Americans really dig social media… but Canadians love it.

Almost 60% of Americans interact with companies on a social media Web site, and one in four interact more than once per week. These are among the findings of the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study (Cone LLC).

When asked about specific types of interactions, Americans believe:
• A company should have a presence in social media (93%)
• A company should not only be present but also interact with its consumers via social media (85%)
• American consumers feel both a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment (56%)
• Companies should use social networks to solve my problems (43%)

Of the younger, hard-to-reach consumers (ages 18-34), one-third believe companies should actively market to them via social networks, and the same is true of the wealthiest households (household income of $75,000+). Two-thirds of the wealthiest households and the largest households (3 or more members) feel stronger connections to brands they interact with online.

Survey:
The 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study presents the findings of an online survey conducted September 11-12, 2008 by Opinion Research Corporation among 1,092 adults comprising 525 men and 567 women 18 years of age and older. The margin of error associated with a sample of this size is ± 3%.

If you thought Americans were demanding… according to comScore Media Metrix numbers from Canada, the Great White North is more social:

• 85% of online population visit a social networking site, spending 6 hours per month per visitor*
• 63% of online population visit a blog site in a month
• Almost 24 million Canadians age 2+ online in a month, spending an average of 46 hours online per person (that’s 3/4s of the country that is older than 2-years-old!!!)
• 94% of online population perform search in a month,
conducting 33 searches per searcher
• 85% of online population stream a video, viewing an average of 120 videos per viewer per month

The comScore Media Metrix numbers are in fact from the beginning of the year and undoubtedly higher today. In fact, according to ZincResearch.com 90% of Canadians between the ages of 18 and 34 are Facebook members (9 million). Those numbers are from the beginning of the year (the participation rate is definitely higher today).

Now I know Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper knows what Facebook is... do Bush and Cheney know?

Employee engagement is often a misunderstood term; to many managers confuse it with employee satisfaction. In short, engaged employees aren’t just happy ones, but have a strong emotional bond to the organization that employs them and proactively look to improve the position of the organization.

An engaged employee is more likely to:

• Understand and support through action a company’s vision and goals
• Recommend the company’s products and services to friends and family
• Work smarter and longer hours without being asked twice
• Enjoy challenges and problem solving
• View their own personal growth as linked to the company’s performance

How do you make an average employee and engaged employee? Well, it’s one of the many topics we’ll cover in a special seminar on October 8th in Toronto, The Employee Engagement Imperative: Proven Techniques for Securing and Sustaining Employee Engagement. This is a 90-minute, breakfast seminar if you are in Toronto or can make the trip. We'll be marrying the latest Ipsos research to leading intranet and communications practices... Register here.

Of particular note, Intranet 2.0 tools are massively engaging if used correctly. Giving employees a chance to express their opinions – and seeing them count and contribute to change – are tantamount to highly engaged employees. To that end, make sure you please take 10 minutes to take the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey and you’ll get a copy of the full results including the good, bad and learned lessons.

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A CMS can be expensive: usually more than $100 – 200k, sometimes more than $1 million. Now these complex systems can house a lot of information: usually 10,000s or 100,000s of files – sometimes millions.

But what happens if you want to move to a different CMS or portal? What do you do with all that content? The question is very complex, often very expensive, and extremely time consuming. The trouble is there is no one or simple answer.

This is why the freshly announced Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification or standard is so important (and why non-techies need to understand this… so attention communicators, marketers, and HR people! Spend another 30 seconds reading this as it could save you boatloads of money!).

CMIS defines a model or framework ensuring that content can be used by one or more Enterprise Content Management repositories or systems.

“Whether it’s exploiting the value of this information, reducing the costs associated with managing it, or simply complying with various edicts regarding compliance and retention – many people think it’s the new battleground in information management,” says Chuck Hollis, VP and Global Marketing CTO with EMC (see CMIS – It’s Not JAS).

“Having a standard way to identify and manage content – the valuable stuff – could create the same kind of breakthrough that SQL did with transactional data, and XML did with web content – a standard, vendor-neutral way of moving content from application to application (CMS to CMS), and preserve important metadata.”

Chuck’s colleague, Lee Dallas, offers some caution (see CMIS – be careful what you ask for):

“It’s good for developers but make no mistake that making use of standards will benefit the vendors. It is simply easier to code to a good set of universally accepted requirements. Unfortunately they could actually hobble the efforts of the also-rans that support the spec but can’t keep up with the pace of innovation. Standards at some level work against competitive advantage and force a vendor to differentiate their product lines on capabilities that are not necessarily relevant to the core function the standard was intended to support.

I’m not saying I’m against standards - I am glad our industry is now mature enough to settle down around them. They are inevitable, necessary and a critical part of the maturation of our industry. But I wonder, did JSR 168 really break any silos for portals? It is arguable that the spec didn’t improve throughput of development either yet we all checked that box when we picked portal related products - except when it came to Microsoft.”

The CMIS technical draft specification (v0.5), announced Sept 10th 2008, has been developed jointly by EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle, and SAP.

In short though, I wouldn’t spend a whole lot of money on a new CMS for a few months if at all possible… and I’d be inclined to limit my purchase to something very inexpensive, or a product from one of the above vendors. Its good to see an open-source solution like Alfresco on board. I’d like to see others like Joomla and Plone follow in-step, and commercial vendors like Vignette (although they might not be around too much longer), Interwoven, Day, Sitecore, ThinPaper, Ektron, The Level, and others also sign-up.

Prescient’s own Jed Cawthorne is monitoring this issue closely and provides some running commentary on his blog. Jed points to some of the best commentary and analysis of this emerging standard in World Peace declared in ECM industry.

RELATED READING:
Alfresco has set-up a CMIS wiki for information and resources.
Use Google to see the latest CMIS related news and blog posts.
Cover Pages provides a summary of the issues.

Universal McCann (UM) is a global media communications agency with 2800 employees in 66 countries. UM undertakes massive marketing campaigns and media buys for large Fortune 500s such as Coke, Mastercard, Microsoft, and others. With a highly distributed workforce, UM found that knowledge and expertise was often trapped in geographic silos that could not be shared easily with other offices.

UM considered a variety of different intranet and social computing solutions and ultimately selected Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) with an integrated NewsGator Social Sites solution.

“The fast-changing media environment in which Universal McCann works demands that our employees have a finger on the pulse of what’s going on, not just in their respective markets and account groups, but globally across the industry,” said Quentin George, worldwide officer for digital strategy & market innovation for Universal McCann. “In order to deliver our clients the ‘Next Thing Now’ we must share and learn from our collective knowledge and experience. We found NewsGator and Microsoft’s social networking tools to be the ideal way to facilitate communication and knowledge sharing across geographic and division boundaries – leading to improved productivity and increased innovation.”

The UM intranet, called LIMO, features:

• enhanced personal profiles
• social networking
• subject matter interest communities
• search for the most relevant or popular content
• blogs
• wikis
• RSS

“Teams can actually interact with, in safe secure areas, with the client – post documents, post status reports, post media plans – where they can work together in a secure environment online,” says Paul Roer, VP Content and Creative Director with Universal McCann. “People can get to know other planners on an account; get to know research people; and they can meet each other in this virtual environment and share best practices.”

Once on the LIMO intranet, UM employees can also form social networks, and build communities based on areas of interest, rather than geography or project teams. The integrated Newsgator Social Sites solution automatically builds profiles of users based on the user’s actions on the intranet. Users are able to find the most relevant colleagues and subject matter experts based on the user’s activity. This activity “surfaces” recommended connections based on common RSS reading, community memberships, tagging, etc.

“Communities support ad hoc formation of groups to facilitate cross-geography & cross-team collaboration, information sharing, & communication around client projects, interests, or activities,” according to Laura Farrelly, Director of Marketing for Newsgator. “Communities enable members to engage in rich discussions, share documents, track activity, & surface relevant, dynamic content.”

According to UM, NewsGator and Microsoft have delivered “immediate business benefits while providing a technology that can easily expand & evolve as the organization’s needs change” including:

• Improved productivity & streamlined workflows
• Better collaboration & communication across the global UM network
• Increased innovation
• Lower technology complexity & support costs
• Improved compliance with corporate security & privacy policies
• Enhanced client service
• Ability to become a “smarter collective organization, faster”
• Increased adoption & usage of the intranet

“Microsoft & NewsGator offered us an enterprise-class social computing solution that delivers the social networking features we need today while providing us with a platform that can easily evolve as our needs grow & change,” says Jason Harrison, Worldwide Chief Information Officer, Universal McCann. “In addition, their solution integrates seamlessly with our technology infrastructure & security protocols, helping to lower our support costs.”

SEE THE SCREENSHOTS POSTED ON THE INTRANET GLOBAL FORUM (FACEBOOK – membership is free)

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The future looks bright for the corporate intranet. While it continues to play poor cousin to the corporate website, suffers from chronic under-funding, poor resources, and is plagued by information architecture, usability, and search problems. But there is hope.

I’ve been quite critical of senior management in recent years (if not harsh and down-right insulting of some of those dim-wits) for their lack of action and support for the intranet. But some executives have come to look beyond their French-cuffs, golf junkets, and internal politicking to realize the potential value the intranet represents:

• A competitive advantage in a global economy
• A business system that promotes costs savings & efficiency
• A sales system that supports sales activity, if not increases revenue
• A communications channel that can engage all regardless of location
• An HR vehicle that helps attract, retain and engage employees

Patrick Walsh, an information architect with the BBC, believes that part of the intranet’s future is that of a more lean, svelte, and productive intranet.

“Any user from the CEO to the receptionist should be able to point to content they find valuable. To achieve this you need to understand what content your users really need to create value within your organization,” says Patrick in his blog Intranet 2.0: the need for ‘lean intranets’. “Once you’ve done this then remove everything that doesn’t add value from the intranet.”

While the intranet should become leaner, the volume of information will continue to grow (with good reason). Therefore a great intranet (Download (free) the Good to Great Intranet Matrix) will continue to grow, but hopefully become more efficient in weeding-out unnecessary or stale information.

This of course is somewhat at odds with Intranet 2.0. which promotes and encourages volumes of more information in the form of:

• user comments
• blog posts
• wiki contributions
• discussion threads
• podcasts & vlogs
• etc.

Can the ‘lean intranet’ and Intranet 2.0 co-exist? The answer lies in high-effective and fine-tuned information architecture, smart search engine indexing, and rigorous information management and intranet governance (policies).

I’ll expand on this in some detail in my keynote address on “The Future of Intranets” at the upcoming jBoye08 conference in Denmark this November 3-6 (I know not too many North Americans can fly to Denmark for a conference, but if you can, or you’re already in Northern Europe, this conference may well be the intranet conference of the year. Reserve your spot today).

Speaking of the future of intranets, please take 10 minutes to take the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey and you’ll get a copy of the full results including the good, bad and learned lessons.

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Speaking of making Intranet 2.0 work… Here’s some very interesting, practical wiki advice from Jessica Merritt (thank you to Kelly Senora) and the Smart Teaching Blog: "50 Ways to Use Wikis for a More Collaborative and Interactive Classroom"

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On a completely unrelated, offline note… I came across a big black bear on a hike last night on one of the local mountains north of Vancouver. He was busily gorging himself on blueberries in a mountain meadow. Like the one who uses my backyard as a toilet or a highway to my neighbor’s bird feeders, I easily chased this particular bear away with a few shouts and waves of my arm. In truth, black bears are little babies (as kids we’d used the moniker “fraidy cats”). But here in the wilds of British Columbia, sometimes the norm dissolves and a bear goes crazy…. Bear attacks B.C. man after jumping on fishing boat.

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Yes, the blogosphere and ‘Web 2.0’ are filled with fluff, idle chatter, and, quite frankly, a lot of crap. However, if you learn to filter the junk, as you do with your mail, e-mail, or television, the rewards can be extremely meaningful – and valuable to business.

 

I live on Wikipedia (and often am driven their by Google). I do a lot of research and reading and find the quality on Wikipedia to be superlative. In fact, while it has its critics, I’ve yet to encounter a credibility gap. And yet, the reliability of more traditional, scholarly sources are not always as reliable.

 

For example, I recently read a biography on Stalin from a very credible source and historian. Now I know a thing or two and am a bit of a history buff, but I called into question the nature and circumstances of his death as detailed in this one biography. In fact, there are multiple versions and contradictions on how and where Stalin died...

Read my full column: Web 2.0 is content that matters (with intranet examples, on Ragan.com)