Previous posts:

Year-End Thoughts On Enterprise 2.0 & Social Software (Part 3)

Year-End Thoughts On Enterprise 2.0 & Social Software (Part 2)

Year-End Thoughts On Enterprise 2.0 & Social Software

While a lot of my research agenda and client interactions focused on collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 / social software during 2009, the most sizeable amount of time and energy for me this year was spent on social media, social networking, and social analytics (externally as well as internally).

Social Media

Earlier this year, there was a noticeable spike in my inquiry load concerning social media. What I found interesting was that the nature of the calls were not driven by a marketing context but by concerns regarding risks (e.g., identity, security, compliance, reputation) and technology-related concerns regarding integration points between consumer sites and the enterprise (e.g., Facebook Connect). The trend of social media as a "hot topic" continued throughout 2009 resulting in several speaking engagements (often with Alice Wang, a co-worker of mine in our consulting organization who focuses on identity, risk, and security topics):

• Concordia Workshop: Use Cases Driving Identity in Enterprise 2.0: The Consumerization of IT (Slide Deck And Background Information Here)
• OASIS: Identity Management 2009 Transparent Government: Risks, Rewards and Repercussions (Session Description Here)
• Burton Group Telebriefing: Leveraging Relationships and Managing Identity – Two Sides of the Social Networking Coin (clients only) 
• Enterprise 2.0 conference San Francisco: Social Networking and Identity - A Cautionary Tale

There is a lot of coverage out there on social media - but surprisingly, not so much that drills down from the softer brand/marketing/customer relationship management strategies into the underlying enabling technology. As social media becomes more complex, with a lot more issues related to interoperability, integration, platforms, standards (formal or vendor-specific), etc., IT organizations are slowly becoming more involved with social media strategies as business strategists begin to see social media as being co-owned across multiple business units. As organizations think more broadly about how enterprise systems work in conjunction with consumer services, those issues began to come into my inquiry load.

I expect this trend to continue and trend upwards in 2010. The business implications are becoming more strategic as organizations such as the FINRA, FDA, etc. establish guidelines for how organizations treat social media from a regulatory perspective. For instance, I just finished reading the FINRA report on "communications with the public" that came out in September 2009 (proposed new rules).  More will come in 2010 (FINRA - Compliance Considerations for Social Networking Sites, FDA-Regulated Medical Products Using the Internet and Social Media Tools).

The issues raised from regulatory activities really does take social media beyond the marketing-centric focus popular in the media and by various pundits. Although social media is one of those meme that has become over-hyped to some extent, it still represents a credible term. That said, I did try to pull some thoughts together to clarify my own thinking on social computing and social media, including a visual taxonomy of sorts for social computing and a working definition (somewhat verbose) for social media.

• One Way To Look At Social Computing
• Defining Social Media

And the framework defined back in 2008 when I started to look at social media for formally is still holding up:

• "ACES" Framework For Social Media (from 2008)

Social Networking

Social networking was overall, my hottest topic in 2009. The field research project I undertook in late 2008 resulted in a series of reports published throughout 2009 on the findings. A summary of the project is available for free here (registration required I believe) Field Research Study: Social Networking Within the Enterprise. One of the most interesting trends in this space I believe is the intersect between social networking, identity, and analytics covered in these posts: 

• Relationships and Identity: Two Sides of the Social Networking Coin 
• Part 2 - Relationships and Identity: Two Sides of the Social Networking Coin

The more I study identity (in-and-of-itself, not so much "identity management"), it leads me back to social sciences and how social structures form, how relations are shaped, structural holes in networks, etc. Research available from people like White, Kollock, Granovetter, Wellman, boyd, Smith, Cross, and a few others took up most of my spare reading time. Identity & Control, How Social Formations Emerge (White) was my favorite book for 2009. I also thought very highly of the work done by Henry Jenkins on media literacies and participatory culture.

While social networking has a lot of positive aspects when it comes to community-building, expertise location, and so on, it remains poorly understood. I find people jumping to tools too quickly and become overly enamored with terms like "broker", "connector", "maven", etc. Also, it seems that there is a lot of misunderstanding when it comes to strong ties / weak / latent ties. Still, there was a lot of client interactions on topics related to profiles, social graphs, activity streams, and social networking in general. For some, social networking trends are providing a spark to re-ignite KM efforts. I don't disagree - I've always felt that KM efforts were also too focused on tools and too focused on "capture" versus relationships and interactions. Expertise location remains a loaded term - often it's more about finding someone who has experience (not necessarily *the* expert) or someone with shared activities (past/current) so that a conversation can ensue. That can be tremendously important - but the capability can sometimes be oversold. However, there is a dark side. Social media and social networking intersect with risk management topics in many instances. Those combined risks (summarized briefly below) represented the hottest topic the second half of the year.

Identity

• Assuring profiles (identities) – internal and external
• Populating profiles with trusted enterprise data
• Assessing social identity attribute claims
• Making sure that controls exist to satisfy privacy mandates

Security

• Applying policy-based management (including enforcement)
• Inclusion of monitoring, discovery, and audit mechanisms
• Validating "fine-grained” access controls and role modeling capabilities
• Satisfying compliance, discovery and related data-retention controls
• Ensuring data loss protection

Profiles And Profiling

• Credibility of profile and social claims
• Possible bias against employees by co-workers based on race, diversity, affiliation information made open and transparent via social media tools

Information Security

• Intellectual property, compliance, e-Discovery, monitoring…
• Aggregation / correlation capabilities
• Data management and data integration (profiles, roles, etc)

Privacy

• Adherence to regulatory statutes, level of relationship controls, possible stalking situations (hostile workplace)

Social Network Analysis

• Makes relationships visible that perhaps should not (“connecting the dots”)
• May lead to “befriend / defraud” situations, social engineering

From a technology perspective, this post summarized my thoughts on the shift in focus from destination sites to a more distributed/federated model: Social Networking Platform Evolution: From Destination Site To Networked Services.

Social Analytics

Social analytics (including social network analysis, SNA) remained an emerging topic based on my client interactions. Social analytics encompasses a wide variety of methods (e.g., sentiment analysis, SNA, reputation analysis, etc). Some tools/vendors focus on analyzing communication patterns (e.g., e-mail), while others correlate patterns across communication and information sources. The ability to aggregate and correlate social data is becoming a highly prized competency - not just from an external social media perspective but increasingly, from an internal viewpoint as well. The posts below summarize some of my thinking during 2009 on the topic: 

• Community Equity, SunSpace, FOAF+SSL, & KiWi
• Social Analytics: Another Front For Business Intelligence
• Community Equity Project

There are a lot of players in this space - although the domain is pretty fragmented. Xobni and Gist focus on e-mail. SAP Business Objects Social Network Analyzer is leveraged by Jive. At its heart is a "relationship analysis server". People within Sun are working on Community Equity (an open source project). You can follow Community Equity here on Twitter. Vendors like Catelas, Trampoline Systems, Value Networks, Contact Networks, and eTelemetry have all made efforts to deliver social networking analysis tools (with different approaches and areas of emphasis). SAS is in the space focused on fraud detection. Telligent has also included an analytics capability within its platform. Marc Smith, formerly Microsoft Research and Telligent, now on his own (you can follow him on Twitter) has an interesting tool called NodelXL based on Excel. IBM has an application (Atlas) that provides SNA capabilities for Lotus Connections (it also has consulting services in this area as well). So perhaps 2009 is the year that social analytics took cohesive shape as a defined "space" but the exact market boundaries are yet to be determined given the amount of fragmentation right now. However, I expect social analytics to become much more prominent of a topic during 2010 as organizations seek ROI from social media and social networking / Enterprise 2.0 initiatives and also look to better understand some of the relationship patterns within social networks.

Previous posts:

Year-End Thoughts On Enterprise 2.0 & Social Software (Part 2)

Year-End Thoughts On Enterprise 2.0 & Social Software

There are a few vendor events that stood out in my mind for 2009 (related to Enterprise 2.0 and social software) - in no particular order:

Cisco Stumbles Early But Regains Composure & Sets The Stage 

Back in July, I published a post Cisco: Great Expectations But "Where's The (Collaboration) Beef"? that took Cisco to task regarding how strongly it was "talking about" collaboration but was not really "doing" much about collaboration. However, by the end of the year, things become much more clear as I outlined in several posts:

• Cisco Broadens Foray Into Collaboration Market
• Understanding Cisco's Collaboration Strategy (Part1)
• Understanding Cisco's Collaboration Strategy (Part 2)
• Understanding Cisco's Collaboration Strategy (Part 3)
• Understanding Cisco's Collaboration Strategy (Part 4)

The good news is that Cisco delivered its opening ante and salvo (hosted/SaaS e-mail) as it more proactively enters the collaboration market. In 2010, expectations will continue to rise that Cisco will have a decent critical mass of large enterprise accounts before we go too far with putting them on par with traditional collaboration heavyweights IBM and Microsoft. Cisco needs to develop an Enterprise 2.0 message and also come up with a plan to reach some level of solution/functional parity between its on-premises and SaaS-based collaboration solutions. I would like to see Cisco also have a more holistic message regarding collaboration/Enterprise 2.0 and its social media efforts. Finally - Cisco should strongly step up as a Google Wave platform - it should not let Google's XMPP efforts erode position as thought leaders when it comes to XMPP (via the Jabber deal).

On the UC front - Cisco's decision to anchor presence on XMPP should cause many IT architects to take notice. Right now, presence tags along with IM, telephony, etc. Cisco has transitioned presence into a model that not only supports XMPP and SIP/SIMPLE but has service oriented and REST interfaces. If Cisco can take steps to build a story around presence, location, and micro-blogging/activity streams - that could be a top story for 2010. Right now - Cisco should hammer Microsoft and IBM for their lack of broad XMPP support (gateways are just expected nowadays).

Microsoft Bets Its Social Fortune On SP2010

The SharePoint 2009 conference in Vegas provided the industry with the first look at SP2010 and its new/enhanced social computing capabilities. With an expected May 2010 release (my best guess), Microsoft has delivered enough "good enough" enhancements that will satisfy a large majority of enterprises committed to SharePoint overall. There is little in the upcoming release that is truly innovative or moves SharePoint out in front of other vendors offering capabilities associated with E2.0 but it is largely adequate. It provides IT organizations with enough ammunition to make a strong case against platforms that add too much infrastructure complexity/overlap.

That said, there is nothing in the release that I think will satisfy external needs (e.g., social media, external communities, certain extranet applications). For those organizations that have a strong business case that is best satisfied by a strong solution for internal communities and social networking - then over vendors are still very credible and viable as alternatives. This release is Microsoft's first serious attempt to support online communities. Some related posts where I commented on the good/bad that I heard in Vegas:

• Microsoft Social Computing Overview
• Analyst Breakfast With Microsoft Execs: Good Food, Insight Pending
• MySite - Social Architecture & Planning
• Customize Enterprise Wikis In SP2010

Overall, I don't see SP2010 eliminating the need for strategists in committed "SharePoint shops" to look at Jive, Telligent, NewsGator, or Lotus Connections given the right circumstances. There are situational needs that can still be best satisfied by competing platform and/or best-of-breed vendors. There also remains a lack of parity between on-premises and hosted versions of SharePoint so organizations strongly pursing a SaaS/Cloud strategy might have reason to pause re: SP2010 and social computing. However, in general, vendors will have to integrate with SharePoint 2010 at some level (e.g., ECM).

Oracle Comes And Goes (Again) - Stay Tuned For 2010 (Like You Did For 2009)

In May, Oracle seemed to renew its commitment to collaboration as I noted in this post Oracle Beehive 1.5: Still A Work-In-Progress. So I was optimistic that at the OpenWorld event the industry would see a more cohesive and aggressive collaboration strategy. But the event revealed a trail of missed opportunities as I noted in these posts:

• The Art Of The Possible
• WebCenter Vision and Strategy Session
• Beehive Session Notes

Clearly, Oracle has all the necessary technology assets to become a player in the collaboration market, taking on IBM and Microsoft. However, the go-to-market message remains a bit murky with overlapping sub-brands (WebCenter, Beehive) and messages (collaboration and E2.0). I also believe that Oracle seriously wants to have a stronger footprint in the collaboration market - leaving that space open to other competitors will leave its application business vulnerable to developers building collaborative applications in SharePoint for instance (especially given SP2010 improvements). Oracle remains a contender but really needs to streamline its message, product portfolio and most of all, execute well.

Potpourri

• IBM: IBM delivered Lotus Connections 2.5. Now that Microsoft has made SP2010 public I think the expectation bar will be set pretty high for Lotusphere. IBM squandered (my opinion) the time between MOSS 2007 and SP2010 to do the type of broad and deep integration with SharePoint that would have given it a beach head to compete when SP2010 does come out. As it stands, I think we're seeing a play to the Lotus and WebSphere install base - for the most part - there are examples of Connections in "SharePoint shops" - but we'll see if that type of situation remains by late 2011. Shops that are committed to both SharePoint and WebSphere have an "embarrassment of riches" I suppose when it comes to social computing but the duality also creates a very interesting debate on which way to go over time. Overall - Lotus Connections continued to mature in 2009. It remains a platform that Microsoft will be measured against.
• Jive: Jive Social Business Software (SBS) 4.0: While there were a number of incremental improvements the addition of application modules on top of the platform (e.g., Market Engagement, Bridging) stood out most. For Jive to stay above the infrastructure debate (e.g., Microsoft, IBM), they need to continue focusing on application solutions - especially those that connect external and internal constituencies. The idea of a platform that straddles internal/external environments to connect employees, partners, suppliers, customers gives Jive a unique edge. Although the differentiation is not unique, Telligent could duplicate this story as well.
• Google and Novell: Google gained a tremendous amount of media attention with its Wave announcement. I think the company deserves credit for pulling together a lot of various ideas over the years into a single concept and adding a unique angle to the technology (XMPP). However, it remains a "concept car" for me. What was intriguing was how Wave might be taken in unforeseen directions by the community and other vendors. For instance, talk about the past and future coming together. Novell surprised many people, including myself, with its Pulse solution that works with Google Wave. I believe that's how Google Wave will get into the enterprise - not so much by what Google does directly but how the community around Google Wave and more specifically, how the ecosystem of enterprise software vendors embed Google Wave and slipstream it into the Enterprise.
• Salesforce: Salesforce Chatter: Perhaps the most over-hyped media event in 2009 (my opinion). While interesting, the lack of details left me unimpressed so I suppose that by not jumping into the media-created "mosh pit" touting Chatter, I am in the minority here. I do recognize the trend of adding social context to applications - not unexpected for those studying market trends in this area - but I just prefer news that is real news vs. promises of something delivered sometime in 2010.
• Yammer / Socialcast / Socialtext: Micro-blogging becomes hot - then becomes a feature. Yammer and Socialcast helped make "Enterprise Twitter" a reality but then vendors like Socialtext made it a feature in a platform (as have other vendors). As it stands, micro-blogging (or social messaging as I call it), is a topic that clients are still interested in but not so much as a standalone tool. Socialtext might have been the first to convert the capability into more of a platform play - but now most everyone else is doing the same - and including activity streams as well.
• Open Source: Although Mindtouch does not come up often in my client inquiries - the company has been hard at work blending an open source model with SaaS. Architecturally strong, hopefully this solution will also get more notice in 2010. Liferay got a boost in my mind with all the Cisco news (there is a bit of Liferay DNA within Cisco's collaboration platform). Drupal and Elgg came up more often in my calls this year but nothing overwhelming. I am still hopeful that Apache SocialSite gains more notice in the media and traction in the developer community - Apache Social Site builds on OpenSocial and Shindig but does not seem to get noticed. Apache Abdera (Atom/AtomPub) also seems to have dropped off the news front. Hopefully that project will become more visible as well in 2010. 

In my last post, Year-End Thoughts On Enterprise 2.0 & Social Software, I wanted to provide a background context on some of the areas where Enterprise 2.0 remains ambiguous:

• Enterprise 2.0 is not a market. Enterprise 2.0 is perhaps best thought of as a collection of principals, organizational practices, and adoption methods that enables emergent participation and contributions models.
• Enterprise 2.0 is not a project. By this, I mean that organizations should not undertake Enterprise 2.0 initiatives for the sake of "doing Enterprise 2.0. This was the fundamental mistake that doomed many KM projects in the late nineties. There needs to be some business purpose - that purpose may be very intangible in terms of ROI, but there should be some localization and internalization of what E2.0 means to the enterprise itself.
• Enterprise 2.0 is not that big of a deal. There are too many voices that are taking E2.0 as the hammer to every nail. Enterprise 2.0 does not address all patterns of communication, information sharing, and collaboration.
• Social Software lacks definition. The Wikipedia definition that McAfee defaults to does not help clarify what E2.0 is about when it comes to use of social software. The best definition that I mentioned in the post comes from Clay Shirky. We too easily constrain social software to specific tools which leaves the door open to ambiguity and vendor posturing.
• Emergent Social Software Platforms remain ill-defined as well. ESSPs form the technical foundation for Enterprise 2.0 yet (1) there has been little effort to examine the evolution of social software platforms over time (made more difficult by a lack on consensus on what social software is in the first place), and (2) if there is such a thing as an ESSP then there must be a non-emergent SSP - so what makes a social software platform emergent - what examples of emergent social software platforms have we witnessed in the past and why did they fail or where did they succeed - and does that mean we have legacy ESSPs/SSps and what can we learn from those older generations solutions.

Enterprise 2.0-related activities overall continued to mature in 2009 from what I have seen in the industry and within Burton Group clients. From a tooling perspective, across the board, IT groups seem much more comfortable with social tools and social applications. Increased calls from identity and security teams indirectly tells me that these systems are getting more scruitiny as they are rolled out to broader audiences. From an organizational viewpoint, adoption challenges remain the most significant hurdle. Project teams consistently under-estimate the need for governance and change management efforts. Getting management to buy off on the business case is also difficult given the discretionary nature of such initiatives and the lack of traditional metrics to gauge ROI.

Wikis are highly commonplace when I talk to clients - sharing content is less "scary" (association with publishing perhaps) than some other tools such as blogs. It is not uncommon for organizations to have more than one Wiki provider but consolidation via standardization is underway. While purists will make the case that Wiki vendors (e.g., Atlassian) have distinct technical advantages over larger platform providers that offer less-than-perfect Wikis (e.g., Jive, IBM, Microsoft), it is clear that platform approaches are winning out. Most conversations now are about platforms that best support 

Blogging seems to be something that organizations remain somewhat skittish about (internally) - there are more blogs discussed during my calls than in 2008 but they still appear to be more controlled (versus letting all employees blog openly). This still strikes me as an irrational fear for the most part. There are valid concerns regarding confidentiality, compliance, etc but the fear that employees will use blogs as a soapbox is one that I have yet to come across when policies and governance programs are effectively put in place.

Tagging/bookmarking remains a nascent topic in my calls. Mostly I chalk this up to most enterprise intranets having poor native web content and the lack of bookmarklets in productivity tools which would allow people to tag/bookmark content in applications other than a browser. Most people I talk to see tagging and bookmarking as a feature not a product.

RSS (including Atom) discussions actually did increase this year vs. 2008 although overall, this topic remains below the level it should within the industry and clients. I chalk this up to the classic middleware dilemma. A feed syndication platform is essential from an architectural perspective. There remains too much emphasis on feed readers and not enough focus on the underlying management platform to handle read/unread marks, de-duping, security, storage and network management, analytics, and so on. NewsGator is the only viable enterprise option (for a feed syndication platform) in most cases. Major vendors (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle) are still missing in action when it comes to a complete feed syndication framework.

Social networking is taking off but from the perspective of a social network site (a "corporate Facebook") that acts as a community and social networking destination hub. Social network sites arguably represent the current E2.0 best practice. These platforms often contain a complete manifest of tools often associated with E2.0 (e.g., blogs, wikis, community spaces) along with profiles, social graphs - and more recently - micro-blogging / activity streams. Back in 2008 I defined (and shared on this blog) an architectural reference model (template) for an enterprise version of a social network site (based on the early work of dana boyd and Nicole Ellison who defined something similar for consumer sites). This model remains an accurate depiction:

Overall, the social network site is where most of the E2.0 action is from a vendor perspective. An illustration of how I personally view the competitive landscape is illustrated below. Platform Vendors are those that have established, broad-based environments. Domain-specific Vendors are those that concentrate on a set of related capabilities (sometimes referred to as best-of-breed). Emerging Vendors are those in a specific domain that compliment or augment an existing market model. Transformational Vendors are those that threaten an existing market model (possibly as a new entrant), or trigger disruption (changing market structure), or act as a template that enterprise vendors mimic (they do not enter the market but what they do has a direct influence).

The goal is to get to the center of the bulls-eye by the way. Note: so far, no one is there.

These charts go nicely with an early post and graphic I shared concerning Social Networking Platform Evolution: From Destination Site To Networked Services. While the focus currently is on a destination site, you can feel change in the wind as the focus shifts towards middleware services that enable social information to be contextually composed into other applications and productivity tools.

A partial list of points-to-ponder:

• Enterprise 2.0 is not a "market": A market should have some common definition along with identifiable boundaries that can be measured with metrics (many of which would be related to financial measures). The industry can identify a "portal market", an "enterprise content management market", and even a "collaboration market". However, when it comes to Enterprise 2.0, the "market" remains very ambiguous. If we are thinking in terms of a solution space, perhaps that's a better descriptor - but the word "market" should probably be avoided when it comes to Enterprise 2.0.
  • By the way, to confess, I sometimes inadvertently use this term as well to group a collection of technologies into a solution space - which I think is what most people are actually referring to when the market term is applied. Enterprise 2.0 is more about how social software is used by people vs. what the social tool actually is. You can use tools in ways that are not aligned with the intent of E2.0. 
• Enterprise 2.0 is not a "project": When people talk about "Enterprise 2.0" projects, I often do an internal translation and listen for the real business solution they are delivering. I'm not always expecting concrete requirements that are strongly process-centric (solutions that directly or indirectly impact sales, marketing, customer service, etc). But I am expecting some intent to address a business or organizational pain point/opportunity even if the focus is on something intangible. Many E2.0 projects are focused on people-centric solutions that promise to deliver "soft" benefits related to community, employee engagement, talent management, learning, collaboration, etc).
  • When I sense that the term "Enterprise 2.0" is being used as a desired end-state in-and-of-itself, I cringe. These efforts remind me of the well-intentioned but often misguided KM projects of the late nineties. Organizations should not pursue Enterprise 2.0 for the sake of Enterprise 2.0. 
• Enterprise 2.0 is not THAT big of a deal: The industry has expanded the solution space of Enterprise 2.0 to encompass so many other domains that the term risks becoming irrelevant. Enterprise 2.0 does not address all patterns of communication, information sharing, cooperation, collaboration, community-building, and social networking. And that's ok. Really. Sometimes a meme takes on a life of its own and its success breeds the seeds of its own destruction. The thinking behind E2.0 filled in a critical gap that was long-missing in collaboration and knowledge management circles. The thought-leadership that the E2.0 community has put forth has added tremendous value. However, it (E2.0) remains a piece of the puzzle - it is not the only puzzle piece.
• • For instance, I've read various articles and posts about E2.0 being equated with "contextual collaboration" - sorry, but that term has been around since the late nineties (defined by Matt Cain of Meta Group, now with Gartner Group). Contextual Collaboration referred to the embedding of collaborative services within the context of line-of-business application. It has though taken the industry a long time to actually mature the underlying tooling and infrastructure to enable such solutions on a broad scale.
  • I've also read recent posts that propose that E2.0 become more process-centric. I would point folks back to the original thinking behind the term "contextual collaboration" which was very much a process-centric view of how collaboration can be improved within structured work activities. At one point (late nineties/early 2000's), Microsoft sometimes used the term "directed collaboration" in this regard while IBM talked about contextual collaboration as the "fuzzy front-end" of process-centric work.
  • Process-centric collaboration has been discussed on-and-off for a decade. It is not new - although there are new possibilities of integrating social tools into business applications - still, the definition and intent has been around for some time. What we are hearing now are new lyrics to an old tune - which is great by the way. Let's just add some historical context to the notion of process-centric E2.0.
• Social Software still needs a definition: Unfortunately, we (the industry at-large) use the term but I'm not sure we're all on the same page when it comes to what the terms means. There are a lot of people who equate social software to specific tools, specifically: blogs, wikis, tags, bookmarks, and social network sites (e.g., a "Corporate Facebook" destination site for communities and networking). McAfee does not clearly define the term even though it forms the foundation of his Enterprise 2.0 definition. Defaulting to Wikipedia is a debatable decision I think - the definition in Wikipedia meanders across a lot of territory and does little to put social software into context when it comes to E2.0. E2.0 community should perhaps work within the Wikipedia guidelines to refine the generic social software definition. Better yet, Wikipedia's "enterprise social software" should be scrapped as another option and recast to support the Enterprise 2.0 term.
• • There are some interesting dilemmas created when an industry relies on tools themselves to define what something is rather than a definition that classifies things by attributes, characteristics, and behaviors. I've seen people list tools that have been around for ages like instant messaging as being related to Enterprise 2.0. More recently, anything that is new seems to automatically associated with enabling Enterprise 2.0 solutions. It might be absolutely correct to label tools such as micro-blogging and activity streams as technology enablers for Enterprise 2.0. However, what about augmented reality ... what about video solutions like Cisco's Show-And-Share?
  • Being able to identify what is, or is not, "social software" is important (at least I believe it to be). Perhaps the social software definition I prefer is one from Clay Shirky who has stated simply that: “It's software that supports group interaction.“ Shirky has other interesting points on social software that are worth remembering: “Every time social software improves, it is followed by changes in the way groups work and socialize“ as well as "one consistently surprising aspect of social software is that it is impossible to predict in advance all of the social dynamics it will create".
• Emergent Social Software Platforms (ESSPs): If we look at the evolution of social software and platforms over time, the concept of ESSPs becomes more realistic. Social Software Platforms and ESSPs are not totally new, they have been incrementally improving as infrastructure and networks have matured and externalized interfaces and services:
• • If we adopt a more expansive definition of social software, then when you look at collaboration over the past 20 years, there have been other examples of "social software" - including tools such as email and groupware. One could make an argument that in the late eighties and early nineties, Lotus Notes was the dominant ESSP. However, during that time, ESSPs were severely constrained by platform, infrastructure, and network barriers. 
  • If we look at collaboration in the late eighties and nineties, most information sharing and collaboration strategies focused on improving worker productivity. Later on, things shifted more towards activity-centric improvements (work groups and teams). In general, ESSP solutions were localized and also lacked visibility and transparency in terms of people's participation and contributions). Finally, these older incarnations of ESSPs often did not scale well and were difficult to integrate with other tools. As platforms, infrastructure, and networks matured to where they are today (including more standardized interfaces), we actually have legacy social software platforms.
  • It's important I believe to delineate between social software platforms and "emergent" social software platforms. We should also look at ESSPs over time - that is, to place them into a historical context. If there are ESSPs, then are there simply SSPs? When does a platform transition from being emergent to being "not emergent"? I believe these are important points to understand so we can think of social software and E2.0 as part of an evolutionary trend rather than a recent phenomena. Older ESSPs were fine in their days (focused on personal and team productivity or semi-structured work group activities). However, these legacy ESSPs (perhaps better described now as simply being an SSP) had capabilities within them that are no longer needed. As various platform, infrastructure and networking capabilities became externalized into common services, a new class of social software platforms was made possible - setting the stage for the industry to accept the idea of Enterprise 2.0, etc. 

Impressive results re: use of Twitter, etc. with demonstrable impacts in addition to the relationship and community-building aspects:

There’s no shortage of folks who have been saying that social media is the next big thing. Dell jumped into the social media space more than three years ago. In those days, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about the larger implications of what we were doing. Back then, it was all about connecting and responding to customers and just making social media work. After starting with a blog, we moved on to IdeaStorm, then into Twitter and Facebook. We built a Flickr page (which recently passed 1 million views) and a Dell YouTube channel to facilitate the sharing of picture and video content we produced for Direct2Dell.

.....

Twitter. Today it's not just Dell Outlet having success connecting with customers on Twitter. In total, Dell’s global reach on Twitter has resulted in more than $6.5 million in revenue. In fact our Brazilian and Canadian accounts are growing rapidly too – and it was Canadian tweeters who asked to make sure Dell Canada came online to Twitter. Dell Canada responded because the team heard our customers. In less than a year, @DellnoBrasil has already generated nearly $800,000 in product revenues. Similarly, @DellHomeSalesCA has surpassed $150,000 and is increasing at notable pace.

Twitter numbers and growth in Dell’s presence in other social networks is one thing, but what does this mean to our customers and for Dell’s social media strategy overall moving forward? In my mind, it boils down to a few key strategies:

• Streamline our presence in social media networks, create meaningful content for customers and continue to increase our connections with them in those places
• Focus on building a tighter integration between Dell.com, Support.Dell.com, our Dell Community sites with our presence in social networks
• Continue our focus on scaling support of social media initiatives into the Dell business units

.....

Update: Earlier this morning, Manish Mehta, who wrote the first blog post here at Direct2Dell, and who worked for years on both Dell.com and Support.Dell.com and now leads Dell's Social Media and Community team, recently published a guest blog post on Huffington Post with more insight on this topic. Hope you'll take a look at it and most importantly, continue to tell us how we can improve.

Tags: Social Media, Business Strategy

Direct2Dell - Direct2Dell - DELL COMMUNITY

For additional information see the links to the FDA transcripts below:

Promotion of FDA Regulated Medical Products Using the Internet and Social Medial Tools, Part 15 Public Hearing - November 12, 2009 Transcript

Promotion of FDA Regulated Medical Products Using the Internet and Social Medial Tools, Part 15 Public Hearing - November 13, 2009 Transcript

Original hearing information:

Public Hearing on Promotion of FDA-Regulated Medical Products Using the Internet and Social Media Tools

National Transportation Safety Board Conference Center

429 L’Enfant Plaza, SW., Washington DC, 20594

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will hold a public hearing to provide an opportunity for broad public participation and comment on promotion of FDA-regulated medical products (including prescription drugs for humans and animals, prescription biologics, and medical devices) using the Internet and social media tools.  FDA is seeking participation in the public hearing and written comments from all interested parties, including, but not limited to, consumers, patients, caregivers, health care professionals, patient groups, Internet vendors, advertising agencies, and the regulated industry.  This meeting and written comments are intended to help guide FDA in making policy decisions on the promotion of human and animal prescription drugs and biologics and medical devices using the Internet and social media tools.  FDA is seeking input on a number of specific questions but is interested in any other pertinent information participants in the hearing would like to share.

Public Hearing on Promotion of FDA-Regulated Medical Products Using the Internet and Social Media Tools

Interesting idea, although I'm not sure a symbol alone provides enough assurance for consumers ... never mind the governance aspects around use of the symbol, monitoring, enforcement, etc.

Pharma Marketing Blog: PhRMA Proposes FDA-Approved Use of Universal Safety Symbol for Branded Tweets & SE Ads

In a telephone news briefing, PhRMA proposed an "FDA-Approved Use of Universal Safety Symbol" that could be used in branded/sponsored ad links (eg, Adwords) and Twitter posts (see image below).

PhRMA says in its slide presentation (see here):

• Universal safety symbol (FDA logo or other FDA-approved symbol) and universal statement would indicate that the linked page contains FDA-regulated risk information (e.g., official Prescribing Information, patient Medication Guide)
• Throughout the Web, a universal symbol would help healthcare professionals and consumers identify official, FDA-regulated medical product Web sites. Prominence of graphic could drive clicks to comprehensive information
• Include established name and true abbreviated indication, if Internet media do not allow for full information
• Include affirmative statement about risks, even if abbreviated
• Universal symbol could be used on search engines, blogs, microblogs, video
• FDA would set conditions on use of the safety symbol by manufacturers

“Leveraging the FDA’s logo – or a universal FDA-approved graphic symbol – in search results and throughout the Web would inform patients, at a glance, that they are visiting a legitimate site that contains comprehensive FDA-regulated benefit and risk information. Such a graphic symbol could be combined with a universal warning statement to provide an indication of risk when there is little space (e.g., a search result or tweet)," said PhRMA (see "PhRMA Statement About Accessing Online Health Information").

Reporters had several questions about the proposal, including what kind of resources FDA would need to review material before granting use of the symbol and monitoring thereafter. Jeff Francer, Assistant General Counsel at PhRMA, mentioned user fees that PhRMA proposed for FDA review of promotions. "Unfortunately," said Francer, "congress did not appropriate the money in order for that user fee to go into effect. PhRMA will continue to support a strongly-funded FDA even if it means that user fees from our companies will have to support some of these activities."

Pharma Marketing Blog: PhRMA Proposes FDA-Approved Use of Universal Safety Symbol for Branded Tweets & SE Ads

Relevant for those involved in social media / social networking / Web 2.0 related strategies falling under FINRA guidelines:

March 10, 2009

Electronic Communications: Social Networking Web Sites
Listen Now/Download | 6 min. 11 sec. 

This podcast, the last in a three-part series on supervising electronic communications, discusses how registered representatives' use of social networking Web sites to communicate firm business relates to FINRA's rules regarding communications with the public.

February 23, 2009

Electronic Communications: Blogs, Bulletin Boards and Chat Rooms
Listen Now/Download | 6 min. 2 sec. 

This podcast, the second of three on supervising electronic communications, discusses the application of FINRA's communication with the public rules for blogs, bulletin boards and chat rooms.

February 9, 2009

Electronic Communications: Web Sites
Listen Now/Download | 7 min. 43 sec. 

This podcast, the first of three on electronic communications, offers suggestions for supervising employee use of Web sites and explains how FINRA's rules relate to this activity.

FINRA - Podcasts

Sign of the times...

The Hartford Enhances Cyber Liability Policy To Address Emerging Online Reputation And Privacy Exposures

The Hartford CyberChoice 2.09sm expands protection for Web 2.0 and social media liability; offers enhanced coverage for data privacy, notification and credit monitoring expenses; introduces defined term for "rogue employee"

HARTFORD, Conn., Nov 10, 2009 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- User-generated content is taking many forms on today's Internet. Whether consumers are posting product reviews to a company's Web site, providing personally identifiable information to receive a special offer, or uploading photos to a social networking site, they're sharing more information about themselves online, which creates both opportunities and liabilities for companies with access to this content. To help midsize and larger businesses address these emerging areas of risk, The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc. has enhanced its flagship cyber liability policy.

"We're seeing widespread adoption of social media technologies among businesses in virtually every industry. At the same time, data is becoming increasingly regulated, which is creating new exposures, particularly in the areas of data privacy and reputational risk," said Drew Bartkiewicz, vice president of cyber and new media risk at The Hartford.

With CyberChoice 2.09, The Hartford now offers broader coverage for data privacy breaches and social media liability exposures, such as online defamation, advertising, libel and slander, by employees or casual users of a company's Web site. CyberChoice 2.09 also defines the term "rogue employee" and provides coverage for such employee's misuse of technology.

"Whether an employee's act is intentional or negligent, the viral nature of the Internet means that errors leading to data breaches, defamation of a competitor or the improper use of intellectual property can quickly become very costly to repair," said Bartkiewicz.

CyberChoice 2.09 offers businesses the ability to choose coverage based on their needs. Coverage options include:

• Data Privacy - with a broader definition that offers protection for data breaches by the company or third parties - such as vendors doing work on behalf of the company - involving the loss of personally identifiable information (PPI) or company confidential information. Coverage is also available for breach of data privacy laws involving citizens of European Union countries. Both notification and credit monitoring expenses are available in a single insuring agreement to give businesses greater flexibility in how they respond to data breaches.
• E-media and Internet Liability -which addresses online defamation, advertising, libel and slander-related exposures as well as emerging Web 2.0 liabilities created by casual users of a company's Web site.
• Network Security - for failure of security measures to prevent a denial of service, unauthorized access, theft of electronic data, inadvertent transmission of a virus or other malicious code.
• Infringement of Intellectual Property (IP) Rights - for copyright or trademark liability as it relates to online text, videos, images, blogs and advertising.
• Professional Services - for ancillary errors and omissions, negligent acts performed for others for a fee.
• Network Business Interruption -which replaces loss of income due to a covered network outage or loss.
• Cyber Investigation Expense -forunbudgeted extra expense incurred to investigate a data privacy or network security wrongful act.
• Cyber Extortion - forexpenses incurred in the event of an extortion threat to cause a data privacy or network security wrongful act.

The Hartford: The Hartford : Investor Relations : The Hartford Enhances Cyber Liability Policy To Address Emerging Online Reputation And Privacy Exposures

FYI - for registration details (including fees), follow the link below.

Compliance Considerations for Social Networking Sites

Live Program
March 17, 2010
1:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m., Eastern Time / 10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m., Pacific Time

This webinar covers compliance and regulatory considerations when using social networking sites to communicate firm business. With the advent of Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter, business use of social networking sites has become popular and can present supervision challenges for firms. Panelists from FINRA discuss applicable FINRA rules for communications with the public and offer practical guidance on how to monitor and supervise social networking sites. This webinar lasts approximately 60 minutes. Audience members can participate in the live, real-time version or listen to the on-demand version at a later date. Questions can be submitted in advance or during the live program. This webinar was originally scheduled for December 16, 2009.

FINRA - Compliance Considerations for Social Networking Sites

I've used this chart publicly since the E2.0 June 2009 event when I ran a workshop on enterprise social networking, but the trend is true in general (from destination site, to networked services) as platforms create ecosystems (re: recent news on Salesforce, LinkedIn, etc). The roots of this perhaps go back to an old post by Marc Andreessen in 2007 on platforms and ecosystems. My voice over on this slide was that we would not see comprehensive social networking platforms until 2012. I could be too conservative on the timeline (maybe not, lets see how robust and mature these solutions are when they finally appear and gain critical mass).

However, this trend from destination site to networked services around a platform-centric model does not belong to the brilliance of any single vendor, it's inevitable if vendors want to survive. The remaining challenge (well, one of a few) - interoperability (standards at various levels, especially in the social data / graph area). You can have lock in very easy (per points often made by Chris Messina, David Recordon, Joseph Smarr) when it comes to accrual of data, owning of the namespace, and use of non-standard formats should be as much of a concern externally on the public social web as internally within the enterprise.

Evolution of enterprise social networking:

LinkedIn expands platform in attempt to one-up Facebook Connect | VentureBeat

 LinkedIn aims to be an even more central part of your professional identity, by expanding its platform today with the site developer.linkedin.com.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based professional networking site already offers a platform for third-party developers, allowing them to build widgets and apps that run in LinkedIn itself. What it’s announcing today is another piece of that platform, one that’s arguably more exciting — the site is allowing developers to access your LinkedIn data from their own external business applications. The idea is that LinkedIn could become your professional identity across applications, in the same way Facebook wants Facebook Connect to be your social identity across the web.

“We’re very opinionated,” said Adam Nash, vice president of search and platform products. “We believe that any business application that someone builds in 2010 that doesn’t integrate with us is going to be an anachronism.”

You can get some sense of what LinkedIn has in mind with already-announced integrations like its Social Connector in Microsoft’s email and contacts program Outlook. LinkedIn is adding new partners today, including Twitter application TweetDeck, simple blogging startup Posterous, and BT-owned voice-over-Internet company Ribbit. Other application-makers can now register at the developer site.

LinkedIn expands platform in attempt to one-up Facebook Connect | VentureBeat

LinkedIn Development Platform Comes to Life

LinkedIn Nov. 23 followed through on its plans to launch a development platform, opening Developer.linkedin.com to let softwareprogrammers put LinkedIn's profile content into their business applications and Web sites. Microsoft is using LinkedIn to add profile information to Microsoft Office 2010 e-mail users with the Outlook Social Connector. Twitter application TweetDeck will support the LinkedIn platform in its next version, allowing TweetDeck users to access their LinkedIn network updates from within TweetDeck, which will add a LinkedIn column.

LinkedIn Development Platform Comes to Life

This morning, professional social network LinkedIn announced that it is opening up its API for developers to build applications around the platform. While LinkedIn has partnered with Twitter, Microsoft, IBM, Research In Motion and others, this will be the first time startups can tap into the platform.

While LinkedIn is releasing 11 different APIs, they fall into three distinct categories. First, developers will be able to let users easily access their information, profiles, connections and messages via oAuth login. The second functionality is to give users the ability to make actionable decisions about information, but letting them message their LinkedIn contacts, post updates, accept contacts and more. And the third piece of the puzzle is search. So developers will now be able to embed LinkedIn search in other applications.

Five Ways Startups Are Tapping Into LinkedIn's API - washingtonpost.com

Hopefully, this would be implemented in a manner that provides Facebook members to set controls that determine the level of sharing of relationship connections, including sharing of one's social graph externally not just to FB apps. It's not just Facebook apps I would be concerned about but what might be made available via Facebook Connect. I also wonder who being classified as a "data controller" will influence how Facebook would implement this type of capability. Interesting, I also wonder if any meta data would be shared (e.g., name of the list on which someone is associated with - how many different lists is someone one, etc).

Today, during the Filtering the Stream roundtable at our RealTime CrunchUp, Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur asked why Facebook isn’t giving third parties access to their Friend Lists. Obviously, that’s a good question now that Twitter has starting giving third parties access to its Lists feature via an API. Normally, you’d expect a canned response along the lines of “we may do that in the future” or “we’re thinking about it,” but Facebook’s VP of Platform Bret Taylor was much more candid.

Taylor said that Le Meur’s request seemed “reasonable” and continued “we should do that.” “We’re not working on that. But we should be,” he continued. So there you go, done deal. Great. It would seem that soon, third parties should have access to the list filters that Facebook uses.

Facebook Agrees To Set Friend Lists Free. Mashups With Twitter Lists Should Follow.

Interesting ...

openid4.me - an OpenID Server 4 FOAF secured by FOAF+SSL

openid4.me is an OpenID server which allows you to use your WebID to log in to any website that accepts OpenID.

Requirements

To use this server you need

• a WebID
• and a FOAF+SSL client certificate securing your WebID

If you dont have a FOAF+SSL secured WebID you can get one at FOAF.me

openid4.me - OpenID Server

Nice to see progress - and integration with Liferay as well - Liferay continues to be an interesting open source project given it's recent direction to build out social capabilities.

Communtiy Equity milestone 1.2 released

I am very happy to announce the availability of the milestone 1.2 of the Community Equity open source project.

Milestone 1.2 release description

• activitystrea.ms support - read and process activitystrea.ms enabled sites and feeds
  • Facebook connect - integrate Facebook status updates
  • status.net connect - integrate status.net software (this is based on an activitystrea.ms extension for status.net from Olof Tjerngren.
  • Cliqset.com connect - integrate with cliqset activitystrea.ms feed

Reiser 2.0 : Weblog