Lilly Hanscom, communications manager at collaboration platform Podio, for instance, got in touch with an audio recording of a thought-provoking SXSW panel discussion called ‘Decentralized Organizations: Do They Work?‘ She thought it was a cool unpacking of the underlying philosophy that animates her company, but it also fits right in with the preoccupations of WebWorkerDaily.

In it, Thomas Malone, director of MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence and author of the seminal 2004 book The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life, lays out how cheap, ubiquitous communication (i.e., the Internet) is empowering more workers to make decisions for themselves. Like a faint echo of the argument that new communication tools have been bad news for dictators around the world the last few years, Malone explains that getting more information to more people at work is also bad for office autocrats and good for knowledge-worker freedom and productivity (it’s a long excerpt but worth it):

It’s now possible for the first time in human history to have the economic benefits of very large organizations, things like economies of scale, and at the same time to have the human benefits of very small organizations, things like freedom, flexibility, motivation and creativity. And the reason that’s possible is because a new generation of technologies – email, the World Wide Web, the internet in general – are reducing the cost of communication to such a low level that it’s now possible for huge numbers of people even in very large organizations to have enough information that they can make sensible decisions for themselves instead of just following orders from someone above them in a hierarchy who supposedly knows more than they do.

It’s the technology, by reducing the cost of communication, that’s making this possible. But just because something is possible, doesn’t mean it will necessarily happen. What I think will actually drive the change in this case are the business benefits of people making more decisions for themselves. When people are making their own decisions, for instance, they’re often more highly motivated – they’ll work harder if it’s their own thing rather than just what somebody tells them to do. When people are doing their own thing, they’re often more creative. They’re willing to be more inventive, try more things, just be more innovative. They’re able to be more flexible if they can decide what to do in their own situation instead of just following rigid rules. Finally, people who are making their own decisions often just plain like it better.

Now, those benefits of decentralized decision making aren’t important everywhere in business. In some places, like making certain kinds of semiconductor chips, the most important thing is economies of scale. And in those cases, cheap communication may lead to even more centralized decision-making, but, and here’s the key point, in our increasingly knowledge-based and innovation-driven economy, the critical factors in business success are often exactly the same things as the benefits of decentralized decision making: flexibility, motivation, creativity, innovation. That’s why I think that even though it won’t happen everywhere, we’ll see  in more and more parts of our economy, more and more decentralized decision making, more and more human freedom.

Other members of the panel went on to offer examples of what this movement toward office democracy could look like in practice. Kat Steinmetz, human resources manager of Burning Man, for instance, explained that the annual gathering has six founders, but no CEO, and decisions are made by consensus. That takes longer on the front-end and can be frustrating, explained Steinmetz, but results in faster implementation as all parties really buy in to a decision once it had been made.

Or, if Burning Man seems a bit far out of the corporate sphere to be really relevant, Zach Ware, campus community development director at Zappos, offered examples of how decentralization is affecting his firm, starting with space design. Their offices, he said, have no walls, to be a literally, as well as metaphorically, flat organization, and their new Las Vegas headquarters offers both internal and external coworking spaces to nurture community.

Finally, Second Life founder Philip Rosedale shared a radical but doable example of workplace democracy in action. At Linden Lab, bonuses were crowdsourced, meaning that the 300 employees were given an equal share of the bonus pot and asked to give away the money to their colleagues in any way they saw fit. The result was a rational allocation of bonus money and a very empowered workforce, according to Rosedale.

And how about Podio? How are they experiencing this tech-driven trend away from command and control at the office? Hanscom explained in an email that, “Podio was born out of the belief that the people who do the work of companies should have the power to choose how they do that work and that software (or any work tool) has an inherent value. If you force tools and processes on them that they have not had a hand in deciding upon, you are dehumanizing, disempowering them.” Their office is also open plan, they’re flexible in terms of remote working, and “we eat lunch together every day,” says Hanscom.

Is technology bringing more democracy to your work life?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Dplanet.

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While the addictive properties of social media are totally obvious, so is the truth that introducing social tools in an enterprise context is a tricky business, and driving adoption is sometimes a painfully slow process. As David Lavenda, VP of marketing at social email company harmon.ie, recently pointed out here on WebWorkerDaily, recent Forrester research found widespread under-utilization of the social tools that organizations have invested in, with 64 percent of companies reporting they realized few, if any, benefits from the investment.

And that’s a paradox. Why do we love social tools in our personal lives but often shun them in a professional context? Author and prominent business thinker Tammy Erickson recently pondered this question on the HBR Blog Network, outlining the key differences between the consumer social experience and the enterprise one. In our personal lives, she argues, social media have these characteristics:

• We’re usually invited to participate by people we know and trust.
• There are specific things we want to do with the other people involved, such as share photos, stay up-to-date on a club’s activities, or develop a personal reputation.
• We get something back from participation: advice, practical information we need, a network to tap when times are rough, or the emotional pleasure of seeing others’ photos or hearing their news.
• We have control over who sees our information.
• The applications are intuitive — there’s no training required.
• The applications are well-tuned to support the specific tasks we want to perform, and their features are regularly rated and refined.

Meanwhile, social at work is very different:

• Often we’re instructed to use it by someone in authority, rather than invited by friends.
• Little of what we actually get paid to do (or believe we get paid to do) requires information or input from the vast majority of other people on the network.
• Participation feels like dropping pearls into a black hole — there’s often no sense of getting something in return for sharing an idea or suggestion.
• We have no control over who sees our information and little idea what “they” are doing with it.
• The site is unattractive and requires a manual to get started.
• The software is generic and requires a work-around to do the specific things we would really like to do.

In the thoroughly interesting post she goes on to make suggestions on how organizations can make enterprise social more appealing to speed uptake of the tools, including offering a clear purpose for the initiative and tailoring offerings to existing user behavior. Have a read for her complete recommendations.

Do you think Erickson has nailed the essential differences between personal and professional social tools?

Image courtesy of Flickr user See-ming Lee.

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The headline takeaway is that employees are shifting from being passive observers of social networks while at work to active participants, dramatically increasing their use of these networks (in fact, total social networking traffic more than tripled). But despite BusinessWeek claiming social-mad employees are hogging bandwidth, don’t be too alarmed about the increase in usage. All that posting and game playing only accounts for a total of about one percent of Internet bandwidth, and Palo Alto Networks is stressing that while some people are certainly slacking off, an increasing amount of social networking use is also for legitimate work purposes. File sharing is way up as well but also only accounts for about one percent of total network bandwidth.

“At first glance, the shifts in usage patterns may imply that there is a significant drain on productivity and a strain on the networking infrastructure, possibly jeopardizing other, more business critical, bandwidth sensitive applications. Clearly social networking applications are being used for both business and personal purposes, but the overall impact to the bandwidth infrastructure is small,” says the report. A more serious risk than wasting time or bandwidth may be threats to data security. The report suggests networks are harder to secure than many IT pros imagine.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Franco Bouly.

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Part of the innovation in this new generation of products is that they are — largely — built on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) foundation, and getting up and running can be as fast as buying a book on Amazon. And because these applications are social at their core, they can be very viral. One member of a small company’s marketing team decides to manage a project using Yammer or Podio, and she immediately invites four other team members to get involved. This means that the tools are quickly adopted, at least in the small group level. (Note: I’ll talk with Soonr’s Martin Frid-Nielsen, Mavenlink’s Ray Grainger, and QuickOffice’s Alan Masarek about this topic onstage at Net:Work, on Dec. 8.)

The new “work media”

However, the more important side of this social tool innovation is that they are based on activity streams. Users’ activities within these applications are not simply captured in the metadata of directories or the states of information in databases: these activities — such as making a comment, adding a file to a project, or assigning a task to a project member — are published in streams, a la Twitter, Facebook, and a long list of other consumer applications.

To distinguish these modern business tools from earlier generations, I use the term “work media.” They share characteristics with well-known social media tools, but they are oriented toward getting work done. And like social media, work media is fluid, with streams of information finding their way to the individual user, who may opt to follow topics, projects, and other users. These applications share the core design metaphor of streams, though they differ widely in how streams are composed, displayed, and shared.

Open tools, closed data

Business has a bias toward privacy, and so work media tools support that tendency by — almost without exception — erecting a password barrier against access to a company or group’s information. Finer-grained access controls are provided for more specific information contexts, such as projects, folders, groups, or other “spaces” managed by the work media apps. In this way, a company can restrict access to a HR group so that only a few HR staff can see the resumes and pay information managed there, for example.

This tendency, along with the relative immaturity of the burgeoning work media marketplace, is rapidly leading us to a very strange outcome: a generation of business software — work media — ostensibly based on the principles of open social media, but which are inherently closed, and which are spawning a million information silos.

But the risks and costs associated with business information stored in these applications is much higher, at least form the view of the companies migrating onto these work platforms. So once a company commits to using a specific work media platform, they may find that the information stored in their projects becomes as fixed as concrete.

Streamed, not structured, data

Let’s lump the information managed in these systems into two piles:

• Concrete, structured, and relatively moveable information, stored in files of various sorts
• Fluid, unstructured, and relatively unmoveable information, such as internal links, social gestures and other application specific metadata

It’s relatively easy to imagine downloading all the files stored in a Yammer account, and uploading them into an IBM Connections instance. But other sorts of information — and semantics — won’t have the same ease of movement.

Consider a hypothetical work media tool — let’s call it Work Talk. Work Talk supports both milestones and tasks, and it also allows tasks to be optionally linked to a milestone. One of its semantic rules is that a milestone cannot be complete until all linked tasks are complete.

Imagine that Work Talk supports exporting all the structured information — files, user identities, and so on — and less-well structured information, like tasks, milestones, posts, comments, and the many relationships between them. Taking that information and figuring how to import it to a tool that is architected differently would be at the least a major programming task and, at the worst, an impossibility. And the semantics of milestones and tasks might simply fail, if the new tool doesn’t implement that capability the same way, even if all that information can be exported and imported en masse.

As the market matures, standards must evolve

We’re at the start of a new era in business software, and there is an explosion of new players and new ideas about how streaming information should be structured and streamed, and how the various bits relate to each other. This is much like the early days of email, when a single corporation might have several different email systems that couldn’t communicate to each other. That problem was solved in two ways: by the emergence of well-defined standards that enabled interoperability across different implementations, as well as the consolidation of the marketplace around a small number of vendors serving large numbers of users.

It’s not too early to see some market maturation. It seems that many of the vendors in the space are making highly similar products, but differentiated around specific market needs (such as integration with specific external tools), focus on specific business functions (marketing versus software development, for example), or emphasizing the size of the company best suited for the tools. I see very little activity on the software standards side, but that usually occurs as the intersection of successful applications, as happened with email and SQL. So, there is no immediate solution in sight, and I wager that a large number of headaches are going to arise from the proliferation of work media tools, especially when vendors go out of business, or when companies outgrow the tool they selected. And there is no simple advice to give to prospective or current users of these work media tools. It is inevitable that these tools will diverge in functionality, and even if two systems are very similar that doesn’t mean that it will be possible to easily and cheaply port from one to the other.

Despite these risks, I believe there are great benefits inherent in the use of work media, and because of those, the rapid adoption of these tools will continue at an unprecedented rate. Just like the adoption of the automobile and the airplane, though, we are going to see a few crashes.

Stowe Boyd writes and speaks about social tools and their impact on media, business and society. A GigaOM Pro analyst, Boyd also writes at stoweboyd.com and is working on a new book about the rise of a socially augmented world, called Liquid City: A Liquid, Not A Solid; A City, Not A Machine.

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From the DoubleDutch :

Leveraging the disruptive, geosocial capabilities of the smartphone, we hacked together a mobile productivity app that allowed our team to “check-in” to work objects such as customers, projects, and products with a tap of the phone. The result? Radical transparency from the CEO to the intern, eye-opening productivity analytics, and a dramatic fall in the use of company email….

Goals

1. Develop communication and collaboration tools to match our work
2. Develop holistic performance measures
3. Retool management for an open world
4. Create a democracy of transparent information

DoubleDutch built on entrepreneur Jyri Engestrom‘s observation that it’s a fallacy “to think that social networks are just made up of people. They’re not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object.” In this case the shared objects are things like projects, customers and places. By letting people know what you are working on and tapping through the project, customer and place objects, you create a signal that can stand on its own, or be taken in context with broader analytics. Coburn noted that you can roll the data up to team and company views — but that it also works as a personal check. He says, “I want to know where I’m spending my time. Gives me a heads up if I’m spending too much time [on the wrong projects.]”

The behavioral change of checking-in regarding tasks is made easier by the commonality of the behavior in personal social media. That said, it’s still a task added to the day’s work. Coburn says HYVE works to motivate the effort through gamification and the ability to  “compete in a gentle way.”

In the middle of my interview with Lawrence, I received a call from my colleague, Al. He and I were collaborating on a teaching engagement that afternoon, but given how I feel about email, I hadn’t done an email “check-in” just to tell him I was ready to go. However, Al is conscientious and so was checking-in with me. I could see the value of HYVE as Al’s number flashed on my phone. With a HYVE mentality I would have checked-in from home, announcing my review of the class slide deck before getting on my call with Lawrence.  Al would have seen that check-in and known I hadn’t forgotten our engagement. Instead, he called, I texted during the call, I later listened to his voice mail, and then called him back as I hadn’t gotten a reply to the text. All extra work that a simple “tapping, not typing” check-in could have avoided.

Certainly the technology alone wouldn’t have reduced our extra effort, but if we apply the check-in gesture to work the way some people check-in at bars, all that workflow knowledge would already be in the stream. I don’t doubt that in great implementations, where human, technical, and organizational practices are adjusted with the addition of HYVE, that email is reduced by over 30% as it was in DoubleDutch’s internal test.

HYVE integrates with Salesforce Chatter and they are considering Yammer and Jive integration. HYVE Public launched for the iPhone on September 9, 2011.

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The key to remaining productive is to not let distractions sidetrack you from your primary job. Here are a few tips for taking charge of your day and kicking a few of the most common distractions to the curb.

1. Social media. Turn it off when you need to focus. Seriously. Shut down your Twitter client and log out of Facebook and other services for at least part of the day when you really need to focus on your work. If you can’t turn them off, you can still disable notifications so that you aren’t having them pop into view constantly. This doesn’t mean that you can’t check social media while you work, but you can minimize the impact by only checking in periodically. Maybe you look at Twitter and Facebook once per hour, or when you finish one task and are moving to the next. But really, if you are checking Twitter every few minutes, are you really going to get as much work done as you would if you weren’t checking it?
2. Visitors. Whether you work in an office or at home, people will drop in and distract you. I’ll admit it, I often listen to music or put my headphones in just to signal to people that I am not available. If people see that you have headphones in, they will at least think twice about bothering you. Leaving your phone headset on can also work. You might try “do not disturb” signs or shutting your office door, if you are lucky enough to have one. I’ve even had pretty good luck with hiding and working in a super secret location until I finished a piece of work that needed focused concentration.
3. Unnecessary or unproductive meetings. I’m a big fan of not attending meetings that aren’t valuable in some way. Now, this probably doesn’t mean that you can blow off your manager’s staff meeting or important meetings with clients, but you can probably skip a few meetings. I’ll often look at the agenda for a meeting, and if there isn’t anything particularly relevant for me, I’ll send the organizer an email to let them know that I won’t be attending. On the flip side, you should be considerate when scheduling your own meetings. Cancel them if you don’t have anything important for the meeting, and always send an agenda in advance to let people know whether or not they need to attend.
4. Email. Most of us get more email than what we can possibly read anyway, and it just keeps coming in! You could probably spend all day just responding to email, but then you would never get any work done. The first thing to do is turn off any pop-up notifications that you get every time someone sends you an email. Next, set up some filters and color code email from important people to help you notice the ones you care about while ignoring the rest. Now, the hard part. You have to actually ignore your email and focus on other work without that distraction. You can occasionally glance at your email on a regular schedule or between tasks and look for anything critical. If it’s not critical, ignore it for a bit until you are ready to spend a little chunk of time focused on doing email.
5. Instant messages. For really serious work, you might think about logging completely out of your instant messaging client. For most of us, we can use custom status messages to signal to people how urgent their request should be before they interrupt you. I recently set my status to “cranky, interrupt at your own risk”, and I don’t think I had a single IM during that time. I also use the generic, “busy – priority interrupts only” status, and you can get pretty creative with these to let people know that they really should think twice about interrupting. It is also perfectly acceptable to not respond immediately to an IM. If a friend or co-worker sends you a message on a topic that isn’t going to be critical, ignore it until you get to a good stopping point or when you are ready to take a break and respond when it makes sense for you.

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Before you get started, you’ll need to fill out a few details or sign up using your OpenID, Google or Yahoo account. Authorize the app to work with your Twitter account(s), and you’re ready to go. The Twimbow screen is divided into three main columns: “Personal Buzz” (your tweets, @ replies, and DMs), “Home Buzz” (your main Twitter stream) and search.

Color-coding your tweets

The “Personal Buzz” column is color-coded by default. As shown by the icons at the top of the column, your tweets are blue, @ replies are green, DMs you’ve sent are yellow, DMs sent to you are orange, tweets retweeted by you are pink, retweets of your tweets are olive, while tweets you’ve marked as a favorite are red. Clicking on one of those icons at the top of the column filters those tweets from the column, so clicking on the red star will remove favorites from the column.

The “Home Buzz” column contains your main Twitter stream. Similarly to the “Personal Buzz” column, it also has color coding, but you’re left to define your own system. You can define labels (such as “News,” “Friends,” “Work,” and so on) and give each label its own color. Apply a label to a tweet and it (and all of the other tweets from that user) will be color-coded. You can also filter the stream to show or hide tweets with each label.

The column to the right has a real-time search feature. Saved searches can be moved to the “Monitor” box at the bottom of the screen if you want to keep an eye on a particular phrase.

Filtering noisy tweets

As well as the color-coding, one other Twimbow feature that aims to help clean up your Twitter stream is the “noise killer,” which enables you to set up a filter to remove tweets containing specific keywords from your stream. This could be useful when an event is happening and there are tweets flooding your stream that you’re not interested in, for example (although you’ll need to make sure to remove the filter after the event has finished).

Twimbow certainly has a pretty interface, but it’s not without a few drawbacks. Despite working well on my smaller laptop screen, there’s no mobile version. You can’t check out trending topics. And while the interface looks pretty, it’s not exactly intuitive — it took me a little while to figure out how the color-coding and search columns worked, for example.

It’s not a full-featured social media dashboard

You should also note that, despite its use of columns, Twimbow is not really a full-featured social media dashboard like, say, HootSuite or TweetDeck. You can’t add additional columns beyond the three that Twimbow provides, nor can you configure how each column works, as you can with HootSuite and TweetDeck. However, as an easy-to-follow and novel web-based Twitter client, it works really well, and for a web app, it’s impressively responsive. If you’re finding it impossible to keep up with your fast-moving and noisy Twitter stream on the official Twitter website, even with the help of lists, Twimbow is definitely worth checking out; it’s free.

Twimbow was previously in private beta and required an invitation to access, but it’s now open to all; you can sign up here.

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In last week’s post, I talked about how technology is creating an “always on” social media world. Like it or not, these days, if you’re in public (i.e., out of the safety of your own house and/or in the presence of a another person with a camera or camera phone), you’d better be comfortable with anything you do being captured and possibly even posted online.

For this week’s post, I thought I’d provide some tips from the PR industry to help you feel better prepared for those impromptu publicity events.

1. Stay (at least somewhat) presentable. Make sure that you’re at least presentable most of the time. My solution is to keep my closet up-to-date so that I feel “put together” enough, no matter what I might wear on a given day.
2. Get comfortable with public speaking. Fear of public speaking is often reported as the #1 fear of most people, so it’s no wonder we’re a little resistant to having video of ourselves broadcasted to the world. A public speaking or improv class can help alleviate anxiety and instill confidence for those times when you’re placed on the makeshift stage of the World Wide Web.
3. Spruce up on interpersonal communication skills. Learning to manage facial expressions and body language and to maintain eye contact can greatly improve how you feel, as well as your effectiveness, when communicating with others.
4. Control your energy and attitude. Sometimes we leave the wrong impression with people, even our loved ones, simply because we aren’t in the best of moods or because we’re not quite feeling up to par. Doing things to better manage how we feel overall can improve how we handle stressful situations.
5. Mind your manners. I often wonder about celebrities who are dismissed as rude, thinking, “Did they just have a bad day and get caught on camera at an inopportune moment?” Bad habits, poor manners and language, and being less than courteous can be a big turnoff for prospective clients and business associates, so it never hurts to err on the side of caution in this department.
6. Try not to appear defensive or guarded. If you come across on video like you’re fighting off paparazzi, it can easily be taken out of context so that others think you have something to hide or have a bad attitude. As nerve-wracking as it can be to appear on camera, try your best to relax and be natural.
7. Get comfortable making smooth transitions. You can expect to be asked a question at some point that you either can’t or don’t want to answer. Learn to make smooth transitions to another topic so that you avoid sticky situations or avoid coming across as uninformed or elusive.
8. Watch what you say and do. As many celebrities can attest, one careless slip in judgement can quickly put you front and center of a debate or media firestorm. Even if you think you might not be that powerful or important to warrant that kind of attention, you could still get into hot water with friends or family, your clients, or your boss, so be careful not to do or say anything that might be insensitive or offensive to someone else.

While it was once the job of publicists to manage the images of high-profile individuals and companies, these days, with the ever-present social media and devices to share content like photos, audio, and video, it’s becoming increasingly necessary to take charge of our own publicity and image as it’s presented online. Fortunately, a little preparation goes a long way to keep you in the good graces of clients and business associates online.

What other tips do you have for preparing for social media close-ups?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Carnoodles

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The rise of curation

Social recommendation isn’t new; marketers have long known the value of vocal advocacy. The difference is that now, a brand’s audience (or its followers) can register direct and extremely visible benefits from their advocacy.

Thus, curation is a valid, and valued, technique for gaining currency with audiences. We benefit from our own curatorial advocacy (which builds our credibility), and we rely on our favorite brands or businesses to sift through the web and point us to good resources, insights and opinions.

Little wonder, then, that many business brands have built large audiences using the curation approach. These brands are seen as leaders because they have the ability to tell the good from the bad, and they have market-leading contacts who keep them abreast of the latest developments.

In the curatorial approach, the network is critical, along with the brand’s ability to sort the dross from the diamonds.

The role of creation

While curatorial communication dominates some social media right now, it’s important not to forget the valuable potential of creation in audience engagement.

After all, curators curate creations. So when you make, do or say something new and valuable, your online presence will be more likely to be included in the curations of others. It’s the basis of viral marketing, but thanks to the nuances of social media, your creation doesn’t need to go viral to deliver value to your brand, or your team.

If everyone else is funneling or channeling information, those brands that create have a point of difference. When you make ideas, products, or thoughts, the information you deliver to your audience is unique.

Your creative work gives you the scope to engage customers, stakeholders, and other parts of your organization, by inviting them to join the process of creation and development. But more importantly for collaboration, creation allows you to share stories of experimentation, learning and application through social media, the company blog, industry events and so on.

That experiential information can form the glue for engagements with third parties, which, over time, can prove mutually and deeply beneficial. Such benefits could be something as simple as landing a spot in an invite-only beta test, or something as valuable as hearing about a bug that may affect you — in time to preempt disaster.

If you create, you have a lot to gain by sharing your experiences online, and connecting with others doing similar work. If yours is known as a creative brand, you likely already have followers and connections who are craving your creative insights. The question is: are you using that opportunity?

Striking a balance

How can you make the most of the opportunities for curation and creation in your social media activity?

Your team’s online presence may address multiple audiences. But whether you are concerned with engaging with customers, suppliers, or peer organizations, your team has a lot to gain by creating, as well as curating, information. This is particularly the case if your team is an isolated unit of specialists, or has a specific technical focus. It should be imperative for such organizations and teams to be directly engaged in the business of creation.

Connect with the creative leaders in your field. Share product development stories and updates on your blog. Invite creative third parties and peers to contribute their ideas for overcoming challenges, or addressing issues you face in your own creative process — and publish your own thoughts to get the ball rolling.

Traditional businesses may be concerned that asking questions or seeking advice from others, even peers,  online has the potential to damage the brand. Adopting a strategy that encourages individuals in the creative team to seek peer input through their own online activity (as employees of the brand) may be a solution to this impasse.

Do you leverage creation in your online engagements, or do you stick largely to the territory of curation?

Image courtesy stock.xchng user rolve.

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Clearvale is a cloud-based, Software-as-a-Service, enterprise, social networking solution that includes interconnected internal and external social networks. It allows customers and employees to collaborate and communicate directly for customer support, idea management, and other needs. Both the internal and external interfaces have familiar components: activity streams, project management tools, communities, discussions, blogs, profiles, embedded media and links.

While there are many  tools to meet these needs individually, Clearvale’s strength is in its ease of use, and in the systems it offers to manage and integrate the internal and external communities. Businesses can create separate social networks for each of these groups, but manage them as a whole. Employees can access the networks using existing tools such as Active Directory, Google Apps, and OpenID; Clearvale has tools to let external partners and customers use various authentication systems. Clearvale can even integrate with e-commerce websites.

The company says that the Clearvale solution gives organizations greater control, with the appropriate levels of access and security, while still enabling deeper customer engagement, and providing the means to integrate with existing social networks.

When I spoke with Richard Hughes, director of product strategy at BroadVision, he told me that after 18 years of experience with developing e-commerce portals, and their recent experiences with enterprise social marketing, the company feels that there is a market for a solution that allows businesses to manage internal collaboration and CRM in one platform.

He feels such a solution will be more effective than trying to use separate social networks for each activity: “At BroadVision we don’t agree that Social CRM is about tightly controlling customer interaction or that it’s primarily about social media monitoring. It should be about integrating all of a company’s customer engagement channels to enable better communication among customers and employees.”

Clearvale is mainly aimed at medium to large businesses of 100+ employees. More information, including a video demo of a Clearvale ecosystem and a more detailed product demo, is available from the Clearvale website.

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