Social Business Strategy and Adoption

Social Media & SharePoint

Jaap Linssen — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:10:42 +0000

On Monday February 13th (1:00PM-6:00PM) OrangeTrail is organizing an event in Amsterdam around the theme “Social Media & SharePoint.”

The event will take place in ‘De Lichtfabriek’ in Haarlem.

During this event:

- We will share our vision on how you can improve your business using social technology.
- Our clients ING, PostNL and Ziggo will share their experience of using SharePoint as a social intranet and take part in a panel session.
- Many of the leading social software vendors, such as Yammer, Jive, Attini, Newsgator and Workvoices will demo how their products integrate with SharePoint.
- There will be plenty of time for discussion and networking.
- Finally, as it’s OrangeTrail’s first birthday, we’d like everyone to join us for drinks.

The event is aimed at people from large organizations responsible for the intranet, communication, social media and online collaboration.

Interested to join us, sign in here!

Management 2.0

Jaap Linssen — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 10:05:21 +0000

Here’s a great speech from Gary Hamel, one of our favorite management thinkers. In this video he talks about the management challenges we are facing today and explains key aspects of modern management models that you need to be successful.

Competitive advantage as we know it has vanished. The value of knowledge is declining everyday because it dissipates so quickly. The game is about “how fast can I create new knowledge?” To excel at in this game you need to:
1. Change as fast as change itself.
2. Make sure innovation is the work of everyone all the time.
3. Get your people to bring you the gifts of their creativity.

The management models that go with this are:
1. Adaptive
2. Supporting innovation
3. Engaging

The key question is; how do you get this done in a large corporate? First of all there is a mind shift where managers morph into being leaders and facilitators. They are no longer dictating what needs to be done, but should answer the question: “How are you helping your employees succeed in their job?”

Secondly a lot can be learned from the Web. The web is an immensely innovative ecosystem that is constantly changing. Much of this is caused by some deep values:
1. Openness
2. Meritocracy
3. Flexibility
4. Collaboration

To summarize Hamel’s speech: companies should start to lead and facilitate their employees to succeed and become an ecosystem with deep values comparable to the values the internet has.

We agree with Hamel’s take on management 2.0. Social business can be a great facilitator of the process of moving a company to a state where they again become more competitive. Social business potentially holds the same values as the Web and can bring a tremendous pace of change to a company. However, many organizations will try to resist these values at first. With our programs we help our clients find fertile ground for change. In these sweet spots we carefully create and nourish the right examples. You will not succeed in creating core values like openness, meritocracy, flexibility, and collaboration by dictating your employees. It is through creating the right examples and encouraging people to follow those examples that you will manage to evolve into a competitive organization.

OrangeTrail’s perfect track record is due to our unique combination of skills and experience of change management and social business.

Enjoy the video!

Companies working with OrangeTrail

belen.bode — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 07:30:43 +0000

We’re proud, that in our first year of business, the following world class companies have chosen to work with OrangeTrail!

Yammer moving toward Social Middleware

Jaap Linssen — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 13:47:26 +0000

Yammer has just rolled-out a major upgrade. They have added the ‘Ticker for Enterprise’.

This is a significant upgrade as it provides an insight into where we believe the industry is heading. Yammer, and other similar tools, will become ‘social middleware’. Up to now Yammer was a place where you could share, communicate, and collaborate. The trigger for the dialogue would always be a person. However, in our professional lives, there are more events in our company that (should) trigger communication or collaboration. Imagine if a CRM system would send out a signal to your activity stream when the status of your client is out of the ordinary. You would be able to collaborate on the issue with colleagues instantly and solve the problem. What if an angry tweet from an important customer captured by your webcare team would appear in the activity stream of the team servicing the client? They could instantly collaborate on solving the issue and regaining the clients trust, faster and more effectively.

In the near future social tools will not only be fed by people posting messages, entire processes will feed them. The social tool will become the spider in the web. Information will be posted by people as well as company systems and instant virtual teams will collaborate to seize opportunities, solve problems, and better serve clients.

The current Yammer upgrade isn’t at that level yet, but it’s clearly moving in that direction. The current integrations aren’t with systems that directly affect the bottom line (except for Salesforce). At this time the ticker integrates streams from: Badgeville, Box, Expensify, NetSuite, Salesforce.com, SharePoint, Spigit, TripIt and Zendesk.

Yammer has built the Yammer Activity Stream API that lets other platforms feed the Yammer activity stream.

We believe that in 5 years time tools like Yammer will become our single point of interaction with our corporate systems. This is where we will organise our work, where we will receive signals and inputs from the organisation, and where we will collaborate with others. Email as we know it will rapidly become extinct.

Want to know more, check out what Yammer has to say about it’s upgrades.

Putting social media to productive use within the enterprise

Jaap Linssen — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 12:04:02 +0000

Below is an interview with John Hagel. John is a renowned thinker and publicist on new technology and it’s impact on businesses and society. Even though John doesn’t work for OrangeTrail, his take on putting social media to productive use in enterprises very much resembles our approach.

ESM presentation

OrangeTrail — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 13:55:48 +0000

Here’s most of the presentation we used today in our workshop on Enterprise Social Media adoption at the Dutch Microsoft office at Schiphol.

Enterprise Social Media Workshop

View more presentations from Jaap Linssen.

Proper use of your Activity Stream

OrangeTrail — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 10:15:28 +0000

There is great danger that your activity stream rapidly fills with posts about people changing their profile picture, linking to others, mentions of birthdays, etc. and this is especially true as the network grows. The consequence is that this type of activity swamps business relevant entries and finding them becomes like looking for a needle in a hay stack.

The place people visit most can quickly become a distracting box of noise. People lose sight of the true business purpose of the network and its value drains away. As a rule of thumb, if the purely social activities go over 15% to 20% of overall entries, start moving them off the main activity stream and put them somewhere else.

There is a phase where the above activities can be of benefit to your platform. When you start your enterprise social media program and participants are thin on the ground, the number of postings will also not be great. Having more social activities in your activity stream can contribute to a more vibrant feel on the platform. We call this ‘perceived critical mass’.

Perceived critical mass is based on the principle that people are more likely to commit to something successful. You need to reach the tipping point ( see movie below ) to get everyone to come aboard. A platform with little activity is not seen as successful and in a way becomes it’s own enemy. In these early stages you need to generate vibrancy to help things along and give people the perception of critical mass. There are a number of ways to generate perceived critical mass, the activity stream is one of your instruments to do so.

So, activity streams are a great instrument to generate critical mass, but be sure not to let them overshadow the business related postings.

Inspiring lecture on self organised learning

Jaap Linssen — Mon, 23 May 2011 08:00:50 +0000

This is a truly inspiring presentation by Sugata Mitra on self organised learning. There are obvious parallels to how people in organisations are able to collaborate. In the spirit of Sugata: Work them out yourselves. Just watch. It’s funny to!

When the hype dies, the real work begins

OrangeTrail — Mon, 16 May 2011 14:43:42 +0000

We came across an interesting survey by Useful Social Media which studied a number of facets of social media use by enterprises. To us the most interesting finding proved a conviction we’ve had for a while. Enterprise marketing and communications investment in social media is slowing and shifting to areas where impact on business fundamentals is greater.

From the table below it is clear that the growth in communications and marketing use is slowing. Customer Service seems to be the next area in which social media will be utilized. Even though the categorisation is a bit rough (why is there no mention of collaboration?) it is a clear sign that companies are starting to incorporate social media in their processes.

We see a number of reasons for this shift:

Social Media use in the MarCom function has been adopted by most companies and therefore the potential for growth is limited. If adoption is at 96%, there’s not so much room for growth.
The real power of social media is to connect with others (hence the term social). It’s real power lies in dialogue. What we’ve seen in the past years is that the MarCom functions have used social media as an extra channel to push their messages. Enterprises are starting to realise that social media have much more to offer in other areas where you tap into the collective brainpower of people and get them to collaborate.
The expectations of social media in MarCom seem to be inflated and many companies are in a phase of disillusionment. They’re just not getting the returns that had been hyped.
The MarCom function is the easiest function to implement social media and therefore social media was embraced there first. It’s not too complex or demanding to tweet about your company, set up a Facebook fan page, or put some videos of your company on Youtube. The biggest pay-off from social media comes when you embed it in the core of your operation to generate value. When you actually better service your clients, because you have changed your customer service processes to incorporate social media real benefits start surfacing. Or, when you utilize the collective brainpower of your company to quickly solve difficult problems its power is easy to see. As the dialogue and shared knowledge are all stored, a valuable and relevant knowledge base builds. Embedding social media in the core of your operations, however, has greater impact on everyone in your company than using it for marketing and communications. For that reason, it’s not strange that executives have waited to see more proof of the positive impact social media has. The case for embedding social media in operations has been steadily building. Executives are increasingly aware of this and are venturing into this domain.

We expect the same to happen to social media as happened to the internet. The internet bubble at the beginning of this century burst. Then, without much hype, the internet continued its steady growth fundamentally changing the way many businesses operate and people interact.

Do you want to allow anonymous posting on your social media?

OrangeTrail — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 11:58:45 +0000

We’ve had a number of clients discussing the merits of anonymous posting with us. Some feel it’s the only way to generate significant activity on their ESM environment. Our feeling is that the desire to have anonymous posting can be seen as an indicator of the organisations openness and honesty and its willingness to address controversial issues. We can only think of one situation in which we would advise anonymous posting. However, we’d like to open this issue up to a wider debate and get others to share their experience and views.One of the major resistances that we hear from people who are just getting into social media is that they are afraid that they will be persecuted (“it’s not good for my career”) if they post what they feel. And that’s a very real fear. If you allow people to hide behind a different or anonymous persona, the theory goes that they will feel ‘safer’ from the repercussions of a controversial post. They can say anything they want, because no one is going to challenge them directly, although they may do so anonymously.

However, we have little direct evidence of people whose career has suffered because they have posted something in an ESM environment that is honest, truthful, but controversial. We do have evidence of people whose careers have benefited from their open and candid participation, but only because they have been willing to take on and follow through with the consequences of their post.

In our experience, when you allow people to post anonymously, they will be significantly more critical as they do not have to take responsibility for what they are saying, nor cope with the consequences. This can lead to some difficult situations where it’s difficult to get to the core of the issue because of the post is anonymous and so it remains an issue.

The evidence thus seems to be against anonymous posting. However, because a rational explanation will not take away the fear, you could still argue that by allowing anonymous posting you will get more people to participate. This reasoning doesn’t diagnose the right problem. It’s not your ESM initiative that isn’t working, it’s your company that’s sick. Re-establishing bad working practices and embed counter productive cultural values in a tool that has at its heart transparency of communication and engagement will not get you anywhere. Your focus should be with fixing the trust in your company first.

And it is with the exercise of fixing the company that we define the only exception to our ‘never anonymous rule’. To ‘lance the boil’ you can run a challenge where you ask everyone to input the things that should be changed in the organisation. In a short period of time people get the chance to surface all the problems they see without having to fear any repercussions. Once that’s done you go into productive future focused mode and collaborate constructively and not anonymously on developing a shared plans to deal with the issues you have identified.