Dilbert on the Social Intranet…
Note the date, June 2000. About ready for an update methinks…I’ve asked ’em for an update on Enterprise 2.0 – let’s see if Scott Adams comes up trumps
Category: Featured Articles
Gallery 3 in a collection of presentations and videos from some of the best E 2.0 minds, I collected together for a project at work. Now shared with a wider audience.
Previous: Social Business Gallery #2: Enterprise 2.0 Demystified & more…
Next: Social Business Gallery #4: Success & Struggles @ UBM & more…
A great Preso from Susan Scrupski @itsinsider to start off this Social Business / E 2.0 Gallery.
Relish!
Russell
Zero to 60: Social Media Strategy via Ford [Keynote – OMMA Global 2009]
View more presentations from Scott Monty.
Enterprise 2.0 : Leveraging collaboration platforms to foster knowledge, innovation and productivity
View more presentations from Cecil Dijoux.
Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet)
View more presentations from David Gillespie.
These are a collection of really informative presos and videos I pulled together for a project at work, now sharing with a wider audience. There are some fine 2.0 minds out there!
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Social Business Gallery #1
This is the first in a collection of social business software galleries I collected together for a project I’ve been working on for the last 17 months or so. I finish in a couple of weeks and thought it would be useful to share with a wider audience. My selection criteria is simple – the presos and films are fun and educational.
Enjoy!
Russell
A collection of Social Software Videos and Presentation #1
Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.
We Think
How will you manage?
More to follow…
An interesting document has come my way from IDC, “Determining the Value of Social Business ROI: Myths, Facts, and Potentially High Returns“. To my mind, the report provides a simple and elegant way of measuring ROI in real terms, it highlights a very important principle of unified social strategy and spells out even more potential gains when we look at the broader picture.
How to calculate the ROI of E2.0
To business: the report points to the way of precisely calculating the ROI of social business or Enterprise 2.0 projects. It does this by debunking a couple of myths, basically fluffy measurements where ROI becomes ‘return on impact’ and the like; and concentrates on the ‘brass tacks’:
“To calculate ROI, in its simplest terms, means that companies must have more money coming in than money being spent on something…[] ROI compares gains with costs and it relates very specifically to money.”
This of course is the literally the bottom line, tangible results in the accounts. So how do they think this can be measured? Leaving aside their arguments on Cashflow Analysis and Net Present Value, they see Social Business gains in the following areas:
- Sales Revenue
- Customer Insights
- Brand Protection
- Lead Generation
- Call Center Operations
For all these gains, IDC details how they would be generated, for example sales revenue is increased by ‘accelerated customer acquisition rates and decreased customer churn’; customer insights leads enables the company to ‘leverage real-time insights to accelerate product development, messaging, and go-to-market strategy’ and lead generation gains are seen in the ‘lower cost of lead acquisition through less expensive social channels’.
Against these, they detail the costs as follows:
- People
- Technology
These costs are straightforward, the people needed to run the projects, cost of software and hosting from Microsoft, Jive or whoever…
The ROI is therefore calculated by subtracting the costs from the gains and IDC provide and example that pumps out a 561% gain. To the skeptical, I can best advise read the report in full, I have obviously and by necessity simplified here.
A Unified Social Strategy
Earlier on I mentioned a key principle of a unified social strategy, let me spell this out if I may. IDC see internal social business practices completely in synch with external social media activities. The gains we see, are in the dialectical play between the two spheres, for example, customer insights provide a better service at a cheaper cost, which means the production of better products, morre aligned to customer needs. We can extend this out further and look at the potential for even more gains. How so?
Articulating the Brand
Well if we look at the brand, IDC see the gains in protecting the brand. They see social business software working to help limit the brand damage in an incident of whatever magnitude. I think there’s more here however. For me this is how social software can work in concert with internal communications initiatives. I may be a little radical here but I see internal communications as about articulating the brand internally, about making the brand something real and worthwhile for employees.
The importance of social business’ role here was shown for me at least in a recent Forrester report, Do Your Employees Advocate For Your Company? What was noteworthy here was the finding that where social business software was present the percentage of employees promoting or detracting the company
With Social Business: 48% promoters / 22% detractors
No Social Business: 31% promoters / 45% detractors
Getting employees engaged and aligned to the company goals is for many internal comms people a number one goal. This is also something that is measurable to the extent it too can be quantified to the bottom line. It is also pivotal to the brand, even more so if we think in terms of damage limitation. If something bad happens and 45% of the employees are cheesed off with the company they are not likely to be brand ambassadors…
In Conclusion
I liked this report for showing in simple and concrete ways how the ROI of our social business efforts can be measured. It also points to a holistic way of managing both sides of the social equation. It achieves this well and provides the foundation for going far deeper and to genuinely quantify how.
Update 1st Dec: checkout this great article on SocialCast’s site: http://blog.socialcast.com/how-to-calculate-the-roi-of-enterprise-2-0/
See also my blog on UBM and their ROI on social business / E 2.0 http://theparallaxview.com/2010/03/ubm-case-study-shows-cash-benefits-social-software/
A recent discussion and I was asked 3 questions on social media at work (enterprise social software).
- Is social media a communications tool?
- Are Communication and Collaboration the same thing?
- Does social media benefit from a network effect?
I think that these questions identify where one stands on the topic – pro or against using social media inside the firewall. Had some great feedback from the Adoption 2.0 Council on SocialCast.
Now interested in hearing your views!
n.b. And all the questions relate to social media as a work-based tool – (i.e., Enterprise 2.0 or social software – my work) and in relation to internal comms – (also my work); NOT social media marketing, or whether one should use Facebook at work and all those types of issues.
An Imagineering Post
Two posts caught my particular attention over the weekend. The first was an alert in SocialCast by @jimworth about a Gartner press release on the trends for 2011. The CIOs Jim pointed out that if they are not already onboard with all that’s 2.0 they will certainly be coming onboard after this symposium. Why? Well Gartner places Social Communications & Collaboration as number 4 of their top trends for 2011:
Social Communications and Collaboration. Social media can be divided into:
(1)Social networking —social profile management products, such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster as well as social networking analysis (SNA) technologies that employ algorithms to understand and utilize human relationships for the discovery of people and expertise.
(2) Social collaboration —technologies, such as wikis, blogs, instant messaging, collaborative office, and crowdsourcing.(3)Social publishing —technologies that assist communities in pooling individual content into a usable and community accessible content repository such as YouTube and flickr.
(4) Social feedback – gaining feedback and opinion from the community on specific items as witnessed on YouTube, flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Amazon. Gartner predicts that by 2016, social technologies will be integrated with most business applications. Companies should bring together their social CRM, internal communications and collaboration, and public social site initiatives into a coordinated strategy.
To this I would add a 5th, but more of this later. The second post that caught my eye was from Dion Hinchcliffe: Making Enterprise Applications Social: Looking at the Intranet and OpenSocial. Here Dion takes up the implication of Open Social on the Intranet. This is something I wrote about a while back, Open Social and the Enterprise Intranet but Dion takes the concept further and consolidates in superb form and links it to the Enterprise App Store:
Now what I’ve started to think about is this (see also A cloudy intranet of HTML5 :
1) As the Cloud & SAAS becomes the dominant technology meme it will include the intranet inevitably (the Jive instance I’m currently working on is hosted)
2) The components of the intranet can be widgetized’ – see Dion’s Social External Applications Store and the HTML 5 link above.
3) These cloud based widgets connect via Open Social.
4) Common function paradigms are made as x widget connects with y to create z result – social bundles.
What I can see from this is that we begin to have collections of intranet functional widgets, possibly from different vendors, all socially enabled and connecting, bundled around particular business processes. It should in theory then become possible to both standardise these processes and to enable them to perform core business processes. The model I’m drawing from here, albeit hazily, is commercial commodity exchange, currency conversion and the like. These can be standardised into processes.
The ‘pure’ business process can be automated – it can run without people, without the social. Yet, it is socially transparent – anyone with the right authority (and this is a political / comercial decision) can in this model, see the transactions. More complex processes, those requiring more people input could be standardised and a business process created and modelled – I’m thinking of the sort of analysis that DMAIC entails. The task then becomes one of identifying the process and rebuilding. The build would be made of clusters of social business applications forming processes: social business processing.
We then have a 5th element for Gartner’s division of Social Communication and Collaboration: Social Business Processing: social technologies joined together, connecting with OpenSocial to perform specific and open business processes in a social and transparent way, often, though not exclusively using cloud platforms.
One outcome of this worth noting is that the traditional intranet would become much more a working tool and would cease to be a simple repository or channel of information. The phrase you can find it on the intranet would be replaced by you can build it on the intranet.
There’s been a great discussion recently amongst The 2.0 Adoption Council crew on what we’re trying to achieve and the role of traditional corporate and internal comms. What more than a few members have experienced in one form or another is resistance from their Comms colleagues. This has got me thinking as to what the core reasons might be and how a reconciliation of interests might be possible.
My own background is in part Comms based & so I can empathise with where the Comms teams are coming from. With this in mind it might be helpful to step back and look at where the Comms guys are coming from (and particularly internal comms, my own area). And where better than to turn to than Melcrum. I had a mail today promoting their Melcrum Black Belt Course which asked:
- When planning your communication activities, which is more true?
A: I focus on delivering outputs.
B: I focus on achieving outcomes.- Was the completion of your last communication project:
A: An end in itself?
B: A means to an end?- When you gauge the success of a communication initiative, do you measure:
A: Levels of awareness and satisfaction with the channels used?
B: Attitudes, behaviours and whether business objectives were achieved?
In many of these instances I would answer both A & B, and I would also say we need to look at more than this, but let’s not jump ahead. If we look at the questions we can see that there is a tangible and controlled exercise taking place here: clearly defined aims, objectives, possible outcomes and measurable media and objectives are all part of The Plan. The Comms person is trying to achieve something and it’s specific and of course it’s timely measurable and all those SMART things.
There’s a message to be communicated, one I’d argue that should be tied into the strategic objectives of the business, and one that needs to be measured. Then along comes Jonny 2.0 come-lately and upsets that whole apple cart. Or at least that’s how it seems to the Comms person. The Comms person often thinks in terms of Signal Noise Ratio metaphors, their message is the Signal and anything in its way is Noise. Thus adding uncontrolled conversation, feedback and the whole social shabang is to add uncertainty, unpredictability and chaos. Absolute Heresy! Or at least this is how it can seem to the Comms person.
For the 2.0 Evangelist, the Comms person becomes seen as a roadblock, they just don’t get it and they block the roll out of social software in the business. An impasse develops, people can fall out, even change jobs…(& the most traditionally ‘connected’ usually win in such instances, at least in the short term).
There is a way forward here though. I think it entails each party looking at where the other is coming from. From an E 2.0 perspective I think we need to recognise that the Comms person has a job to do, a highly legitimate one and that in no small way their job is to produce a managed and measured message. They need to achieve both the Outputs and Outcomes and to be shown to do so. So from a 2.0 perspective we need to play by their rules.
But, for this to work the Comms person needs to also recognise where the 2.0 person is coming from. That dialogue and conversation are not a threat, but are aspects of the message that can help achieve the aims and objectives and often in more productive or unthought of ways. This is where Melcum’s Black Belts can become true masters of the art, by both managing the message and facilitating the conversation. As E 2.0 practitioners and evangelists, our job is to help achieve this.
It’s these sorts of ideas that are leading me to think of a new way of defining this holistic and social approach to communications and dialogue. Maybe we’re all becoming Social Business Communicators or IC 2.0 people. Or maybe I’m just a heretic!
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Old School Google
I really like this ‘Old School Google’ sketch.
It produces a small smile as we realise that just a short while ago, this was how it used to be. Getting information was time-consuming, slow and expensive. It took physical trips to the library, hand written or mechanically typed letters to get information and lots of lots of patience. We (of a certain age) look back with some sense of incredulity, yes it did used to be like that.
I wonder how long it will take for the current paradigm of business interaction, i.e.s the e-mail, the hefty attachment and the video-less phone will look so clunky, primitive and just so old-fashioned. Given the rate of technological acceleration coupled with business’ inevitable tendency to move forward with caution, I’d say 5 years. And by that I’m talking about the sense of looking back and the kindred nostalgia generated by the hand-written memo, the literal carbon copy, or the carefully scribbled overhead projection sheet made from acetate and felt pens…