Taking the Pulse of your Business Content with microblogging

When many users first encounter microblogging they don't 'get it'.

Twitter is of course the classic and most widely known microblogging site, and its style has been taken up by many others such as Facebook in a broader set of social media approaches. A common initial reaction is something to the effect: "I don't care if your cat just threw up – in fact, I'd rather NOT know!!"

Once people start to microblog, they find many different ways that it can provide value, beyond answering the question: "What's happening?" that twitter poses. Commentators have described endless ways of using twitter such as: 5 marketing approaches, 10 diverse applications, 50 different topics, etc.

But how does microblogging add value within an organization? Most of the discussions about business value have been on better ways to reach outside an organization to customers and partners by breaking down barriers, increasing transparency and the like.

At first blush making the case for microblogging in the workplace might seem to be hard. People often comment that they are too busy to engage in 'chit-chat' while at work. But over the last couple of years the use cases that have real business value have become clearer.

For me there are two general styles of internal business microblogging:

1. User status updates – close to the twitter model, but with a distinctly different topic set
   
2. Content status updates – fairly unique to business and keyed to the fact that many work processes produce and manage content (i.e. documents and other business files as understood in content management)
   

At Open Text we recently released the Pulse module for Livelink 9.7.1 that adds microblogging capabilities to support both styles (available for free to customers from the Knowledge Center).

Status updates are pretty much what you'd expect – you can make a post about anything, although some of the most useful ones are:

• "I'm looking for..."
  
• "Anyone interested in..."
  
• "Have we..."
  

These have value because they help people to be more effective through better networking in an organization.

You can select specific users to follow and you can follow the stream from all users. We have a very similar Pulse capability in Open Text Social Workplace.

BUT, I think the real advance in Livelink/Content Server Pulse is to follow the status of content irrespective of location in a range of very powerful and comprehensive ways.

Sure you can post a link to content in twitter, and many microblogging services allow you to attach documents or other kinds of files to your posts. But the advance here is to have the act of adding or changing a piece of content anywhere in an ECM system create a status post. The feed is reporting a content action by another person. If I'm following Joe and he adds a new sales presentation anywhere I can see it in the status stream – provided of course I have permission in the repository to see the added content. All of the important support for compliance is maintained.

There are many ways to slice-and-dice: by following specific people or all people, and following changes in user status, content or both.

You can also 'pulse' specific content objects, so all changes and all comments about a piece of content are seen in the unique Pulse stream of that object. It's like a filtered window into the stream looking at just one object, even if the ECM system contains millions of documents.

And Pulsing is not just limited to files/documents, but is applied to containers like folders and places such as project workspaces and communities. You can imagine the power of an accumulated stream of all content and status activity related to a project!

Livelink has had a notification capability for many years, but it requires users to first identify existing documents and containers that they would like to follow. Pulse adds the human dimension – you can be notified of changes based on the people you follow and what they do with the content.

To honest I'm still 'figuring out' all of the ramifications and power of Livelink/Content Server Pulse but I'm very excited!
 
If you'd like to learn more:

• Initial description in the May 2010 issue of NewsLink
  
• Free Webinar Thursday 3 June 2010
  
• Software and documentation in the Knowledge Center
  
• And if you are an Open Text Online Communities member you'll be able to use Pulse very shortly (announcement)
  

Syndicated at http://conversations.opentext.com/

Really looking forward to Virtual Content World - other ways to be 'virtual'

You've probably heard about the first Open Text Virtual Content World (www.opentext.com/virtualcw) on Tuesday 19 January 2010. Hopefully you can attend. I'll certainly be there in a virtual sense. It's not too late to register, and if you attended Content World 2008 you'll have received a code promotional code for free registration.

For those who can't attend, there is an even 'more virtual' and dare I say free option – watch the many postings on twitter and Facebook.

The twitter hashtag is #otvcw.

• If you go to http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23otvcw you can get a listing of all of the posts
  
• If you use a twitter client like TweetDeck you can of course set a standing search
  

The volume of tweets will really pickup on Tuesday if the Content World 2009 experience is any guide, not just from the 'official' event twitter account (@OTContentWorld) but of course from other OT staff like me, and most importantly, customers.

It should be a great event. There as certainly been a lot of organizational activity. Colleagues have told me this virtual event has been as much work as an in-person one.

'See' you there!

Twitter: @MartinSS

Syndicated at http://conversations.opentext.com/

Customer Community Success Metrics for 2009

Customer communities are all the rage nowadays, but it is not always clear what works and indeed how to measure success.

As 2009 draws to a close we have been reviewing how Open Text customer communities have been doing.

Background: For those not familiar with Open Text, we are a vendor of enterprise-class software to manage digital files (called content). The term enterprise indicates that we sell to organizations not consumers. We have relatively few customer organizations, but they are often typically some of the biggest organizations in business and government. We estimate that at least 1 in 3 Internet users visit sites that run our software! The software we use for our own communities is the same as we sell.

The Sites

For historic reasons, we run three primary community sites (requiring membership) in addition to our typical corporate websites. The community sites are:

• 
  
  Open Text Knowledge Centre (KC)
  
  • Primarily for system administrators of the software we sell
    
  
  
• 
  
  Open Text Developer Network (OTDN) which is housed on the KC
  
  • Primarily for developers using Open Text APIs
    
  
  
• 
  
  Open Text Online Communities
  
  • Primarily for business champions and power users
    
  
  

Site Metrics

1. The Knowledge Centre is by far the oldest community, dating back to 1996! As you'd expect, it has the most members and the most ongoing activity. Every day approximately 4,000 users access the site, and between 150,000-200,000 documents downloads are performed every month!
   
2. OTDN just completed its first full year during which just over 3,200 unique users participated over the past year
   
3. Online Communities got started in its present form in 2005. This last year 10,600 members collectively visited 118,000 times over the year
   

These numbers only measure direct participation. As you might expect, many community members participate through email-mediated discussions.

Convergence

Multiple systems have traditionally meant that there are multiple, disconnected silos of information. As a result, users don't know where to look and administrators have to duplicate critical content between systems.

A better approach is to deploy a single, 'enterprise library' of digital files (content) which contains all of the files, but just one active copy of each. The three sites above will soon converge to use the same enterprise library, which will also be used by our corporate website that is open to the general public.

One single repository can make user navigation harder unless the most relevant content is presented and organized in a fashion that best meets the needs of each type of user (i.e. persona). Communities of users with similar interests or jobs are one approach to organizing content, but of course there are others, including personalization based on the activities and preferences of specific users.

Measuring 2010 success

These communities will continue to develop, but the latest social networking approaches provide new ways to surface important content. As we deploy more social networking approaches during 2010 we'll have a solid base of community metrics from 2009 to judge progress. As you might expect, activities on external sites like twitter, YouTube and facebook are becoming increasingly important.


Syndicated at http://conversations.opentext.com/

Social Networking in the Enterprise - Part 1

I’ve immersed myself in social networking over the last few months. I’m not particularly interested in gaining online ‘friends’, but I do want to understand the potential of the new tools to meet specific objectives, especially those of enterprises and their staff.

Take Twitter as an example.

• BTW, if you’d like to follow me on Twitter check here: http://twitter.com/martinss. - follow me and I’ll automatically follow you by way of SocialToo.com).
• If you look at my score on various Twitter sites I don’t currently score very highly, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t learned from Twitter ;-)

Originally Twitter’s model was one of personal status updates: “MartinSS is walking the dog”, or some such. And for many purists it should still be that way. There is certainly value in that – I’ve learnt things about colleagues that I would never have done otherwise, and maybe we interact better as a result. In the end though I think there is a limit to how many people I want to know in detail. Interestingly this was reinforced by a recent study that showed humans have an enlarged brain center that is predicted to allow them to follow about 165 people and all of the interactions between those people in detail. That number seems about right to me, or perhaps in my case a bit high ;-)

Twitter is just a tool – it’s how you use and the benefit that you derive that matter most. There is no right way to use Twitter any more than a right way to use a telephone. As another blogger expressed it recently, why should he have to justify using Twitter when he doesn’t have to justify using a phone?

At the other end of the spectrum from the social update users, are people epitomized by Guy Kawasaki. He unabashedly uses Twitter as the most powerful marketing tool he knows. As a result he is one of the most followed individual Twitter users, but he is also one of the most reviled but unapologetic. I find value in his posts. Recently there was a controversy when it was revealed that he uses ‘ghosts’ – other people who make posts for him – which is hardly surprising given the volume of his posts and the nature of his effort. Since his posting formula is quite clear, there is nothing wrong IMO with others following his formula under his direction.

When you start using Twitter you can be overwhelmed with the flow of information. You can select a few people to follow and keep the volume down, but inevitably over time the volume builds. One of the first things you have to learn is to, ‘let it go’. If you don’t read a feed for a period you don’t have to go back and read everything you missed – it isn’t email where people have been conditioned to try and read everything (although that’s breaking down nowadays, but that’s another topic). There is an ongoing ‘conversation’ and if you aren’t ‘in the room’, then you’ll miss it, but you have other things to do, so don’t worry.

Next you have to learn how to filter and manage the flow. There are tools to look only at replies targeted to you, posts related to specific key words, etc.

Kawasaki is using Twitter as a Social Marketplace tool. My interest is more in how tools like it can work in the Social Workplace – do they help people in an enterprise get their jobs done better or faster? And if they do, which tools are best, what features must they have and what other tools must they be connected with?

Currently within Open Text we are working on an enterprise, social networking tool currently codenamed “BlueField”. I’ve used it a lot and really like it, and I think the ways to use it best are becoming clearer.