Yammer Helps Your Company Create More Edges and Flows

On March 12, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson

Last month I gave Yammer (a product I like) a hard time because it doesn’t integrate with microblogging clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck and I feel that their pricing is prohibitive to large, enterprise companies.

I got several comments from people and had some really good discussions around the use of Yammer and the good and bad people face with the product. To my surprise the most engaged commenter was David Sacks, Founder and CEO of both Yammer and Geni, was previously the COO of Paypal and if that wasn’t enough, producer of the movie Thank You For Not Smoking.

I’ve been meaning to, to do a follow up post on what Yammer decided to launch instead of the features I thought they should have implemented but yesterdays Social Business Summit provided the perfect fodder I needed.

Lane Becker, CEO of Get Satisfaction, made the comment that we need to create more edges in our companies. Edges are where the cool things happen, it’s where conversations with partners and customers happen; it’s where innovation occurs.

John Hagel then later made the comment that companies need to move from knowledge stocks (proprietary IP that they milk dry) to knowledge flows (rich interactions and collaborations with stakeholders).

Earlier this month Yammer released Yammer Communities a tool that can do just that.  From the Yammer blog:

This new product feature enables companies and organizations to create a new type of Yammer network that is not restricted to a common email domain.  Yammer Communities provide companies with a secure, private, and separate space to communicate with their external business contacts.

Yammer Communities

This is an excellent move for Yammer. Traditional “partner portals” or “extranets” are secure, intranet like sites where companies can share things like documents and announcements with partners and over the years extranets have grown to include some level of collaboration. Most extranets suck for two reasons:

  • They’re hard to use have horrible UX
  • People don’t want one more place they have to remember to check

I have no doubt Yammer will destroy current extranets on both accounts. However I still think that being able to access Yammer from an aggregated application like Tweetdeck or Seesmic will make the service much easier to use. But David is a successful serial entrepreneur, the one category of business person I have the most respect for, obviously knows what he’s doing and shouldn’t be listening to every blogger with an opinion and an overinflated sense of importance.

I’m looking forward to giving the new communities feature a test to see how well it works.

It’s pretty long (just under 30 minutes) but if you’re interested here’s an interview Robert Scoble recently did with David.

I chat with the CEO of microblogging and corporate social service leader, Yammer, about what they are doing and how the enterprise market is becoming hyper competitive with companies like Salesforce, Jive, Socialtext, SocialContext, Google, and Zoho all angling for the market that Yammer was first in.

Internal social media is about to go through the growth external social media went through for the last few years. It’s going to be exciting to watch.

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We Need to Completely Rethink How Business Operates Using Social Media

On March 10, 2010, In The Book, By Tac Anderson

Writing a bookI’ve mentioned the book I’ve been working on. I’ve actually made considerable headway on the weekends (except I can’t come up with a good title to save my life) and thought I’d share my current working summary. I’d love to hear your feedback.

I am looking for examples where social technologies have been used by companies to build trust, retain  knowledge, foster collaboration and spur innovation. If you or your company have any good examples please leave me a comment or shoot me an email: tac@newcommbiz.com

Social Media has brought about a groundswell of change that has swept the business world up in its wake. Antiquated processes, organizational structures and technologies  have kept companies from staying tuned in and engaged with customers and employees, to say nothing about keeping up with smaller, nimbler competitors.

No one can dispute that the Internet has radically reinvented the financial drivers and restraints of  traditional business models. It has lowered almost every barrier to entry in almost every industry. What the Internet has done to business models, the technologies behind social media are doing to the rest of business.

For the first time since the universal adoption of the org chart and the inbox (the physical not the digital one) we have the opportunity to fundamentally rethink how a business is run and what the various stakeholders of a company are and do. Customers don’t just buy products, they are helping companies ideate, design, develop and then sell products. Partnerships between two companies in a supply chain are no longer one dimensional relationships. Partners can also be competitors, customers and shareholders. In the very near future the way we recruit, retain and manage employees today will seem medieval.

The social media revolution is on the verge of creating truly social businesses. This change is being driven by the forces of: Trust, Knowledge, Collaboration & Innovation. These forces have become so important that have become there own form of capital. And like monetary capital they follow the same laws of capitalism and the free market. Until now companies have tried to govern these new forms of capital like a controlled market when what is needed now is a free market approach. Like in a free market, the rights of the owners must be protected but the free trade of capital must not be restricted.

The truly social business will be fully realized when social technologies are leveraged to build collaborative relationships across all company stakeholders.  By leveraging social technologies in an open and transparent way businesses will regain and build more trust among stakeholders. This increased trust is a necessity to creating greater shared knowledge, which the same social technologies have the ability to capture, organize and distribute at a yet to be seen level of efficiency. By building collaborative relationships with all company stakeholders using social technologies, businesses will be able to quickly create and capitalize more innovation.

No business has fully achieved this seemingly radical state but many early revolutionaries have developed pockets of deep expertise and experience. While many companies and their employees believe that the lack of adoption of these new technologies is hindering this quintessential state, the fundamental barriers are the outdated structures and process that have existed inside corporations since before the Internet. It’s time to stamp out the last bastions of resistance and remove those barriers and get out of our own way.

Join the New Comm Biz Facebook Page or follow the Twitter account.

Photo credit via icedsoul photography

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What Does the Social Business Look Like?

On February 23, 2010, In The Book, By Tac Anderson

What does the Social Business look like? Some rough draft thoughts.

The Social Business will be fully realized when social technologies are leveraged to build collaborative relationships across all company stakeholders.  By leveraging social technologies in an open and transparent way businesses will also regain and build more trust among stakeholders. This increased trust will will result in greater knowledge creation, which the same social technologies have the ability to capture, organize and distribute at a yet to be seen level of efficiency. By building collaborative relationships with all company stakeholders using social technologies, businesses will be able to quickly create and capitalize more innovation.

Some definitions:

Social Media: The output of Web enabled open collaboration using social technologies.

Social Technologies: The technologies and tools used to communicate, collaborate and create on the Web such as blogs, microblogs, wiki’s and forums

Social Business: A business that has built a strategy around leveraging social technologies and social media to maximize the relationships with all company stakeholders.

Collaborative Relationships: Open transparent and mutually beneficial relationships between companies and its stakeholders.

Stakeholders: A companies employees, customers, shareholders, partners and competitors, past, present and future (basically everyone).

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been “working on a book.” I’ve been working on said book for about three years. Maybe this year is the year I finish it. The above is my most recent raw notes from the book writing process. Since I like to bounce my ideas off all of you I thought I’d solicit your feedback here. Let me know what you think.

I’m really excited to go to the Dachis Group’s Social Business Summit next month because I want to test my above theories against the smartest people working on the vision for the Social Business? That and I’ll finally get to meet Peter Kim.

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The Innovation Equation and Social Media Solution

On January 26, 2010, In The Book, By Tac Anderson

I have a theory: The amount of Knowledge and quality of Collaboration a company is able to achieve directly effected by the level of Trust all parties have in the company.This is reflected in the potential value of the Innovation.

Collaboration
Image by yuan2003 via Flickr

(Knowledge x Collaboration) x Trust = Innovation

Knowledge is the raw materials businesses are built on today. All commodities are just that, commodities. Production became a commodity thanks to globalization and distribution became a commodity thanks to the Internet. The only thing that’s left is knowledge.

Knowledge is easy for individuals to gain. Knowledge is itself a commodity – for individuals. Knowledge is a scarcity for companies. The ability to mine the wealth of knowledge inside of the people employed by a company is harder. Add to that the need to mine knowledge from customers and partners and knowledge just became the scarcest mineral on the planet.

Why is knowledge so difficult to gain? Two factors: Retention and Trust.

Retention because we don’t stay at the same job as long as we used to, customers are rarely brand loyal anymore and partnerships are fleeting. None of this is going to change dramatically, which puts an increase on the need for trust.

Employees, Customers and Partners have an inherent lack of trust in corporations. This means they will only give up as much knowledge as they have to in order to gain something of value like a paycheck, a product or a contract.

In my last post I talked about the value of Trust. Let’s assume for a minute that you are actually able to gain enough trust to gather sufficient knowledge, now what? Now that you’ve mined that raw data you need to turn it into something. This is where collaboration comes in.

As companies continue to rely on remote and mobile workforces our ability to collaborate has been hampered and becomes expensive and difficult. This yields lower returns comparable to the level of investment. Which in turns causes companies to kill potential breakthrough innovations much sooner.

Social Media has huge payoffs in all of these areas. Social Media allows companies to open up and place trust in their employees and customers which in turn yields more trust. Social media allows for the gathering, storing and sharing of knowledge as well as facilitating communication and collaboration across multiple regions and stakeholders.

Among other benefits, this social media centric approach lowers the overall costs and increases the output making it easier to invest in, what in the short term seems like, smaller innovations but may actually have larger returns in the end.

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How to use Posterous for Internal Collaboration

On July 30, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson
Image representing Posterous as depicted in Cr...
Image via CrunchBase

Working in a cross functional team I meet with a lot of teams to share advice, tips and tricks. I then frequently get follow up questions (because I openly invite them). Last night I received one and wanted to share an edited and more detailed version of the email exchange Q&A with you because I think it would be helpful.

Not too long ago I would have recommended setting up a Ning site or a Google Group or even a private Blogger account but Posterous is just so much more simple to use, especially for people who live in their Outlook inbox. Now we just need an enterprise version of Posterous.

Q – I’m looking for ways to connect micro groups within the agency on social networking platforms such as former interns who’ve grown through the agency, remote employees, etc. It is for conversations that need to remain limited just to a particular group (like an alias if your thinking email terms) and not exposed publicly for all to see. What do you recommend? I worry somewhat about folks having to go to another app outside of Outlook for discussions such as this, but there’s a need to tap into some digital exploration here.

A – As long as you’re not talking about confidential information you can have your cake and eat it too. :)

Posterous lets you have blog type functionality with the ease of email. If you have not tried Posterous yet send an email RIGHT NOW to post@posterous.com. I’ll wait.

Now that you’re set up in Posterous, log in w/ the info they send you and you can set up groups, you can also set it up privately. You can post comments by replying to posts (which show up as emails) and you can share attachments like video, picture, audio and documents which Posterous will embed in the post. You can also set up multiple Posterous accounts. My account is www.tacanderson.com plus I have 2 others.

If that doesn’t work for what you need let me know. FriendFeed also has some similar features but its geekier and not as easy to use for the average person.

Q – This is perfect! So one question is – sometimes we share best practices, which is a little bit exposing and we may not want all account teams to see. Could someone view in?

A – As long as you set it to private no one that is not invited can see it or post to it. If they are invited they have access to see, post and comment.

***But remember just like Yammer or any other social network this is not “secure” so you can’t share confidential or restricted info.

Good luck and let me know how it goes.

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UPS Whiteboard is pointless

On April 27, 2007, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

So apparently UPS has some cool ads, done by some cool director. The only thing I really liked was the music, You can listen to the full song here.

I don’t watch TV anymore (only what I download of iTunes) so I never saw the commercials. But I did see the billboard while in California, driving down Melrose last month going to visit my friend Nick, for ups.com/whiteboard.

Being a self proclaimed Web 2.0 geek I instantly had visions/delusions that UPS was using some of the new collaborative “whiteboard” technology that has begun springing up. GE has launched a great example of what I was thinking of. Combine this with a skype call and you can instantaneously collaborate with a client on what it is that they want.

Instead at UPS I am prompted to enter a friends email as well as my own and a short message. Still I am thinking that this may be some sort of invite (keep in mind I didn’t sit through the whole flash presentation which might have explained all of this). I entered my message and was greeted with this.

Needless to say I was unimpressed. What a missed opportunity to really create value for your clients.

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