GigaOM » social business

Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:55:38 +0000

“Social customer service” refers to those services that provide customer support via social media channels. Providing such services is no longer merely a niche or specialty sideline. Challengers, or disruptors who were early with the new technology, are working to expand and integrate their offerings into enterprise systems and processes.

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Social first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook

stoweboyd — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:14:19 +0000

Social business technologies remain in the foreground of discussions about business transformation, but the events of the first quarter of 2013 raised as many questions as they answered, or more.

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What every enterprise should know about social-business tools

Jenn Marston — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 20:30:24 +0000

Social-business tools are everyone in today’s enterprise, integrated into not just employee communication tools but also integrated into HR departments, finance departments, and other areas of day-to-day business. In the latest GigaOM Research podcast we hear from collaboration experts Stowe Boyd and David Coleman on the latest tools disrupting the enterprise and how to best integrate social tools into your business.

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SHOW NOTES
Host: Adam Lesser
Speakers: Stowe Boyd and David Coleman

Social business software: The integrated approach
Social business software: Small and simple
LinkedIn gets pushed into social
How do you measure the value of social tools in the enterprise?
Disruption in the collaborative tools world
A “no fire” corporate policy: Could it change the business world?

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T-Metro, Broadband Caps, Remembering Steve Jobs

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What’s the role of HR in building a social business?

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 14:03:45 +0000

So your company is trying to be more social, leveraging new ways of communicating to break down barriers to collaboration and information sharing. Great, but what role does HR play in that process?

That’s what David Kiron of the MIT Management Review recently asked Jeff Schick, the vice president of social software at IBM, in the course of a lengthy interview. The long conversation about IBM’s efforts to build a more social business and put all its social technology to use internally, dug into not only what specific tech tools IBM employs, but also questions of the culture of sharing that successful implementation of these tools demands.

“It’s not all about the technology. I think culture plays a huge dimension in how successful organizations are in transforming themselves into a social business,” said Schick. “This stuff is so easy to use that it’s not about what button to click to post a blog, but how do you create a vibrant community?” The interview goes on to touch on how IBM uses social “ambassadors” and gamification to encourage participation in its social communities, as well as offering heavy users the chance to win donations to charities of their choice by creating content.

But it also touches on the interesting and under-discussed question of whether HR should get involved in mandating or refereeing participation in an organization’s social tools, comparing different approaches used in different countries. Schick says:

As I travel around the planet, the role of human resources and what you can ask an employee to do or not do is subtly different. For instance, I spent time recently in Germany, and more than a healthy amount of discussion with clients was about, “Gee, there’s a workmen’s council in your organization, made up of different workers from different areas of the company. And as you make policy on employees and what they can do or cannot do, or tools that they can use and cannot use, the workmen’s council plays an instrumental role in whether or not they’ll permit that.” A group like that works hand in hand with human resources on changes that would take place in the organization.

An example is that we’re rolling out social software at Bosch in Germany; and working with HR and workmen’s council. So we ask, what should be our policy in asking an employee to fill out their profile? Can the company mandate it? Or is that not permissible? Have you established a set of business conduct guidelines that talk about the ethical aspects of being an employee, the way you need to behave, the way you would conduct yourself in terms of business, including blogging and responding to questions in Facebook?

So human resources does take an active role in describing and creating policy around leveraging social, both inside an organization as well as outside the organization. And this has become such a popular discussion with us that we actually publish our Social Computing Guidelines right on IBM.com, so people can understand the policy that we hold our employees accountable to.

Laying out what’s acceptable and what’s off limites when it comes to social technologies seems like a fairly inevitable responsibility of risk averse, legalistic HR.

But is social something HR can mandate or, like forced “fun” activities, is the whole cultural point of these tools lost when you require people to participate?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Brandon Giesbrecht.

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Social business and the valley of disinterest

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 13:04:53 +0000

With the rise of consumer social media and the untethering of work from a fixed geographic location, interest in ways to put social tools to work in the enterprise has been on the rise. A host of business-specific collaboration offerings from Yammer to Rypple are aiming to capture the interest of firms, while nearly every business is trying to figure out how to best utilize the likes of Facebook and Twitter. But are all companies equally engaged in figuring out how to do social?

Recent research that MIT Sloan Management Review conducted in collaboration with Deloitte reveals a striking pattern, according to an intriguing post in MIT Sloan’s Improvisations blog. When asked whether they believed social business was important, those at the biggest and smallest firms showed the greatest interest, with a steep fall off in interest among those at mid-sized organizations. Here are the percentage of respondents who agreed with the importance of social business by company size:

Less than 1,000 employees: 21.2 percent
1,000-5,000 employees: 13.6 percent
5,000 – 10,000: 13.6 percent
10,00-100,000: 12.1 percent
More than 100,000: 21.2 percent

Why might this be? The post speculates that, “social tools enable smaller organizations to appear bigger, and larger companies to appear ‘smaller’ — more accessible, responsive, and nimble,” noting that 31 percent of the smallest firms thought these tools were important to growing revenue, a much higher percentage than at larger companies. Gerald Kane, a professor at Boston College, suggests this may be because smaller firms can use social tools “as a way of increasing their voice, as a way of connecting with customers.” The analysis of the findings in ongoing, according to the post, and the final results will be published sometime this spring, so those who are interested should keep their eyes open for the full report.

In the meantime, what’s your reaction to these initial results – are mid-sized firms underestimating the potential benefits of social or are these tools really of less value to businesses of this size?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Nicholas_T.

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Personal tools lead to practical business

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 07:55:00 +0000

Much of business communication activity still happens in email, but in this day and age that presents a problem. Easy access to and tracking of projects has become more critical as workers go mobile and teams assemble remotely, and right now, the pairing of large files and email takes its toll on speed and storage capabilities, lessening productivity. Simply put, it is essential for businesses to adapt to these changes and others by providing tools that are simpler to use. This report, based on a recent survey of business managers, highlights some of the problematic areas around business content collaboration, and it provides some options for working through them. Companies mentioned in this report include 39signals, Dropbox, IBM and YouSendIt. To see all companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Socialcast building better businesses with simple social tools

Kevin Fitchard — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 01:26:33 +0000

A simple emoticon can tell you wonders about the emotional state of your company, Socialcast and About.me founder Timothy Young revealed Thursday at GigaOM’s Net:Work conference. Socialcast experimented with a simple emoticon test in a Japanese factory, at the end of the workday asking each employee in an email to click on a happy, average or sad face, gauging how satisfied they were with the day’s work experience.

It’s a simple test, Young said, but it was also one that all employees could easily participate in. The resulting data points could be used to not only rate an individual employee’s satisfaction with his or her job, but also to help promote cohesion between team members and identify if certain groups or employees, such as graphic designers or salespeople, were becoming disenfranchised.

VMWare recently acquired Socialcast, making Young VP of Social Enterprise. Despite the sophistication of its virtualization software implementations, Young said it has kept Socialcast true to its principles of providing simple business solutions can cut through the normally high level of complexity at an enterprise.

“We’re not really building software here,” Young said. “We’re helping people to unleash their power internally, become heroes and become more affective at their jobs. If we can provide really simple tools — not complex tools inside the workplace that they have to spend a lot of time training on and learning, trying to figure out how they drive value for their own jobs — if we give them really simple tools, they can use them to flourish.”

Watch live streaming video from gigaomnetwork at livestream.com

Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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Socialcast extends collaboration to external contributors

Simon Mackie — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 12:00:17 +0000

Socialcast, a social business start-up that was recently acquired by VMWare, has announced an update to its product that will support what the company calls the “extended enterprise:” the external contractors, partners, suppliers, clients and customers that all businesses rely on to get their work done. Users will now be able to create “external facing” groups and invite people from outside their organization to participate in discussion and collaboration.

In order to keep company data secure, enterprise social networking tools like Socialcast usually only allow people from within a company to join that organization’s social graph — a restriction that is usually based on email domain. This makes social business tools useful for discussion and collaboration within a particular organization, but means that whenever users want to interact with people from outside of the organization, they have to use a separate tool, like email. Some social business tools, such as Moxie Software’s Spaces, do offer facilities for bringing external users into discussions, but they are usually focused on specific groups of people (customers or contractors for example). Socialcast’s new features are much more flexible, allowing users to invite external participation from anyone, but still allow the company to maintain control over data privacy.

Bringing external users into Socialcast is pretty straightforward; a user simply has to create a new group and check a box to make it “External facing.” External users invited into that group will log in and use Socialcast in exactly the same way as employees, with just the same capabilities as regular users (posting updates, commenting, uploading and downloading files, etc.) However, they only have access to that group and cannot see anything else, even the search box is eliminated, as shown in the screenshot to the right. Internal users (employees) accessing the group will see a prominent warning that the group is external facing and anything they post could be seen by external contributors.

In addition to the ability to bring external contributors into groups, Socialcast is also getting two other enterprise-friendly features:

User Roles. Community administrators, or IT within large enterprises, can now create permission-based access to Socialcast’s premium features, reducing the burden on IT and community administrators.
Org Charts. Automatically mapped org charts make it easier for people to understand “Who’s Who” in the company and their social interactions without having to leave the Socialcast community. External contributors will also be included in these charts.

I think opening up Socialcast to external contributors is a welcome move that’s likely to be followed by other social business vendors. Companies are not islands: they work within much larger interconnected networks of vendors, partners and clients. Having two separate silos of information for communication and collaboration — a social business tool and email, for example — is tricky to manage for both users and management; the way that most social business tools can only be used within an organization was one one of the reasons that I suggested that Google+ might find a home in the enterprise. Opening up Socialcast to external contributions should help to resolve that issue, while allowing businesses to maintain much more control over their information than is possible with a consumer tool like Google+. Archiving external conversations in a social business tool like Socialcast makes a lot of sense, too: if a particular user leaves a company, the business has an archive of their conversations and relationships with external suppliers, which makes it much easier for their replacement to hit the ground running. I spoke with Tim Young, Socialcast’s founder and CEO, who said that a select group of companies that have had 45 days’ worth of early access to the new version of the app in beta have seen a whopping 40 percent increase in usage, so it seems that businesses will readily embrace these kinds of features.

The new features are rolling out Tuesday. There’s no per-user charge for external contributors, so companies can add as many as they like.

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Why Google+ could find a home in the workplace

Simon Mackie — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 17:40:56 +0000

Last week, Google rolled out a beta of its highly-anticipated new social networking platform, Google+. Reaction to the launch so far has been mainly positive, with praise for the app’s design and features. But having played with Google+ over the last few days, I think that it may find a home in a somewhat unexpected market: the workplace.

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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Enterprise social media: offline company culture impedes implementation?

Jessica Stillman — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 12:04:12 +0000

With Google again jumping into the social game with Google +, social is incredibly hot on the consumer side. But while Facebook and co. blaze a trail for home use, in the workplace interest in social has been smoldering away for years without really catching into a similar bonfire.

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?

Image courtesy Flickr user Scott McLeod

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