“Looking for greater flexibility and support for more ad hoc processes, employees have responded with a more bottom-up approach, in some cases circumventing official information systems,” say CMS Watch Founder Tony Byrne and contributing analyst Jarod Gingras, the principal authors of The Enterprise Social Software Report 2008.

CMS Watch's social media vendors matrix.

In other words, if your organization hasn’t embraced and standardized social software, your employees will begin installing it and using it without your permission. I know of what client that only found out recently that 15% of their employee base had voluntarily joined a dedicated company Facebook site. At BT, 4,000 employees formed their own “BT Facebook” site. BT took note and in response built their own social networking site called MyBT (see The power of Intranet 2.0).

If your organization hasn’t already developed an Intranet 2.0 plan (social media plan), you would do well to develop one before employees develop their own. This plan ideally contains the business case for moving to Intranet 2.0. Byrne and Gingras cite a number of business benefits to implementing enterprise social software:

Hard benefits:

• Reduce expenses
• Increase productivity
• Increase customer retention

Soft benefits:

• Improve internal communication
• Improve internal collaboration
• Improve employee morale and retention

I cited a number of positive ROI examples, or link to others, in Intranet 2.0: A must-have.

While a plan is a must, an even more difficult task may be the selection of the actual software that will power your Intranet 2.0 – there are now hundreds of solutions on the market. The Enterprise Social Software Report dissects the capabilities of 20 different social software (social media) solutions for Intranet 2.0 (or Web 2.0) including those from:

• IBM (Lotus Connections)
• SharePoint
• Connectbeam
• Facebook
• Google (Blogger)
• MediaWiki
• Socialtext
• and others

Each of these solutions are reviewed for their business service uses including:

• Blog
• Wiki
• Social Ranking
• Project Tracking & Participation
• Multimedia
• Info Filtering
• File Sharing
• Web Conferencing
• Discussion Forums
• Presence / Instant Messaging (IM)
• People Finding (e.g. social networking)

All of this is rated according to various Administration & System Services (e.g. security, analytics, etc.) and various corporate scenarios (e.g. Enterprise Collaboration, Project Collaboration, etc.).

Some interesting notes regarding the two big solutions, SharePoint and Lotus Connections / Quickr:

• Lotus Connections / Quickr: strong social networking, strong presence and IM tools, excellent integration with Notes and emerging Outlook connectors, and an innovative Blackberry application; “underwhelming blog/wiki” and requires WebSphere Portal for roles and group modules – best for Enterprise Networking; poor for Project Collaboration.
• Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS 2007): broad range of third-party plug-ins, lightweight portal services including bundled applications and lightweight document and records management services into social applications, search works well in an all-SharePoint environment; almost all native services are weak compared to competitors, near complete absence of social networking, social tagging & Bookmarking, and surprisingly weak integration with Outlook – best for Project Collaboration (e.g. team sites); poor for Enterprise deployments.

In short, Lotus is a better enterprise solution; SharePoint is a better project or team solution.

Regardless, 20 different products are reviewed in detail (from 10 – 25 pages per product review) and it’s a worthwhile read if you are looking at implementing social media or Intranet 2.0 software. Buy CMS Watch’s Enterprise Social Media Report 2008 (they offer a 30-day, 100% money-back guarantee).

If you’re looking to move to Intranet 2.0, but don’t exactly know how, then have a look at our Intranet 2.0 Blueprint service, or call me at 416.986.2226.

ADDITIONAL READING:

Intranet 2.0: A must-have

Enterprise 2.0 vs. Intranet 2.0

Embracing Enterprise 2.0

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Most intranet or employee directories are the most used, if not most popular, applications on the corporate intranet. Most pull key contact information directly from the HR database or ERP; others allow employees to update and maintain their own information.

For those organizations like IBM that allow employees to edit parts of their profile (but not key reporting information like title, department, reporting lines, etc.), an over-looked and under-appreciated challenge often occurs: ensuring that employees actually keep their information up-to-date.

An internal study by IBM some years ago found out that 40% of employee directory listings (called Blue Pages) had not been updated at all in the previous 9 month period. A lot of tacit knowledge and information is left unreported in employee profiles. That in itself is not a big problem if you know who you’re looking for, but in a company of 385,000 employees, finding the right employee for the right issue can be a challenge.

An employee profile page using Fringe, IBM's people tagging system

Wilcox et al (Werner Geyer, Stephen Farrell, Tessa Lau and Stefan Nusser) created a people tagging system called Fringe. “People tagging is a form of social bookmarking that enables people to organize their contacts into groups, annotate them with terms supporting future recall, and search for people by topic area,” says Wilcox.

“People-tagging has a valuable side benefit: it enables the community to collectively maintain each others interest and expertise profiles.”

Fringe profiles display contact information and automatically generated information from the Blue Pages directory including:

• Communities that they belong to
• Blog entries
• Bookmarked pages (from their social bookmarking tool, Dogear)

The real value though is in the people tagging:

• Employees can tag anyone with any keyword or tag (e.g. a doctor might have the tags “doctor,” “MD,” “surgeon,” “pediatrics,” etc.)
• All tags are recorded to the tagger and the tagee (therefore no anonymous tags, and no private or hidden tags)
• When you tag someone, they can tag you back (forcing extra diligence and consideration)
• Authors of a tag are displayed when hovering over a tag
• An outgoing tag cloud shows which tags a person has applied to another
• An incoming tag cloud shows what tags has been applied to that person
• All tags are linked to the creator, and their respective tags
• Users can even tag someone through the corporate instant messaging tool (SameTime)

Employees find added value in being able to search for people or experts by tag (subject matter) that might help them in their day-to-day work.

“People tag other people as a form of contact management, and they confirm in subsequent interviews, that the tags they have been given are accurate descriptions of their interest and expertise,” says Wilcox. “Moreover, none of the people reported offensive or inappropriate tags.”

A link on a Fringe profile page, called Zeigeist, takes the user to a page that consists of a tag cloud containing the most recent 100 people tags across all IBM. It also contains a list of recently active taggers as well as recently targeted taggees (those that have been tagged).  

“The goal for this page was to try and characterize or draw out trends in the people tagging space,” adds Wilcox. “For example, let's say a researcher gives a great talk on how IBM is turning scrapped silicon wafers into solar panels. There might a surge in the use of the tags "solar" and "wafer-reuse" which should bubble up in the zeitgeist cloud. The researcher who gave the talk might also drift to the top of the taggee list.”

Man, these IBMers are smart.

While IBM’s Beehive social networking site (see Behind Beehive’s social success @ IBM) has proven more ‘viral’ in a shorter period of time, Fringe has enjoyed a modicum of success of its own:

• Number of connections: 206,000
• Number of profiles tagged: 55,000
• Average tags per profile: 3.21
• Number of people tagging: 8,500
• Average tags per tagger: 20.73
• Total number of tags: 178,000
• Self-tags: 31,569

“I think the biggest take home here is that the greater IBM population is able to benefit from a relatively smaller population of taggers,” says Wilcox. “This plays very well into the power law distribution of many social systems. By making tags social in Fringe, not only does the tagger benefit but the community and taggee all benefit as well.”

More directly, says Wilcox,  tag benefits 3 users:  

1. The tagger (helps him/her describe a person),
2. The taggee (profile gets populated by others), and
3. The general public (tags are aggregated to add context and improve expertise search).

So some might ask the question, how does Fringe relate to Beehive, their employee social networking site?

”Fringe started from a very different place,” says Wilcox. “Fringe's main goal is to create a better - more representative - corporate directory.”

Wilcox highlights some of the differences between Beehive’s social networking, and Fringe’s people tagging:

• Everyone at IBM has a Fringe page by default where as in Beehive users must opt in and join Beehive explicitly.
• Content in Beehive such as photos, Hive-5's, and events must all be entered manually. Fringe grabs existing corporate data automatically for the user (except the people tags).
• Connecting in Fringe requires confirmation while connecting in Beehive does not.
• Beehive is meant to be more of a place to go and socialize; Fringe is primarily still a corporate directory and expertise search system.

“It has been asked more than once why wouldn't Beehive and Fringe eventually merge...?  I find this to be a very interesting prospect and may be the ultimately desirable state,” adds Wilcox. “However, both teams are still investigating really interesting problems from different perspectives.” 

But Wilcox et al are not resting on their laurels: the next iteration of Fringe is already underway.  “We are continuing to aggregate from even more exotic sources than before!”  

There are of course many different ways to ‘socially network’ as represented by both Fringe and Beehive, My Space and Facebook. Regardless of the approach, each serves distinct needs and purposes. Your organization might benefit from one approach, all of the approaches, or perhaps none. Regardless of the view, one conclusion cuts through all the social chatter and business networking: employee social networking fulfills a great need and desire of many employees who are already networking on the public Internet (see The power of Intranet 2.0).

Next week I’ll examine two other employee social networking sites: BT (MyBT) and Sabre (SabreTown).

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ON A PERSONAL NOTE: Some of you have gathered by now that I haven’t been writing a whole heck of a lot lately – and it’s not just the good weather that’s kept me from the proverbial typewriter! Actually, things are quite busy and clients and staff of a growing company do require significant attention! I won’t suggest that the demands on my time will slacken in the next few months, but you can count on me to do at least 2 articles / postings per week (sometimes 3-4).

On another note I’d like to welcome to the Prescient Digital Media team: Susana Hsu, and Jed Cawthorne, and a welcome back to Meredith Mcknight who has rejoined our team as a consultant after a year of maternity leave – congratulations! Welcome! 

Additionally, I’d like to welcome the following new clients to Prescient: Arconas, BC Transmission Corporation, Nintendo, CCS, CDHA, CSI, IronMountain, Toshiba, and Texas Instruments. I’d also like to welcome back Atomic Energy, Computer Associates (CA), Heart & Stroke Foundation, and the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute. Many thanks for your business!

Did you know that in the ‘guess the jellybeans’ game the average guess of all the guesses is almost always closer than the closest individual guess? It’s a wonderful example illustrating the power and wisdom of the ‘crowd’ – and why Web 2.0 and Intranet 2.0 are proving to be so powerful.

Like Web 2.0, Intranet 2.0 represents the evolving collection of social media tools that are revolutionizing the intranet, and the way organizations and employees connect and collaborate. Specifically, Intranet 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis and social networking sites promote collaboration, people connection, and ongoing dialogues that augment, but not replace the traditional top-down communications model.

Whether you’re ready or not, your organization can no longer ignore Intranet 2.0. Employees are reading blogs on the web, contributing to wikis, listening to podcasts, and networking via Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, or others. Moreover, they’re probably talking about your organization, and you’re not part of the conversation.

Before they implemented their own employee social networking site, MyBT, BT (British Telecom) discovered that 4,000 employees had voluntarily joined a BT Facebook community in their own time. Employees were connecting online, in their own time, talking about BT, and BT wasn’t part of the conversation.

“Many believe that trying to stop social media tools seeping onto intranets is a futile activity anyway, so it is better to introduce them on your terms in a managed way,” says BT’s social media chief Richard Dennison, who’s quite candidly shares this though and BT’s work on his blog Inside out.  

While BT’s management was reluctant to introduce these tools to employees, they really had little choice: employees were already using them and BT was in danger of being left out, and left behind. Adds Dennison: “If you don’t think about what value you can deliver in an enterprise 2.0 environment, you are going to become irrelevant!!”

Intranet 2.0 has indeed exploded at BT. In addition to social networking, BT employees blog, podcast, collaborate in discussion forums, and they wiki too. In fact, the wikis are so popular and successful that there are more than 500,000 employee wikis – and the vast, vast majority of them are dedicated to business topics that help BT compete in the global workplace (I will share a more comprehensive case study on BT’s Intranet 2.0 tools and successes next week).

A study of Prescient Digital Media’s clients who participated in yesterday’s Intranet 2.0 webinar found:

These numbers are very average indeed (though much, much lower in medium size, and small organizations) and echoed by many recent studies: most organizations have not introduced Intranet 2.0 tools, but want to. An additional 50% of the webinar participants (representing a couple dozen organizations) are testing, trialing, evaluating or planning to introduce such social media tools on their intranet in the next year or so.

Many, many others of course have blazed that trail and so while some organizations struggle with the ‘how’, IT and communications managers need only look to the trailblazers like BT, IBM, and many others that have shared their successes (I will link many of these case studies below).

Sabre, the company that runs most of the world’s airline flight reservation systems among many other systems, is a an impressive example of the power of Intranet 2.0. With about 9,000 employees, they are a medium-sized company that have embraced Intranet 2.0 with spectacular results. Building from scratch, Sabre launched their own intranet social networking site for employees (built on Ruby on Rails) called SabreTown.

SabreTown has all the features of most social networking sites:

• Employee profiles with lots of details
• Shared photos
• Blogs
• User commenting
• Network connections & feeds
• Enterprise question & answer functionality

On Sabre Town, users can post a question to the entire organization, and the site’s inference or relevance engine will automatically send the question to the 15 most relevant employees (based on what they’ve entered in their profile, blog postings and other Q&As that have been previously posted). The results have been spectacular: 60% of questions are answered within one hour (one hour!); each question receives an average of 9 responses (9 responses!). The system has already led to more than $150,000 in immediate, direct savings for the company, with much greater benefits not yet measured.

SabreTown’s success is summarized in one spectacular metric: 65% of all Sabre employees became active SabreTown members in the first 3 months! More than 90% of employees are active today.

(I’ll provide a more in-depth case study on SabreTown next week. Watch for it as it is worth the wait, and the read).

Intranet 2.0 is no longer the future, it’s now. Many organizations have embraced the new social media technologies for the benefit of both the organization and its employees. If you ignore the potential that Intranet 2.0 offers, you’re doing so at your own risk, and the perhaps to the benefit of your competitors that may have already embraced these tools, or soon will.

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If you have additional questions about today’s Intranet 2.0, or a comment feel free to post them below. You can see a summarized version of the presentation on Slideshare: Intranet 2.0 webinar. 

You can also join the discussion on the Intranet Global Forum (Facebook community requiring free, 30-second registration).

If you’re looking to move to Intranet 2.0, but don’t exactly know how, then have a look at our Intranet 2.0 Blueprint service, or call me at 416.986.2226.

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MORE INTRANET 2.0 CASE STUDIES & READING:

Behind Beehive’s social success @ IBM

Beehive builds buzz at IBM

Intranet case study: Intrawest Placemaking

Serena’s Facebook intranet

Could Facebook be a real intranet? IBM is onto something...

Intranet 2.0: A must-have

Enterprise 2.0 vs. Intranet 2.0

Embracing Enterprise 2.0

Intranet 2.0 on the rise, but barely

Intranet 2.0: social media adoption

Intranet portal solutions die, evolve & move to Web 2.0

Taxonomy driven folksonomy

Social bookmarking the intranet

“Inspired by Top 10 travel guides, and Amazon’s ListMania, we thought that shared lists could be an interesting content type for an enterprise social networking site,” say Geyer, Dugan, DiMicco, Millen, Brownholtz, and Muller, IBM’s collective brain trust behind IBM’s Beehive social networking site for employees[1].

While Beehive is a social networking site that allows employees to connect, track each others’ activities, share photos, and even schedule events, a key viral ingredient of Beehive’s buzz is the ability to create shared lists – “top 5” lists called “Hive5s”.

“We hypothesized that lists in an enterprise would be used to discuss opinions and share information related to the work context, (e.g. “My favorite RSS readers,” “Best lunch places,” or “Useful web design principles.” Since lists allow users to express preferences and opinions, and put items into an order, we envisioned that they would spark controversy between users and provoke social interaction.”

To create a list a “bee” (user) enters five items related to a given topic (e.g. top 5 products) and can insert a photo or a link to any of the five items, can “tag” each list with keywords, and determine whether or not the list is viewable to any employee, or just to direct connections (friends). Additionally, bees can reuse others lists to create their own list for comparison.

“We decided to explicitly support “reuse” of lists in Beehive, i.e. based on another list, a user can create their own list on the same topic linked back to the original list,” say the Beehive creators[1]. “When we designed the shared lists, we thought that users, when reading a list, might feel compelled to create their own list about the same topic, either because they disagree and want to create a list with different items and ordering, or the topic inspired them to share something similar.”

Once a list is published it can be read by others in several places:

• A collection page of recently created lists on the Beehive home page
• A collection page of all the lists of a selected user within the users own profile
• Within search results of a specific topic or “tag” (keywords).

Each list when viewed reveals:

• The text for 5 items
• Any annotated photos
• Any annotated tags
• A ‘reuse map” (who reused it, when, etc.)
• A list of “the buzz” (user comments)
• A note of how many times that list has been viewed by other bees 

The adoption rate is the impressive statistic. Up until August 2007, Beehive was still in ‘trial’ mode and only had a couple of hundred invited users. In the nine months since, Beehive has exploded:

• Over 35,000 registered IBM employees
• Created over 280,000 social network connections to each other
• Posted more than 150,000 comments
• Shared more than 43,000 photos
• Created over 15,000 "Hive5s” fives"
• Hosted over 2000 events

If the “Hive5s” are the key viral ingredient, the “reuse” list is the secret honey. One user comment in IBM’s own internal study sums up the fantastically viral nature of list reuse: “I found it interesting and wanted to reveal and show myself within the community (a specific Beehive community of IBMers) […] and in a sense I wanted to get into this community, so I entered it reusing somebody’s Hive5 and in a friendly way, in some social gesture, reuse the Hive5 and get into the community.” For this bee, and many others, the Hive5 list reuse was an invitation to a community that he wanted to be part of, despite his geographic location.

One early list called “4 truths and a lie” sparked a lot of reuse, dozens of comments, and bubbled over into real-world and face-to-face conversations. “Several times I did it with my team. Like people writing to me and I’m writing to them, saying did you see […] that thing on Beehive, sending the link,” said one user.

In fact, people who don’t know each other are connecting through Beehive, and those that are reusing lists often don’t know each other. “The interview data (from the internal study) suggests that people need not feel any particular connection to the person whose list they reuse” say the creators[1]. “While we found that reuse in itself is not always a social act, there are some reuse trees that have sparked many conversations and have formed ad hoc interest groups”

Beehive clearly demonstrates that employees want to network socially, and that if the employer creates the hive, employees will create the buzz.

Read more about the Beehive social networking site: Beehive builds buzz at IBM.

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On Wednesday: A look at IBM’s other employee social networking tool: Fringe. If Beehive is akin to Facebook, Fringe is akin to LinkedIn. However, Fringe is more of a people-tagging tool that is significantly different than any of the above, but equally impressive.

Tomorrow’s (Tuesday) Intranet 2.0 webinar: if you’re a client of Prescient (or about to become one), then you have a free invitation to this special clients-only webinar that will showcase the latest and greatest in Intranet 2.0 including IBM’s Beehive and Fringe, BT’s employee social networking, and many other leading examples. If you’re a client or about to become one and don’t have the coordinates for this hour long webinar, then please call me right away to get the details (416.986.2226). The webinar starts at 1pmEDT (10am PDT). If you can’t make the webinar but still want to learn more, perhaps we can reprise the webinar for you and your team at a later date (call me to arrange).