? If we look at the Forbes piece, the argument there is that there have been 3 generations of consumer web tech

• Web 1.0 (companies founded from 1994 – 2001, including Netscape, Yahoo! (YHOO), AOL (AOL), Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY)),
• Web 2.0 or Social (companies founded from 2002 – 2009, including Facebook (FB), LinkedIn (LNKD), and Groupon(GRPN)),
• and now Mobile (from 2010 – present, including Instagram).

And here’s the punch line:

With each succeeding generation in tech, it seems the prior generation can’t quite wrap its head around the subtle changes that the next generation brings.

Thus there’s no ‘Web 3.0’ the web is no more and as example, Instagram simply side-stepped the web and went directly to the mobile app. Now if, and I grant it’s an if, the enterprise social world follows the wake of the consumer ‘web’ does this mean that the next generation of Enterprise 2.0/Social Business vendors should do the same and jump right into mobile and ignore the intranet? My answer is not necessarily, but I think Forbes puts the finger on the salient point, in order to win in these changing markets, new paradigms need to be invented, not old ones re-made. But while consumerland tech might be a fresh new ‘greenfield’ in which fortunes are to be made for those who reinvent it, is this the same for it’s industrial buddy, that of E2.0?

To my mind the market is still wide open, but the starting stakes are much much higher. There are no E2.0 Instagrams, though there’s plenty of wannabees. Jive Software, the leaders at least in terms of waves and magic quadrants has an IPO that is far more modest than those mouth watering offerings of Consumer. To sell in the industrial market takes clout, real clout not spelled with a K. The old caveat about no one ever losing their job for buying IBM still holds in social business – IBM’s Connections works and they have massive industrial back-up to support it.

And yet and yet, the market is still wide open. It’s wide open to those who can simultaneously re-invent the paradigm ‘E2.0’, support it, their customers (and at an industrial level) and themselves and their employees. No easy task and I’ve no idea what sums are needed here, logistically or financially. Added to that the innate conservatism of many businesses (the cause of many a downfall in itself) – the traditional intranet and Internet Explorer are not going to be replaced that quickly for example.

Or will they? Maybe the paradigm shift we’re going to see in how we work is the end of the Office, it’s structures, nineteenth century politics and its desks. Those lines of desks – in Victorian rows or postmodern chaos, are still an old paradigm.

Or maybe something very different, the black swan. My gut feels is tech around flows, streams and activities that are sticky to both the activities and where a person is. So Mobile yes, most likely, but mobile in the sense of mobile devices, mobile work flows and mobile people. What this means are flows of activities that move with the worker. Streams that can be stuck onto specific activities and that move when the work, people or flows change.

Flows, streams, exchange – liquid collaboration.

‘sticky streams’. You heard it here 1st.

* Disclaimer – I’m contracting at one of their companies, all thoughts my own.

The Intranet that’s Social

Of late I’ve been spending far too much time than is healthy in some of the nitty gritty issues of a tactical deep dive with no less than 5 separate Jive Software installs and how they all connect with Active Directory, LDAP, synchronisation, permission structures, and the like. Added to this are topical projections on how to bridge them, create walled gardens, secure shared extranets and to connect to SharePoint, 2007 and 2010. And running along side this are mobile devices – iPhone, Blackberries, iPads and the like, integrating Outlook into the social layer and with these mobile gadgets, and synching it all with the Office suite.

Coming back up for air some thoughts come to mind.

1) The social intranet isn’t so much a social intranet, it’s an intranet that’s social. By this I mean the each of the data structures connecting to each other represent a sociality of things to which people engage at certain points.

2) An enterprise social network is aint nothing but a database with a nice GUI on top, with which people engage – they they engage with each other via the sociality of the things – Jive, AD, Outlook etc.

3) The mobile devices both fragment and unify the system

4) Microsoft holds it all together in the form of Active Directory (and that’s a lot of enterprises)

5) Rick is inherent and the only way of dealing with this is a flexible yet resolute approach

6) We live in interesting times…

All told though – what we’re creating, using, evolving and evolving with is a fluid layered and yet structured aggregation. And of course what I’m describing here is a mere technical layer, a schemata. What’s really interesting is not how this connects together, nor even how people connect together and with it. What’s really important is what they produce because of it, the physical, practical outputs it enables and engenders.

And what’s fun is this, we don’t know what that outcome might finally be…

I keep on seeing e-mails, they’re nearly always e-mails though one was a DM on a central Jive site, for a ‘space’. We need a space, can we have a space, we need some where…In all of these instances the desire is for a geography, a terrain, a sense of place. ‘My team needs somewhere to live’, they seem to say, can you make us a clearing in which we can build a site?

It reminds me somewhat of a vague memory of Martin Heidegger’s clearing in the forest where the density without needs an opening and thus an abundance of light. I think Heidegger may have been harping on about meaning. But then there was also the paths in the forest. Perhaps we call these streams, streams of activities.

And it’s these activities that are more important. Rarely do I see requests for an activity, ‘we want some activities’, ‘we want some action’, ‘we want to act’. These of course are the most important.

At the top of one of the 5 Jive sites I’m working on at the moment someone, the community manager no doubt though I haven’t checked who, has posted an announcement. This says simply: ‘This is not a document store’. This encapsulates entirely what is changing here.

There’s a shift, tectonic maybe, from working with a store of documents, to people engaging together with each other and these documents. Most people when they encounter these new forms don’t realise this, they want spaces, and sub spaces and even more subspaces. They then get so lost in the resultant labyrinth that no one bothers to find them, there is no activity.

If on the other hand, the focus is on the activity and not on the store, this simply does not happen. The need therefore is to start not with structure, architecture and taxonomy but with a structural folksonomy created by users’ actions. This of course marks the end of what to now has been known as the intranet.

The Strange Death of Liberal England,

George Dangerfield, 1935.

One of the things I’m quite often asked for is the answer to ‘what makes a social business / Enterprise 2.0 project a success?’ What the questioner is after, is often at heart what they need to do to make their project a success. In many ways there’s no definitive answer here as each social project needs to be approached, managed, evangelised and generally nurtured into being in different ways. I’m seeing this in no small way on my current engagement where I’m helping do all the above to no less than five fully-loaded Jive sites.

The diversity of this engagement is stimulating and it has also gotten me thinking about what the success factors might be to really make things rock. Or put another way: what do you really need in place and what do you need to do, to make a social business project a success?

What follows is an outline of some of these elements. One caveat: I’ve worked on too many projects where one or more of the fundamentals are not in place and so while such an absence doesn’t preclude success, it does make it that more harder to achieve. So the motto here is, don’t lose heart if you don’t have all of the below, they’re not all essential. And excuse the overlaps…

Infrastructure

1)  Use the right social platform. This will vary from environment to environment but select the one that works best for your existing architecture and processes, but also one that can help reinvent both. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and Forrester’s Wave are good enough places to start to review the options. And don’t just go along with what Comms/IT/Marketing (delete as applicable) say is best – do your homework.

2) Pray for a good network. If your employees aren’t all online, with decent PCs and good connections then your work is going to be harder. Not necessarily a bad thing, so long as you’ve innovative minds on your side.

3) Fully Funded. Most projects I’ve worked on have been strapped for cash. Having the budgets in place to support the project is very helpful.

4) Fully Supported. It’s a lot easier when IT support the project and buy into the social idea. (See below too).

Culture

1) Leadership. Get your leaders on board – get visible support, get them seen using it and spelling out where Social fits into the scheme of things.

2) Middle Managers. Get your middle managers on board. This is vital – they can and will spanner the entire project!

3) Ducks in a row. If Comms don’t already own it, make sure they’re fully synched in. Ditto with HR and Marketing. Get the 4 ducks of Comms, IT, HR and Marketing in a row.

4) Digital People. A digitally savvy, socially aware workforce is a big plus – even if they’re currently disengaged and fed up with the company as a whole.

Engagement

1) Engagement Strategy. Decide on how to engage with people. Map it out.

2) Dialogue. Always aim for conversation – this is 2-way

3) Business. Align the social engagement strategy to the business strategy – focus on the what matters most targets & aims.

4) Pleasure Principle. Doing business doesn’t have to be painful, leverage the fun side of social.

Planning

1) Share the ideas. Have a clear & shared plan.

2) Plan for Success. Decide what success looks like up front.

3) Measure it! Decide on how to measure success up front.

4) Milestones. Create aims and milestones.

5) Monitor it. Review at regular intervals, listen to what people are saying, ask them what they think.

Leaders, Champions & Users

1) Tell your leaders. Get your leadership team on board

2) Find your friends. Identify champions, get them promoting social

3) Create a Champions Group. Create a social Group to support your champions

4) Create a Comms Plan for your Users: who, where, when & with what channels

5) Training. Decide on how your audience will be trained & supported

Activities

1) Activities. Decide on a series of engaging events, projects & initiatives.

2) Gamification. Make the activities game-based, for example, blogger of the month, best video, most creative Group.

3) Challenge. Think of ways to challenge the users to channel their creativity.

4) Timeline. Create a roadmap of the activities with a supporting comms plan.

Make it Personal

1) People. Feature people at al times – a picture of one person is worth a 1000 docs.

2) Video. Moving pictures is what makes social, really social, bringing it to life – people like videos, use them often and widely.

3) Success. Celebrate success, show people what people & teams are doing.

Make it Practical

1) Day work. Provide practical examples of how social can be used in everyday work

2) Crowd Source. Show how other people are using social tools in their daily work

3) Structure. If there’s a best practice, make a structure or template that others can use

4) Create User Cases. For example, Projects, Meetings & Conferences, Pitches, Multi-Location Teams etc

Make it Aspirational

Think Big!

If you don’t think big, don’t worry – you teams may do it for you…

Pulling it all together

As I think pictorially, this is how it all looks as a diagram. Get the foundations in place. Work from that. Always think outside the structure by thinking beyond what’s really possible…