Engage U.

We all know that the last major disruptive media shift of our lifetime was from print to video, but in the current climate of social technologies we've moved back to empowering the written word and that value and power is obviously now derived from the analysis of what we type in public channels and how that data is mined to determine how to target ads or content to us.

The technology has even progressed to a point where what we say can be analyzed to determine the sentiment of our wording outside of sarcasm since that's a tough thing to crack using text alone. The latest trend in social has manifested itself as a mixture of media types. This means that people are now including pictures and video into their updates more frequently. Along this vein there have been several examples of companies who are video centric, trying to embed social technologies alongside their service or content in order to associate or glean a measurable metric from it.

A few established examples of this include CTV recently embedding a live chat alongside it's live streaming of the Oscars, online video chat service TokBox providing the ability to invite Twitter followers to an ongoing video chat, Google Hangouts on Air mixing G+ conversations and video content, and TWiT.TV using and sometimes including comments from a live IRC chat during their show tapings.

More recently this phenomenon has moved into more specialized apps such as the ever present Instagram that allows you to publically share photos, Snapchat which allows you to send time bombed pictures or video to specific contacts, and Vine which allows you to share 6 seconds video clips with your Twitter followers.

What these apps and established companies have not managed to do is take the actual image or video and audio content they're creating and analyze it for the infinitely richer and thus more valuable information it contains. If there was technology attached to these previously mentioned examples that could analyze the tone of what someone is saying, then the ability to determine sentiment becomes a given, and sarcasm could also be analyzed correctly. When it comes to video, body language and static objects could be analyzed with the audio to determine if they play a factor or are related.

In a search to see who may have considered video and audio sentiment analysis, I've found a somewhat promising video specific project, an interesting audio paper from 1999 that talks about converting spoken word to text and using that for analysis, the usage of spectrograms in Shazam to create fingerprints for songs in its database, and also skimmed a couple of papers looking at text analysis which are at least 3 or more years old now.

All of this makes me wonder when we are going to start evolving and combining some of these audio and video initiatives and begin analyzing where we're obviously heading next?

Can you imagine a YouTube video with a negative sentiment towards a product or service being prefixed with an ad that is actually related and counteracts with positive information to the content you’re about to watch?!

 

This image has been floating around Facebook for a few weeks now and it really struck a chord with me. The image made me ask myself a few questions such as; has social media really changed how I work; do I work better or are these pure distractions from the task at hand?

I may be showing my age, but I started into the work force just as email was catching on and I remember asking a few of my co-workers whether or not I should even add my email address to my business card. Now I can’t imagine how I would do my job without it. The average person spends 13 hours per week processing email, but some weeks I feel as though email is all I do.  Of course nowadays email is just a small part of the various channels of communication that I work with day to day. My day use to start and end in email but these days I typically start my day in Twitter, move back and forth from email to our own social collaboration tool, a few minutes on Facebook, possibly a quick peek into LinkedIn and then back to Twitter - and of course this is often done from a mix of my mobile and laptop. Has this new way of working across the “omni channel” made me more productive? I think the answer is yes! I am more connected, have a more transparent view of my organization and a wealth of experts at my fingertips.

These new channels are not here to disrupt my style of work or displace my email. This is just the evolution of work as we know it. The importance is learning how to adopt these tools effectively and educating the workface on their importance in a way that showcases meaning and purpose in their use.

As Jacob Morgan writes in a recent post; http://www.jmorganmarketing.com/enterprise-collaboration-replacing/

“….the notion of working 9-5 from an office is being replaced by the idea of being able to “connect to work;” an employee feeling like a cog is being replaced by the voice of the engaged employee; email and intranets are being replaced by networked and connected systems; yearly reviews are being replaced by real-time feedback; working in silos is being replaced by cross-boundary collaboration, and the traditional idea of what it means to be an organization is being replaced by evolving to a collaborative organization.”

I see this as progress, do you?

 

When it comes to introducing any new system into an organization the first thing that goes through most employees minds is usually ‘Oh great…*Another* system I’m going to be forced to use. Add it to the list!’

While that sentiment is unavoidable the difference when it comes to social business software is finding a way to implement it along with a culture that supports the use of it and establishes a purpose. Some good examples of this include gathering feedback on an inclusive initiative, or establishing a company-wide community of people interested in a specific topic. This is not an easy task and ‘dropping’ the software into your organization isn’t going to be a magic pill that solves everything. If you want social software to succeed there are several things you could do as part of your rollout to establish and maintain the engagement level.

1. Include champions in different sections of your organization as part of the project team deploying the solution
   
   This step is meant to ensure that you have a solid base of people who are energized and interested in making use of the solution in their own departments. The feedback gleaned could be invaluable and you then have a dedicated group of testers to help you with your implementation. These people may eventually end up being Community Managers for their respective communities.


2. Use the solution in a test or beta environment to solve a specific problem or achieve a goal
   
   Nothing reaffirms the value of something to people like coming together to solve a common problem or achieve a goal. This is also a good opportunity to test the implementation and see what parts of the software worked in which scenarios. It’s also a good way to determine what areas need to be revisited.


3. Have the champions or Community Managers summarize important details of the community they’re involved in into weekly updates to members that link back to the community
   
   In general, when users join a community there is an initial spike in adoption followed by a gradual decline in engagement, with users complaining that social software is too overwhelming or confusing. Providing weekly updates or summaries slowly makes these users check-in and enables them to engage on their own schedule.


4. Enable email and/or RSS notifications
   
   Since the inception of email we’ve been conditioned to have conversations and collaborate on documents in long and unmanageable email threads. Fighting this urge is often futile and will likely only spur less adoption. In a similar fashion to step 3, if you enable email notifications you’re slowly transitioning people from a long email thread to using something such as a wiki to brainstorm or draft a specific topic, document, or idea.


5. Establish a publishing schedule for your community
   
   While this might be taking a page out of an external social media strategy, the same principal of keeping customers engaged works for keeping your employees engaged. If a blog or social feed isn’t updated, you’re not giving people a reason to interact. If you’re lacking ideas (it happens to all of us) ensure you are following other community managers or champions and share their content to keep your community active. Alternatively you can bring in ideas from external social media channels that can also generate conversation.

While I’ve touched on some things, this is by no means an exhaustive list nor a roadmap or recipe for success. There are several other factors to take into account when you plan to deploy a social software solution into your organization. The following list of resources provides some guidance and insight on how to achieve a smooth implementation and increase engagement:

You want to be a social business? 9 boxes you need to check

Work out Loud: Stop Knowledge Hoarding! 

Getting Real About Employee Engagement

The Adoption Peak and why it’s not a good thing

Could the Junk Drawer 1.0 become the Junk Drawer 2.0?

It’s not the same thing – The 3 types of collaboration

While reminiscing about a recent trip to London, England I was reminded of my travels on the Underground. With every step onto or off the commuter train I was instructed by the overhead loud speaker to pay close attention to the small opening in front of me. Any misstep could have caused harm or hindered my journey onward.

There have been a number of conversations about the importance of marketing automation tools and WEM’s function in helping organizations elevate brand identity and distinguish themselves from all the noise and other distractions. A larger customer experience ecosystem begins to emerge where both technologies play critical roles in helping organizations understand a 3-D view of their customer and deliver optimized online experiences.

As marketing programs and campaigns become more sophisticated, we need to be "mindful" of some of the hand-off points and gaps between these complimentary technologies.

As with all hot new buzzwords "marketing automation" is not a new concept and has been around for some time. Marketing Automation is the process of creating and defining programs and campaigns that engage customers across multiple, interactive touch points.

Following specific rules of engagement (e.g. scoring) the intent is to generate demand, nurture and convert only those leads that are qualified. Reporting and accountability are essential at every touch point and are used by marketing departments to justify each dollar spent.

WEM solutions support all online marketing initiatives by providing marketers (such as content authors, web designers and graphic designers) with simplified tools for creating and managing all your corporate web properties. It delivers dynamic, interactive, personalized and contextualized web content to customers regardless of the channel they arrive from.

Inherent in these tools are enterprise social capabilities that allow for ongoing collaborative discussions that facilitate expert communities of knowledge. Finally, web and social analytics tools collect and measure real-time, click stream data in the context of the published "live" site.

What if you could have both technologies working together harmoniously? A fully integrated marketing platform that exchanged customer related information, supported all marketing related activities, and managed your corporate brand content from one central point of access?

The goal of marketing automation and WEM is to integrate marketing processes that collect data and content from multiple locations toward developing meaningful customer relationships that begin and continue well after the initial sales cycle is complete. Consumers do not want to feel as though they are being marketed at — they want to feel the content they uncover is part of their organic efforts.

Let’s look at some of the gaps between the two technologies:

1. The Focus on Content Marketing Sourced for the Web

According to Forrester’s report "The Rise of Content Marketing: Invest In Content Development and Management for Success," 58 percent of marketers consider their website to be the most important channel when creating interactive marketing content, second to social media (15%). Marketers will continue to evolve and enhance the online experience by creating great and meaningful content for their sites.

It’s no surprise that companies that invest in WEM solutions report greater online success in delivering and managing all corporate content. Marketing automation solutions need to leverage not only the creation of new content for websites but all the other technical features in WEM.

For example, WEM systems can determine how content is consumed and from what device; gather analytics on customer behavior, geo-location, previous interactions and social media participation. This type of data can be used by marketing automation solutions to influence how subsequent follow-up conversations get started and remain open.

2. CMO and CIO Alignment

A consistent trend I’m seeing is how marketers are solving their own business problems with little or no IT intervention. End users are self-provisioning solutions, in the cloud or on premises, and using marketing spend to do so.

WEM solutions traditionally owned, built and secured by IT are now sharing ownership with marketing. But a three dimensional view of the customer can only be achieved when information can be gathered from all corporate data stores — whether managed by IT or marketing.

According the Aberdeen Group report "Enhancing Customer Experience through CIO and CMO Alignment," companies with CIO and CMO alignment achieve a 10.1 percent higher annual year-over-year growth in ROMI, compared with 5.6 percent of their peers. “This shows that partnering with peers in IT helps marketers better analyze customer information and launch campaigns that deliver quantifiable results by addressing changing customer needs.”

3. Omni-Channel Consistency

Marketers are faced with the challenge of providing a consistent online experience across all delivery touch points — namely mobile devices. The same challenge is replicated by a marketing automation tool that needs to maintain a dialogue via the same context of the interaction.

WEM solutions offer native support to many social media features (e.g. blogs, wikis, discussion threads) and packaged integration into many social networking sites. Harnessing WEM’s targeted listening capabilities will enhance how marketing automation tools evaluate customer engagement and influence lead scoring.

4. Cross-enterprise Information Processing

Customers are engaged with a number of different systems stored across the enterprise — ERP, CRM, e-Commerce, WEM and CMS. The proper application of a Business Process Management system can capture content and metadata from multiple corporate locations and help facilitate marketing automation systems to properly respond to customer inquiries.

5. Capturing Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI)

Marketing wisdom tell us that if you cannot measure effectiveness, you cannot measure its change. Without a common set of metrics, as provided by both systems, all marketing efforts are at risk and offer no opportunity for correction and improvement.

According to the Aberdeen report "CEM: Using the Power of Analytics to Optimize Customer Delight," “analytical tools are a critical component for providing businesses with the intelligence that can be used to create both contextual and potential prospect / customer conversations.” One of the common questions I hear from customers is "how do we collect data from disparate systems, which utilize different metrics, and standardize it within one meaningful report?"

Rather than selling products or services to your customers, ensure that both your WEM and marketing automation system’s primary goal is to help customers find the information they need. Identifying and addressing these gaps is the first step in achieving a complete customer view that elevates your brand to one that generates loyalty, advocacy and satisfaction.

My advice — Don’t try and close all the gaps at once. Start small but think big. Start by integrating "progressive profiling" in your WEM system so that it passes information to your marketing automation tool. This will provide incremental insights into what prospects are looking to understand and qualify how likely they will be to purchase.

Image courtesy of dutourdumonde (Shutterstock)

See ConceptShare Blog. 

3 Perspectives on Leveraging DAM to Manage Work in Progress

ConceptShare has worked with over 100 enterprise marketing and creative services teams. By peering over their shoulders we have acquired a deep understanding of their work in progress (WIP) process, which they describe as moving from “I need an asset” to “I have an asset.” WIP is a process with a broad range of stakeholders working together to route, review and make decisions on work in progress.

Over the past twenty-four months WIP has become top of mind for marketers, creative teams and Digital Asset Management (DAM) system owners. Marketers and creative teams are demanding a solution that is designed, developed and optimized for managing the WIP process. As a result, they are asking, “Can our DAM system support the WIP process?”

What organizations have determined is that there is no single, perfect solution to manage WIP. Instead, the solution is a moving target based on an organization’s current goals with respect to workflow, available technology and process maturity.

Many of the organizations we work with are what we refer to as DAM-centric, investing a significant amount of time and resources into a DAM system. The DAM system is often thought of as an enabling or foundational technology that can and should support all phases of an asset’s lifecycle.

We have observed DAM-centric organizations work through three common options before selecting the option that will best support WIP. Below we have outlined the three options we most often see enterprises consider, how the options meet their requirements, and our observations on why they select one option over the others.

Option #1: Use a DAM System to Manage WIP

Requirements

We want a single system that manages the entire lifecycle of an asset                             Yes
We want a system (with functionality, UI, UX) that is designed and optimized for WIP     No
We consider WIP to be a critical process requiring support and investment                     No
We are committed to developing a strong WIP process                                                      No

Our Observation

We see organizations adopt this option when they already have a DAM system in place. They want to leverage their investment to deliver support for WIP to benefit from having a single system for managing the entire asset lifecycle. Organizations that choose this option don’t deliver functionality that is becoming a standard expectation for users involved in the WIP process, such as the ability to annotate an asset to communicate clear and actionable feedback. DAM systems also have a UI/UX that was designed for storage and distribution. For the vast number of non-technical users involved in the WIP process, the DAM system’s UI/UX can complicate and slow down the overall process.

Option #2: Use Two Systems Operating Independently

Requirements 

We want one system that manages the entire lifecycle of an asset                                     No
We want a system (with functionality, UI, UX) that is designed and optimized for WIP      Yes
We consider WIP to be a critical process requiring support and investment                      Yes
We are committed to developing strong WIP processes                                                      Yes

Our Observation

We see organizations adopt this option when they are seeking to deploy a “best of breed” WIP solution. WIP solutions are designed, developed and optimized for enterprise marketing departments and agency account teams to route, review and approve WIP. These solutions are designed for teams that have a narrow window of time to capture stakeholder input, react to change requests and deliver approved assets. The benefit of this option is that organizations deliver functionality that is becoming a standard expectation for users involved in WIP, such as the ability to annotate an asset to communicate clear and actionable feedback. Equally important these systems have a UI/UX that was designed for WIP and the broad range of users involved in this process.

However, organizations give up the benefits of having a single system that manages the entire asset lifecycle. By using two stand-alone systems, organizations risk creating information silos and disconnected workflows. Based on our observations, these organizations usually resolve this issue by integrating their DAM and WIP systems.

 Option #3: Use Two Systems Operating Interdependently

Requirements

We want one system that manages the entire lifecycle of an asset                                     Yes
We want a system (with functionality, UI, UX) that is designed and optimized for WIP      Yes
We consider WIP to be a critical process requiring support and investment                      Yes
We are committed to developing strong WIP processes                                                      Yes

Our Observation

We see organizations adopt this option when they are seeking to deploy a “best of breed” WIP solution and tightly integrate it with their DAM system. These organizations believe that users should be able to work in applications designed for their role or current task, and that information and workflows should be synced across their DAM and WIP systems. The benefit of this option is that organizations deliver functionality that is becoming a standard expectation for users involved in WIP, such as the ability to annotate an asset to communicate clear and actionable feedback. Equally important these systems have a UI/UX that was designed for WIP and the broad range of users involved in this process. Organizations benefit from having a single, integrated system that manages the entire asset lifecycle.

 

This is a CMSWire cross-post.

Perhaps the most welcome business innovation in the 21st century is the realization that the 1990’s CEO pablum, “People are our greatest asset” is actually true.

This means that business must rebalance its structures and processes to support and enable people rather than to control and contain them while they service the processes and infrastructure. A flipped business if you will. A humanized rather than mechanized ideal of the perfectly efficient organization.

It has finally been proved — what everyone already knew was true — employees who give a darn [sic] do better work, which makes their lucky employers more successful.

So we are thrilled that work will finally evolve away from what has often been a negative experience, and start becoming place where people thrive —  along with the economy and society at large.

It all sounds great. But it is an earth-shifting change that leaves many management teams uncertain and uncomfortable and many employees frustrated. A human-centric business questions some of the fundamental tenets of traditional enterprise design and operation, and it will take some time to sort it out. Being human is complex and being a business is complicated and so growing together is sure to be a precarious but altogether magnificent undertaking.

As yet however, many of us are still in a hard place.

Drivers of Disengagement
There are three ways that work becomes a soul-crushing, disengaging job that leads to “it's fine like that," what-kind-of-shortcuts-can-i-take, and the-least-I-can-get-away-with effort.

1. Work that asks people to do stupid stuff
This can be menial work, in which the person doing the work has no stake or impact on the outcome. Think fast food, factory work, mail delivery or other work that is heavily routinized and automated. A craft is different, because it involves mastery — these jobs do not. This also happens when the policies or processes of work are flawed in ways that are obvious to employees, but aren’t likely to change as a result.

2. Work that prevents people from doing good stuff
Many knowledge workers suffer in this camp, though often craftsmen (builders, etc.) and service providers (nurses, consultants) do too. [My housekeeper quit her company for this reason and started her own, so my house is cleaner.] They have ideas, aspirations, curiosity, commitment to quality, but their management is so focused on maintaining the status quo that it is nearly impossible for these people to do any of the good work that they want to do. [This status-quo fetish is a frequent and sometimes unintended consequence of command and control hierarchies. The antidote is leadership.]

3. Work that takes undeveloped souls and keeps them in the dark
Hire people to do something, and never invite or enable them to develop their skills or to do more than they were hired for, and what you will get is glassy eyed mushrooms. These people disengage because they don’t know anything better. There can be many causes of stagnation, but simply accepting it is a losing strategy.

So how do we go from unintentionally soul-crushing to the labor’s Valhalla we seek? (Intentional soul-crushing is another matter altogether.)

Dan Pink showed us that intrinsic motivation is vastly superior to external motivation (do this, get that) to drive effort and outcomes for all but the most mechanical of tasks. Pink’s model shows that people are engaged (intrinsically motivated) when their work has three elements:

 

Mastery - the ability to demonstrate and constantly improve one’s craft

Autonomy - the ability to solve problems and make decisions on their own

Purpose - the idea that their work matters as part of a greater whole. (Click here If you haven’t seen his classic TED talk).

Pink focuses on the individual, however, and what we need to understand here is how to make that work for organizations. There are those that claim the drivers of employee engagement are “Relationship with immediate supervisor, Belief in senior leadership, Pride in working for the company.” But normal people will recognize those as markers (KPIs), rather than drivers of engagement.

Drivers of Engagement (The human enterprise)

1. Purpose
If I don’t believe that my company is valuable, then my work is not valuable, and therefore I don’t value it, so I don’t invest in it — I am not engaged. Duh.

Purpose, however, is not limited to green and eleemosynary causes (thanks for tolerating my nerdy words, it means charitable). A corporate purpose is an understanding of the change you want to make in the world — whether it is to make people happier, richer, more entertained, more constructive in their work, etc.

Purpose must be deeply authentic, and not just a carefully crafted-by-committee Mission Statement. I talked more about why it matters here. In order to scale beyond small business size, purpose must be accompanied by narrative — that expresses that purpose to your customers, your market and your employees. This gives everyone the ability to connect with, tell and build his or her own part of the story.

2. Transparency and Impact
You may find yourself with a purpose, and you may mean it, and you may find yourself with a marketing plan that expresses it and a roadmap that builds it (congrats to you) (if you’re saying to yourself, this is not my beautiful purpose, this is not my beautiful roadmap, then read on). But to make it work, to make it great, you need a team of people who have full, mutual awareness of what they are doing and what the leadership is worried about.

If people can’t see the drivers of their work (why) , and the impact of their work (how’d I do?), they can’t be engaged. If R&D doesn’t know what marketing is pushing and marketing doesn’t know about the latest innovation, and the plan to re-architect the customer support program, and the team in Europe’s new experiment and the recent customer loss or win and the six major decisions that the executive team is working through, then they are probably not very engaged.

When people don’t know what is going on, they can not consciously affect its outcome. They are not engaged. Transparency is not just about soaking in each other's intellectual and emotional effluence (though that has its advantages too), it's about knowing what’s going on around you so that you can constantly align, connect, consider and matter.

The flip side of transparency is “impact.” With the right kind of transparency, i can see what is going on, and understand the impact that my best work makes. I can see who and how I help. That matters.

3. Mutual Dependence
When we work together as a team, we help unpack each other’s intellectual boxes, we refine one another’s ideas and discover new ones. We improve each other. We build a continually improving, communal memory, experience and insight (to riff on a William Gibson quote). Members of such a team take ownership of their responsibilities seriously, but invite and relish in the fact that they can rely on their colleagues to help them work through sticking points and make their best work better.

A collaborative environment helps sustain energy, focus, and purpose. But to get here, you must be aligned, you must have a mutual respect that leads to mutual compassion and curiosity that makes it fun to air challenges, problems and failure and a joy to bash and hash it out together.

If you do not have a “culture” of mutual dependence at work, technology will not change that fact. Generally this is about aligning around common goals, and offering one another respect as a conduit to trust, which enables you to do what teams do best — amplify strengths and minimize weaknesses. If you've ever been a part of that team, you know.

4. Leadership
Some social media-ites believe that in the future, organizations will be purely emergent and collaborative, with no leadership required. I am not of that school — though certainly the nature of leadership will change.

Leadership matters, and there are two things that great leaders do 1) communicate without ceasing (leading to that transparency and inclusion thing) and 2) listen without ceasing by asking lots of questions. Dear leader, if you aren’t both sharing your vision and listening to your workforce, then there is at least an organization’s worth of people who think you are a fool. This perpetual telling and listening looks like a subtle and dynamic balance between confidence and humility.

There is a third thing, and that is that you must be authentic. The human nose can detect the scent of patronizing palaver in micro-parts per million.

It might shock you that I'm not a traditional sports fan and didn't watch the Super Bowl. I really didn't need to because most of the interesting points outside of the score we're captured on Twitter.

If you're like me and don't follow sports, but also don't follow Twitter you may not be aware that there was a power outage at the Superdome this year (that should hopefully come off as a sarcastic joke to most of you).

This presented a unique opportunity for advertisers to capitalize on a lull in the action and engage with their audience on Twitter who were already making the blackout the biggest trending topic of the night (yes bigger than Beyonce and Destiny's Child).

Two big brands we're able to come up with a quick comment related to the blackout. Oreo was one of those brands and already had a commercial appear earlier that night. Tide was another, but didn't have a commercial during the Super Bowl and instead had a Super Bowl inspired one.

Below are the two tweets and the associated images included with them:

      
See the following article for more details on other brands and companies who also joined the blackout tweet brigade: Super Bowl blackout generates plenty of online buzz, gives brands a boost

Dissecting the numbers of these two tweets a little bit gives you some insight into the value these single tweets created. With 1,359 re-tweets and 363 favourites Tide ensured that at least a minimum of 1,359 people viewed its tweet during the blackout and shared it with their follows for an unknown level of reach. Oreo's tweet trumped this number with currently 16,060 re-tweets and 6,156 favourites.

The value in both of these tweets is probably not measurable in advertising dollars per say. However, if you look beyond Twitter the coverage that accompanied both of these tweets in the mainstream media obviously fed the popularity even more and gave it a significant bump.

So what was it about these two tweets that propelled them further than their counter parts?

Looking at each of them they both make direct reference to the blackout, and they both use images to engage their audience. Tide has an arguably better and more related message, but is 3 minutes behind Oreo in posting its contribution. Walgreens was technically one of the first tweets out a full 4 minutes ahead of Oreo's and enjoyed more exposure than Tide's tweet because of this.

So what does this all mean and why wasn't everyone under the sun doing it?

If you can get an innovative and relevant post out with some associated content odds are you're going to get some decent coverage and return. Unfortunately, most large organizations don't have the flexibility they would like or should have on social media and have established archaic approval methods for social media content which stifles this progressive type of engagement. The lesson is not to be one of them!

A guest post written by our own Matthew Mullerworth.

This week we saw a cyber-attack on US Fast-food giant, Burger King. For over an hour their Twitter profile resembled a McDonald’s advert. During that time, it posted comments about why it had been bought by their rivals, along with numerous racial and obscene tweets. This goes to show that no organisation is immune to a cyber-attack.

Criminals, and terrorists alike, target businesses with the goal of disruption, the bigger the better. With cyber-attacks they often aim for the soft underbelly of an inexperienced person within that organisation. This can be in the form of a simple email purporting to be from a colleague asking the recipient to click on a link or open an attachment. This is what experts are calling “spear-phishing”. Chances are that this simple action can result in a virus that attacks the computer in question and subsequently infects the rest of the company. This gives the criminals access to do their thing and cause disruption.

All companies have sensitive information, some more than others. These could include governmental departments, emergency services, pharmaceutical companies and law firms.

Many have taken steps and have done all they can to prevent this from happening. All organisations should have Information Security teams who monitor, legislate and educate staff to be aware of any potential dangers. In the UK, ISO27001 is the standard that most adhere to.

Also more recently, Content Management and Information Management technologies are being used to offer an improved level of access and security to the data held within an organisation.

Information Security is one topic being discussed at OpenText EIM Days this year. In the UK it is being held at Twickenham RFU Stadium on 16-17 April 2013.

OpenText has a wealth of experience in this area globally, working with many governments and businesses alike. Please contact your local office to learn more and experience true information security for yourselves.

Matthew is a key member of our UK Account Development Team. He is a keen marketer and amateur blogger/photographer.
He is currently supporting the OpenText UK Public Sector Sales Team to be thought-leaders in the EIM space through strategic & specific ideas and campaigns.

This is a cmswire cross-post.

What we have ourselves here is a chasm. Collaboration isn't breaking out all over.

 

Dear Colleagues:

Can you feel it? It's the subtle loosening of gravity’s pull as we pause at the peak of the hype apex before we thunder down into the trough of disillusionment (with apologies to Gartner). Social collaboration isn't working very well, but must we go gently into that good night?

Some of the reasons we’re hitting the near edge of this “chasm” we've known and predicted from the beginning.
 
This is a paradigm shift as fundamental as any the modern workforce or capitalism has ever seen. More significant than the PC, the internet and the IT department combined. More significant than globalization. It's about retreating from command and control practices designed to make the ENGINE of capitalism (and government and war) purr, to a collaborative one which activates the full capabilities of the participants and networks them in a way that amplifies and accelerates action.

It's about changing from a daily grind of covering our individual and collective heinies to one where we are joined in the intellectual, emotional and emergent pursuit of “better.” Of mission and service.

Ok — so that’s pretty hard, we have established but few ground rules, and it looks like we’ll wander another 10 or 20 years or so in the desert till it's really as true as we’d like to to be, but it does seem inevitable, and so it is. But we could speed it along with more rigorous research and learning. We need to stop trying to ferret out bits of good news and start ferreting out learning.

In other words, we need to take our own advice about facing both good and bad news with equanimity and an authentic learning orientation.

But there’s another angle to this and its really, really bothering me. Adoption. All the 68,000 vendors in the space (including my employer, OpenText) have settled on streams and digital workspaces as the definition of social collaboration technology — with some allowance for variance in quality, focus and features. And now we’re all lecturing on about adoption.

There are several things that are bothering me about that.

First. The language we’re hearing about adoption is eerily similar to the language we heard about every other enterprise IT paradigm that social collaboration is supposedly saving us from. “People don’t get it, we need change management and training and… ”

And maybe that’s all true. But I know that I have scoffed at those foolish 1990’s KM people who stuck to their guns and soldiered on in spite of the fact that what they were doing clearly wasn't working — though the value proposition was real, vital and clear. I have said the same thing about other IT systems of yore.

Can we now smugly believe that we are somehow more enlightened than others because we “get it”? If we’re so awesome, why isn't this working? Why doesn't everyone “get it” and why are we having such a hard time with adoption?

I know, I know, human behavior, culture and all that. But we adopted cell phones as fast as they could make em. Just sayin’. Some of the change management stuff is real, true and urgent, and some of it is just denial. We do not want to believe that maybe we aren't right. But we aren't.

Second. So we’ve been pushing this techno philosophy pretty hard for three or five years, and as a Gartner analyst recently observed in a meeting, it's no longer a new industry. And what have we learned?

We have a bunch of people like me, many better than me, lecturing on what should be and could be, but where’s the “what is”? I want a more rigorous body of learning out of the last five years. We deserve it and we need it to continue to be leaders in the reinvention of work. I know that there is an Amazon’s worth of books and papers out there, but it's not enough.

Yet.

We have some clear wins. The majority of fortune 1000 businesses are using some form of social media to communicate internally as well as externally. Pockets of success are found within many companies and a few organizations are entirely transformed. Perhaps more new organizations are being formed after the new model rather than the old.

In the face of a mountain of evidence that something isn’t working as well as we hoped, is “try harder” a good strategy? Are we asking the hard questions of ourselves that could help us tell the difference? Like —why do people like email so darn much in spite of the fact that its killing them and makes their life more difficult in both the long and the short term. Are we wrong to ignore it? To insist that “email is dead, use this instead”?

Why do teams fail to act the way we think they will? Are we oversimplifying the notion of team? What about organizations? Where is the deeper insight on the relationship between teams and organizations? Why isn’t a sophisticated vocabulary breaking out? Why do we not yet have 100 words for different kinds of collaboration and teams, as expert in it as we think Eskimos are about snow? What is the difference between an intranet, a community and a team?

I don’t want a tweetchat full of clever answers, I want clarity — and so do you.

So — yes, the paradigm shift will take a generation to turn over. But we have not yet come close to our full measure of duty as techno-innovators to drive it. I would like to toss out some themes where I think we have important questions to ask, things to learn. Maybe these are on the right track, maybe not, maybe its the wrong question entirely. But we need to start asking questions and stop searching — exclusively — for crumbs of corroborating evidence and data, and start looking at the entire body of information.

In other words, we need to step back from building business cases — though they are still important and valid — and put more emphasis on building our knowledge.

Editor's Note: Deb will be speaking on this topic at Social Media Week NYC on Feb 21 at 2pm

Themes and Variations
These are some of the themes where I want to see harder questions asked. What are your questions?

1. The organization
First — the organization, the intranet and collaborative teams are NOT the same thing. The relationship among and between these things needs serious scrutiny.

We’re beginning to see serious and rigorous study of public social networks in use for marketing, crisis management, etc., but that’s a bit easier — it's all happening out in public, so we can see it and analyze it, thanks to the Twitter API. It's a bit harder to go into private enterprise systems and have a look (with some obvious and disturbing exceptions).

2. Connecting the dots
Second — streams are nice. I adore Twitter. I adore our internal corporate tools that are similar to it. And here we've seen great adoption. We've turned our org into a giant chat room: an extension of Instant messenger or chat for all. There’s benefit in that.

Ambient awareness has huge benefits and is one of the key elements in making remote work work. But that’s not a"wirearchy," it does not make work visible in an actionable way, it does not cement team bonds, it connects only a modest set of dots, it is, in short, inadequate to change how we work, though it's a nice addition. We need to build the semantic, statistical, psycho-social and otherwise tools that goose the gods of serendipity.

3. Collaboration
Several years ago, I came up with a definition of collaboration that focused on three key ideas: creation, connection and compounding. I also observed that great teams shared four basic traits — they had a shared sense of mission, they respected one another, they trusted one another and they were committed to achieving excellence.

We've since learned that very effective teams have great communications — and very importantly — members are more or less equal in the amount they contribute. No divas, no wallflowers. But we’re only seeing whispers of real actionable insight into how to contrive (or “cast”) these magically great teams. Leadership, yes, balance and matching of people — yeah, we sorta kinda know we have to do that, but few of us know how.

How is most collaboration achieved? What is the type, volume and velocity of information that needs to be exchanged? Is this the same of variable by team? By task? By… what? How can teams connect to the whole and vice versa?

Ah, the infamous junk drawer. We all have them in our homes. They are that designated place, often a kitchen drawer, where we store the items that we use frequently that really don’t have a proper home, or they do but never make it back there. In the drawer, there is a huge quantity of “stuff” that we need, not all of it put there by us. Typically the junk drawer creation is a group effort, with many contributors in the home. There are a lot of items in there that I have several of, like 4 sets of spare keys, 6 nail files, chopsticks, 15 pens, all different colors of course.  I often need dig to the back of the drawer to find what I need, and by the time I get to it I realize that I don’t need it anymore as I now need to move onto a different task in the house.

My last trip to the junk drawer gave me a sense of déjà vu as I realized that is a similar experience that I have when I am trying to locate information in the office.  As I launch my PC and try to search for a piece of content that I need to work I open my intranet and realize that there is a ton of content here, created and added by several different people. The content is often contributed by a large number of authors, and often there can be duplicated work, appearing in a variety of formats and layouts. Even with the best search tools, there is no easy way to find the information that you need without looking through many different layers that often exist inside the intranet. Often before I locate the content I am looking for, I am pulled into another direction, probably an urgent email that needs to be dealt with.  According to IDC, “The typical enterprise with 1,000 knowledge workers wastes $6 million to $12 million per year searching for non-existent information.”

Of course my junk drawer at home is small in size and can be easily cleaned out and reorganized to be effective again. The same cannot be said about the intranet or file shares that many of us are using. As the amount of content grows, so does the size of the junk drawer.

So how can we battle this plague of the ever expanding junk drawer? Content is not going to stop growing. According to Yankee Group, “80% of data in an enterprise is unstructured Information. This type of information is growing at 200% per year.”  Many companies are tackling this issue by moving away from the static intranet scenarios and adopting a better, more effective way to work by deploying more collaborative tools that augment their content with social features. Allowing them to share more effectively with co-workers, add value to the existing content and  search more easily for both content and the people they need to be able to get their work done.  But are team spaces, social collaboration tools and community spaces exempt from the plague of the junk drawer. I don’t believe so. It is just as important to ensure that these environments are also designed with purpose and driven by good design.

I am seeing this first hand as OpenText has adopted the use of our Tempo Social application internally. Our new environment has quickly spawned well over 300 communities in a short time frame. We are learning firsthand the importance of keeping the signal to noise ratio just right to encourage adoption. We are thinking through things such as the lifecycle management required for communities. We are learning how to better understand when a community is needed versus a forum or a project space. We recently hosted a webinar session campaigns.opentext.com/forms/2013-Q3-GL-CS-OS-OTLive-January172013 on the topic that resulted in some great conversations, in case you are interested. We have also published our use case for using Tempo Social.www.opentext.com/2/global/customers-home/successstories

I would love to hear from others on what their recipe is in avoiding the “social sprawl” that can result in the junk drawer 2.0. Feedback and comments appreciated!