Doug Cornelius .com

I watched a preview of SocialText 3.0 through a webinar.

Ross Mayfield kicked it off by addressing the problems with email and also with using just wikis. With wikis you get the content, but not the person. The goal is to move from conversations to colleagues. You can discover the social context of the content. In effect you can use the social network as a filter.

The product allows great interlinking of content with people using SocialText People.  It allows you to easily organize into groups, gather people and gather their thoughts. When seeing a comment or an edit from a person, you can click on their name or picture and be taken to their full profile.

The profile information has the basics like name, phone number, etc. It also shows you some of the hierarchy, such as who the person reports to. You can use information from a corporate directory as a starting point. You can see the communities that the person is a member. You can also see the person’s blog. Blogs are an integral part of the platform. There is an updates that pull of the stuff the person has been working on lately.

You can also create a list of people you follow. You get the formal structure of the corporate directory, plus the social directory of who this person really works with.

The platform allows you to tag information. Those tags show up on your profile.

Pulling all of this information creates a great repository of expertise that is easier to find and leverage. It also should create stronger relationships within the organization. By pulling that content into one place about a person, you get a search-able page that can be indexed. You do not just find experts, but experts who share. If you are blogging and tagging information on a subject, that is a great indicator of expertise.

SocialText also allows for dashboards that allow you to drop widgets onto a page using SocialText Dashboard. Widgets allow for videos, blog feeds and other useful information from other sites or re-purposes information from other places in the platform. SocialText supports the Google OpenSocial standard for their widgets. This should allow for greater integration with the product.

SocialText People can also be deployed externally on an extranet. 

The product is supposed to be released later this month to all hosted customers. The “SocialText People” module is a separate add-on. They offer both a hosted solution and an appliance deployment.

SocialText wants to drive productivity through social networking. SocialText wants it to be simple and easy to use.

Here is Ross Mayfield’s summary of the new features: Hello Socialtext 3.0! and video of SocialText 3.0 in 60 seconds:

I listened to a profound presentation on the benefits of inefficiency and its implications on enterprise social networks and enterprise 2.0.

One of the many great things at The Firm is the Life Series. The Firm brings in interesting outside speakers to speak about interesting things. A few weeks ago, Devon Harris spoke about his experience as member of the 1988 Olympic Jamaican Bobsled Team and Captain of the 1992 and 1998 Jamaican Olympic teams.

This week Dr. John Lachs, Centennial Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University spoke about how we, as individuals in a complex, modern society, can resist the tendency to allow large institutions to get the better of our human natures.

About 15 minutes into the presentation, I realized the implications of his presentation on justifying knowledge management, enterprise 2.0 and enterprise social networks. I did not have my laptop or even a pad of paper, so I started taking notes of the blackberry. (I think everyone around me thought I was ignoring Dr. Lachs and sending emails.)

Dr. Lachs put forth a proposition about the impotence of large institutions. They break the unity of action. He defined the unity of action as having three parts: (1) intention, (2) execution and (3) the enjoyment or suffering from the action.

People lose interest inside large institutions because they lack control of the three nodes of the unity of action. They are going through the motions because someone else is making them. They are stuck with policies for which they had no input or comment.

The misery of the modern world comes from there being so many of us and our institutions are too big. People do not feel good about it. We can’t go back to living in small communities. (Although there are a few left over hippies from the 60s.) But, there are great things about living in the modern world. (You can have grapes in the winter!)

Institutions need to make things more transparent. The CEO needs to spend time with front line workers. People inside institutions need to get to know what others are doing inside the institution.

What are the consequences?

1. Its okay to be a little less efficient if we can be more human. There is no need to keep secrets when making policies. Why are doing this? How could we do it better? How does it impact the enterprise as a whole? All of these questions can be better answered by exposing the policy-making process to a larger audience.

2. We have to lodge responsibility and accept responsibility. We should hold people at the top of ladder as responsible for bad acts of the institution as we do for those people who commit the bad acts.

Institutions, even if built on best intentions, can become inhumane. Sheer size causes institutions to become inhumane. There is a break down in communications. The larger the institution, the bigger the chain of command and the greater the problems.

Using new communication techniques, we may be able to break down some of the barriers and the breakdowns in communications. It is better to be less efficient in order to share information with a larger group.

How do you take the time in our time-sensitive culture? It takes less time then you think. Can you say hello to everyone? (On twitter or yammer you can!) Instead of creating a policy, say “what do you think?” It is actually more efficient because the opening up of the process allows for improvement of the policy. A larger audience will provide greater insight on the impacts of a policy and how it can be improved.

Dr. Lachs wrote the book “Intermediate Man” on this subject.

I am in New York City today participating in a panel on Social Networking for Lawyers sponsored by New York Legal Marketing Marketing Association. I will be joining  Robert Ambrogi of Legal Line, David Johnson a member of the advisory board of Legal OnRamp and John Lipsey of Martindale Hubbell.

The LMA put together this reading list for further reading:


Social Networking Articles

“Social Networks Get Down to Business”
eMarketer Daily Newsletter, August 18, 2008
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006482

“LinkedIn: A Competitive Intelligence Tool”
By Shannon Sankstone, Marketing the Law Firm Newsletter, August 14, 2008
http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?id=1202423760902

“The Social Network as a Career Safety Net”
By Sarah Jane Tribble, The New York Times, August 13, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/14/technology/personaltech/14basics.html?ref=personaltech

“Social Networking: For Lawyers Only?”
By Robert J. Ambrogi, Law Technology News, August 8, 2008
http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?id=1202423612473

“Social Networking May Pay off in the End “
By Robert Ambrogi, Law Technology News, June 9, 2008
http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?id=1202422007910

“Exclusive First Look at Martindale Hubbell Connected “
By Robert Ambrogi, Legalline, July 31, 2008
http://www.legaline.com/2008/07/exclusive-first-look-martindale-hubbell.html

“LinkedIn to My Facebook on My Blog – Social Media for Lawyers and Law Firm Staff“
By Jenn Steele and Doug Cornelius
Published in ILTA’s March, 2008 white paper titled, Marketing Technologies – Putting Your Best Face Forward
http://www.dougcornelius.com/pro/publications/linkedin_to_facebook_on_my_blog.pdf
http://www.jdsupra.com/post/documentViewer.aspx?fid=05cdf159-64b1-4a35-9d2b-bec72defe67d
or
http://www.iltanet.org/communications/pub_detail.aspx?nvID=000000011205&h4ID=000001184605

Social Networking Surveys & White Papers

Humans Seek Connections: The Case for Online Social Networking
LMA Resource Committee, with Jayne Navarre
http://www.legalmarketing.org/about-lma/products-and-services/white-papers/newssocialnetwork

Networks for Counsel Study:  Online Networking in the Legal Community
Independent research, sponsored by LexisNexis
http://www.leadernetworks.com/networks_study_form.shtml

Social Media in the Inc. 500: The First Longitudinal Study
The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research
http://www.umassd.edu/cmr/studiesresearch/blogstudy5.cfm

Social Networking Sites

LinkedIn  www.linkedin.com
Facebook  www.facebook.com
Legal OnRamp  www.legalonramp.com
Twitter  www.twitter.com

I ran across this video of Pete Fields of Wachovia at the Office 2.0 Conference last week:

I became a big fan of Mr. Fields after listening to him at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference: Realizing Business Value through Social Networking within Wachovia. It was great to hear his update on the use of social media/enterprise 2.0 tools at Wachovia.

At the time of the Enterprise 2.0 post, I was so impressed with the initiative that I said maybe its time to buy some sotck in Wachovia. Of course, since then Wachovia and lots of lenders have run into some problems. Pete shares some of these events and how they affected his Enterprise 2.0 deployment.

Thanks to Susan Scrupski of ITSinsider for pointing out this video as part of her coverage of the Office 2.0 Conference.

In continuing to explore Enterprise Social Networks after my Beyond Blogs and Wikis post I came across an an article by Toby Ward: Employee social networking ? Sabre Town case study.

“We humans are social creatures. With rare exceptions, we strive to relate, converse and connect with others. Social networking promotes online communities of interests and activities that promote connections between users in a more open and robust manner than simple e-mail. While best represented by the quintessential MySpace and Facebook, social networking has made significant strides into the corporate intranet where employee networking is becoming a valuable asset to leading organizations that covet the new breed of employees. This young, web savvy employee cohort desires – if not demands – a more social and dynamic work environment that uses the best possible Web 2.0 (Intranet 2.0) technology.”

Sabre runs most of the world’s airline flight reservation systems among other systems, with nearly 10,000 employees. They rolled out an enterprise social network called Sabre Town. The employee profile is more casual and friendly than your standard employee directory. The profile includes the following, if answered by the employee:

• Shared photos
• Blogs
• User commenting
• Network connections and feeds
• Enterprise question and answer functionality
• What’s your hometown?
• Where do you live now?
• What do you really do for a living?
• What are your corporate gigs and contacts?
• What are your skills, expertise or things you rule in?
• What is your favorite lunch spot or watering hole?
• What are the sports you can’t live without?
• What are your favorite hobbies?
• What’s the music you put on continuous repeat?
• What celebrity are you most like?
• Places you’ve traveled
• Places you dream about going

Sabre is able to show an ROI from the system’s question and answer feature.

Thanks to James Robertson of Column Two and Step Two Designs for pointing out this article:
Employee social networking at Sabre .

We are continuing to roll out wikis at The Firm and getting ready to push out internal blogs. Wikis are rapidly gaining traction at The Firm. We now have more wiki pages than conventional web pages on our intranet.

With this success, I am thinking ahead to what is coming next. An article by Ashley Jones in E Content Magazine gave me some ideas: Studies Suggest That Enterprise Social Media Will Change the Face of Business.

Though many companies already have enterprise-wide wikis and blogs to promote collaboration, enterprise social networking brings something a little different to the table. “We’re huge fans of wikis and blogs, but they don’t do a good job of helping users find those people who would be interested in collaborating in a wiki in the first place,” notes [Peter Biddle, VP of development for Trampoline, which offers its SONAR suite—a portal delivered via API that provides tools for employees to locate experts, connect, and collaborate.]