Supernova 2007: because technology is everyone's business

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Perspective: Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems

Excerpts and paraphrasing from a conversation with Jonathan Schwartz, CEO, Sun Microsystems.

Q: As part of the top to bottom review of Sun, what have you learned about what’s going on in the tech world.

A: There are two things that put this in context. IT is moving to a phase where there is divergence – Oracle or SAP? Looking at Sun’s ERP implementation, the whole company will run on one infrastructure. Then there is connectivity. Everyone is trying to connect to their communities of interest. They want to talk to us about connecting to the marketplace. We have to choose which products to build, which markets to focus on. As companies look to IT, they divide into two segments: Those who view it as a cost center are a trivial small portion. Or those that look at IT and tech as a means to drive value.

Q: When everything is getting cheaper, how do you compete?
A: Commodity companies like Exxon and Google, will only the most valuable companies in the world, only if they can leverage R&D. If your only strategy is to lower price to get customers, you’ll have a grim future. But if R&D lets you differentiate, there is plenty of opportunity out there. The demand for what we build will never diminish.

Q: How do you prioritize the R&D
A: We focus on energy efficiency because energy is a huge cost. We focus on security and provisioning, because the way we deployed the internet today is inefficient and complex. We’ll be less focused on building consumer devices and services, we’ll be focused on driving standards that connect us to the market and monetize that.

Q: Web 2.0 to describe what’s going today. Does that resonate?
A: The web is no longer real. Rather than having a hub, the spokes are now connected to each other. All client devices within the next 3-5 years will be functionally identical. The apps will run identically across all your devices. Innovation won’t slow down, but a uniform infrastructure will create the broadest market.

Q: Do you have to be open in way IT vendors haven’t traditionally been?
A: When we developed Java, we used the Java community process to drive development. We put consumer reviews of our products on our web site, even if they trash us. We’re going to focus on allowing our customers to drive development.

Q: Some say every CEO should blog. You do. But not a lot of others.
A: Five years ago there were CEOs who didn’t do email. The job of any leader is to communicate the vision of the company, your passion for the company. Whether it’s a blog or a weekly column. Blogs are very efficient. I want to stay connected to a diffuse marketplace. We have two constituents: the CIO, who is making fewer decisions. And the developers. They hang out on the web, they look at what you have to say. That’s the constituency that can transform Sun’s business.

Q: Robert Scoble said Bill Gates decided not to blog, so people would listen to Microsoft employee bloggers instead.
A: I disagree. I don’t have the best read blog at Sun. I don’t have a monopoly on communicating on behalf of Sun. The guy who blogs about Java has readers who don’t want to listen to me.

Q: What competitors are you most concerned about?
A: We have such incredible demand, I’m not worried about the competition. I’m focused on how to communicate the message to the market. When you look at the scale of where people are going on the internet and how they spend their time, it’s incredibly complex (e.g., the amount of time adults spend on immersive games). Adwords on Google aren’t going to cut it. You have to worry about where to reach your constituents.

Q: What is the potential of massively multiplayer games.
A: When you have an industry that size, that drives a ton of infrastructure. That will drive innovation to deliver. It will be great for Sun’s market.

Q: There seems to be no market research any more. Why is there no description of the workloads that are growing faster than Moore’s Law?
A: Industry analysts can no longer rely upon their brand as a conduit for data. There are people doing the research, but they’re not necessarily the name research houses.

Q: The operating system platform has changed, based on how people use their computers. Where is that going to evolve?
A: You have operating systems for your watch, camera, phone, computer. We put billions of dollars in R&D into building operating systems for our servers. There has been a tremendous amount of change in the network side. That’s separate from the devices, which will converge. How many different OS do you need? You can get content on any device you use. We’re not done with R&D based on how people will use networks.

Q: If you were starting a company now, what would you do?
A: Barriers to entry in tech are high. The barrier to start a business in consumer network services is nothing. Look at ring tone sales. That’s pure profit, based on a digital snippet. If I started a company tomorrow, I’d figure what services consumers are going to most.

Q: What metrics do you use to cut through the hype and identify the real trends?
A: The era of custom hardware is on its way out. When you look at how fast our general purpose servers have become, that simplifies what we need to build. Now we have storage devices that can run apps, because they run on Solaris. We can rebuild out of Sun components. As we prioritize what we do, we’ll move after large scale, horizontally scalable workloads that are growing faster than Moore’s Law. On the consumer side, we’ll focus on ensuring any device that touches the network can interact with the network. 

Perspective: Eric Shepcaro, AT&T

Excerpts and paraphrasing from a conversation with Eric Shepcaro, VP, Business Development, AT&T

Q: How do you overcome the legacy of being slow moving?
A: The industry has been through dramatic change, with the entrance of new competitors, consolidation, emergence of new technologies. We talked to our customers to find out what they wanted. The network was going to be the enabler of all the services. Customers are going global. We had to make choices. We’re transforming the network into a software based network, so we can launch new services more quickly. We also have an ecosystem of partners to manage niche services to meet consumer business requirements.

Q: Where’s the line between your services and what others do on the network?
A: As we built out the capabilities with a service-oriented architecture, it’s a more open architecture. It’s about the user experience and interface. We work with others who can deliver core components. When you talk about companies like Skype and Vonage, customers want more than just voice service. We can combine services and compete effectively. Security is also a strength for AT&T. We’ve built an anomaly detection capability to detect threats.

Q: Is the price of voice connectivity going to zero?
A: We’ve seen the price come down. But it’s only one application on the network. It’s the whole interactive communication experience.

Q: Network neutrality is controversial. Should you choose what people can do on the network?
A: The term and concept is misunderstand. We’re not going to block anyone from getting access to content across the web. What we’ve said is that we’ve invested in the network. We provide managed services to businesses for premium, quality delivery. In the consumer world, it’s the same as offering premium delivery. If a content provider wants to provide premium delivery over our network, we talk to them about offering a managed IP environment.

Q: Why should we trust AT&T?
A: we’re looking to deliver quality services to end user customers. It’s a competitive landscape. We don’t need a more restrictive government environment.

Q: What had to change to enable innovation and be competitive?
A: We picked key focus areas, like wireless technology. We asked what it would take to meet our customers requirements. Developing new services as part of business development, we had to get services out more quickly.

Q: This is a regulated industry, and regulations change. How do you innovate within that context?
A: Regulation doesn’t prohibit us from innovating. But it affects how we share information, and what we can collaborate and communicate on.

Q: What kind of company do you want to be?
A: We aspire to be a networking and entertainment company. 

Perspective: Linda Sanford, IBM

Linda Sanford, Sr. VP, IBM, answers the question: How does IBM drive innovation internally? (Text is not verbatim.)

My responsibility it to help transform ourselves, which is a continuous process. How do you take a 330,000 person organization and make it relevant, a source of ongoing innovation, internally and across our partner networks.

Recently we conducted a CEO study among clients around the world to get what they thought was most important in the 21st century market. No. 1 was innovation, which would drive their sustainable profitability.

We also undertook a Global Innovation Outlook sessions, bringing people together across disciplines to talk about how to apply innovation to specific topics. One set of observations on the future of the enterprise.

From our own perspective, we have a broader definition of innovation. It’s not just inventing new products and services that we need. It’s the sum of invention and insight – the application of innovation to solving business problems. It’s about new business models, new processes, new cultures and behaviors, and it has social responsibility implications.

There are 6 degrees of innovation:

6. It’s about the endeavor, not the brand.
Today, graduates look at not the job, but the project, who they’ll work with, how much responsibility they’ll have. You have to bring the right set of skills, passion and expertise together to enable people to innovate. Teams form to complete a project, then disperse. Allow people to self select what they work on, solve the problem, then disband.

5. It’s how you play the game.
The skills you get in education programs aren’t hitting the mark for what we need in business. You have to make decisions on dispersed information, collaborate with people you never meet. The leader of the 21st century will come out of the gaming generation. They bring a set of skills that you master when you play the game. How do you bring that into the workforce? You need to let people build skill sets and educate themselves in the workplace.

4. Talking about my reputation.
In a free agent world, you need to measure the value of an individual and decide if they will bring value to the enterprise. When you let the community evaluate the reputation of the individual, that will impact employer-employee relationship. How we assess experience and skills is changing.

3. From not invented here to invented here not.
We asked CEOs what would be the major sources of innovation. They said they saw more innovation coming from outside their company than from within. It’s important for them to open their borders. Those businesses that collaborate more are more profitable from a financial performance perspective. Innovation outside the four walls can lead to more profitable success. Leaders who embrace that will most successful.

2. Balance is beautiful.
In a collaborative world, we need to rethink old 20th century paradigms. Intellectual property policies protecting the rights of the creator but still allowing open collaboration. Part of what we’ve done is pledge patents to a patents commons, and open patents around web documents and services in healthcare and education. Some IP needs to be protected in a traditional way. Others needs to be non-traditional, but give the opportunity to build a proprietary advantage on too of it.

1. Collaborating to change the world.
Web 2.0 provides us with the computing power to apply to some of the world’s problems. We’ve been participating in the World Community Grid, which is linked to different devices. When your PC is idle, you can give that idle time to solving these big problems – e.g., AIDs, the human genome, predicting natural disasters.

Technology is an enabler. But it takes personal leadership to deal with issues like good vs. bad. It takes human imagination, and human touch, to ensure that we deliver innovation that matters. 

Power to the People

Excerpts and paraphrases from the Power to the People panel:

Moderator: Kevin Werbach, Supernova
Craig Newmark, Craigslist
Saul Klein, Skype
Tina Sharkey, AOL
Mena Trott, Six Apart
Gil Penchina, Wikia

Q: These companies rely upon user involvement for their success. How do you facilitate users gaining value to participate?

AOL: We provide the context, users provide the conversations. Now they can create the applications as well. We want users to help build our service, now that we’ve opened it to the open web.

Six: Most people at the company came in because they blog. The best ways to develop our product is by using it. We’ve learned more by using it daily than we did during development.

Skype: The US is an important market, but it’s growing fastest in Europe and Asia. We focus on enabling people to have conversations. Voice is central to a connected conversation in a way that IM isn’t. We put voice at the center, and allow people to build out with video and SMS. Now people are hosting skypecasts.

Wikia: We provide a place to create content that isn’t educational reference material. These are sections of content that aren’t appropriate for wikipedia. We’ve taking trusting users to the next level, with software that is written by users, content written by users, and the home page controlled by users. They control the site, as well as what’s on there.

Craigslist: I don’t know what users are, but I do know what people are. We need to engage the people that we serve, even if they drive us crazy.

Q: Is the community an undifferentiated mass that pulls in different directions?

Six: We disagree with the idea that most communities scale into large groups. Large groups have a purpose for some things. But most people function in smaller groups. You can have conversations of 6 –10.

AOL: On our auditorium chats, people come to hear one person. The community was built in your row. People may want to be members of many small communities. Natural leaders emerge. Communities moderate themselves. Social media is a great model to facilitate other people’s experiences. Let the community shut down the obnoxious ones. P

Q: What is the value in scale? MySpace, etc., built on scale.

AOL: The people who use IM have clusters of buddies, but not more than 100.

Wikia: We think larger projects inspire more people. You can rant by email or blog, but our goal is to bring people together around large, inspirational topics. We don’t let people fork off and start their own splinter groups. Things work better when people collaborate.

Six: It’s about observers vs. participants. Most people want to observe and not participate. It’s the auditorium, vs. the living room. It depends on your goals for the community.

Q: When skype came along as an internet based service, it was free and that was an advantage. But one thing that drives adoption is that it works a lot like IM.

Skype: By bringing voice to the Internet environment and letting people talk by voice, text, IM, video, skypecast, we have a presence available on people’s web sites, so they can choose to engage or not.

AOL: In terms of presence, one thing we deal with is the proliferation of screen names. People want to interact with their communities using different personas.

Q: Is the notion that the services are open and user driven a myth? It works because there is hierarchy and structure in place.

Wikia: It’s true that we’re a participatory democracy. We align around a particular topic. The bulk of the work is done by a small group of people. That group is elected by the community. We select those who we think are best able to write about the topics. Each page has a hierarchy to help filter some of the passion and the inaccuracies. Debates happen. Administrators try to resolve the debates. Then if they’re at an impasse, they pass the buck up. The more we participate, the better the democracy. If anyone can add or remove pages, you can be vulnerable to a few bad people. But if there are enough good people, they find the bad ones. Big cities have more crime because they’re complicated. We try to create a small city feel.

Six: We’ve been doing this for five years, and we see patterns. People feel like small groups have less noise and more comfort. I don’t want a debate on my blog. That adds unwanted stress. You forget about the good people an start to hate the noise.

AOL: eBay was smart in letting people sell online and be responsible for shipping. The seller reputation is their badge of honor. As the first large scale social media platform, their reputation management was critical. People want to bring the eBay seller profile with them to other platforms. Reputation management will be critical in all these communities.

Q: Are you willing to consider that most people are not basically good? There’s spam, phishing, pornography, sex trade. There’s a lot of bad behavior on the web. What happens to our business when real life happens?

Wikia: eBay proved that most people are good. We don’t trust everyone absolutely. A few well organized bad guys can be trouble. But I’ve been doing this for nearly 10 years, and I believe people are good.

Craigslist: The technology lets a few people do a lot of damage. We find them and stop them. Even in our dodgier categories, I won’t take a stand on whether or not the behavior is bad.

AOL: Serving our communities means making sure the lights are on and someone is watching. We have community managers and community action teams. We shut people down all the time. The numbers are decreasing. Users shut each other down. With no audience, they can’t thrive. We learn to serve the good people and give them tools to shut down the bad ones.

Six: I can see the blog post: Panel of naïve fools think social media users are good. There are interactions that you want to be public, and those that you want to be private. That’s why we let users restrict who can see their blogs.

Q: Startups spend time listening to their community of users to aid product development. Should we participate in the conversations or just listen from the sidelines?

Skype: We have forums, blogs, beta testers. We try to create a participatory environment around skype. We get direct feedback. If you can contribute to the conversation in a meaningful way, then we encourage people in skype to do that. If it would be helpful to the customer and the conversation, participate.

Q: As your communities scale up, won’t your focus have to change to find new ways of filtering with whom you interact. You need collaborative filtering of both content and the communities themselves.

AOL: We think about social media as being like people searching. We use it as a way to give context to the conversation. When you surf in profiles, you might search blog content, photos, shared interests. That way, you discover new blogs to read, new music to listen to, etc. It’s about the collections that people curate, allowing their friends to discover new things.

Skype: Because we’re built around the notion of the contact list, that becomes a tool for discovery. There’s a hug opportunity for people to have large networks predicated on small groups and contact lists.

Q: As platform providers for your communities, the service delivery infrastructure is critical. What are you looking for in functionality from the incumbents?

Craigslist: We’re looking for a level playing field – Net Neutrality. We also need a break from the ISP when we’re going after bad guys.

Skype: We’re interested in how broadband gets adopted, whether that’s wifi, 3g, fixed line, etc. With the widespread adoption of broadband, the next generation of infrastructure will need to work with devices of all kinds.

AOL: We want users to be able to connect wherever and whenever they want to. So the infrastructure providers need to scale the platform.

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

The Marketers Dilemma: The Rise of Social Multimedia

Moderators Pete Blackshaw and Max Kalehoff of Nielsen Buzzmetrics tell us the fastest growing media are those that consumers create themselves. Consumer-generated media (CGM, i.e., generated through message forums, blogs, social networks, rating systems, et al) create impressions that get in front of other consumers and have an impact. There is an ROI impact of consumers who go online as evangelists or attackers.

When you ask people what the best source of info about products and services, 92% say word of mouth. Now, consumer expression of loving/hating products is moving into the rich media zone.

The panelists addressed some key questions based on their experience in this space:

P&G
Stan Joosten of P&G says that from a business perspective, the company is doing better than ever. They’re known for marketing, but also for understanding consumers. What are consumers doing with new media? There’s no strategy to move away from TV to the Internet. The strategy is to move with the consumers to whatever media they’re using.

Revver
Oliver Luckett of Revver says Revver solves the problem of how video creators can meet advertisers in a sponsorships marketplace. Revver is about people uploading content they generated and looking for advertisers to sponsor it. Sponsors get an unobtrusive ad at the end of the video. About 4% of consumers click on those ads. If you have a product, you get 6-20% clickthrough. Video content aggregators can make money as affiliates for redistributing content. That embraces the viral nature of this medium.

GM
Michael Wiley of GM says vehicles are heavily researched on the Internet. Most auto companies don’t participate in the conversation. GM launched a blog. They don’t want to seek cheap publicity with a gimmick. They taking a holistic view of the space, looking for people who are negative about GM and trying to change their perceptions of the company through conversations.

GM Planworks
Curt Hecht of GM Planworks says GM can win in the digital space with an approach that takes advantage of the buyers who go online to do research. A 30-second spot won’t be the way we get people to the dealership for a test drive. This year, Chevy drove traffic toward a neutral voice site to have an impact. Google Pontiac, and the search points to enthusiast sites. People can hear the voice of the brand believers.

Yahoo!
Brian Zeug says he moved from selling consumer packaged goods (CPG) to the online space to be part of the explosion on CGM. People want to express themselves. The question is, can you increase your brand equity/social standing by becoming a part of that.

Conversation with participants explored the challenges in engaging customers, dispelling misperceptions, and recruiting brand evangelists in the campaign to promote your products and services.

GM: The predominant advertising medium, TV, gives people very little info. A grassroots medium can give an in-depth look at the brand. If you put out a brief and say you’re looking for an ad for product x, then have a contest for impassioned users, they’ll create the ad for you.

Revver: We did this with Firefox, with a user-created 30-second video. See firefoxflicks.com. Agencies will be the most impacted by this, because the creativity is now coming from the consumers.

P&G: It doesn’t’ have to be an either or proposition. Agencies are sometimes pigeonholed in one medium that they’ve mastered, but they need to move toward a media-neutral reputation. Creative starts with an idea, what you want to talk about with consumers, then you execute through the media that will have the most impact (e.g., P&G put out a min-brief on MSN.con for an Old Spice video; the winner gets a film training course).

GM: Instead of serving up GM-produced ads online, we can take consumer-generated content and use the existing testimonial as the advertising vehicle. These are honest testimonials.

P&G: GM products are high-dollar. People do their homework. P&Gs products are a different order of involvement. People don’t go to charmin.com. To extend the brand equity, we have to extend the communication platform. For example, Home Made Simple is a multibrand website that has content about caring for the home. We’re creating an emotional connection with our customers. There’s now a TV program spin-off on The Learning Channel. The internet can become part of the product – facilitating discussions, getting advice.

Yahoo!: The global color vote for m&m drove $30 million in incremental sales and activated a consumer group. Through partnership with MSN, it drove people online through offline communication. You create discovery around a product, give the product to consumers, then capture their thoughts about it. It was a simple strategy. They didn’t have the power of bloggers, but there was a swell of activity around major media outlets. Yahoo is still wrestling with how to aggregate people around communities (e.g., yahoo360, yahoo answers, yahoo groups).

Revver: Channelization on the Internet means media are consumed on user terms. At , the big media companies are using it as a distribution channel. You embrace users wherever they are.

GM: There are misperceptions about the company. It’s treated as a monolith that isn’t made up of people. We wanted to begin to show personality and begin to engage people, whether they liked us or not. Even if we don’t like their comments, we’re putting ourselves out there. If you’re going to participate in this space, you need to be open to criticism and be willing to engage in the conversation. … There re very few people in the company who are working on this. Businesses like GM need to fundamentally change they way the operate and engage customers. The every opinion counts mentality is new. There are engrained cultures around advertising and communications, and the process of changing that is slow. 

Engaged Markets: Conversations

Moderator Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency reminds us that The Cluetrain Manifesto defined markets as conversations.

Christopher Carfi of Cerado, the social customer manifesto, suggests that we think about customer relationships as groups of conversations linked over time. What can we do to engage customers and facilitate these conversations?

Francois Gossieaux of Corante declares that the old rules of product development and marketing have dissolved. As we rebuild new, we need to co-create our products/services with customers, partners and competitors. The challenge is to launch new products when attention is scarce in the value chain.

Brett Hurt of Bazaarvoice (nod to cluetrain manifesto authors for the name) says that by tapping into customer relationships, we can learn what products to sell and how to improve them.

Robert Scoble, formerly of Microsoft and now with Podtech.net (and author of the Scobleizer blog, among others) says that old school PR was about pushing messages out. New school PR demonstrates listening skills and learning from customers. Word of mouth networks are hyper-efficient.

Here’s the question at hand: If people are empowered to act, would they? Given these tools, they can use their individual power to make that choice. Blogging allows us to build evangelistic behavior in customers.

The workshop broke out into groups to brainstorm solutions to four marketing challenge scenarios. Here’s what they came up with:

Project No. 1: An established company with heavy market penetration has a public image you need to change. How?

Companies don’t have a choice when it comes to listening to the consumer, whether what they have to say is positive or negative. The key is the follow-up. You can understand what people are saying about you and react. Or you can be proactive, and tap into the online community to create trust. You have to be authentic in your interactions with customers. Don’t ignore the bad stuff. Mine the blogs and social networks for the conversation threads. Don’t deny, their concern. Respond to them.

Project No. 2: How do you build a community from scratch when you are not an established company and are in a crowded space?

If your boss says, build a community. Where do you start?

1. Define who you are [your brand/UVP]
2. Define who your community is [the audience/your customers]
3. Define what they care about [the conversation threads]

If you’re a startup up, the three things you can do to start a new community are:

1. Know your passion
2. Think about how people will find you (e.g., Google keywords)
3. Make people stars in your community by rewarding them for participation.

The challenges are: Narrowing your focus to a unifying idea/theme, changing course when the community takes the conversation in unexpected directions, rising to the level of competition in your area of passion, involving experts who may not be the best communicators

Project No. 3: You’re a startup with a B2B product you haven’t launched. You have no marketing budget. How to you reach the market?

Marketing is marketing, whether it’s for B2B or B2C. You have to do the same things, only better, by using new tools and channels. Target niche delivery systems, just like you’d target big advertising. Create a web persona. Cross sell customers in existing markets. Use super connectors to build buzz that distributes to the broader news channels.

Know your customers and who monitors the info for them. Hit the influencers, who will filter it up to the buyers. Build your expertise in the industry, then pitch your product as a solution. Organize your marketing so that everyone in the company is a marketer. Affiliate yourself with other players who will add value to what you’re doing.

Project No. 4: You’re a startup in a market dominated by a giant. What can you do?

Engage with early adopters. Understand that the conversations have to happen at a human scale, not with 18 million people. Push it out to the masses. Be authentic. Be on your customers’ side. Innovate. Create a loyal employee base.

Follow the old school rules: Create unique customer value and compete on the product innovation. Interact with the customer, listen and build relationships. Fight for distribution by forming alliances.

And use the new school rules: Use digital tools to enable interaction. Use web 2.0 to speed word of mouth. Use your relationships as a source of innovation so you can be better than your competitor. Building an architecture of collaboration, and always be part of the community you serve.

Enterprise User Perspectives

Case Study: drKW
JP Rangaswami, former CIO of German investment bank DrKW, says they launched a collection of wikis, blogs, IM, and other social software in part so his bank could stay up to speed with Gen N, the next generation of employees who are going to expect these things in the workplace.

The challenge was to find a few early adopters who would see the value in using these tools, add functionality, and spread the word. Then adoption spreads like a virus. The more lightweight the software is, the more likely it is to be adopted. If it’s hard to maintain or hard to use, it won’t fly.

They initially looked at wikipedia as a model for how to store their teaching materials and documents. Within 8 months of bringing the wiki in, 75% of their documents were on the wiki, not on the intranet. They allowed the intranet to atrophy.

By empowering the end user to do the publishing and editing, they saw a huge shift in the way people use the information. Once they’re doing things faster and better, he says you can make the business case for ROI. It can’t be a top-down mandate to use the technology. It has to be driven from the bottom up.

Case Study: NextPage
Cydni Tetro of NextPage says when they were developing the NextPage service, they looked at how people work on office documents individually and together to get projects done. Certain aspects of user adoption influenced design (e.g., if there is one person who fails to use the system, such as the manager who still uses email).

They set up the document management application as a hosted service. No critical data is stored in the enterprise, because the enterprise doesn’t necessarily want to be a data warehouse. The client component resides on the desktop and tracks everything that happens to a document. No matter where the assets exist or how they got there, the app knows what version it is and what’s happened to it.

Document management technology has been around a long time, but it’s been process-driven. The process-modeling approach takes too long and is too costly. The Web 2.0 approach is bottom up, with users driving the adoption and use.

Compliance in using a collaborative tool can be a problem. If IT introduces the tech, and users don’t see how it will solve their problems, adoption can be slow.

Case Study: SAP
Jeff Nolan of SAP says they looked at how to connect service components so people can use them. They’ve automated processes and moved away from transactions to collaboration. Implementations can be departmental or divisional. They target super user nodes, so not everyone needs to buy off on a service.

When they introduced a wiki (using SocialText), instead of giving users a blank piece of paper, they provided a basic level of structure and hierarchy. Then adoption skyrocketed. Similarly, they use blogs internally as a publishing mechanism.

Usability is critical to gaining implementation. You have to give users sensible ways to do their work. They use usability experts to put a structure around the social software interface.

Workshop Discussion
The discussion around social software in the enterprise ranged from usability and adoption issues to security and compliance monitoring. Some key points:

Look at social software as conversation enablers. When you have talented workers, you make it more exciting to work together. They can search across data silos to access and connect information scattered among many departments. These tools empower the workers. They also solve problems of document management, teamwork and communication. Having conversations is key to getting work done across departments.

Enterprises are inherently social environments. Your success is contingent on your ability to work within the social network. There’s the paper organization chart, then there’s the informal organization of working groups and alliances. Once you provide a way to interact that is measurable, you can discover the true organization and the real opinion leaders.

These social systems ultimately make organizations more transparent, as they expand to include the external world. Internal information may become mobile enough that it escapes the control of the organization. Although fears surrounding security issues are exaggerated, there do have to be some controls. For example, there can be a meta layer that crawls the network to detect and monitor compliance.

When you develop a system were people can contribute regardless of their formal roles, you have to have a level of trust. There are some simple rules that employees are expected to follow (e.g., confidentiality). The legal department may be wary of the risks involved. Their job is risk mitigation. Developers of these tools need to provide options that legal can be comfortable with, but you have to ask: What do you trade off as a result of a zero-risk approach?

From an organizational behavior perspective, most people in an organization have specific jobs. The problem and impediment to social networking is, people are incented by the division of labor. The problem is not publishing. It’s getting people to subscribe to the collaborative system. You have to overcome assembly-line thinking and empower people to work across silos, outside of traditional roles.

To promote adoption within the enterprise, you have to be a better change manager. Sometimes, you have to be willing to lose your job over it.

“If you don’t have, ‘So fire me,’ written on your T-shirt, you shouldn’t be working for a large enterprise,” says Rangaswami.

Cutting-edge companies are using these tools to do things they did before, only more efficiently (e.g., using a wiki to facilitate software design).

The remains the question of where money is to be made in this space. Panelists identified three models for making money: Idea to market, problem to repair, and sales to cash. These tools can directly impact revenue if they help you get ideas to market faster. Businesses are pressed to be innovative. Social software enables innovation.

Personal Infosphere

Supernova2006 workshops open with a look at the “Personal Infosphere,” and asks: With all the feeds of information that come to us, how do you get your life back? Five companies demonstrated Web services that enable you to aggregate information and collaborate with others who share your interest in that information.

imeem: Dalton Caldwell, co-founder and CEO of imeem, showed how an IM client can be used to gain “presence” online and find out what are other people doing. It becomes a social networking medium when you use meems (groups) to aggregate people around different interests.

eSnips: Yael Elish, CEO and co-founder of esnips described a social service focused on finding people with like interests and sharing content that you’ve collected. People who use esnips want to go beyond sharing and socializing, they can sell things. Collections can be public or private.

Plaxo: Ben Golub, president and CEO, says Plaxo is the industry’s first smart address book. It connects people through multiple accounts and synchs data, so no matter where you access your address book, you can have a consistent data set. When you change an address, your book is automatically updated.

Netvibes: Tariq Krim says the idea of netvibes is to create one place where you can access everything you like. From the start page, you can aggregate your blogs, searches, bookmarks, personal channels, etc. You build your personal portal, using modules you create, or ones built by other users.

Plum: Hans Peter Brondmo, founder and CEO of Plum. Plum gives you a way to collect information, no matter where it is, and bring it together in one place, which you can share with family, friends, colleagues. Plum creates communities of knowledge. When you search for info on the web, Plum indexes it and creates a searchable archive of articles on that topic.

Audience Discussion
Opening the floor to discussion opened the door to every conceivable issue that could be raised in an hour. These are some of the perplexing questions raised by not fully answered by the audience:

If you want to connect with people locally, regionally or globally, how does that affect data structure and tagging? People want to put form and structure around content, but that restricts how it can be searched, shared, archived, indexed, etc.

Does the company that hosts the web service claim the data as an asset? Most terms of service agreements state that the user owns their information, barring copyright issues. The knowledge you applied by making a collection makes that content yours.

What happens when too many people use a social networking tool? The people in your social network become your filter. When you search a social network for information, When the masses start using social networks, the quality of that filter will degrade. Then you need collaborative filtering.

How do you structure services so you can continue to add value? Does the service adapt to adjust from a narrow search among a small social circle, to a broad search among the masses? With all these different ways of getting information, are we simplifying our personal infosphere, or contributing to its complexity?

Does tagging data impose unwanted structure? When you initiate a search, you have a moment of unstructured discovery. There needs to be a seamless connection between the digital realms where data may be stored in both structured and unstructured ways. You can spontaneously discover things because instead of searching for info, it’s being pushed to you through your filter (the social network).

If your data collection represents who you are, just like your collection of books , do you want just anyone rifling through it? Would you pay a premium for a service that lets you have a private collection behind the firewall, and a public collection that takes advantage of collaborative filtering?