Chapter 3

Putting Social Collaboration to Work

In This Chapter

Harnessing the energy of social networks for business

Gearing up for implementation

Addressing enterprise requirements for social collaboration

Viewing an alternate vision of workplace software

In the first chapters of this book, I define social collaboration and cover its history as well as some of the megatrends driving changes in collaboration technology and its use. In this chapter, I talk about how to put social collaboration to work, pivoting from theory to practice. After all, where do you begin? Keep reading to find out about common requirements for the implementation and rollout of any social collaboration platform.

You can find more on product selection in Part III.

Harnessing the Energy of Social Networks for Business

Seeing the potential for social networks to streamline collaboration within your organization is a good start but only a start. How are you going to make it happen? Where are the biggest opportunities?

Developing specific business scenarios for how you think social collaboration can be used productively is an important way of focusing your efforts. Particularly at first, set a template for the use of social technologies at work. After you set the example, employees will be more likely to figure out their own inventive uses of the platform. If you present them with nothing but a blank Set Your Status field, you will fail.

You may have a short list of business uses in mind for the platform already. Better yet, there may be a department or project team within the company that has been actively clamoring for access to tools of this type. Take the time to brainstorm a longer list, and then whittle it down and prioritize it. This list will suggest the business units or business functions that would make the most sense to start with. In addition to meeting their specific needs, you want to have an idea of the payoff you’re looking to achieve. They should be candidates to produce the early wins you will showcase when you later make your case for broader adoption across the enterprise.

Consider making one of those target audiences sales or another group with a direct connection to revenue or new product development. That will tend to make whatever success you can claim later more attention-getting.

Other good candidates may include employee teams who already actively use the latest collaboration technologies, regardless of whether they were officially authorized and endorsed by IT. Most large corporations have pockets of adoption of Yammer, or other team collaboration tools like Basecamp (a cloud-based project collaboration tool) or cloud file sharing tools like Box and Dropbox. Whether or not these ad hoc tools earn a place in your official company strategy, they provide clues to the kind of work environment employees have been stitching together in a do-it-yourself fashion. If you will be asking colleagues to give up their established collection of tools, be sure you can make a strong case for how the social collaboration platform you choose is an improvement — more integrated and capable, easy to work with, and productive.

In addition to deciding where to start, some of the questions you need to answer up front include

What’s in it for me? Employees being asked to change their established work habits will want to know how they will personally benefit. This is where you need to be ready with your case for how the social collaboration system will help salespeople sell, managers manage, and everyone save time.

When is it appropriate? Clarify when social collaboration is the right way to share information and when e-mail is still preferred.

What are the ground rules? If the etiquette on the social collaboration system is the same as for e-mail, that’s easy to communicate to colleagues. However, if the new system requires tweaks to corporate policies for acceptable use of the network, make sure that you communicate those policies to all employees. Is there any sort of information employees are prohibited or strongly discouraged from sharing on the social platform? For example, some organizations may discourage discussion of sensitive personnel matters or sharing personal data, such as Social Security numbers, preferring to restrict those to systems with more tried-and-tested information security.

What are the pitfalls? Rather than treating social collaboration as a magical cure-all, acknowledge the ways it can fail and have a strategy for avoiding those pitfalls. Do not let fear, uncertainty, and doubt fester.

How will we measure success? Stake out at least a few metrics for the key business processes you are targeting for improvement.

Gearing Up for Implementation

Some of the project steps I outline in this section may seem like overkill if your organization is relatively small, or if you select a cloud-based solution that promises to dramatically simplify the implementation process. Of course, these are just guidelines. You should scale and adapt them to your needs. Still, think through how these requirements are being satisfied, even if one person on your team will be fulfilling multiple roles or some of the tasks will be outsourced.

Forming the team

Here are some constituencies that should be considered as part of the product team.

IT: Regardless of whether a project is initiated by IT or a business-led group with IT playing a supporting role, someone needs to evaluate the social collaboration platform against the organization’s minimum technical requirements to determine how it will be implemented and supported. In an on-premise implementation of a product like IBM Connections, the IT team will have many decisions to make about systems architecture, such as whether multiple servers and databases will be required to support a large or geographically distributed employee population. For more on this perspective, see Chapter 16.

Senior leadership: The more you can get the CEO and other executive leaders involved, the better. Their presence in detailed planning sessions may be rare, but their endorsement of the concept will be invaluable.

Business unit leadership: Your pilot or showcase business units should be actively involved in helping you field an environment that will meet their needs.

Human resources: People are as important as technology to the success of social collaboration, and HR should have a role in the workplace design element of the project. HR may also have concerns about aligning the collaboration environment with employee policies (or policies may have to be adjusted to fit the new possibilities).

Legal and compliance: Particularly in regulated businesses such as banking, legal issues and regulatory compliance can sink a social collaboration initiative if not properly addressed. Get these groups on-board early so you can show how their concerns can be mitigated: for example, by archiving social communications for regulatory review.

Corporate communications: Corporate communications teams sometimes initiate social collaboration as a replacement for traditional employee newsletters or e-mail communications. In other organizations, the communications group may be a laggard, while other groups (like Training) take the lead. Even if corporate communications doesn’t immediately embrace the platform for its own purposes, you will want its help promoting the launch of your collaboration network.

Corporate training and professional development: Social collaboration can complement formal training and education programs, extending the learning after the course is over and covering a broader array of topics than can be addressed through traditional company education programs. Social learning will be more successful if treated as an explicit goal of the collaboration network.

Community managers: Even at the earliest stage of planning and piloting social collaboration, you should have at least one person charged with building and nurturing the online community. This role includes coaching and training employees on productive use of the platform, as well as the ability to intervene as a moderator in unproductive online interactions or remove inappropriate content from the site (a rare occurrence on most networks).

Large successful collaboration networks often have a team of community strategists, community managers, and system administrators overseeing the overall collaboration network, plus part-time community managers who have administrative rights for specific workgroups. Try to envision the structure you will require in the long run and put some basic scaffolding in place from the beginning.

Community advocates: You need people who believe in what you’re trying to do with social collaboration. You need as many of them as you can get, particularly within the groups where you plan to establish your first beachhead for social collaboration. These people may or may not have any official community management duties. Their more important role is to be active users of the collaboration platform: the people who will talk it up to their peers and show how it can be used effectively.

Skeptics: As much as you need advocates who instinctively grasp the potential of social collaboration, you also need to acknowledge the skeptics who say it will never work. Your best tactic may be to ignore those who are habitually negative, but you may also consider trying to enlist those who are raising well-reasoned objections in working on how to overcome the obstacles they have pointed out.

Former skeptics who change their minds can be your best advocates.

Social media marketing specialists: Although not all tactics that work on public social media translate to an internal collaboration network, many do. Before you can make your people productive on the platform, you have to get them to use it. Enlist the people who handle your firm’s external social media in suggesting imaginative ways of engaging the employee population. Social media marketers know a lot about how to get people’s attention and get a conversation started.

Designers and web developers: Even if you can’t harness quite the same level of budget and effort that would be lavished on a customer-facing site, steal whatever attention you can from your web developers and designers to make sure your collaboration network is good looking, easy to navigate, and highly usable.

Organizing advocates

One of the most important elements for the successful launch of social collaboration is an aggressive program for recruiting community advocates. You want to find the people who will believe in the online community before it really exists. Some may be social media enthusiasts or habitual early adopters of technology. Others may have had positive experiences with previous generations of collaboration technology or social collaboration environments used by former employers.

These are the people who you give early access to the collaboration platform so they can test it out and give feedback. You may ask them to play around with more than one environment at the product selection stage. Then after you make your pick, get their recommendations on the early decisions for the design and configuration of the environment.

You also want them to help you “cheat” on pre-populating the collaboration environment with content and conversation starters, so it looks like there is already something going on in the community even on what (for everyone else) is day one. Project managers can try to come up with their own list of content to use when “stocking” the environment. If you have organized advocates from all the business units you are targeting for the launch, you will have a much better chance of including what people from those businesses consider truly important.

At launch, your advocates become the friendly, familiar faces within those business units whom employees will turn to for coaching. They are the people who post regularly and try to draw others into participation in the online community.

Advocates extend the reach of the core community management team, relaying messages and amplifying them by relating them to the needs of the department or the local office in which they work. In a geographically distributed organization, you want to have local (or at least regional) advocates to spread the word.

Typically, advocates perform all these duties in addition to their regular jobs. To keep them motivated, project leaders need to dole out both planned and spontaneous recognition and praise. Be sure they know what they are doing is important (because it is). If a success story emerges from their work, make sure they get a generous dose of the credit.

Borrowing freely from consumer innovations

In the configuration and design of your collaboration network, it makes sense to leverage the innovations and conventions of consumer social networks and websites where possible. Although familiarity isn’t a cure-all, you may as well take advantage of it where it makes sense.

For example, on many social software platforms, you can customize the labels on different features. Having said that, resist the urge to out-clever yourself and reinvent the wheel. For example, but if you have the option of renaming a Like button as something new, you should probably stick what the tried-and-true that most everyone knows and accepts instead of coming up with some other novel name. More importantly, wherever possible, features of your collaboration environment that mirror the functions of Facebook or Twitter should behave the way those consumer tools have trained your employees to expect.

For example, when pasting a link to a YouTube video to a status post, you’d expect a collaboration environment to generate an embedded preview — and be disappointed if it’s displayed as a link only. If that’s not the default behavior of your collaboration platform, I’d ask the vendor why it’s not. Maybe you can set a configuration switch or use a plug-in that will make it so.

You want your employees to understand that social collaboration is different from participating in public social networks, so the software should function a little differently. The distinction I’m trying to make here is that having it be different (more businesslike) should not mean having to settle for less. You don’t want to promote clunky software that looks just enough like a social network to be frustrating because it doesn’t act like one.

Branding the network

Just how much you can shape and mold your collaboration network will depend partly on the platform you select, but most environments will allow you to add a logo and change the color scheme.

You want to take ownership of the collaboration environment and make it reflect the image your company projects to the world. Give it a name of its own. In many companies with successful collaboration networks, the average employee couldn’t tell you what the underlying software was. They collaborate on “The Hub,” not knowing whether the underlying software is Jive (as it is for UBM’s The Hub), Tibbr (of KPMG), or Socialcast (the SAS Institute version). At Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, employees interact through Yummer (powered by Yammer), which is a play on the company jingle lyric, “Red Robin! Yummm!”

Publicizing the launch

Before your collaboration network becomes a big success, you need people to use it, and first you have to make them aware of it. That can be a challenging project all its own in a large organization.

Before the big launch, when the collaboration implementation isn’t ready for prime time, some organizations start with a soft launch, which is a quiet launch, made known only within select circles of early enthusiasts and testers. Other employees who find out about it and are curious may be able to establish an account and pull in their co-workers, as long as they understand that the design and configuration are not final.

A real launch is louder and more aggressive. You may have one company-wide launch or a series of launch events targeted at different departments or constituents. Regardless, whatever the audience, you want to get as many as people as possible to try the software because in social collaboration, activity begets more activity.

You may want to build a company event around the launch or time it to coincide with a company meeting that you know a lot of people will attend. Launch with a public endorsement from the CEO and other top company leaders, if at all possible. Launch with early success stories from any pilot projects you’ve run and suggest how to build on them.

In terms of mass communication, sending e-mail blasts and reminders is an obvious first step, but you can certainly get a lot more creative.

In his book, The Collaborative Organization (McGraw-Hill), Jacob Morgan cites the example of Yum! Brands (the parent company of KFC and other restaurants). Morgan is the principal and co-founder of Chess Media Group, which consults on what he prefers to call “emergent collaboration,” and he provides this example of a clever way to promote a new social network. When Yum! introduced its collaboration network, branded iCHING, it accelerated adoption using an elaborate internal marketing campaign featuring decal stickers for elevator doors and bathroom mirrors. Because of how the capital H in the logo was styled to look like two people shaking hands, the company used that letter alone on the elevator doors. Every time the doors closed, the decals created an image of people coming together. Meanwhile, the bathroom mirror decal was styled as a representation of a social profile with a clear area where the profile photo was supposed to go. While standing at the sink, employees would see themselves as they would appear on the social network.

Elevators also factored into KPMG’s enterprise social network launch. When partners from the firm gathered for an internal conference, the organizers had arranged to have videos promoting the collaboration platform playing on the video monitors in the elevators.

Addressing Enterprise Requirements for Social Collaboration

In information technology, enterprise is a code word for big, sprawling, and hideously complicated. In reality, enterprise information technology systems don’t have a monopoly on technological complexity. Consumer social networks and consumer websites are backed by some very complex systems, except that ordinarily consumers don’t worry about any of that. They’re presented with a simple experience, and that’s all that matters to them. What is really different about large enterprises is their scale and the complexity of the legal and regulatory burdens they face.

Enterprise technology managers worry about a lot of things, including consumer technologies being used for business purposes. They work an environment that’s not just technologically but organizationally complex. Multinational organizations with thousands of employees are the classic example, but even very small organizations may have enterprise concerns if they operate in complex businesses or have aggressive growth plans.

If your organization is a ten-person web development firm, you may want to skip this section or skim lightly over it. On the other hand, organizations with a few dozen or a few hundred employees have their share of enterprise concerns, particularly if they have been around for long enough to have a list of legacy technology and business processes to take into account, rather than starting from scratch.

Ensuring security and balancing trade-offs

No corporate network is triple-secret secure. Individual applications may be accessible only from within the firewall, but they are accessed by employees whose computers are also connecting to the Internet on a regular basis. Being able to connect to the outside world is important, so the prudent approach is to make some practical compromises while still trying to take reasonable steps to protect data and systems.

Many social collaboration platforms take this compromise another step further. Many of the most valuable scenarios for the use of these tools involve employees getting access from home, on the road, or from a mobile device. Other important collaboration scenarios involve connections to business partners who also need to gain access from outside the firewall. Usually, that means providing access via a simple web login form to whoever has a valid username and password.

This is why so many collaboration solutions are hosted, whether in a multitenant cloud or on a dedicated server. But it also means the collaboration system will be vulnerable to all of the problems that plague every other web-based, password-protected application, such as the tendency of users to employ the same login credentials on many websites.

Yes, you can set up your collaboration platform inside the firewall and require any external user to have virtual private network software to gain access to the application. Do this if you must to address some requirement for regulatory compliance, but understand that it will have its own trade-offs in ease of use and adoption.

More commonly, organizations that move forward with social collaboration work to make its security strong enough for everyday use, while deciding that some subset of data or business processes are too sensitive to be managed on the platform. Considerations for this process include

Data classification: Categorizing types of data by the regulations or policies they are governed by or by the sensitivity or proprietary nature of the information.

Data ownership: Determining who is responsible for a given class of data and can make the call on whether or not to trust it to the collaboration network.

Risk management: According to the National Institute for Standards and Technology’s Risk Management Guide for Information Technology Systems, “The principal goal of an organization’s risk management process should be to protect the organization and its ability to perform their mission, not just its IT assets.” In other words, this is not just an IT function but a judgment call. The key question is whether the value to the organization and its mission outweighs the risk, and the answer may be different for different classifications of data and processes.

Risk mitigation: In addition to ruling certain data out of bounds, the risk assessment process may also lead to a mitigation strategy, which may include additional intrusion detection and prevention measures or a response plan to be implemented in the event of a security breach.

Archiving content for backup and legal discovery

In addition to protecting content, preserving it can be important. For example, many financial services businesses are required to archive all electronic communications for certain employees, such as brokers and financial advisors. Regulations originally crafted for e-mail and instant messaging are being applied to social collaboration tools as well. That means social collaboration data must be archived on a similar schedule if those regulations apply to your business.

Archiving may also be important for purposes of legal discovery in the event of a lawsuit. Content showing how an important decision was made may be important documentation for an organization’s legal defense, or the organization may be compelled to reproduce it by the demand of an opposing legal team. In the absence of a system for archiving and indexing this content for e-discovery, an organization may still be required to produce it through a much more manual, labor-intensive process.

Integrating with existing portal and document management infrastructure

Typically, large established enterprises have previous investments in portal and document management systems that the social collaboration environment will need to integrate with, unless it will completely replace them.

At the product selection stage, this matters partly because a broad social platform like Jive or IBM Connections can be considered redundant with systems already in place. Some organizations choose to instead minimize the overlap with a social technology like Tibco’s tibbr that emphasizes the social feed and tries to wrap that newfangled element of collaboration around the existing application using web frames and other integration mechanisms. Even if the decision should be that the social platform’s document management meets the organization’s needs as well as or better than prior technologies, that would imply the need for a mass migration of content from one to the other.

Otherwise, if some documents will be managed on the social platform and others will be managed on some other document management platform, at a minimum, there ought to be a strategy for what goes where and why. If there is a rational strategy — perhaps based on an information classification scheme that dictates legal documents should be managed outside of the social platform — the division can make perfect sense.

On the other hand, where collaboration platform users have a reasonable expectation that the content ought to be easily accessible to them, seek opportunities for integration: for example, cross-platform search across document repositories.

Linking to corporate directories and HR systems

Employee social platforms also benefit from integration with (or at least periodic synchronization with) other sources of employee data, including human resources information systems, network directory servers, and web-based “phone book” directories.

You want accounts to be created when employees join the organization and deleted or suspended when their network and e-mail accounts are removed.

In addition, you can make it easier for new members of the collaboration network to set up their profiles by importing data such as name, e-mail, phone number, educational records, and placement in an org chart.

If any corporate system includes a standard employee photo, such as a security badge photo, you may want to consider importing it into the employee profile at system startup. Part of what makes social collaboration feel warmer and more human is seeing people’s faces, and that requirement is not met by a generic placeholder icon. A security badge photo may not be an employee’s favorite image of himself, but if not, having it in place on his profile will be good motivation to replace it with another photo.

Layering social connections onto existing applications

One of the goals of many social collaboration initiatives is to “put social in the flow of work” by integrating it with the applications employees use every day to do their work. In other words, an accounts payable clerk should see some sort of social sidebar on every screen of an invoice processing application, making it easy to send a question to a co-worker that includes an embedded reference to that specific record. This becomes more practical in a workplace dominated by web applications for every business function (albeit not so practical if your payable clerks continue to use old fashioned terminal software connected to an AS/400 system).

The Jive Anywhere browser add-on takes advantage of the proliferation of web applications for business by making it easy to share any record that is represented by a unique web address. Not all web applications follow this convention, but for those that do, no integration is required beyond integration with the browser. On the other hand, this mode of integration doesn’t run any deeper than link sharing.

The other common pattern is for a social stream to be embedded within a business record. For example, a customer record in a CRM system from Salesforce.com, SAP, or Microsoft’s Dynamics may have a social feed embedded within it, showing the most recent comments on that record. Users can also easily post a link to that record into the social stream. Typically, the most intimate connections between the social environment and the application arise where both are provided by the same vendor: Chatter and Salesforce.com CRM, Jam and SAP CRM, or Yammer and Dynamics CRM.

However, other social collaboration vendors have every incentive to achieve whatever level of integration may be possible with popular products, even those from competitors. For example, Jive says that its Jive for Salesforce module enables bidirectional data exchange so information about opportunity, account, and case information is visible in Jive, and relevant Jive information is also visible in Salesforce.com.

Similarly, Moxie Software has crafted an integration for its collaboration environment, which is geared toward use by customer service and support teams, to link to the Salesforce.com Service Cloud suite of applications.

Connecting multiple social applications

Besides connecting social collaboration to business applications, at some point, you will likely want to connect social software products to each other, particularly if you work in a large organization.

Despite the ambitions of social software vendors to put themselves at the center of the social collaboration experience, as the platform everyone else will build on — or the universal social layer — none has secured overwhelming dominance. Commonly, different parts of the same organization will choose a different social software product or service: say, the sales folks use Chatter, HQ uses IBM Connections, and R/D use Socialcast. At the same time, the activity feed format of social applications has become popular as a user interface for all sorts of applications. The latest upgrade to your business intelligence software may arrive with what looks like a social feed for commentary on the latest reports published out of the system, even though that feed isn’t connected to any broader social platform. Products for social media marketing or monitoring may include their own team collaboration tools, without being tied to your collaboration network.

For a consistent social experience, you would like to be able to aggregate feeds and present user profiles in a consistent way. When you click someone’s name or photo, you should be taken to a profile where you can see all their activity and content across all the social collaboration tools used by your organization. Is that too much to ask?

Actually, it probably is too much to ask, at least at this stage of the market.

Some standards are emerging for connecting and combining social experiences, which I cover in more detail in Chapter 11. As these continue to mature, and vendors forge partnerships or produce prepackaged software for connecting to each other’s products, the possibilities for integration at a reasonable cost will expand. As of this writing, I’m starting to see more options for integrating Chatter and Yammer streams into other platforms.

Certainly, you have to consider the cost and effort required for integration and decide whether you can afford a perfect solution (if you find one that’s “perfect”). Users who work primarily with one social application and within a team of people who also use that application may not care much that they aren’t linked to the broader enterprise. They may still appreciate the social user interface convention as a way of interacting with the system. They may feel comfortable hopping between different social applications that follow some common design conventions, even if they aren’t integrated at a deeper level. If your business users aren’t complaining that lack of integration is a problem, maybe you shouldn’t make it into a problem.

Recommendation: Pay attention to (and try to moderate) the proliferation of islands of social collaboration. Build bridges between those you do have, where practical.

Putting Social Collaboration in Context

The market for social software for business is broader than the enterprise social networking products I cover in this book, which focus on internal employee social collaboration, as well as online collaborative work with business partners.

Some of the other ways social software is being put to work include

Public-facing enterprise social communities: These include communities for customer service and support, as well as company-sponsored social sites for special interests that include some soft-sell marketing. Jive Software, IBM, and Telligent provide social community platforms that can be configured for internal or external use.

Other products like Lithium Technologies and Get Satisfaction focus exclusively on public-facing communities. They are enterprise products, but not for internal social collaboration.

In customer support and technical support scenarios, one of the advantages of the community format is that customers will often answer each other’s questions, lightening the workload of support employees. Figure 3-1 shows the Jive Community, a public website aimed at Jive Software customers and sales prospects. It functions much like an internal implementation of the software, except that in this case anyone can sign up for an account rather than only employees and other authorized corporate users.

Figure 3-1: The Jive Community is a publicly accessible implementation of the same social software Jive provides for internal corporate use.

Social media monitoring and analytics: Capturing mentions of companies, brands, and products (yours or those of your competitors) on public social media websites. A lot of the innovation here is in semantic analysis to detect positive or negative sentiment or summarize common themes appearing in social posts.

Social media management: Publishing content on Facebook, Twitter, and other websites and responding to the public.

Social CRM: Products for connecting with customers through social networks or social customer service websites. This category overlaps with public social community products but also includes tools like Nimble, a social contact manager for sales and support teams for cultivating contacts on public social networks. Nimble has some collaboration capabilities, meant to be used in the context of the application, but isn’t intended as a general-purpose social collaboration platform. See Social CRM For Dummies, by Kyle Lacy, Stephanie Diamond, and Jon Ferrara for more information.

If you’re engaged in a broad social business strategy, part of planning for social collaboration is figuring out how it fits in. For example, if you are gathering market intelligence via social media monitoring, how will you share that information internally? Is there a need for technical integration between the monitoring platform and the collaboration platform? Are the users of the monitoring tool a good target community of a social collaboration pilot or showcase example?

Often, the different elements of a social business strategy aren’t coordinated as well as they may be because they are managed by different parts of the organization. In that case, you may wind up with a social media marketing strategy, a social CRM strategy, and social collaboration strategy, but little to no synergy between them.

A more holistic social business strategy needs to be coordinated by a crossfunctional team or leader who pulls together the puzzle pieces.

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