So what usually goes wrong? At Net:Work 2011 Podio CEO Tommy Ahlers suggested  companies often make things too complicated, complaining about “Swiss army knives” that try to solve every problem and end up failing users. When I spoke with Yammer CEO David Sacks a few weeks ago, he suggested that companies often go wrong by “trying to bolt that on to some existing tool, because if the tool isn’t built from the ground up to be social, it’s not going to have the level of usability that’s required.”

Now David Lavenda, VP of marketing at social email company harmon.ie, has gotten into the act, offering up common ways that well intentioned companies muck up the roll out of social tools and suggesting better ways to bring these tools to your team. “Simply throwing out social tools isn’t going to work,” he says, pointing to recent Forrester research that found widespread under-utilization of social tools. The study shows that even though companies have invested in an average of five or more tools, 64 percent realized few, if any, benefits from that investment. Only 8 percent actually use social collaboration software once a week.

So what should you do if you want your company or team’s move to social to go as poorly as some of the roll-outs documented by Forrester?

Imagine your team loves change. Some people like nothing better than to shake things up and try something new, but you can be pretty sure that’s not everyone on your team. So when you’re thinking about rolling out a tool to make your organization more social, keep in mind the howls of complaint that greet even the smallest changes to social networks in the consumer space.

“People are naturally reluctant to change,” says Lavenda. “Enterprise 2.0 author Andrew McAfee warns organizations to, ‘never underestimate the fondness of people and organizations for the status quo.’ When transitioning to a social model, it’s imperative to understand exactly how users work. Then, build a strategy and toolset that integrates with these practices in a way that makes sense with their current workflow, rather than asking users to make a dramatic change in their behavior.”

Rip and replace. If the wheel is turning along with just a bit of a creak or wobble, it’s not a good idea to try and entirely reinvent it. “People are often lured into thinking they need something entirely new to solve a problem. Instead of a D-Day approach that flips the switch on relatively unproven technologies like blogs, wikis and allied next-gen tools—essentially asking employees to immediately abandon existing tools like email and documents—plan for a gradual introduction that allows users to get up to speed with new functionality and capabilities at a comfortable pace,” recommends Lavenda, adding, “the idea is to improve productivity, not hinder it.”

The more the merrier. More may be better when it comes to chocolate cake or vacation days, but not when it comes to tools for the social enterprise. Rather than asking your team to log in to six different things, try to find solutions that allow them one go-to place for many needs. “An effective social strategy must start in a familiar environment and then aggregate all other pieces into the users’ base of operations. The goal is to eliminate steps, not add more. Bundling collaboration tools together in a common context and shared window drives faster, more widespread adoption and delivers the promised benefits of social enterprise integration much quicker,” says Lavenda.

Have you experienced any serious screw ups in the real of enterprise social that you’d like to warn others to avoid?

Image courtesy of Flickr user markomni.

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• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• The Future of Workplaces

“To most effectively build a thriving enterprise social network, the existing groundswell community, forward-thinking leaders, and use case influencers must be directly involved and feel a personal connection to the success of the network,” said Murray. He noted that although all three of these user groups are important, they each play different roles.

Marketing, sales, information technology, and formal communities of practice are all tangible units at the heart of an organization. Yammer’s implementation experts have found that great things happen when these segments identify use cases for the product. Groundswell adoption and executive attention are both valuable for awareness, but the heart is best able to combat the “what’s in it for me” questions that push back against any new collaboration tool. The heart has identifiable work to get done that can often benefit in a visible way by having faster or broader access to knowledge across the organization.

Value From Sharing Across Similar Stores & Regions

Supervalu  (a nationwide grocery and pharmacy company, which owns Albertsons, Lucky, and Jewel-Osco) provides an especially good example of how Yammer can help facilitate collaboration. When Supervalu’s CEO Craig Herkert started in 2009, he aimed to transform the company through “radical transparency” and give the stores a hyperlocal focus to better meet their customers’ needs.

With a history that goes back to 1870, Supervalu was a conservative company where social media use was rare. There had been informal use of Yammer at Supervalu for years, but things didn’t take off until the business units began developing ways to support the hyperlocal efforts in the stores.

In one particularly effective project, store directors photographed product displays, posted the pictures on Yammer, and linked the images to local demographics and outcomes. Directors in similar situations (e.g., a college town during spring break) were able to use that information to decide which displays were likely to generate the most sales.

Herkert’s executive vision gave collaboration and transparency greater credibility and budget, but it was the business goal at the heart of the company that gave the collaboration efforts the energy to spread.

As Herkert says in this video, “Yammer has made my life easier, but what it has really done is made my life as a CEO better. Better because I’m able to listen and converse with all of our associates. Real time. All the time.”

7-Eleven convenience stores provide another example. Similar to Supervalu, Yammer was adopted by a groundswell community, and the executives were on-board, but it was in the heart where the value grew.

The company is built on a very distributed model with stores spread around the globe. David Sacks, Yammer’s CEO, said 7-Eleven aimed to use Yammer to “unify its distributed workforce, drive consistency across franchise locations, and foster better communication among employees and leadership.”

7-Eleven’s information technology group was the first to use Yammer, but now the dominant use case is of directors tracking regional trends and sharing that information. They also appreciate how easy it is to quickly share examples of employees supporting their guest services culture. For instance, a story about an employee who helped a customer change a tire in a 7-Eleven parking lot might not be something that would be emailed to all, but it’s perfect for a short post.

Sharing with a Purpose

Sharing is a crucial part of collaboration, and tools such as Yammer provide us with low friction ways to share our knowledge, activities, and results. Yammer’s experience with their clients suggests that while broad, groundswell support and executive attention are important for creating a viable network, business success comes from sharing at the heart of the organization’s work.

How are these three levels (groundswell, heart, executive) of importance in your own collaborations?

Images courtesy of Yammer

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Email is without a doubt the most tried and true technology for both enterprise and personal communication, but it’s not without its shortcomings. Specifically, Atos CEO Thierry Breton cited email’s spam-like nature as one of the biggest contributors to “information  pollution” that’s bogging down management. His goal is for Atos — which has nearly 50,000 employees worldwide — to be a “zero-email company” within the next three years. In place of email, Breton says that Atos will increasingly encourage its employees to collaborate on instant messaging and social networking platforms.

This marks the first time an organization of this size has made such a definitive statement on email, but it almost certainly won’t be the last. In truth, the gradual shift from email to messaging and social networking platforms began some years ago, but it’s only recently that this phenomenon has penetrated the enterprise from the consumer side.

Over the past several years, the rise of social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter have taken a lot of the conversations that once occurred on email to other channels on the consumer side. While email is still a central repository for tracking updates from various networking sites, it has become decidedly less useful for interacting with friends and colleagues on a daily basis compared to mediums like instant messaging and streaming content feeds.

As is often the case, the consumer side embraced these platforms well in advance of the enterprise. Instant messaging, Facebook and Twitter have all been in use for years for personal computing purposes. As the “internet generation” has come of age, entrepreneurs have increasingly put effort behind enterprise-friendly communication and automation tools. The rapid rise of platforms like Yammer and Salesforce’s Chatter - which are exclusively geared towards the enterprise — suggest the larger rise of the “social enterprise.”

The social enterprise refers to a premium on enhanced collaboration and real-time communication in the name of greater organizational efficiency. As such, there’s no single be-all, end-all tool that will ultimately replace email. Rather, a suite of complementary tools are gradually emerging as more effective mediums for enterprise collaboration.

Some other noteworthy technologies that are emerging in place of email include:

• Process automation tools: Automating processes via business process management (BPM) tools enables automated responses and actions via automated emails, instant messages, etc. that prompted actionable messages (I.e., a “yes/no” button). This can eliminate the tedious back-and-forth associated with corporate functions like employee on-boarding/off-boarding, invoicing and employee requests. BPM has seen a spike in interest in recent years, with mega-vendors like Oracle and IBM  putting more effort into their BPM offerings, and smaller vendors like BonitaSoft (my company), Intalio and BizAgi also offering BPM suites.
• Enterprise portals: While enterprise portals have existed for some time, they’ve recently begun integrating more social features to increase collaboration between employees — often via real-time, streaming feeds with more accessible user interfaces. More and more, these portals are including plug-ins for other features like process automation and instant messaging to create a wider social intranet in which employees can collaborate. eXo and Liferay are two examples of enterprise portal vendors that have successfully incorporated a social aspect into their respective offerings.
• Semantic web technologies: This is a still-evolving area that, while it has yet to make a significant mark in the enterprise, is poised to emerge as a critical technology in the near future. As organizations continue to struggle to manage the massive volumes of unstructured data generated by internal communication, it’s important to have tools capable of properly sorting and analyzing the information it generates. Examples of this can be seen today from the likes of Microsoft (Powerset/Bing), Apple (Siri/Apple 4S) and Google (FreeBase), among others.

This is not to say that email is not still a necessary component of enterprise communication; it’s still a vital cog for many core organizational processes. However, with the rise of tools such as those mentioned above, it’s undoubtedly seeing a decline in overall  usage — particularly in terms of internal collaboration. Atos’ decision to phase out email is perhaps the most ringing endorsement yet for the notion that email is being gradually phased out of the enterprise, and it will be interesting to see how many other large scale organizations will follow in its footsteps over the next several years as collaborative technologies continue to evolve.

Miguel Valdés Faura is the CEO and co-founder of BonitaSoft, a France-based company that produces business process management (BPM) software and provides commercial services and support for the open source Bonita project, of which he is also co-founder. Follow Miguel on Twitter @MiguelValdes.

For more information about the future of collaboration tools, check out GigaOM’s Net:Work event on Dec. 8, 2011.

Image courtesy of Flickr user cambodia4kidsorg.

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• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• Working out loud: how work media and social cognition are altering business
• The Future of Workplaces

So what other collaboration trends does the study confirm? Remote work, it turns out, is largely a privilege of those higher up in the office food chain. Previous demographic studies on telecommuters and remote workers have revealed that they’re a highly educated, highly paid lot, who are generally higher up in their organizations. Forrester concurs, saying:

The report also reveals that workers are untethered from the office as they rise in rank. 53 percent of individual workers are office-bound, but that number drops to 35 percent among managers and supervisors, and plummets to just 10 percent among directors and executives.

No surprises there, then, but another finding is eye-opening. Here at WebWorkerDaily, social technology at work is a big topic, and we cover a variety of social tools for enterprise, from Jive and Chatter to Yammer. But despite its being a fast-growing market segment with huge media buzz, Forrester reveals exactly how far these technologies are from going mainstream. The research concludes (italics are mine):

Adoption of enterprise 2.0 technologies is still nascent. Only one in six Gen Y professionals uses social tools. Despite significant and ongoing investment in enterprise social technologies, their roughly seven-year lifespan within enterprises has yielded a maximum of 12 percent adoption within the overall workforce. This market has failed to displace traditional collaboration technologies like email as a preferred way to communicate at work.

Of course, this finding doesn’t mean that 12 percent isn’t the thin edge of a very big knife. We may yet see social for the enterprise slice into the mainstream market, but the Forrester research is a nice reminder of the gap between what’s commonplace among media types and geeks and what’s still alien to “regular people.” Several articles have made this point lately about consumer social media and Twitter. Perhaps it’s worth making about enterprise social as well.

For the time being, is enterprise social overblown?

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While Facebook and Twitter have been massively successful in the consumer space, they’re not really suited for use in the workplace, as they make it difficult to keep personal and work-related information separate, and few companies would be happy about the possibility of potentially confidential information being broadcast to the world. Google, however, has produced an app that’s much more suited for use in the workplace by building Google+ around its Circles feature, which enables users to limit the sharing of information to specific groups of people, and by incorporating some very useful built-in collaboration features.

Circles, effortless contact management

Google+ is a lot like Facebook, offering users the ability to connect to other users, post status updates, share links and photos, and so on. But where it differs from apps like Facebook is its use of Circles, which allows users to define groups of contacts and then only share specific updates and other information with that group. Circles are effectively easy-to-understand privacy controls. They can be set up via an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, and there doesn’t appear to be any limitations on the number of them you can define.

You could, for instance, have a Circle for all of your work colleagues, a Circle for your team and then also create ad hoc Circles for project teams as required. This ability to easily control who you share specific pieces of information with is powerful, and very useful in the workplace: you may only want to send an update regarding the status or a project to only those colleagues working on that project, for example.

Facebook has tried to give users a similar degree of control over contact management with its Lists feature, but it’s clunky and nowhere near as well-implemented or as central to the experience as Circles is; while Google + is effectively  built on top of Circles, Facebook’s Lists feature feels like an afterthought.

As Google+ is a general-purpose social networking tool, a user can connect with any other Google+ user. This means that, unlike with many of the private enterprise social networking apps like Yammer, Jive, tibbr, Socialtext and Salesforce Chatter, people can use the app to easily communicate and collaborate with people outside of their organization — contractors or clients, for example.

Hangouts, Google+’s killer app for remote teams

Hangouts is Google+’s built-in multi-user video chat tool. It allows users to chat with up to ten people simultaneously and it’s really well implemented. Unlike other video chat apps, where you generally have to ping the other people you want to chat with on IM or email, get them to open their video chat client and then connect with them, Hangouts enables you to “hang out” in a video chat room, advertising your availability to chat to your contacts. If no-one else is around, you can leave it running in the background.

It’s all browser-based, so the user doesn’t have to fire up another app, and allows for much more spontaneous and effortless collaboration than other video chat app I’ve tried. I think it could potentially come close to replicating an “in office” experience for remote teams, allowing for the virtual equivalent of wandering up to a colleague’s desk to discuss a problem, or the traditional “water cooler” social chat.

Hangouts has an intuitive interface: Whoever is currently talking is highlighted in the large central window, with everyone else displayed in  strip of smaller windows underneath. In my testing, it works really well, with little lag. There’s a built-in IM feature for sharing links and so on, and also a YouTube feature, which enables users to share the watching of YouTube videos (which is neat, but probably not all that useful in the workplace). As Om noted, Hangouts is group video chat done right. It’s much better than Skype’s somewhat clunky group video chat feature, it’s free, and as it’s standards-based, it could be integrated into other applications, too (if you’re curious, Janko has written an interesting overview of the standards-based tech used to build the service).

Hangouts isn’t Google+’s only collaboration tool. It also features a built-in group texting feature called Huddle (see Stacey’s review here), which is currently only available on Android handsets.

Keep your team up-to-date with Sparks

Another great feature that differentiates Google+ from Facebook is Sparks. It lets users define an interest (robotics, for example), and then trawls the web looking for articles related to that interest, making it easy for users to find relevant articles to share. This could be useful in the workplace for research or keeping abreast of industry news, for example, helping users to stay up-to-date with topics of interest to them and their team, and then easily share and discuss any particularly interesting bits of information.

Why Google+ isn’t the perfect enterprise social-networking tool — yet

While Google + is well designed and has a lot of really great features, it’s not the perfect enterprise social networking tool just yet; it’s got a way to go before companies like Yammer and Salesforce should begin to really worry. Firstly, as Mathew noted, it needs users. Google+ is still in beta, but even after it launches to the general public, even if Google is massively successful in getting new users to sign up it will be a while before Google+ can get anywhere near rivaling Facebook’s numbers.

Secondly, Google+ isn’t yet set up to work with Google Apps accounts, which precludes a large number of potential enterprise users from using it with their main work email accounts. However, it’s probably safe to assume that Google+ will be made available to users of Google Apps soon — and the prospect of integrated social features in Google Apps powered by Google+ is a tantalizing one.

Finally, although Circles is an easy to use and intuitive way for users to determine who they share specific bits of share information with, it’s not perfect: there have already been reported privacy concerns with Google+ and Circles, with updates being forwarded on (or “reshared”) beyond the original Circle it was intended for. Google is being responsive to the concerns and is now addressing that particular issue, so hopefully any lingering privacy concerns will be ironed out before the product sees a more widespread release.

Of course, as Jess noted earlier today, the success of enterprise social networking tools depends on much more than just the technology itself. But Google’s latest foray into the social space is very well designed and offers a a great range of features. Assuming the company can tackle any privacy concerns that pop up and can persuade enough users to join the service and give it the initial traction it needs, Google+ could well become entrenched in the workplace.

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• Measuring the effects of social tools in the enterprise
• The Future of Workplaces

Why? Previously, WebWorkerDaily has spoken to Yammer co-founder and CTO Adam Pisoni who explained that some executives fail to grasp the full benefit of social for enterprise. But perhaps there are other reasons social media at work has failed to catch on as speedily as it has at home that have nothing to do with the limitations of the tech itself or the imaginative failings of corporate honchos.

Writing on the IBF blog, Katrina Pugh explains that many of the corporate clients she works with fail to garner the full benefits of social media tools not because these tools are badly conceived or improperly rolled out, but because the larger corporate culture that surrounds them makes workers hesitant to fully utilize social. Without these two offline prerequisites, she writes, organizations will fail to reap the full benefits of social media:

Interpersonal trust comes from a sense that you who are asking for my help (or from whom I am asking for help) are worthy of that engagement. Worthiness might come from relationships I’ve developed with you or your team, or from an affiliation we share (part of the same company or network). I will go out into a public forum, a SharePoint Discussion or Yammer thread, and try to help you. Interpersonal trust doesn’t mean we’re best of friends. Richard Hackmann, renowned Harvard University team researcher, found that for teams and musicians, a small amount of friction generally results in a better quality product or performance. You might say, where there is trust, interpersonal trust trumps like-mindedness.

Individual safety comes from the sense that sharing will not rob me of something I value, such as credibility, recognition, or respect.  If the organization rewards me explicitly for inventing my own solutions, I’ll close myself to input from others. If the organization rewards me explicitly for being the “subject matter expert,” I’ll hold knowledge close to the chest until I know I’ll “get the credit.”  These hold-back behaviors come from outside the social media world, and spill over into that world, in the form of absent experts, opaque comments, and grandstanding.

She concludes that whatever tools or techniques you bring to a your organization, “only when leaders encourage inquiry (versus defensiveness), welcome diversity (versus group-think), and invite respect (versus judgment)” will people fully engage with social media at work.

Do you agree?

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• A 2011 NewNet Forecast
• Communications, Platforms, Privacy Ruled NewNet in Q4

All  of the companies I spoke to reported similar benefits from their adoption of social tools:

• Breaking down silos
• Connecting like-minded individuals
• Reduced need for meetings
• Leadership access and buy-in

Given the benefits reported, and generally positive senior management sentiment towards these tools, I think we’ll see much more widespread adoption in a short space of time.

To get the complete detail on how social tools are transforming the companies that use them, the benefits the companies reported, and patterns of adoption, check out the full article over on GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• Measuring the effects of social tools in the enterprise

Email has transformed the way people shop, bank, communicate with family members and do business. Now an essential tool for approximately one billion mobile workers across the globe, email continues to dominate the way in which we communicate.

Four decades since the first message – believed to be “QWERTYUIOP” – email seems to be going strong. But is it about to hit a midlife crisis? With web workers now using more sophisticated collaborative apps and social business tools to communicate and share information, are we going to see email’s reign come to an end?

Email is a great communication tool. You can get in touch with business colleagues, family and friends at the touch of a button. Gone are the days of waiting by the front door for a letter from uncles and aunties across the globe, or sitting by a fax machine waiting for that signed document to come back from a client’s legal team. However, email isn’t a collaboration tool. Anyone who has tried to collate feedback from numerous colleagues on a document over email knows how painful the process can be. No one seems to remember which version the team is working on and there is always that one person who sends over some (supposedly) final amendments overnight. Hours can be wasted waiting for emails to go back and forth, searching through inboxes for missing documents, and putting large files onto CDs, USB sticks or FTP servers due to file size restrictions.

It is little wonder then that web workers across the globe are turning to the likes of Dropbox for storing and sharing files. Store your files on one computer, and they’ll automatically appear on your other computers with Dropbox installed. Simple. Indeed, Apple has finally joined the party and realized that emailing photos from your phone was so 2010 — its forthcoming iCloud service will provide a far smarter way to move your content between devices. Evernote is another popular tool with remote workers, enabling you to quickly capture anything. Whether it’s a photo, a screenshot or a web site, whatever you capture is stored, processed and made searchable. And, of course, there’s Huddle. Being cloud-based, Huddle enables you to manage your projects, files and people on any device, from any location.

With social networks making it so easy to stay in touch and share information with people in their personal lives, the demand for such simplicity in the workplace has increased. Take Facebook, for example: You can message your friends, share your photos and videos (and every other aspect of your life should you so wish), and co-ordinate events from wherever you are. With more than 500 million active Facebook users spending 700 billion minutes per month on the site, and more than 200 million people tweeting, email’s grip on our personal lives may well be coming to an end.

For business, however, it’s a different matter. Yes, there are tools being used to make our working lives easier, but removing email from the workplace completely will require more than just introducing intuitive, easy-to-use tools in the office. It requires a change in habit. Email is deeply entrenched in our daily working lives and moving to other tools will require a culture shift. Any new tools and services need to be integrated into processes from the outset of a project / program / campaign so that people become accustomed to using an alternative tool. And this is before you start the mammoth task of introducing client and partner companies to your amazing new tool. While email may not dominate workplace communication in another 40 years, there’s life in it yet!

Andy McLoughlin, Co-founder and EVP Strategy at Huddle, can be reached on Twitter @Bandrew.

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• Communications, Platforms, Privacy Ruled NewNet in Q4
• How to Manage Consumer-Grade Collaborative Tools in the Workplace

WebWorkerDaily spoke to Chan to find out what’s worked for him and what hasn’t, so other companies can crib from his answers and avoid the school of hard knocks.

Talent

Chan’s first move into web work was to hire a virtual assistant, Marina. She is from the Philippines and eventually came to work directly for ADP, becoming a baseline for the company in the country and helping them hire more people. Having such a linchpin is key, according to Chan.

“If you have one really solid person who you trust in country, whether you know them personally or they come through a reference, that can make or break your whole virtual team,” he says. “I think it’s really been because of Marina that we’ve been able to succeed in working in the Philippines. The same is true now in India. We have one lead person and it’s because of our relationship with him that we can manage the India team without us falling apart.”

An adequate hiring process is also essential. “We hire based on the resume, the portfolio they show us online, and an interview process where my lead person in the Philippines interviews them first and my partner and I do subsequent interviews. Finally we give them a test at the end of the whole process to make sure they can do what they say they can do.” But it wasn’t always that way. Previously, the company simply hired off a resume and a single interview, “but then we found these people were not performing, leaving, slacking off, so that’s when we put in the other procedures.” Problem solved.

Tools

At first, “it was hard for us to figure out how to manage virtual workers properly,” Chan confesses, “but now we’ve put a number of tools in place so we can monitor their hours and then match the hours with the productivity.”

To do so the company uses a range of off-the-shelf, paid-for cloud services. Chan explains: “Basecamp manages all our projects. We use Yammer, a corporate Twitter-like product. As soon as a team member finishes a particular task in Basecamp they have to ‘Yammer’ it. Then we use Skype for one-on-one discussions. We use GoToMeeting for training purposes. We also use SlimTimer to track how much time is actually spent on a particular task. One last tool people might consider using is called RingCentral. Here in the U.S. I have an 800 number for our company and I can parcel out extensions to anyone I want, including people in the Philippines and soon in India.”

Tips

Leave little up to interpretation is Chan’s first tip. He suggests having “a very discreet process for  the tasks you want workers to complete. You can’t be ‘loosey goosey’ on your requirements – it doesn’t work. If it’s left up to interpretation, most of the time it will fail.”

Close collaboration is also important. Chan and his partner meet the entire team virtually every day at one o’clock. “The team we have in the Philippines works California time. That’s a requirement, which is the graveyard shift for them. So we meet every day come rain or come shine and we go through all our projects and everyone gives updates.” This is part of a concerted effort to keep the team cohesive, which also involves giving the team leader in the Philippines resources for team-building meals and drinks on a regular basis. And Chan has also invested in a few face-to-face meetings: “we have visited the Philippines once to get the team all together and we recently flew to Singapore and flew one of the team members there to meet us.”

Finally, Chan advises close attention to avoiding cultural miscues, at least at first. “When I started working with these teams, I was very cautious about what I said, how I said it, being polite. I’m less worried about what I say now because we have built a relationship up. But I think it’s very important that you understand the cultures that you’re dealing with and cultivate that. Then over time you can loosen up,” he says.

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
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Speaking to WebWorkerDaily following an appearance at the IBF 24 event and the announcement of new business integration tools for his product this week, Pisoni offered strong arguments to counter skeptics of social networking for the organization:

When I think about who in a company should be the happiest about this, it’s executives. Because your employees are talking about the good and bad of your company somewhere, and if it’s not within your corporate social network, then it’s either around the water cooler or on Twitter or Facebook – places that you have far less visibility.

Companies are really taking advantage of the fact that not only can they bring that in-house, but they can turn it into a positive by getting involved. The ability for a brand new employee to have an interaction with the CEO on his first day – you can’t imagine what kind of impact that has on retention and loyalty.

We’ve heard so many stories about an employee or a set of employees who disagreed with a policy change that was about to be made and went on Yammer to start talking about it. Executives were able to get involved, explain what was going on and turn that situation around.

Historically, because information has been so siloed, it’s been easy to believe that you could control that information and make sure people don’t talk about things. But with something like Yammer you turn that into a more connected workforce that feels involved with the executives, with the strategy, with the vision, and thus become more productive on executing on that vision.

If you’re still unsure that you can prove the value of social networking for businesses, Pisoni adds an analogy to illustrate the power of social tools for connecting employees:

People  often question: what is the value of social? I gave this analogy on the IBF 24. Nowadays when you’re walking down the street and you want to find a good restaurant, you pop out your iPhone, you do a search on Google Maps and it tells you where the restaurant is. You look up reviews, get the phone number, get bus maps and all that stuff. This process — that used to be highly inefficient, that required going to many different channels to look for information in many different ways — has been brought together in a way that is so highly efficient. Google has taken all these databases and brought them together in a simple interface.

The way I look at social in the enterprise is it’s that same kind of thing but around people, where people are these repositories of knowledge and the social layer really takes these complicated processes that would have involved going up and down hierarchical chains of management or across divisions in geography and connects them in a way that is very similar to that Google Maps app on the iPhone. Because people are really the greatest source of knowledge within a company.

Has Pisoni succeeded in swaying your skeptic (whether internal or external)?

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• The Future of Workplaces

Unlike apps like Yammer and Socialtext, which are trying to be more general social tools for the enterprise, WorkSimple concentrates specifically on the sharing of goals. Users can comment on shared goals and “follow” the people, teams and categories they are interested in, in order to get visibility of goals (and their progress) across an organization. While the app can be used for collaboration — by uploading file attachments to goals, and commenting on shared goals, for example — WorkSimple isn’t really designed to be used as a general communications tool.

As well as individuals sharing their own goals, users can also assign goals to individuals and teams. Reporting features allow users to track goal progress. The tool allows managers to provide continuous feedback through comments, goal tracking and goal reviews.

WorkSimple shares some features with many collaborative task and project management apps, such as Basecamp and Producteev, but it’s better suited to sharing and managing broader goals, rather than more granular, individual tasks. As its name implies, it’s also simpler and easier to use than many task management apps, which should make it easier to deploy across an entire organization. That ease of use is a necessary asset, because the whole idea behind the app is to create a transparent environment where everyone is provided with real-time visibility into what people are working on, what work needs to get done and how things are going — if only a few people use it, it won’t be anywhere near as effective.

I can see WorkSimple being particularly beneficial in larger organizations and those using distributed teams, where visibility of goal setting and progress across an organization can be a big issue. However, its lack of integration with other task management, collaboration and social business tools may prove to be a stumbling block for many organizations. Additionally, businesses with existing task management or social business tools in place may find it somewhat redundant.

The basic social goals features in WorkSimple are free. Advanced features, such as the reporting tools, require a paid Company ($5 per month, or less with volume discounts) or Manager ($5 per month) account.

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Here’s a look at the home page, which can look very different from one organization to another:

Note the familiar “activity stream” on the left, which you’ll find in all of the other enterprise social networking solutions. Podio allows you to add apps from the app store to workspace areas  called “Spaces.”  You can create as many Spaces as you need for your private network, or to share with external users such as clients or partners. The App Store makes it easy to set up specific tools for each of your Spaces. Podio also includes useful core tools such as a calendar, contacts area and a task management system like that you would find in solutions like Basecamp. These are all good features to include for a social platform in the workplace. Finally, having the ability to add other tools from the App Store gives each company a great deal of options.

Podio on the Go

There’s a free iPhone app for your Podio network, but I wasn’t as impressed with the it as I was with the Podio website. Currently, the iPhone app only provides access to a few core features such as the main activity stream, messaging, contacts, tasks and profiles; you don’t have access to any of the apps added to your Spaces from the App Store. I think it would make sense to include a way to include apps that you want your workforce to use while on the road on their mobile device.

Comparisons

So how does Podio compare to the current crop of corporate social platforms? Well, some have begun to give more options to add more features and customization, but none of them offer Podio’s range of specialty apps; I think its closest competitor could be a newly launched service called Convofy, which Simon reviewed recently.

Podio offers a free version for up to 10 users and a premium edition for $99/month for up to 25 users, and $4/month per additional user.

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

This ability to add context to shared items in Convofy might seem fairly insignificant, but it makes it into a really powerful and dynamic collaboration tool. For example, as shown in the screenshot below, a Convofy user can share a link to a web page and highlight the specific sections of text that they want to share, adding comments or hyperlinks. Other users can then add their own comments, generating a discussion around the shared content.

Users can also upload documents, spreadshseets, images or PDFs and add contextual notes, annotations and hyperlinks, linked directly to the comments they make, as shown below.

There are some other innovative features, too. For example, Convofy’s bubble-like presence indicators not only indicate whether someone is online and available to chat, the size of the bubble indicates how active the user is on the system. There also a a re-positionable dropzone added to the edge of the screen that makes it easy to share links and documents on Convofy just by dropping them onto the dropzone. The dropzone is active even if the main Convofy is minimized, streamlining the process of sharing items.

Convofy is available as an Adobe AIR-powered desktop application; it will work on Windows, Mac and Linux. Mobile access is also catered for via a mobile-optimized web app; it doesn’t have access to all of the fancy collaboration features, but should enable users to stay up-to-date while they’re on the go.

I’ve only had the chance to briefly play with a demo of Convofy prior to its launch but I have to say that I’m impressed. It’s a slick app, and the built-in contextual features should make it into a very capable collaboration tool.

You can sign up at the Convofy homepage. Free accounts are available now, while Pro accounts, which should be rolled out in a couple of weeks, will cost $5 per user per month and will include access to additional administrative tools, such as the ability to moderate content and block users and domains.

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• The Future of Workplaces
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

For example, if you wanted to create a “write requirements doc” to-do with a due date of tomorrow, you could craft an update like this:  “#todo #tomorrow write requirements doc [redesign]” (the “redesign” in square brackets indicates a topic). You can also attach multiple files to any update, and address other users using an @ symbol. Status updates assigned a date will be displayed on your calendar.

You can create separate project spaces for different projects and teams. It has real-time updating: any updates or edits made by coworkers will be instantly relayed to your browser.  It also even has a location-based “check-in” facility, so you can see where your coworkers are.

That all sounds pretty cool in theory, so I was quite looking forward to trying it out; I liked the idea of being able to quickly assign to-do items via the keyboard in a status update. I also liked the way you can attach files to any update, so that a to-do, note or even a reply to someone else’s update can have a relevant file associated with it. Unfortunately, the current implementation seems to be a bit buggy. During my test, I ran into a few errors, and some of the functionality didn’t work as I expected it to. Tagging an update as a to-do, for example, added the item to my calendar, but not to my to-do list. Additionally, there’s quite a lot of functionality packed into this app, some of which may not be all that relevant to many users, such as the location-based features, for example. Coupled with the new syntax, it makes it a little confusing to use, and the poorly-written site copy doesn’t make it any easier to understand.

Tadagraph is still in beta, so you’d expect to come across some issues like these, and I hope the developers iron out these problems before launch. The idea is quite promising, but I can’t recommend it just yet.

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

One of the first people I spoke to was Jaimee Clements, a social media strategist at the American Automobile Association (AAA). I wanted to talk to the AAA, as I thought it could make for a good case study. It’s a typically “old skool” organization, both in terms of its age (it’s over 100 years old) and the fact that it’s also a very traditionally structured organization, as it’s actually a federation made up of various affiliated auto clubs.

Adoption

The story of the AAA’s adoption of Yammer is an interesting one: Rather than being the top-down software implementation that would be usual in such a traditional organization, Yammer started off being used by just a small group of tech-savvy users on “work from home” days, as a means of communication and keeping everyone up to speed on with goings-on. Usage remained fairly low-key for about a year, until the day the COO mentioned the product and its usefulness in a town hall meeting, whereupon usage exploded. Two years after that initial adoption by a small group, the organization now has around 3,700 Yammer users.

Effects

Even more interesting than the viral way Yammer spread throughout the AAA, though, is the effect its use has had on the structure of the organization itself and its decision-making processes. Clements notes the organization is very old and traditional. It generally moves pretty slowly and suffers from information silos, particularly as it has offices in three states. However, since implementing Yammer, some of those silos have broken down, and some of the more time-consuming committees have been dropped in favor of using Yammer, greatly speeding up the decision-making process in some areas. What’s more, the organization is discovering a rich pool of ideas that otherwise may have been overlooked.

What I found really surprising was the speed of change in such a traditional organization. All these changes have occurred in a pretty short space of time: just one year into widespread adoption of Yammer throughout the business.

Best Practices

I asked Clements if she had any best practices or advice to share with other organizations that are thinking of adopting social tools like Yammer. She noted it’s really important to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high, in order to maintain value for the business and interest for users. Otherwise, the conversations may descend into a free-for-all where people are just chatting about non-work-related matters, or a ghost town with no interesting content. In order to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high, Clements recommends creating a group of “active curators” by identifying super-users and making them into administrators. They can then help to guide the use of the tool, steering conversations onto more useful areas and suggesting topics. Clements mentioned that a great way to drive conversations if things do start to get quiet is to get the curators to ask deliberately provocative questions. They will encourage people to participate and can even be used as a way to get an idea of how the team feels about a particular topic.

Clements also noted that when implementing a social tool, the HR, IT and legal departments are likely to have concerns, so it’s important to get them on board beforehand. IT, in particular, will be concerned if users can use the tool to circumvent regular IT processes. It’s also vital to have a plan in place for when things go wrong.

Knowledge capture can be problematic when using social tools; there may be huge amounts of knowledge stored in the app, but unless it’s stored and organized in such a way that users can find it again, it’s not helpful. Clements says the AAA uses a combination of monthly wrap-ups, a newsletter overview, and summarizing the most interesting or useful conversations on the corporate intranet. The active curators can help to identify the important conversations for capture. While that’s perhaps more labor-intensive than would be ideal, it appears to be working for the AAA.

Overall, I was struck by just how quickly Yammer had spread throughout the AAA, and the speed with which its use had made quite drastic changes to the way the organization worked: breaking down silos and streamlining its decision-making.

If your business has implemented a social tool, tell us about the effect that it’s had in the comments.

Photo courtesy Flickr user AndrewH.uk

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• How to Manage Consumer-Grade Collaborative Tools in the Workplace
• Top Remote Work Trends to Watch for in 2011

A new report at GigaOM Pro (subscription required) covers this landscape of new tools, looking at a selection of the leading companies in various sectors, examining each offering’s strength and weaknesses. However, I was particularly interested to read what author Haydn Shaughnessy thought made for sustainable (as opposed to functional) differentiators in the various providers of collaborative tools; looking more deeply at the value each vendor brings, rather than just the number of features its tools now provide. As you can see in the table below, many of the tools have very similar feature sets.

There are several potential sustainable differentiators that could each make for a strong product, including:

• Experience: Companies with more experience of the way tools are used in the workplace should have an edge over those that don’t. For example, companies with histories of working with user-driven communities, like Jive, will likely have an edge when implementing community features in its more recent apps. Of course, newer, inexperienced vendors could always acquire talent with the required experience, but in general, companies with long track records in a particular field will have more combined experience than those that don’t.
• Driving new concepts in collaborative work: Certain vendors, like Socialtext, are known to drive innovative thinking around new work practices, such as the use of “streams” to provide visibility in knowledge work. Companies at the forefront of those kind of innovations are likely to add ore value to their products.
• Ease of implementation: Some vendors offer tools, such as the “enterprise-lite,” consumer-like offerings from the likes of box.net and Yammer, that are easy to deploy and implement. They don’t require potential clients to go through a protracted enterprise decision-making process, and so are much less risky than complex, more expensive alternatives.
• Deep system integration: Some vendors have made integration with existing enterprise tools, like SharePoint a specialty. Certainly, if your business already has established enterprise tools in place, one of your priorities should be to look to vendors whose tools are designed to deeply mesh with those tools and improve upon them — not just superficially interface with them.
• Work process innovation: If discovering better work process is a priority, then Shaughnessy argues that businesses should choose a tool that’s already used by employees (presumably as this means that the concentrating on how the tool woks will be less of a priority for users), or one with strong ideation features, like brainstorming and discussion tools. I agree with this to an extent: Complex tools that force users into certain ways of working are much less likely to be used to discover new work processes; if you allow users to pick their own tools, they’ll implement their own ways of getting things done. The flipside, of course, is losing some control and oversight of employees.
• Stronger management oversight: While collaboration tools have the potential to make organizations flatter, we’ll still need some management oversight, and those managers will  need additional support if they’re working with remote teams. Certain vendors provide platforms with more advanced management tools that go beyond milestone setting or status updates.

Of course, certain companies would likely prioritize one or more of these differentiators depending on their needs, and when choosing software, there are many other factors to consider in addition to those listed above. But by looking deeper than the list of a product’s features, it’s possible to assess whether a company really brings an understanding of how its products could benefit the workplace and improve work processes,  and, ultimately, whether they will be successful.

Read a more in-depth analysis of these new work tools in the full report at GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

Photo courtesy Flickr user prettydreamer.workshop

Related Content From GigaOM Pro (subscription required)

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