social_business – ITSinsider

Working out Loud for a Better World – Part I

It was about six years ago that the concept of “Working out Loud” started picking up traction in the blogosphere. It was an easy way to describe the contagious, fun way to work in a more transparent, generous, and authentic way. Of course, you needed a platform to work out loud on, but the tribe who was following this new mode of corporate conversation, communication, and collaboration was already well aware of the power of enterprise social networks.

My friend, Bryce Williams of Eli Lilly, an inaugural member of The 2.0 Adoption Council and later a Change Agent as well, had attended a panel at the 2010 Enterprise 2.0 conference, and heard the term used loosely to describe this new phenomenon. Bryce, a regular blogger, then remixed the phrase to create an entirely new way to look at working collaboratively in a large enterprise social network. His original blog post describes his thinking.

Of course, the purpose of the Council in those days was to accelerate learning and sharing, so it wasn’t long before others started remixing and re-purposing what Bryce had started. The most notable WoL champion today is my hero John Stepper who left his investment bank day job to strike out on his own mission to spread the love of Working out Loud to the ends of the earth. John’s book, Working Out Loud: For a Better Career and Life has become the revered playbook for this fast-growing movement. (There’s a web site too.)

We’ve been saying in the Change Agents Worldwide network, that we can “feel the tide is turning.” Last week was international #WOLweek, and while scanning the post-election news, I serendipitously stumbled upon this incredible photo on Twitter:

Today is the last day of our Int. WOL Week at @VirtusaCorp. Make your work visible @johnstepper @MaduRatnayake @prageeths @apwickrama pic.twitter.com/8A8z8isVU0

— Anjale Jayawardena (@AnjaleOfficial) November 11, 2016

This 8 x 12 foot sign was literally affixed to an office building in Sri Lanka. Who would have imagined in those early days, circa 2009, that this could possibly result from a group of like-minded, random people who came together to improve the world with enterprise social networking technology? I could.

The big story behind the phenomenon of this worldwide movement is just starting to unfold. Of course, talk of a possible Slack IPO doesn’t hurt. But truthfully, Slack was late to this game (2013) and had been working somewhat independently of the community that fueled the organic adoption of social tools. The way had been paved by many that came before Slack took off. For instance, McAfee’s seminal piece in MIT SMR is already a decade old.

I’m just as excited as ever about the possibility of enterprise social tools to improve life on the planet. In fact, I kicked off my social impact startup, Big Mountain Data, using Yammer. Part II of this post is next that explains that.

Welcome to the future.

Social Business by the Numbers

While the blustering goes on in the blogosphere, I thought I’d (ahem) cut to the chase and get serious about the Social Business opportunity in, well, spreadsheet terms. I popped into a little discussion between Adam Holt at Morgan Stanley and Tony Zingale and Bryan LeBlanc of Jive Software (JIVE). Although specific business gains directly related to Social Business can’t always be divulged by large companies for a variety of reasons, we can take a look at the category as an investment play and make some judgments about its viability. To that end, here are a few key points CEO Zingale and CFO LeBlanc made to the investor community:

What’s different about the social business category is there are multiple entry points for a sale. The sale could come from IT, Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, HR, Corporate Communications or more often than not a Business Unit. < Key learning: this is different in software investing. Buyers abound.

The Social Business story has reached a tipping point. No longer are sales “missionary” sales. There are line item budgets for social business software, and large RFPs are on the market from F1000 companies who are investing in these platforms. Further, every software company is now incorporating social into its product suite, albeit mostly still relegated to “silo” functional software for specific departmental needs (Sales, HR, etc.).

Social Software is not a “replacement” category of software like Salesforce was with Siebel or Workday is with various ERP modules. This is not a cloud v. on premise alternative. (Jive sells both on and off premise.)

The deals are larger. Jive closed three million dollar plus deals in the fourth quarter of 2011. Large institutions in various industry segments (PwC, Thomson Reuters, and Ace Insurance) chose Jive to introduce a new way of working to their firms.

Social Business software delivers real value to every knowledge worker in the enterprise. The market opportunity exceeds that of traditional enterprise software which typically serves a discrete business unit function (manufacturing, HR, finance, sales, etc.).

The JIVE call has some interesting nuggets about how JIVE is uniquely poised to compete against the other two main competitors in the enterprise space: IBM and Microsoft, but the essence of the story is about the legitimization of the social business category for the institutional buyer. More importantly, this investor story is not even about technology and tools. It’s about organizations behaving differently by connecting and engaging with constituents. The tools will come and go, but the behavioral change is a paradigm shift well worth the early entry.

Jive management took the company public on December 13. Since then, the stock has doubled and Jive’s market cap is $1.24B. Institutions hold 82%, so lots of pension funds are betting that social business is real. I’ll side with Wall Street on this one.

I, For One, Welcome our New Social Data Overlords

Historically, the trouble I’ve always had with social media was the precision deficit surrounding the interpretation of its influence. It always seemed to me that if you could get, say, Chris Brogan to talk about anything, you were successful with social media. Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration, and social media has really never been my area of expertise in the spectrum of all social business. Readers of this blog know I focus more on the internal enterprise side of social business. Because, well, it is more rational maybe? See my coverage of my first SXSW Interactive.

BUT…

Before I got back into the technology sector in the 90s, I spent a solid few years in the Advertising business. And not digital or online advertising (it didn’t exist yet). In the real Advertising (TV/Broadcast/Print) world. (With a capital A.) Think of it as Mad Men for Yuppies (late 80s). I entered the ad world as an Account Executive on the IBM account. The agency I joined, LGFE, was a boutique outfit, a part of JWT. We had 100% of the IBM business. In 1980 dollars, we had a $160M annual media budget for IBM and it comprised the lion’s share of the agency’s billings. The agency was best known for two things: 1. its launch of the IBM PC and 2. its famous Executive “breakaway” which literally made Advertising history. But those are great stories for another day. Like most LGFE employees after the breakaway, I skedaddled my way down Madison Avenue to a new position with Ogilvy & Mather where I helped teach our Creatives about the Unix operating system. Again, great stories for another day, another blog. I just wanted to establish a little Mad Street Cred before I get to the heart of this post.

When I think about the burgeoning world of social media, I compare its trends and “findings” with what we were doing 30 years ago in Advertising. Even back then, for all the hoopla, big expense accounts, private limos, and 5-star hotels, Advertising was pretty serious stuff. It was all about the numbers. (We all thanked the technology gods for Lotus 1-2-3.) Campaigns that strove to cultivate an emotional connection to a brand were paid for by executives who wanted to see stone cold returns on their investment. And, I’m going way out on a limb here, after 30 years I’m pretty sure that hasn’t changed. In fact, the pressure to deliver results from media spend is probably more fierce than ever considering the fracturing of a traditional media landscape that was fairly easy to manipulate in the old days before the Internet and mobile technology.

So fast forward to 2011. No, 2010. Erik Huddleston joined Dachis Group as CTO. When Erik first arrived, I wasn’t sure what he was going to do. Get our wifi working in the office or something. But, the next thing I knew, Erik was presenting at Defrag, whaaa? and young men in black tee shirts that said, “Hadoop” started skulking around the office. I finally got briefed on what this little dream team was working on buried away in remote locations around the world, and I was kinda blown away.

A beginning step in that effort is announced today for public consumption. Erik’s team has built a platform that crunches hundreds of millions of data points in near real time to deliver a view on how social a given company is – how they compare to their industry, their competitors – broken down as best in class by company, subsidiary, geography, department and brand. Culling from APIs, data buys, data partnerships, page scrapes, crowd-sourced data, company contributions, and our own internal data team, we now offer the Social Business Index (SBI) to anyone who wants to get a view into how your company’s brand is performing on the social web. Over 100 leading companies participated in the early access program to get the data refined and help develop useful insights for its use. The SBI offers insights for 26,000 brands from over 20,000 companies by analyzing over 100 million social accounts world wide, and hundreds of millions of other sources.

Again, the SBI is simply a lightweight lens on a massive platform that is compiling ground-breaking social data analytics and analysis. The SBI is free for the companies covered and anyone can sign up to see how your brand is doing at www.socialbusinessindex.com.

This first effort is just a taste of what is coming. Big data will yield something that has been inconveniently missing in marketing on a large scale: evidence-based marketing with business outcomes correlated to measurable metrics. Internet marketers have done a great job with what’s known as performance marketing, but with the advent of big data, marketing spend can be targeted with much greater precision and brands can engage meaningfully in near real time. In fact, interactive advertising has finally matched broadcast TV spend. Forrester recently reported that, “By 2016, advertisers will spend $77 billion on interactive marketing – as much as they do on television today.”

This post is a departure from what I typically cover regarding the Enterprise 2.0 sector, but I’m extremely excited about this work. On the road map is deep analysis into workforce/partner/supplier engagement, so the relevance for the enterprise is huge. Even having this type of brand intelligence will impact internal operations in many ways. Agile companies who can react quickly, will be competitive winners in their categories.

If Dachis Group is known only for its BSD (Big Social Data), then I am totally cool with that. Being first to market with real ROI on social is sweet, and will go far to relegate the buzzfest of social media 1.0 to the history books.

SMC Austin Chapter hosts a conversation on Social Business

Be there: Register today.

Just when you think you have all the answers, something crops up that challenges your beliefs on how Social Business works and will work in the future. Whether it’s new platforms/tools, new regulation, organizational changes, even world events — the Social Business world does not stand still and learning in this space is highly iterative. At Dachis Group and for our Social Business Council members, we face this reality day in and day out. The good news on Social Business is there are ample opportunities to increase and share your learning. To that end, I’m going to be moderating a panel discussion on Social Business at the upcoming Social Media Club Austin meeting next week. (Tuesday, 8/16 from 6pm – 8pm CT). I hope you can join us if you’re local, and if you’re not, I’m sure the tweet stream will be buzzing. The twitter hashtag for Social Media Austin events is #SMCA.

We’ll have a great panel of vendors (who just happen to have great “user” experience as well) relating their own journeys on transforming their clients, as well as their own companies, to become fully-functioning Social Businesses. There is a lot of collective wisdom represented on this panel of experts, so I hope you’ll join us in the conversation. This will be my speaking debut to our awesome local Social Media Club chapter (most active club in the world, outside of San Francisco I hear). I’m looking forward to mashing up my knowledge of the internal enterprise social space with the external expertise resident in this town, as well as meeting lots of new social enthusiasts.

On the panel we will have Jive’s Deirdre Walsh, who is somewhat of a hometown hero of mine as she led National Instruments‘ social strategy prior to joining Jive as Social Media Manager. Then, we have the amazing Kat Mandelstein who has been a terrific champion for Social Business at IBM and one smart cookie on all things social. Kat is also on the international board for the SMC and has done a great job supporting the Austin SMC chapter as Vice President. The other two panelists are Will Staney of VMware (which recently acquired Socialcast) and Jean-Claude Monney of Microsoft. I have not yet met Will or Jean-Claude, but have heard great things about them, so I look forward to hearing their insights. Will has an impressive background in introducing social media and adoption of social technology at VMWare with a solid foundation in community management and new media strategy. Jean-Claude leads Microsoft’s technical strategy in the Discrete Manufacturing industry, chairs the Microsoft High Tech Customer Advisory Board and represents Microsoft as the chair of the OAGi High Tech Council, a global B2B standards organization.

In preparation for the panel, we’re soliciting your questions ahead of time so we can get them into the session. Don’t be shy. Let us fashion the panel to suit your interests.

Send us questions you’d like to hear answered.

See you there!

Chatter: From Both Sides Now

The gala event, Dreamforce, isn’t really my gig. The Enterprise Irregulars know “up and down and sideways” everything related to Cloud-computing. One of our EIs, Anshu Sharma, was a key architect of Salesforce’s database.com offering announced last week. In short, I spare everyone my uninformed opinion on most things Cloud-computing related for which I’m certain my EI pals and everyone else is grateful. But, because I’m an Enterprise Irregular blogger, I guess, I was invited to attend Dreamforce this year. And even though I’m not really clued into Salesforce (the company), I accepted the invite because I wanted to see for myself – eyes and ears on the ground – what Chatter was all about and how it would fit into the social business landscape.

The good news on Chatter

The good news on Chatter is more about Salesforce.com than it is about Chatter the social tool. Like I said last year, having Benioff move front and center to embrace the social revolution is like a dream come true. This sector needs a Benioff. Grafting on JP Rangaswami to the SFDC social story was pretty slick as well. It occurred to me at Dreamforce that an item that has been conspicuously absent in the internal social-collaboration space (heretofore called Enterprise 2.0) has been high quality marketing with great creative and real reach beyond the echo chamber we’ve been nestled in for the past four years. So, the combination of Benioff who’s somewhat larger than life in real life and agency-designed creative is a huge plus to our sector. Score one for professional marketing, awareness building, promotion, and tech rockstar iconoclasts. Related is the nature of Salesforce’s corporate culture. Again, I admit ignorance writing about a company I don’t know very well, but there is a detectable undercurrent of raw ambition that seems to drive the company ethos. It’s also a winner-takes-all, scrappy underdog vibe that is easy to spot from Benioff’s jabs at old skool enterprise vendors and thinking, to the high energy vibe on the floor of the Cloud Expo exhibit hall emanating from Salesforce employees and partners. Score two for raw ambition and high energy. To make a distinction, Salesforce strikes me as the perfect blend of raw ambition without hubris. That’s tough to achieve in a competitive market, but that’s how I see it. From a company whose primary customer is sales people, it kinda makes sense. The remaining plus in Salesforce’s corner is its deep technology prowess and its playa status in the broader tech market due in some part to its status as a public company with revenues over $1B. It’s unlikely to me that Chatter will face any technical obstacle it can’t solve or any partner who’ll reject its overtures. So, score three for technology wunderkind with deep pockets.

The bad news on Chatter

Even though it was announced last year at Dreamforce, Chatter is late to the party. In the Council, we have hundreds (yes, hundreds) of the largest enterprises in the world already engaged in a social business initiative. Granted, Dreamforce, is like a “revival” (h/t Dennis Howlett) for Salesforce customers and its ecosystem, so there was a lot of giddiness surrounding Chatter and its game-changing energy. I found myself commenting to my blogger friends, I felt like I was surrounded in a sea of n00bs who just discovered social. That’s actually not bad news, but it is bad news if the legions of non-converted enterprise employees flock to social via SFDC and cause a disruptive wrinkle (and endless analysis paralysis) in the strategic plan that’s already underway on another platform. In truth, most of our members are not zealots for their platform (well, some are), but most of them simply want to deliver the best social collaboration platform for the company. When we first started discussing the Chatter phenomenon, most of our members said something similar to this,

“I am a little worried about it “cannibalizing” some of what we are trying to do.”

Remember, the Council represents a small minority of all organizations on the planet who will eventually move to social platforms. But, they happen to be some of the furthest along and most advanced. One of our members summed up a good response after it was all said and done,

“I just got off the phone with Salesforce, followed by a conversation with our internal team that manages it. We will “turn it on” for current Salesforce users only. It will not be positioned for or compete with our enterprise solution. In doing so, we get data on how many Sales folks choose the “Hide Chatter” button, and if by some chance it does take off wildly, that becomes a good problem to solve later next year, and we can look at a much bigger play…”

So, net net Chatter arriving on the scene is probably a good thing for our sector. I personally am counting on those ambitious SFDC n00bs to spread the word far and wide to the unconverted. The faster social becomes a phenomenon in the Enterprise, the sooner we get to the promised land.