The Connectbeam Social Computing Blog

How to Increase the Influence of Confluence

This week we announced the availability of Spotlight Connect for Confluence. What is that? It's our integration of Confluence wiki entries into the Connectbeam central tag repository.

This is a big milestone for Connectbeam. We continue to lead the industry in social bookmarking for the enterprise. And that has been a hit with customers.

We talked earlier about the need to connect the emerging Enterprise 2.0 silos. When you integrate the great employee-generated content in applications like wikis, blogs, forums, etc., you tap a whole new vein of value and adoption for these applications.

The integration with Confluence is an important step in Connectbeam's larger mission to bring the benefits of social software to each and every employee of a company, whatever application they use.

Atlassian Confluence is leading the charge for collaborative social software inside companies. Through the integration of Confluence content, Connectbeam expands the reach of employee-generated content well beyond the boundaries of the wiki itself. A good example of the value of this is the case study we wrote about recently, Tangible ROI: How Connectbeam Saved $50,000 for a Company.

Atlassian's VP of Marketing, Jay Simons, described the value of the integration this way:

"Confluence leads the market in enterprise wiki technology, and is a cornerstone for many organizations’ social software strategy. The Connectbeam integration is a valuable complement to Confluence -- mixing content from Confluence with other content and activities, and organizing it all smartly around people and teams for easy discovery."

Here are a few points about the integration:

1. Set up is fairly simple process

2. Each Space on Confluence maps to a unique Group on Connectbeam

3. Configure the plug-in so that any entry or only those that have labels are fed into Connectbeam

4. Labels in Confluence become tags in Connectbeam

5. Wiki authors are automatically associated to their content in Connectbeam

6. Every entry from Confluence is stored as a directly accessible URL in Connectbeam

You can read more here on our website about the integration.  And Atlassian's Bill Arconati has a wonderful blog post about it as well, Connectbeam Connects | Confluence Customers Beam.

If you're interested, download our free 30-day trial of the Connectbeam application, and contact us to get set up with Connect for Confluence.

Finally, you can view this quick video (2:10 running time) that demos the integration:

Tangible ROI: How Connectbeam Saved $50,000 for a Company

A recurring theme you will see here is that companies can significantly increase the value of their various social software applications by tying them together. A second theme that is seen in the market is the need for hard dollar ROI for social computing.

 

With that introduction, I’d like to relate a story we heard from one of our customers. This company saved $50,000 because of its Connectbeam implementation. Here’s a bulleted summary of the story:

 

• An employee created a wiki page explaining how to get a discount on software
• Wiki page was shared on Connectbeam
• Employees in other departments Googled the name of the software app
• The wiki page was returned alongside the Google search results
• Other employees clicked on the link to the wiki page, learning how to get the discount
• Result = $50,000 savings to the company

The Full Story

 

Large enterprises have thousands of employees, dozens of departments and multiple locations around the globe. Coordination can be quite challenging. And unsurprisingly, valuable information that can help others is often not found, costing companies real money and lost productivity.

 

Our customer has an enterprise wiki. Wikis are fantastic for letting employees share knowledge and collaborate on projects.

 

An employee created a wiki page explaining how to purchase software from a third party vendor. This employee’s department uses a third party software application extensively, and had negotiated a favorable departmental vendor license agreement (VLA) over time. The employee’s wiki page explained the details around this VLA.

 

The employee’s wiki page also was shared into the Connectbeam application. There are two ways to do this – bookmark the page, or leverage Connectbeam’s integration with Confluence.

 

Now it turns out that this software was getting interest elsewhere in the organization. In the absence of knowing about the departmental VLA, others would have negotiated new VLAs with the software vendor, at full price.

 

So here was the problem. Highly valuable information was on the wiki. Employees needed this information, but it didn’t occur to them that others in the organization might know something about it. Instead, they did what a lot of us do – they turned to Google.

 

And here’s where Connectbeam kicked in. Connectbeam can integrate with any search engine. When employees search, they are presented not only results from that site, but results from Connectbeam as well. Here’s a screenshot of how that works:

 

Employees elsewhere in this company were presented with a similar search side panel of results from its Connectbeam application. And the original employee’s wiki entry for the software VLA was included in the Connectbeam search results.

 

They clicked on the wiki entry describing how to buy the software, and were able to tap into the departmental VLA to get the discount. Result? $50,000 saved by the company that otherwise would have gone to the software vendor.

 

Putting Information In the Flow of Daily Work

 

When we discussed the ‘why’ behind the release of Spotlight 3.0, we highlighted the following elements:

 

• In the flow: put information where employees do their work
• Connect enterprise apps: need to make it easier to find the incredibly valuable information employees create everyday

As you can see from this case study, there are real opportunities for companies to improve results when they make it happen. 

Three Ways to Double the Value of Your Social Software

We gave a webinar yesterday, titled Double the Value of Your Social Software.

So how exactly does one “double the value” of social software? Well right now, organizations face a new issue of "enterprise silos" 2.0.

The great thing about companies rolling out the tools of Web 2.0 is that it lets people from everywhere contribute. Multiple people jump on wikis, blogs, microblogging, etc. Social software can tear down the departmental and geographic walls that separate employees.

So it’s ironic that these wall-busting apps end up as new walled gardens of participation. Employees update their Confluence wiki, they blog on Movable Type and Yammer away. But there’s no integration of the apps.

The core of the "doubling" argument is that integrating the various social software apps inside companies produces a new layer of value. In terms of how this happens, we developed three areas of focus:

1. Expand information’s reach
2. Create an employee skills database
3. Diversify and strengthen workers’ sources of information

The Slideshare below is the presentation we used in the webinar.

Double the Value Of Your Social Software

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: bookmarking blog)

As always, feel free to contact us if you'd like to discuss this further.

Webinar: Double the Value of Your Social Software

Are you using multiple social software apps in your organization? Each one is individually valuable. But ironically, these collaborative apps end up as new data silos, not integrated with the wider organization. Tying the apps together improves accessibility and is the foundation for employee social networks. This was the gist of our earlier blog post Fix the Enterpise 2.0 Silo Issue.

We're holding a Webinar - Double the Value of Your Social Software - to discuss the benefits of connecting enterprise 2.0 apps, and how Connectbeam does this to significantly increase their value. We welcome your attendance. Here are the details

Thursday November 20

1:00 pm EST, 10:00 am PST

Click here to register

Economic Downturn: Putting a Dollar Figure on the Value of Enterprise 2.0 for Companies

The times they are a-changin'. In a space of weeks, the global economy has slowed. Employees are concerned about their jobs, companies are preparing for negative growth. Everyone's in a tough period right now.

For the Enterprise 2.0 industry, this is indeed the time to demonstrate the business case of social software. On the FASTForward Blog, Jevon MacDonald penned a great piece: In uncertain times, Enterprise 2.0 takes the stage. Included in the post is a quote by Enterprise 2.0 consultant Thomas Vander Wal:

The interconnections and interactions between people spark great value, but the more costly traditional tools have missed out on this great reservoir of value, but the newer lower cost solutions offer these gems up wonderfully with a little coaxing.

Enterprise 2.0 improves three critical components of companies' success: innovation, productivity and responsiveness. During times of economic stress, productivity rises to the top in terms of priorities...

Do more with less.

In that spirit, we want to discuss a fantastic academic paper that studies the effects of IT, multitasking and social networks on companies. Specifically, the researchers studied a multi-office, geographically dispersed executive recruiting firm.

The results are eye-opening, and provide empirical evidence for the power of social software to improve productivity.

How to Do More with Less

The study Information, Technology and Information Worker Productivity was produced by researchers at MIT, NYU and Boston University. The team evaluated over 125,000 emails, detailed accounting data, completion rates and team membership for over 1,300 placement projects, and surveys with most employees. What were they looking for? "The fine-grained relationships among information flows, IT use, and individual information-worker productivity."

The researchers found statistically significant relationships among social networks, technology use, completed projects and revenues for project-based information workers. Here are the four findings of the research team:

1. The structure and size of workers' communication networks are highly correlated with their performance
2. IT use is strongly correlated with productivity
3. Productivity is greatest for small amounts of multitasking, but too much multitasking reduces productivity
4. Asynchronous information-seeking promotes multitasking

The full report includes many, many nuggets of valuable information. We want to focus on two outcomes of their research that put a dollar figure on the value of social software.

Putting a Dollar Figure on the Value of Social Software

A key finding of the researchers was this:

A one standard deviation increase in betweenness centrality in the email network is associated with approximately $76,000 greater revenue output per year controlling for human capital, demographic variables and use of the ESS system.

A one standard deviation increase in network diversity is associated with approximately $83,000 greater annual revenue output.

What this report gives us is a dollar figure for the value of social software inside companies! The research computed significant productivity gains for workers with superior positions on two attributes:

• Betweenness centrality
• Network diversity

Both of these attributes are core to the value of social software. But let's define them first, because the terms sound daunting.

Betweenness centrality: What's the probability that an individual will fall on the shortest path between any two other individuals? This attribute measures the strength of an individual's connections to other employees. Sort of a probability-based LinkedIn.

Network diversity: Measures the degree to which an individual's contacts are connected to each other. If your social network consists of people who all know each other well, your network diversity is low. If your social network has a lot of connections that don't know one another, your diversity is high.

Let's examine one of the attributes, network diversity. The $83,000 improvement in revenue production referenced above was for a one standard deviation improvement relative to the mean. Graphically, here's what that means:

Employees who connect to a wider range of their colleagues generate higher revenue for their companies. In this case, an employee in the 84th percentile of network diversity delivers $83,000 more in revenue annually than average. Why?

If all you ever see is the same perspective from your cohorts, it can be hard to figure out solutions to  problems that are new to you. As the researchers note in their study:

Information in local network neighborhoods tends to be redundant

Soliciting input from a greater array of co-workers brings new ideas, information and perspectives to an employee. This becomes a competitive differentiator, and a basis for better collaboration across the enterprise. The question, as always, is how to find and build relationships with others who can help beyond your normal internal contacts?

Now here's where this becomes an interesting opportunity for companies. The results calculated for these high-performing employees were based on their email social networks. In other words, these employees' email contact lists present an after-the-fact look at how they're connected.

For an employee looking to improve her social network, it's hard to use email in this way. A random email over-the-transom will do little to foster a new, vital connection internally. It lacks context.  Unfortunately, most systems inside organizations are ill-suited to provide the context for what co-workers are working on, as Thomas Vander Wal notes above.

As a result, diversifying an internal social network is slow, and likely stagnant, for all but the most proficient workers.

So how does one break out of the small, insular social network?

At Connectbeam, our application lets workers identify their expertise, interests and projects. It aggregates the workstreams of employees, providing a way to find the information that colleagues generate. Colleagues that an employee already knows well, as well as those beyond her normal social network. Suddenly, there's a better awareness of others' work and context for reaching out to them.

If you're a statistical type of person, the objective is to move the average of the normal distribution to the right (increase average production per employee) in the above graphic, and to tighten up the curve (everyone enjoying the fruits of network diversity in a similar way).

Check out our product page for more information on how we improve both network diversity and betweenness centrality.

And for companies looking to get more done with less in these tough economic times, recognize that social software provides a solid, statistically based way to improve productivity.

Five Moves of Power Users in Enterprise 2.0

Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee recently penned an interesting post, Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings? The post examines the idea of applying ratings to workers based on their activity with social software applications. Ratings would be part of the toolkit of adoption techniques.

The comments to his post are a good discussion about the problems with this approach. These ratings hold the potential to undermine the spirit of "let's get people talking and collaborating" that defines Enterprise 2.0. That's not to say the idea is wholly without merit. But "ratings" carry negative connotations in this context. Maybe there are "levels" that employees could earn, without the stigma of having a low "rating".

His post did cause a discussion here at Connectbeam. Rather than focus on ratings, we wondered:

How would a power user operate in our application?

There are actually a lot of ways. This being a blog, and we're going to keep things tight. Here are five that we came up with...

The Power Moves

1. SEO your social profile. On the web, those whose success is built on people finding them are very good at maintaining their profiles. Profiles are a basis for being found (e.g. LinkedIn). Inside a company, same rules apply. The power users will be unusually good at building their Connectbeam Social Profiles with key words, along the lines of search engine optimization techniques. The Connectbeam app lets you find people in two ways:

• People search based on terms in their profiles
• Recommendations based on common expertise, interests and projects

Want to ensure your reputation precedes you and co-workers know what you can do? Maintain a vibrant Social Profile.

2. Build a good-sized social network base. Out on the Web, there are individuals who have successfully built up a following of ten of thousands of individuals on Twitter and on their blogs. There are two benefits to developing your own community:

• You can learn a variety of information and viewpoints from others
• You can get your message out to a large number of people, who will in turn talk about it with their networks

Now those kinds of numbers are pretty daunting. Inside the enterprise, power users don't need that big a network. But having a good-sized network does provide them with an information advantage, and a fast way to communicate out to the organization at large.

How to build out a good-sized social network? See #1 above, and read on below.

3. Comment, engage, discuss. A key understanding of social networks is that people want interaction. For many social media first-timers, that can be one of the biggest challenges: how to get the conversation going. The Enterprise 2.0 power user understands this, seeks out areas of interest, and interacts. This simple act does two things:

• It creates a bond between the power user and others
• It moves the ball forward in terms of drawing people into the larger enterprise conversation

A central point of Enterprise 2.0 is to collaborate. Having power user instigators who can push things forward is a tremendous value. And they get the benefit of building a strong internal network.

4. Celebrate and communicate the workstreams of others. Recognition and acknowledgment are important motivators of employees. In Connectbeam employees will see bookmarks, wiki entries, blog posts, etc. The power user will find those nuggets shared by others, and celebrate them. This is not easy - if one re-shares things that others don't find useful, the power user quickly loses status.

But having the talent to spot useful information shared by others accomplishes two things:

• Raises awareness for valuable information that will help co-workers and the company
• Motivates the original source of the information to connect more closely with the power user

In Connectbeam, one can simply re-share a bookmark from one Group to another, including attribution in the comments field. Or one may maintain an internal blog that lists the "best of" information shares. Or even the occasional email pointing to the bookmark.

5. Share information with a vengeance. Build up the set of information you share with others. Share relevant information often. Be it in web bookmarks, wiki entries, blog posts, etc. If the content shared is relevant and useful, the power user's name tends to show up a lot when others in the organization are looking for information in the Connectbeam application. Don't think that goes un-noticed.

Want to develop a reputation for expertise and understanding markets/technologies/customers/etc.? Share with a vengeance.

Those are five moves of the Enterprise 2.0 power user. What we like about them is that they are not only good for an individual's career, but also are good for the organization. If you think of any others, feel free to leave a comment.

Fix the Enterprise 2.0 Silo Issue

Came across a nice post by CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne on KM World, Enterprise Social Software Technology. In the post, he articulates the functional underpinnings of social computing software. If you're tracking the Enterprise 2.0 space, it's a good read.

A couple quotes caught our eyes here. First:

Vendors are also "socializing" existing software products. On the main, that is a good thing, but it should not be confused with dedicated social software tools. In the absence of accepted integration standards, adding things like tags, profiles and instant messaging services to longstanding applications can create just another set of siloed communities.

A core principle of social computing is connectedness. Adding social computing features to existing enterprise silos certainly helps, but fails to connect the larger organization.

Here's the other quote from Tony's post:

But it is equally clear that no single vendor in the marketplace excels at all or even most of those services. In fact, many successful social software case studies revolve around the dedicated application of a standalone tool.

We have not yet seen the emergence of a full-suite vendor that addresses the different needs of the market. Expect to see enterprises with multiple social computing apps for the foreseeable future.

Companies' Opportunity in Connecting Enterprise 2.0 Apps

Finding information in the various social computing applications certainly is a function of enterprise search engines. Enterprise search engines are great for what they do:

1. Index content from different applications
2. Apply term frequency algorithms to rank search results

But there is a layer of meta data, of employee judgment in the creation and sharing of knowledge that is not captured in typical enterprise search engines. This data includes:

• Who created or saved the information
• Tags to provide richer meaning (how was this information useful)
• Groups to put the information in context

Capture this information, and you can create a connected layer of social information that opens new possibilities for employees:

• Find useful information faster
• Figure out quickly which colleagues might be able to help with a project
• Create a single go-to repository for the valuable content that is produced and shared throughout the organization
• Build their own social networks based on common projects and interests

Yes, we love enterprise search. We even have connectors ready to go for Google Enterprise Search and FAST. But there's much more to the story when it comes to the content generated in the various social computing silos inside companies.

Why Use a Jet Engine When a Feather Will Do?

We enjoyed ourselves at the KM World Expo. Nice to get out of the office, meet companies working on their own social initiatives and see what other vendors are dong. In a conversation with one visitor to our booth, an interesting use case came up.

Connectbeam maintains a unique Social Profile for each employee. These profiles let people identify their skills, interests and projects, and include the information they have shared and created. Through out-of-the-box connectors and APIs, these Social Profiles can be incorporated into a number of enterprise applications, including portals. In addition, these Social Profiles are the basis for employee searches.

Our booth visitor was intrigued by this, but asked about this use case: Assume a number of people inside an organization include "Lotus Notes" in their list of skills. Some are help desk staffers others are architects and designers. What happens when employees forget their passwords, and search the company Social Profiles for "lotus notes"? Wouldn't a Lotus Notes developer get bombarded with requests for password resets?

We talked about a couple scenarios.

The Jet Engine Scenario

First, imagine a system where the Social Profiles tapped into an Issue Tracker system. This system records all requests for password resets, and which employees closed them out. From this, a list of Lotus Notes password reset gurus could be developed. The Social Profiles tap into this intelligence to identify who the go-to people are for password resets.

And it addresses the problem of the Lotus Notes developer who shouldn't be bombarded with password reset requests.

It would take a special algorithm built inside the Issue Tracker app to generate these results. The Issue Tracker would integrate to the Social Profiles, and update them for the new skills an employee has. The custom code and integration on the Issue Tracker app would need to be maintained and incorporated into any upgrades...

Yeah, pretty daunting isn't it?

The Feather Scenario

Or, there's a simpler way to tackle the problem. A Lotus Notes developer simply adds this to his profile:

** I do not reset Lotus Notes passwords. Please call x1234 for those requests. Thank you. **

Problem solved.

We love social software. Give people the tools, and you'll be amazed what they can come up with.

Connectbeam Spotlight 3.0 Is Now Available - Here's the 'Why' Behind the New Release

One of the great things about working with our enterprise customers is that we get a ringside view into what they want to accomplish and what issues they are facing. Companies see the benefits of collaborative information sharing, and are working hard to connect employees and knowledge. Andrew McAfee articulated well the value of information sharing and collaboration in his bulls eye post, which provides a great analysis for the value of internal social networks.  The companies with whom we talk are moving aggressively to create authentic, useful employee social networks.

With that as backdrop, we're pleased to announce today the release of Connectbeam Spotlight 3.0. Spotlight 3.0 adds a number of features to the Connectbeam application designed to make information and expertise easier to find and share. Full details are available on our Products page. Here are the release highlights:

• Integration with leading enterprise applications
• Feeds of user generated content from Enterprise 2.0 apps
• Social Profiles with both employee-provided knowledge and experience, and real-time updates for their work activities

There's a lot to this release, and the Connectbeam website and data sheets will tell you more.

We wanted to give you a sense of why we released Spotlight 3.0. The reasons shed some light on the direction of the enterprise market.

In-the-flow: Michael Idinopulos of SocialText wrote about the differences of putting tools in-the-flow or above-the-flow of employees' daily activities. This is a critical consideration for vendors in the social computing space, and it's an approach we pioneered here at Connectbeam. To maximize knowledge touch points, and user adoption, inside an organization, we're big fans of in-the-flow tools. That's why Connectbeam integrates with leading enterprise apps. We want to put information and internal resources right at the fingertips of employees.

Connect enterprise apps: Companies have significant investments in their existing technology stacks, both financially and operationally. They also tend to have a collection of best-of-breed apps, particularly in the enterprise social computing realm. Full-suite Enterprise 2.0 solutions are still a ways off. So the problem they're experiencing is a lack of visibility for the amazing amounts of user generated information that has been created inside their walls. Connectbeam sees tying together these different apps as a major benefit for companies. Through our Connectors and APIs, we pull in content created from across the enterprise, including wikis, blogs, news feeds, forums and other applications.

Workstreams: Connectbeam's roots are as the leader in social bookmarking and tagging inside the enterprise. Fundamentally, what we bring is the ability to tap employees as sources of relevant data and filters for what's valuable. From this, everyone in the organization gains. With Spotlight 3.0, we're extending this philosophy by integrating the workstreams of employees. Workstreams include bookmarks, wiki entries, blog posts, forum discussions and other activities. There's tremendous value in providing a single repository where these workstreams:

• Can be organized and are searchable
• Form the basis for social networking and collaboration
• Can be discussed
• Are integrated into the everyday applications that employees use

That's a brief explanation for how we approached Connectbeam Spotlight 3.0. Hats off to the team for a great job pulling this one together.

The Lessnau Lounge on Social Bookmarking

John Lessnau has created a number of web sites including LinkXL.com that has provided a new brokerage model. He also publishes The Lessnau Lounge that offers Twitter feeds. It covers electronics, internet marketing, linkage, pop culture, and social media. It is interesting to see a site that shifts through and offers Twitter tweets. Twitter is on the rise. TechCrunch wrote that in March 2008 there over a million users, and over three million Twitter messages a day. Aggregating them around topics is a good thing.

His Twitter tweets about Social Bookmarking as of August 27, 2008 mentioned one of our blog posts, The Connectbeam Social Computing Blog: ROI for Social Bookmarking: Very Large Possibilities. I am grateful for this and that was how I learned of the Lessnau Lounge.

Cory Treffiletti’s Companies to Watch

Cory Treffiletti writes a blog about marketing strategy and fundamentals. He is President and Managing Partner for Catalyst:SF. Cory's been in interactive marketing and advertising since 1995. He writes a weekly column for Mediapost.

Cory recently published a post, Company to Watch: the Bonus Issue. These companies were drawn primarily from the Stanford Always On! Summit that occurred earlier this month. I was pleased to part of panel, CEO Showcase, at the event. I was also honored to see Connectbeam included in Cory’s list of companies to watch. Cory’s blog is worth looking at if you are interested in emerging trends in marketing, especially through new media.

Research Shows Majority of Fastest Growing Companies Are Adopting Social Media

ReadWriteWeb recently reported on a follow-on study by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research. This research into social media adoption at 500 of the fastest growing companies in the US has found that familiarity with and use of social media nearly doubled in 2008 from what it was in 2007. Now 77% of respondents report at least some use of a social media tool in their business.

I was especially pleased to see than social networking topped the list on familiarity over online video, blogging, message boards, wikis, and podcasting. It was also on top in 2007. Consistent with this social networking also top the list on usage in 2008, moving up from third in 2007. Last year “don’t use any” was the top category. Now don’t use any” is fifth, only barely beating podcasting. Asked to rate importance for business strategy, 44% said very important and 34% said somewhat important. This is all good news for social media and is consistent with prior research.

It was also interesting to see that while 11.6% of Fortune 500 companies currently have a public blog, 39% of the Inc. 500 companies are blogging. This is not surprising as these smaller firms are often more progressive.

I found this study through Keith De La Rue who writes the blog AcKnolwedge Consulting for the Australian firm by that name. I found his blog as Keith linked to my post on Forrester Reports that Corporate Social Networks will Augment Strategic HR Strategies. There is a nice coverage of enterprise 2.0 on AcKnolwedge Consulting blog.

TradeVibes – Web Community for and about Startup Companies

I recently discovered TradeVibes as some people came to this blog through the Connectbeam description listed on this online community. TradeVibes says that it “finds “cool and interesting startups and adds them to TradeVibes. By leveraging the collective wisdom of our community, TradeVibes separates the best startups from their competitors. Come share your opinions, or just come see the ratings, opinions, and discussions about which startup will be the next star.” I am honored that Connectbeam is included in this discussion.

TradeVibes explained that their long term mission is to democratize business information by increasing transparency. Ultimately, they believe this will increase innovation and encourage entrepreneurship globally. It was founded in 2007 by four early employees of PayPal: David Li, Peter Chu, David Kang, and Doug Ihde. Their office is located in Mountain View, California. They have a TradeVibes blog. This is a useful effort and I wish them luck.

ROI for Social Bookmarking: Very Large Possibilities

Rawn Shah of IBM recently blogged that the IBM enterprise tagging social software saves IBM $4.6 million a year. Like Connectbeam, the enterprise tagging system (ETS) at IBM allows for social bookmarking within the enterprise so I was very interested to see how they developed their business case and the results they achieved. They developed their application on Dogear for their enterprise tagging service, which is a sub-component within Lotus Connections. It is deployed across their intranet as a sidebar to a number of key web properties: traditional search engine results, top content pages, and web applications. Connectbeam pioneered this sidebar display appraoch of combining bookmarked and tagged results alongside raw enterprise intranet search results. Connectbeam can do this with tools such as Sharepoint and Google Enterprise Search, External Internet Search, as well as stand on its own.

Rawn wrote that the ETS team did a survey asking users how this tool helped them. They found that the average person saved 12 seconds, across the 286000+ searches performed through ETS each week. This sums up to 955 hours saved each week across the company. In terms of cost savings, it amounts to a rough estimate of $4.6 million a year, in terms of productivity gain. The system cost $700,000 to build and deploy across IBM Intranet. While it can be argued that general time savings ROIs are hard to place on a balance sheet, increased efficiency on this scale certainly needs to be respected. They also found that the reusability of the ETS page widget resulted in an additional $2.4 million in cost avoidance since it did not have to be re-implemented for each site.

Promoting Innovation and Co-creation Within the Enterprise

McKinsey recently released a study on the topic of co-creation, The Next Step in Open Innovation. The abstract says, “The Internet and new social-networking technologies are allowing companies and their customers to interact with unprecedented levels of richness. Some leading organizations are using this opportunity to draw customers into the heart of the product-development process.” However, they also caution, “Cocreating products and services with customers, however, is uncertain territory fraught with challenges and questions—for instance, who owns the resulting intellectual property?”

I think reaching out to customers and the wider internet is a great idea. Cisco’s I-Prize is a wonderful example. Cisco has launched a contest and invited the world to give it great ideas. The winner gets to join Cisco and is funded to make the idea real. This is a smart move but we do not want overlook another important source of innovation, those within our own enterprise.

A number of years ago a major manufacturer launched a search to find best practices to reduce costs at their plants, only to discover that these best practices were operating within their own plants but they did not have an effective means to discover this knowledge. Now with the tools of enterprise 2.0 we can look more effectively inside the organization, as well the wider web. This is a goal at Connectbeam, to help firms discover the innovation within. Intellectual property and some of the other issues with co-creation outside the organization are greatly simplified when we look inside.

KM World and Braintrust Both Enter Their Second Decade

KM World is back again, appearing on September 23 - 25, 2008 at its usual venue, the San José McEnery Convention Center San José, CA. It is nice to see knowledge management still going strong. Connectbeam will be exhibiting at this event. I hope to see you there.

The Braintrust Knowledge Management Summit, another great KM conference enters its 10th year when it runs November 18-20 at the Disney resort in Orlando. Knowledge management has been on a long run. It is nice to part of its latest incarnation through Connectbeam. Both events have a great collection of speakers with a lot of new faces.

Getting the Right Balance of Convention and Innovation Through Small World Networks

Brian Uzzi (Northwestern) and Jarrett Spiro (Stanford) recently published a study, Collaboration and Creativity: The Small World Problem in the American Journal of Sociology. They begin the article by noting that “creativity aids problem solving, innovation, and aesthetics, yet our understanding of it is still forming. We know that creativity is spurred when diverse ideas are united or when creative material in one domain inspires or forces fresh thinking in another.” In other words when new connections are made.

The authors analyzed the small world network of the creative artists who made Broadway musicals from 1945 to 1989. The Broadway musical networks they examined shows that between teams arise when artists work in more than one musical and create dense overlapping clusters that are prototypical of a small world network.

Any successful production is likely to be a combination of convention and innovation. Innovation comes from material that extends conventions by showing these conventions in a new form or mode of presentation. Just as conventions are learned and gather strength within networks of personal contact and repeated public performance, innovative extensions often emerge when artists are exposed to other conventions besides the ones they have been using, thus inspiring or forcing creativity.

However, they found limits to this effect. Too much internal connectivity reduces some of the creative distinctiveness of clusters, which can homogenize the pool of creative material. At the same time, problems of excessive cohesion can creep in. In this case, the ideas most likely to be implemented can be too conventional rather than fresh ideas because of the common information effect and because newcomers find it harder to land “slots” on productions.

I think in the same way innovation within the enterprise occurs when there is a balance between established team connections and the introduction of new connections. A tool like Connectbeam that combines social networking around ideas helps to bring new connections to keep stirring the innovation pot within the organization. At the same time it can support the work of established teams and help with cohesion. It was interesting to see this concept appear in an academic study. Thanks to Bill Ives and Valdis Krebs for pointing out this study.

Susan Scrupski on Rules for Blogging Success

I recently came across, through Jerry Bowles' post, How to Be a Successful Blogger: The Scrupski Rules, some excellent rules for bloggers by Susan Scrupski. Susan e2.0 Evangelist at Austin-based nGenera, which strategic advisory and technology design & deployment firm. Her blog is on my list, as is Jerry's. I will not repeat all the rules here as you can find them at Jerry’s post, but they are all ones I try to follow.

One of the rules is to participate in the community. Blogging is not a solo activity (though that is probably one of the greatest myths about blogging). Linking and commenting are key to the experience of blogging. I find a lot of good information from the bloggers on my list and others. This list is one example.

Should We Live with Software Insecurity?

Ben Worthen of the Wall Street Journal recently reported on the Black Hat Conference, the tech security conference, in his post, Living with Insecurity. He noted that Ian Angell, a professor of information systems at the London School of Economic, speaking about software insecurity, told the audience just to live with it. Ben said that “while Angell’s advice is everyday behavior for the overwhelming majority of people – albeit without an awareness of the risks they’re taking in most cases – it’s a radical notion at Black Hat.”

It is also a radical notion to many of our clients. This is why we put Connectbeam within an appliance behind the firewall. It also makes updates much easier. There is always some insecurity around but some of it is optional. We are trying to provide a chance to reduce insecurity around enterprise data.

McKinsey on Building Enterprise 2.0

A new research report from McKinsey, titled, Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise: McKinsey Global Survey Results, provides some useful and encouraging information. This report covers their second annul research survey on the topic. This year the researchers found that companies have adopted more Web 2.0 tools this year than in 2007 and are using them for higher-value purposes. They add that companies that are satisfied with their use of these tools are starting to see changes throughout the enterprise. In addition, companies that are deriving business value from these tools are now shifting from using them experimentally to adopting them as part of a broader business practice. This fits with what I am seeing with our customers.

I was also interested to see that companies use Web 2.0 technologies more frequently for internal than for external purposes. This is all good news for Connectbeam. In the list of tools that count, social networking came in second to web services, ahead of blogs, wikis, RSS, etc. This is consistent with the Forrester study I wrote about earlier.

There are still challenges and not everyone is happy. The study found that higher levels of usage are found at companies that encourage it by integrating the tools into existing workflows, starting enterprise 2.0 efforts in conjunction with other strategic initiatives, and getting senior managers to act as role models for adoption. These are all good adoption practices that have proven useful in the past for new technologies.

The study concluded with the prediction that companies will continue to spend more on web 2.0 technologies, even the ones not yet satisfied. The majority of the companies that are satisfied with their web 2.0 technologies see them as a driver of competitive advantage. McKinsey said, “Expect these companies to become more aggressive in the marketplace against rivals that are slower to get on board.” They predicted that driving innovation may be the next major use of the new technologies. There is much more in the report. I have only hit the highlights in yet another positive report on enterprise 2.0

What’s Happening with Tech Startups? – Churchill Club Session

The Churchill Club is hosting on session, “Startup Or Hunker Down? What’s Happening with Tech Startups “ this coming Monday August 11. It will be held at SRI International, 333 Ravenswood Ave. Menlo Park, CA. It starts at 6 PM with a buffet dinner. Guy Kawasaki, a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm will moderate the event. The speakers includes:

Richard Archuleta, CEO, Plastic Logic 

Rousseau Aurelien, CEO, Second Rotation 

Susan Coelius-Keplinger, Co-founder & COO, Triggit 

Martin Frid-Neilsen, Founder, Soonr 

Puneet Gupta, CEO, Connectbeam

I am pleased to be part of this session. The site describes the session as follows. “This panel of both early- and later-stage startup founders and executives from a range of sectors including green tech, enterprise software, mobile, semiconductors, and Web 2.0 will talk about ideas, money, technology, marketing and sales, talent, and timing. What factors are most responsible for economic success? What are the biggest obstacles they are overcoming and how are they doing it? What advice do they have for tomorrow's entrepreneurs?”

I am looking forward to this event and hope to see you there if you are in the area. Cisco is the sponsor. Registration details are at the Churchill Club site.

Defining Aspects of Social Computing, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, and the Consumer Web

Susan Scrupski and Jevon MacDonald are working on a model that breaks apart aspects of the new web world, inside and outside the enterprise. See Susan’s Circles of Expertise in 2.0 for Biz post for the current model. The four areas as range for digital marketing and mass collaboration (or co-creation) to social media and enterprise 2.0.

Connectbeam is squarely in the enterprise 2.0 space and I think these types of distinctions are important to develop. It helps to avoid the confusions that can arise over issues like the role of Facebook in the enterprise that I have written about on this blog. Susan writes, “Although there is overlap among all these groups, the areas of focus are distinctly unique. Of course, businesses can benefit by incorporating the expertise from all these areas, but they’d need to source it separately.”

It will be interesting to see where this model goes. I would bring the connection between enterprise 2.0 and mass collaboration a bit closer than the current model depicts since this mass collaboration can, and should, occur within the enterprise as well as out on the web as a whole through projects like Cisco I-Prize. One of the benefits of a social networking tool that combines social bookmarking like Connectbeam, is that we can help with this mass collaboration by getting the right people together inside the enterprise to more effective engage in this collaboration. Susan and Jevon are inviting contributions to their evolving model in this shared space.

Mixing Hardware and Social Software

Daniela Barbosa recently did an interesting post, A VC Calls for Startup Ideas and I Ponder What I am Doing at Dow Jones, on the list of Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund by VC Paul Graham. She discussed a number of his desired concepts as they relate to her work at Dow Jones. I highly recommend the post.

I was also drawn to look at Paul Graham’s complete list and from this interesting desired idea - Hardware/software hybrids. Paul writes “Most hackers find hardware projects alarming…Hardware is already mostly software. What I mean by a hardware/software hybrid is one in which software plays a very visible role. If you work on an idea of this type you'll tend to have the field to yourself, because most hackers are afraid of hardware, and most hardware companies can't write good software. (One reason your iPod isn't made by Sony is that Sony can't write iTunes.).”

We put our social software into a piece of hardware for many reasons but security is certainly one of them. In addition, with a rapidly changing technology, we did not want clients to have to deal with implementation concerns and face any issues with upgrades. We literally adopted a plug and play approach through a hardware/software hybrid to get things not only inside the firewall but also inside the box, the one we provide. It also enables one click back up and restores, one click upgrades, and automatic authentication. We find that many of our large customers appreciate the added security. It is nice to get the added validation of the concept through Paul Graham’s list.

Is Increased IT Investment and Disruptive Technology a Business Game Changer?

Andrew McAfee addresses this question in a clever way in a recent post, Technology Beats a Full House. He begins with a long discussion on the decline of variation in baseball hitter’s averages. He references the work of Steven Jay Gould in Full House and quotes his conclusion that “Complex systems improve when the best performers play by the same rules over extended periods of time. As systems improve, they equilibrate and variation decreases.” In baseball there have been no significant game changing rules in over 100 years so the variation in batting averages has continued to decline as the stats show.

Andrew then takes this concept to business to see what, if any, game changing events might disrupt the performance of companies. Andrew writes, “If the combination of the Web and commercial enterprise IT really was a ‘game changer’ for the competitive game of business, then the introduction of these technologies should be accompanied not by a decrease in variation in performance, but instead by the opposite—an increase in performance spread among competitors.” He looks at data from the 1962 to 2004 and finds a major disruption in the variation in company performance through several measures beginning in the 90s when significant investments in enterprise IT began.

He divides industries into those who spend heavily on IT and those that do not. He found that “For virtually all the ratios we considered, variation in high-IT industries started to increase in the mid 1990s and stayed high after that, with some exceptions during the post-2000 economic slump. The less IT an industry had, the less pronounced this trend was.” Andrew offers some useful graphs that clearly illustrate the dramatic difference between industries that spend more on IT and those that do not. These results support the idea that IT is a disruptive game changer and that as rules change, the winners become more separated from the losers.

Enterprise 2.0 and social software are changing the rules of engagement in business now. Andrew’s evidence suggests that the winners will come from those who continue to invest in these disruptive technologies. The data also suggests that the gap between winners will increase during this disruptive period until the rules settle down again, if that ever happens.

Defrag 2008 Conference Discount

The Defrag conference will be held November 3-4 in Denver Colorado. It is “focused on the tools and technologies that accelerate the "aha" moment, and is a gathering place for the growing community of implementers, users, and thinkers that are building the next wave of software innovation.” Connectbeam is pleased to be a sponsor.

There is a great array of speakers including Esther Dyson, Stowe Boyd, Daniela Barbosa, Charlene Li, and Clay Shirky. Rich Hoeg, from Honeywell and one of our clients is speaking on “Social Search in the Corporate Environment.” I will be speaking on “Unleashing the User Generated Content Inside of Enterprise Apps.”

As a Gold Sponsor of the event, we can pass on a discount code to you that is offering an additional $100 off the early bird registration. Use the code – cb1 – and this defrag conference link.

Always On and STVP Summit at Stanford

The AlwaysOn & STVP Summit at Stanford is a two-and-a-half day executive gathering that highlights the significant economic, political and commercial trends disrupting the global technology industries. It is taking place July 22-24, 2008 at the Arillaga Center on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, CA. It is anticipated that over a thousand technology, media and entertainment CEOs, business development officers, venture capital and private-equity investors, and leading members of the press and blogging community will attend this event. The agenda is very comprehensive and you see at their site through the link above.

At this event the Always On editors will also honor the AO Global 250 Top Private Companies. Fifty of the top CEOs from the AO Global 250 will present their market strategies to a panel of industry experts in our “CEO Showcase” in sessions over the two and half days. I am very pleased to be part of one of these sessions. On July 24 at 10:45 at Faher Hall our panel will include. Maynard Webb, CEO, LiveOps, Lyle Fong, CEO, Lithium, Bill Cook, CEO, Greenplum, Manish Sood, CEO, C-Mail, Billy Marshall, CEO, rPath, and myself, CEO at Connectbeam.

Immediately following our CEO presentations, industry experts will comment, and the CEOs will be available for 30 minutes of Q&A in the lobby. The industry experts for our sessions are: Steve Schlenker, Managing Partner, Chief Investment Officer, DN Capital, David Nanto, Director, NEC Corporation of America, Sanjiv Parikh, Managing Director, Corporate Ventures, HP. I hope you can attend if you are at the event.

Enterprise 2.0 Virtual Conference - July 23, 2008

This Wednesday, July 23, ebiz is sponsoring an Enterprise 2.0 Virtual Conference. David Mitchell Smith from Gartner will provide a keynote, Innovating the Enterprise with Web 2.0, and Rob Koplowitz from Forrester will offer another keynote, Control Versus Chaos: The Enterprise Web 2.0 Effect. I am participating in a panel, Web 2.0 and SOA, with Dan Woods, CTO and Editor, Evolved Media, and Nathaniel Palmer, President, Transformation+Innovation.

Here is the description of our panel from the ebiz site. “Web 2.0 is about enabling end users to easily access information from multiple sources, and use it in new and creative ways, including creating new applications, and customizing their interactive web experience. But will end users actually be able to create their own mash-up applications? How will IT control and manage this new breed of applications? Is SOA still a relevant part of this discussion? What are the implications for IT infrastructure requirements?”

I hope you will be able to participate. Registration details are on the ebiz site description of the session. Krissi Danielsson writes an ebiz blog, Saas Week, to support the conference series.

Birth of a Business Blog – Joe Nocera

I was interested in reading Joe Nocera’s post on Birth of a Blogger. Joe is the Talking Business columnist for The Times. His new blog, Executive Suite, “offers his take on topics from Steve Jobs and iPhones to the future of General Motors — and much more.”

In Birth of a Blogger, Joe explains why he started this blog. Joe said he resisted starting a blog for some time. He claims he is “an ink-stained wretch in his mid-50s; people my age have a hard time adapting to this new world. But I’ve come around, for several reasons.” First, his weekly column only appears once a week, and there are good stories everyday. Joe also said he gets hundreds of emails after his column appears and it is not possible to carry on individual dialogs with each reader. So the blog should consolidate these conversations and make them accessible to others to join in. His solution is that “every week, I plan to post a short preview of my column on Friday, with a link to it once it is posted on nytimes.com, after which I hope you’ll weigh in with your own response.”

I find it encouraging when an old media guy starts using the new media and when he says he will take more risks with the new media. We started this blog at Connectbeam to also have more frequent conversations with our customers and the market. We hope you find it useful and please share any observations you have.

New Aberdeen Report Indicates that Best-in Class Companies Make Greater Use of Social Computing

I recently read the June 2008 Aberdeen Group report, Workforce Collaboration and Web 2.0, that has some nice things to say about social bookmarking and social computing, in general. The report drew on an aggregation of surveys and interviews with more than 270 organizations worldwide. They defined workforce collaboration as “connecting employees and sharing knowledge to achieve identifiable goals.” That sounds like our objectives for Connectbeam.

For purposes of their analysis, the Aberdeen Group divided companies into best-in-class, industry average, and laggards. The best-in-class group reduced project completion time on average by 34%, shortened time to resolution on average by 22%, improved new employee time-to-productivity on average by 19% and decreased training cost per employee on average by 14%. These are all good numbers.

Using these distinctions, Aberdeen then looked at the use of web 2.0 (aka social software) for collaboration in the best-in-class group. They found that 39% of companies that are considered best in class use social software to find the experts within their organization while only 20% of companies than are not considered best in class do this. This means that best-in-class organizations are 69% more likely to use social software to ensure employees are connected to subject matter experts.

These best-in-class organizations also make significantly greater us of social software throughout the employee talent management process. For example, 48% of best-in-class organizations use social software to help with employee on-boarding while only 11% of the others do this. An important part of on-boarding is finding the right people in the organization and to understand who knows what about what. These are all objectives for Connectbeam.

The Aberdeen report said that these best-in-class organizations are using social software in more strategic ways and more “more likely to focus on capturing institutional knowledge, expertise, and experiences, codifying it and making it available throughout the organization.” I could do agree more. They also said that these best-in-class companies “focus on generating and capturing content form the workforce and allowing others to access it and add to it.”

There is a lot of additional valuable material in the report. The Aberdeen report concluded with these required actions for companies than want to be best-in-class and remain in this status. They must capture and transfer organizational know-how, seek collaboration between IT, HR, business managers to ensure the right technologies can be supported, and educate stakeholders on the potential and derived value of workforce collaboration. The first action has been covered above. I think the second is also critical as there needs to be an enterprise strategy for social software to achieve the network effects on enterprise collaboration and information access and to avoid creating a lot of silos of disconnected social software tools. This second goal is essential to produce the substantial value that can be communicated in line with the third action.

This is one in a series of analyst’s reports that are consistently coming out of the value of enterprise social computing. I have covered the Gilbane report on Collaboration and Social Media-2008, the Forrester Report on how Corporate Social Networks will Augment Strategic HR Strategies, the AIIM Research on the Need for Integrated Approach to Enterprise 2.0, and the Forrester Predictions of Large Growth in Social Networking Market. Each of these reports are consistent with, and support, the Aberdeen conclusions.

Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web (and Enterprise) Search?

Here is an interesting paper, Can Social Bookmarking
Improve Web Search?, I found (via ReadWriteWeb and Mike Gotta). It starts with the statement that search is probably the most important application on the web and goes on to say, “what will be the next big thing that substantially improves search quality? One of the big contenders for this "next big thing" is social search: the idea of adding user annotations or other metadata to the process.” So they looked at the question in their title, Can Social Bookmarking
Improve Web Search?, by studying the effects of del.icio.us. Their main major findings were: “Social bookmarking URLs are full of new and fresh information (Results 1 and 2). Tags on URLs are often redundant given title, domain, and page text (Results 10 and 11). Social bookmarking is probably still a bit small to have a big impact on web search (Results 8 and 9).”

As I have written, social bookmarking and tags are not the same thing. Enterprise social bookmarking goes beyond simply applying tags and tags are used widely outside social bookmarking in a variety of tools. I like the first two results as they support the use of social bookmarking. In terms of the results 10 and 11, this redundancy is generally avoided with type of tagging done through Connectbeam.

This research was done in the context of the consumer web, where I guess you need that critical mass of tags relative to the overall index of the entire World Wide Web. Things work differently within the enterprise where the volume within the index is smaller. Also, the fact that page links do not get refreshed as often in an enterprise search index setting (compared to public internet), that adds a new parameter to this research and equation that was not even touched upon in this research as it primarily focused at the consumer web. Therefore, our take is that this inflexion point of influence described in results 8 and 9 above arrives much sooner in the enterprise. In addition to providing social information to complement search results, Connectbeam can also be used to augment enterprise taxonomies and search indexing.

Connectbeam on the Scoble Show via YouTube

Here is a link to a YouTube presentation of a Connectbeam demonstration I did on the Scoble Show back in 2006. It provides an overview of some of our basic functionality. Hope you enjoy the show. I posted on some of this functionality here at Connecting Social Networking and Social Bookmarking but the video provides a personal look. A longer version is available at the Classic Scoble Show blog.

CMS Watch Says to Look Carefully at Social Software Vendors, Big and Small

Computerworld recently commented on a study by CMS Watch that found a “general lack of system and administrative services threatens to undermine the benefits of improved collaboration and networking from social software technologies.” Tom Byrne, CMS Watch founder’s comments are based on a recent CMS Watch study’s findings that evaluated 20 major social software suppliers through extensive technology research and customer interviews.

Tom commented that while enterprise customers are showing increasing interest in extending internal social tools outside the firewall, vendors are having difficulty supporting customers’ internal and external environments at the same time. CMS Watch attributes this difficulty to significantly different functional, performance, and security profiles of both environments. CMS Watch commented that while the large players like “Microsoft, Oracle and IBM have actively promoted their social software products, each arrived relatively late in this market segment. Consequently, such vendors still rely on established portal services for key functionalities.”

I am pleased that they found a silver lining in the study, “Despite the gloomy study results, CMS Watch notes some exceptions such as wiki vendor Atlassian that provides comparatively strong security and access control. The analyst firm says that hosted community vendor Awareness has good multi-site management; while Connectbeam’s social networking solution provides highly functional back-up and restoration services.”

The Computerworld article concludes, “"Customers should not automatically assume that social software modules from their incumbent vendors are somehow more mature or better integrated than some of the smaller players in this space," says CMS Watch research analyst, Jarrod Gingras.” I am very pleased to see Connectbeam included in this group of respected smaller players. We have focused on the needs of the enterprise, and internal deployment from the start with increased security and other features. We are also working to integrate with and enhance the offering of the large players with our Microsoft Sharepoint and Google Enterprise Search integration.

Social Bookmarking has Great Value in the Enterprise – Thomas Vander Wal

I was pleased to see Thomas Vander Wal’s post, Getting More Value in Enterprise with Social Book Marking (via BizTechTalk). Thomas is an information architect best known for coining the term "folksonomy."He is also known for initiating the term "infocloud." Under the subheading social Bookmarking has Great Value in the Enterprise, he starts, “Every organization needs to know itself better then they currently do…The need to connect people inside an organization with others with similar interest, contexts, and perceptions is really needed.”

Thomas then goes on to say, “As people also share these bookmarks in the organization with their tags and annotations, they also realize quickly they are becoming a valuable conduit to helping others find information and they grasp the value they will derive from being a resource that adds value in the organization. Other people derive value from information in the organization and outside it being augmented with individual perspectives and context.”

Thomas next has some nice words to say about Connectbeam in this context, “When this is pair(ed) with search, as Connectbeam does with their social search that pairs with existing pairs with existing FAST, Google Search Appliance, and others in-house search engines, the value the whole organization receives is far beyond the cost and minimal effort people are putting into the tools to get smarter, by more easily holding on and sharing what they know.” I have great respect for Thomas’ viewpoints so these words and much appreciated. He has captured our goals at Connectbeam.

Thomas concluded that every attendee to workshops he has delivered on enterprise 2.0 quickly sees that they undervalued the impact and capability of social bookmarking in the enterprise. His firm, InfoCloud Solutions, provides consulting and training in many areas of enterprise 2.0 There is an extensive list of workshops at his InfoCloud Solutions site.

Let’s Not Confuse Tagging with Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is often called tagging or a tagging system. While tagging is an important part of a social bookmarking system, it can cause confusion to say they are the same thing. The wikipedia offers many definitions for tags within eight categories from sports to personal identifiers. The relevant one here is “Tag (metadata), a keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information.”

The wikipedia defines social bookmarking as “a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata.” It goes on to add,” Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags.” So tags are an important component to most social bookmarking systems but they are just one component and tags are not limited to social bookmarking. Social Bookmarking helped make tagging popular so they are often called tagging systems and the act of using one is often called tagging. Now social bookmarking has moved beyond the internet to move inside the enterprise through tools such as Connectbeam. At the same time, more and more other tools are allowing for tagging as they realize its benefits.

Going to the full definition of tags (metadata) in Wikipedia, we find that, “Tagging was popularized by websites associated with Web 2.0 and is an important feature of many Web 2.0 services. It is now also part of some desktop software.”

This widespread use of tags beyond social bookmarking, while providing an added benefit within these systems, has the potential to create multiple silos of tags within the enterprise. This issue is one that we are working on and I will be writing more about it in the coming weeks.

More on the Rise of Social Bookmarking and Social Networking in Enterprise 2.0

The recent Gilbane report on Collaboration and Social Media-2008 has some interesting statistics. In their research Gilbane looked at medium-sized to very large companies — $25 million or above in revenue and more than 250 employees in size. They picked this size as they felt firms of this size or larger are most likely to be seeking solutions to their communications, collaboration, and information sharing problems. I would agree. Working with the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, headed by Nora Barnes, the survey researchers conducted telephone interviews with 286 respondents in November and December 2007.

Among other things they looked at how people were using social media and how they felt about a number of social media, both channels that might be considered Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. When asked to rate different media as "very effective" - social bookmarking – (46%), mashups (48%), and social networking (59%) achieved the three highest scores of enterprise 2.0 tools , well ahead of blogs, wikis. podcasts, and even RSS. They also added that social bookmarking adoption rates are expected to grow significantly (66%) next year. This is consistent with the Forrester Reports I commented on earlier (see Forrester Predicts a Large Growth in Social Networking Market but How Will Its Integration Occur with the Enterprise?) and more recently (Forrester Reports that Corporate Social Networks will Augment Strategic HR Strategies). I am pleased to see this growing recognition of the value of social bookmarking and social networking within the enterprise.

They conclude their extensive report with the following statement. “Over the next five years, we expect the social media tools and technologies to continue to improve, the domain knowledge to expand, and the methodologies to become more sophisticated. Among the emerging population of digital natives, collaboration skills are well developed and participation in communities is a way of life. All in all, we believe that collaboration and social media will be among the fastest-growing technologies and that the information needs of business people throughout the world will be better served.”

This report is further validation that there is a growing market here. Members of our team were recently at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston where we served as a sponsor. We heard that attendance was double from last year and last year was double the year before. We certainly had a lot of interest in our booth and were glad to attend.

More on Integrating Enterprise 2.0 Social Data

I am pleased to see more conversation on creating the integrated Enterprise 2.0 environment. In this case it occurs in a blog post under that name by Ben Gardener on Dif-fer-en-ti-ate. Ben is an internal consultant at a large blue chip Pharmaceutical company based in the UK. His current role involves facilitating clients with re-engineering their work processes.

Ben lays out an architecture to get the social side of enterprise data acting together. There are three components in his scheme.

1. Single User ID – so users have a single identity across all the tools. As Ben writes, Enterprise 2.0 has a big advantage over Web 2.0 as it can leverage this via LDAP or Active Directory.

2. RSS Enterprise Server – an RSS enterprise server could provide a tacit method of aggregating all content from social computing applications with an RSS feed.

3. Tagging Service - this would provide a way to aggregate all keywords/tagging and annotations a user assigns to the content they interact with along with their microblogging.

Ben writes that this approach is achievable. I would agree and it is something we are looking into as it would be very beneficial to the realization of the rich connections possible with enterprise 2.0. I will be writing more on this in the coming weeks. See the post Providing an Integrated Tagging Feature Set for the conversation so far.

Great Advice on How to Comment About Your Company on Blog Posts, Without Being Spammy

As someone who writes a company blog, I was pleased to see this excellent advice from Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb in his post: How to Comment About Your Company on Blog Posts, Without Being Spammy. ReadWriteWeb often writes about new technology and gets many comments so the post draws from their experience and reactions and speaks to those who might comment on their blog. I think their advice generalizes well to any one who comments on technology, whether it is through a blog comment. Michael also offered the interesting statistic that less than one in a thousand who reads a post leaves a comment.

ReadWriteWeb welcomes five types of comments from company representatives: updates on new product developments, clarifications on your product or market position, articulation on product differentiation, kind words about the other companies, and comments that add humor or insider insights. Michael adds concrete examples in his post for each comment type. He adds that these comments work when they are delivered in humble manner and writes they are most effective when, “gently engaged with competitors and focused on adding value to the discussion of the whole sector.” You are also advised to be transparent about yourself and your interests.

This makes sense and is excellent advice. ReadWriteWeb welcomes comments since they want to known as a source for discussion on social media. As they write, much of their advice to blog commenters is common sense. I would add one more suggestion. I think the same rules for conversations in-person meetings apply to social media. Treat conversations on the web like those at events. For most situations, the conversation has already started, the group has already gathered. You need to understand what is being said before you enter the dialogue and then add value.

I also think Michael’s advice applies to those who write company blogs, not simply to the making of comments. Your blog is like a comment to the larger blogosphere. While I do not think your are limited to the five types of comments when you write your company blog, I do think the sprit of humility, transparency, and the attempt to add value to the conversation as a whole still applies to your efforts. I always invite your comments here.

Providing an Integrated Tagging Feature Set

John Eckman wrote an interesting post, Enterprise 2.0 Conference - Social Bookmarking and Tagging, after attending the session of Thomas Vander Wal. Thomas is the man who coined the term “folksonomy. ” The wikipedia now defines this term as “the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is generated not only by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content.” It also gives Thomas credit for its origins.

John focuses provides the presentation from Thomas’s session and focuses on the portion where he says “the tools are “too simple” - where their feature set isn’t the one most likely to lead to effective use by the most users. Stemming, an awareness of the danger of single tags, recognition of co-occurrence of tags, inline help and context setting, as well as an awareness by the tagging application of the social environment in which the user operates, all can lead to a more effective tagging experience.” Thomas says that tags can be lacking structure and less effective when there is no grouping of taggers, the ID does not tie to a person or profile, and there is a lack of a relationship with the tagger. He also adds that they need to work across many applications and services.

I agree completely with both John and Thomas. This is our goal at Connectbeam as I have written in a number of posts on this blog. We want to provide a tagging capability that integrates to enterprise applications, as well as profile information on the tagger and their communities. We combine social bookmarking with social networking. I will not repeat past posts but you can find how this works at the following:

Connectbeam and Microsoft Announce Spotlight ConnectTM for SharePoint 2007

Connecting Social Networking and Social Bookmarking

Connectbeam Release 2.2 Offers Enhanced Enterprise Application Integration Opportunities for Social Networking and Social Bookmarking

New Online Community for Collaboration and Content Management - Content Management Connection

A few weeks ago, I joined George Dearing’s social networking group, Content Management Connection. It is an “online community for technology practitioners, software companies, and end users to share thoughts and ideas on the changing landscape of content management and collaboration. This site is produced by The Dearing Group LLC., a marketing and new media communications company.”

There are 46 bloggers the last time I looked. A number of the participating blogs are already on my blog list and others look interesting. You can add your own blog to have it reach a new audience. It also has news, events, and surveys. In addition, there are features like most read posts, ability to comment on posts, quick surveys with instant results, most discussed authors, most active authors, most highly rated posts, etc.

George also writes his own blog on new media, marketing, and technology. I liked his post on 3 mistakes customers make with their content. Essentially, he warns people against buying on price or personal reasons and using last decade’s technology but goes into more detail. I think these are also more likely the last decade's buying practices but agree with George that they are still around. With all the integration possibilities within enterprise 2.0 these tendencies can cause even more problems now for the buyers who uses them. George also regularly publishes links to key content management and enterprise 2.0 reports and blog posts.

Forrester Reports that Corporate Social Networks will Augment Strategic HR Strategies

Zach Thomas of Forrester recently came out with a report, Corporate Social Networks will Augment Strategic HR Strategies, which stated that enterprise social networking applications are an emerging trend. Assisting on the report were Paul Hamerman, Claire Schooley, Charlene Li, and Meghan Donnelly. Zach added that many business processes could benefit from these applications. He wrote in the summary, “savvy human resources (HR) professionals are taking the lead and using them for recruiting, alumni programs, mentoring, learning, collaboration, and connecting people across the entire organization. They understand that corporate social networks are not a replacement for human interactions; this technology should augment — not replace — existing process automation apps, and they will need broad internal support for their initiatives to succeed.”

This has been a theme at Connectbeam and we are pleased to see these conclusions from Forrester. The report begins with a section titled, “professional networks are the backbone of business.” I could not agree more. He points out that collaboration translates into innovation, strong personal ties increase employee retention and they help with sales. He added that failure to establish a means to support this networking can result in lost knowledge when someone leaves, difficulties in finding the right people to help with pressing business challenges, failure to optimize relationships across geographies, and disappointment in younger workers who experience these networks outside work and expect them to be provided on the job. These younger employees may then turn to consumer web tools that are not designed to support business functions (see The Role of Facebook in the Enterprise) and will only operate in silos of the subset who might engage with them.

Zach offers a number of useful HR related applications for social networking applications in the report. It is nice to see Forrester continue to cover enterprise 2.0 and social networking. They predicted in an earlier report on the enterprise web 2.0 market that social networking applications will make up the largest share of the $4.6 billion that enterprises will be spending on enterprise web 2.0 applications by 2013 (see Forrester Predicts a Large Growth in Social Networking Market but How Will Its Integration Occur with the Enterprise?).

Zach divides the corporate social networking software market providers into three groups: targeted solution providers, adjacent solution providers, and platform players such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Connectbeam is included in his list of targeted solution providers and points out that we operate behind the firewall. We feel this offers greater security, control, and integration into company IT infrastructure than operating out in the cloud. Zach predicts that larger established application vendors will lag behind innovators in this space. At the same time, he predicts that many firms will stay with established tools such as Sharepoint as the market matures. This is one reason we recently announced our Sharepoint integration. He concludes with the good advice to align social networking tools with pressing business problems.

Connectbeam and Microsoft Announce Spotlight ConnectTM for SharePoint 2007

Today, I am pleased that Connectbeam and Microsoft jointly announced, at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008, Spotlight Connect™ for SharePoint, an add-on module allowing for the integration of Connectbeam Spotlight™ (formerly referred to simply as Connectbeam) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Availability for the add-on module is planned for July. Our Spotlight Connect™ allows SharePoint to better leverage the “social metadata” that is generated naturally as employees interact with information and colleagues. Now each person’s tags, bookmarks, as well as relevance rankings of these indicators become available and useful to everyone in the organization from within the Office SharePoint Server 2007 platform.

A large part of Andrew McAfee’s original vision in Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, was the ability to support more spontaneous, knowledge-based collaboration. He wrote back in 2006, “These new tools, the author contends, may well supplant other communication and knowledge management systems with their superior ability to capture tacit knowledge, best practices and relevant experiences from throughout a company and make them readily available to more users.” We feel the integration of Connectbeam Spotlight increases the enterprise 2.0 impact of Sharepoint and is part of our ongoing efforts to integrate with enterprise applications.

Connectbeam Spotlight gives employees across the company not only a platform for finding highly relevant information and documents quickly, but also for discovering the people and expertise behind that content. Spotlight makes the social metadata, the data that describes the experiences and knowledge of colleagues from across the company, accessible to everyone through a central tag repository. Here is a demonstration of the Connectbeam Spotlight integration with Office SharePoint Server 2007.

One of our mutual clients, Thomas Chapin, Director, Knowledge Management, WBB Consulting in Reston, Virginia, said, “The fact that Connectbeam allows the capture and use of actual day-to-day and historical human experience in an organization (in conjunction with their central tag repository) means that when paired with SharePoint Server 2007, all the promise about collaboration can actually happen… naturally. As an enterprise license holder of both Connectbeam Spotlight and SharePoint, we’re pretty excited about the possibilities.” So are we. I will have more about this in upcoming posts.

Many Blogs Make Top 25 Tech News Sites.

Blogs are a great way to get the news out and they have also become trusted sources for many people. eBizMBA provides many top 20 - 30 lists, such as the 25 most popular tech news sites. These tech news sources were ranked by a combination of Inbound Links, Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, and U.S. traffic data from Compete and Quantcast. eBiz MBA added, “Although no traffic metrics are completely accurate we do believe the data below to be useful for gauging relative audience size.”

To no surprise blogs play a major role, while the CNet News and ZDNet sites are numbers one and two, the blogs, TechCrunch (Michael Arrington) and Mashable (Pete Cashmore) are numbers 5 and 6. The top two sites also have a number of blogs within their sites. We cover a number of these on our blog list, so it was nice to see them in the top 25 sites (web sites and blogs). In addition to TechCrunch and Mashable, we have GigaOM.com (14), ReadWriteWeb (Richard MacManus) (15), and Scobleizer (21). We also have a number of the ZDnet bloggers such as Joe McKendrick, Dana Gardner, Dion Hinchcliffe, and Dan Farber. If CNet News and ZDNet aggregate the bloggers into their traffic results then bloggers are really all over the top 5, as well as the top 25.

Check out the complete list. It makes good reading.

Enterprise 2.0 2008 Conference Offers Discount

Connectbeam is pleased to be a sponsor of the Enterprise 2.0 conference. As a sponsor, you can use our discount code CMBYEB34 to get a 20% discount on attendance if you use the Enterprise 2.0 Conference link to register. We will be speaking on "Context is Everything!" on Tuesday June 10 from 5:05 - 5:15 PM. We hope to see you there. The conference will be held at the Westin Boston Waterfront in Boston, MA from Monday, June 9th through Thursday, June 12th. It is a great event with many of the leading thinkers in the Enterprise 2.0 space.

AIIM Research Shows Need for Integrated Approach to Enterprise 2.0

Carl Frappaolo recently wrote in his Taking AIIM Blog, a post on Putting the E in E 2.0. He noted that in their recent research on enterprise 2.0, Market IQ, that they found few organizations have taken a strategic and holistic approach to deployment. He wrote, “In terms of "Enterprise 2.0", in most organizations today, enterprise refers only to use of Web 2.0 technologies within the firewall, not the application of these technologies across the enterprise, leveraged as a truly enterprise resource. This piecemeal approach to deployment, our research found, typically leads to fragmented pockets of functionality, whose value is not maximized or shared across the enterprise.” I could not agree more. His organization is now offering training programs to address this issue.

Our latest product directions at Connectbeam are designed to address this fragmentation. We now allow for integration of our Connectbeam social networking and social bookmarking capabilities with enterprise applications such as Google Search and Sharepoint to look across the enterprise and share the social context of information. We will soon be announcing some new initiatives to take this a step further and help aggregate the social information across the enterprise from multiple sources. I will be writing about it soon on this blog.

“People and Information are Deeply Mismatched in Most Organizations” - Andrew McAfee

Andrew McAfee recently posted on - What I Said About the Revolution. He said that at a recent event he was asked to "Briefly describe a “design flaw” or “impediment” that undermines the capacity of organizations to adapt, innovate, or fully engage the talents of their members." In response to this question, Andrew said in bold that, “Impediment or design flaw: People and Information are Deeply Mismatched in Most Organizations.”

Andrew went on to write, “it is striking how few opportunities people have to generate, modify, and share information freely and widely on the Intranet, especially when compared with their abilities to do the same on the Internet. Since so many organizations describe people as their most important assets, it is puzzling why these opportunities are so constrained.”

In response to this challenge, Andrew proposed the following again in bold, “Radical Remedy: Create an Emergent, Social Enterprise Information Environment.” He added, “This environment should contain mechanisms to let structure emerge over time; such mechanisms include linking, tagging, voting, rating, and trading, as well as algorithms that generate recommendations, assess relative popularity, etc.”

As you might imagine, I agree completely with his diagnosis and his remedy. This has been our goal at Connectbeam from the start. We want to connect people through their ideas and provide a number of the features that Andrew describes above. It is nice to hear this position articulated by one of the most respected new IT thinkers. Andrew was recently selected as number 38 on the top 100 Most Influential People in IT by Ziff Davis. As an aside, Andrew credited his blog as a major reason for this influence. I hope he continues with messages such as the one above.

Infovark - Blog “Digging the World Of Enterprise 2.0”

Dean Thrasher and Gordon Taylor write the blog, Infovark. They also run the enterprise 2.0 software company by the same name, headquartered in Northern Virginia. Their first product, also call Infovark will appear later this year. I am sure they are hard at work getting this out but they have also managed to write the blog since September 07, when they founded the company.

They recently responded to my post on Making the Enterprise Knowledge Market More Robust in a post, What do you know?. They wrote, “The real knowledge in your enterprise is in your colleagues’ brains” and add later, “Most people learn more things from each other than from reading a procedure manual or browsing the corporate library.” Not understanding this simple premise was the problem with many traditional knowledge management efforts. I agree and this is the premise of Connectbeam, making it easy to connect people around business ideas.

Dean and Gordon are providing some useful commentary on other enterprise 2.0 bloggers (e.g., Jon Husband and Kathy Sierra) on enterprise 2.0 and productivity. Their blog has an interesting feature. There is the regular blog, and then the underground blog. When you click on the underground part - you find the link back to the front end is referred to overground. The overground blog has more traditional commentary posts and conceptual pieces about their product development efforts. The underground is where they share some of the technology and experiences they run into as they build Infovark. It is much more about the technical bits. This is nice way of splitting their content for two different audiences.

Dean and Gordon are also big on Twitter and you can access their Twitter feed from their blog if you what even more immediate indications about what they are up to. I look forward to their release.

Biggest Enterprise & Web 2.0 Business Obstacles: Security and Information Leakage

Actually, those two issues sound like variations on the same theme. A recent study reported in eWeek, Enterprises Diving into Web 2.0 Waters, said that, “When asked to name their two biggest concerns with social networks and other Web 2.0 technologies, respondents named security more than any other issue (41 percent), followed by a fear that these open platforms would result in leaks of sensitive company information (35 percent).” At the same time adoption of “web 2.0 technologies” was largely driven by the desire to help workers inside the firewall with 82 percent of respondents indicating serving current employees was the adoption driver. Consistent with this goal, when asked about the goal for implementing the new web technologies, 71 percent of respondents said improved communication and collaboration among internal staff, while only 46 percent said it was improved communication and collaboration with customers.

Like other studies on enterprise usage, the study found little love for consumer social networking tools like Facebook but instead businesses looked for tools designed for business objectives. There has been some talk in the press about social networking tools having a negative effect on productivity. The study found the opposite as only 15 percent of respondents worried that the use of the new web tools would cause a hit to employee productivity. Cost reduction is also not a driver even thought some tools are free. Only 15 percent of respondents to the survey named “reduction in IT costs through the use of free apps” as one of their two biggest drivers for implementing Web 2.0. This is not surprising as a free tool might not be the first choice to an enterprise buyer who wants proper support and continuity from the software provider.

The article also quoted a Forrester study that found “three challenges face vendors: IT shops are wary of what they perceive as insecure, consumer-grade technology; ad-supported Web 2.0 tools on the consumer side have set ‘free’ as a starting point; and Web 2.0 technologies enter a crowded space dominated by legacy software investments.”

All of these trends align with our goals at Connectbeam. The security issue was one reason we created Connectbeam as an application packaged and delivered as an Appliance that sits behind company firewall. It is also designed to not compete with legacy enterprise applications but, instead, we integrate with many of them. We did not modify a consumer Web 2.0 application for the enterprise but designed a social networking application for making business connections within the enterprise. The study found that twenty-seven percent of respondents said they had implemented a social network for use at their company and Forrester sees this number as growing, both in an absolute sense and as a percentage of the enterprise 2.0 tools that organizations adopt. This also makes sense as blogs and wikis, the current leaders, can be brought in on an individual basis without approval. A social networking tool has a broader enterprise reach and requires approvals at broader levels to be effective. We are seeing that an increasing number of firms understand the value of business social networking tools and feel excited about what is happening in the market.

Connectbeam Enterprise Social Computing Covered at Minnibar 2008

Matt Craven at Blog Herald recently blogged about a presentation at the May 10th Minnibar by Rich Heog that included his firm’s use of Connectbeam. Minnibar is the Minnesota version of barcamp with the description, “Technology & Design (un)Conference: No Spectators, Only Participants.” Their site is a wiki and is a great use of that tool. There were over 423 participants and the site contains photos, media mentions, blog posts, Twitter updates, and other related information and links.

Matt attended Rich’s presentation and blogged it live. He wrote, “Connectbeam integrates with Exchange Server, if that’s your poison, and integrates with internal Google search appliances as well as external Google searches. It’s not an issue integrating services like LinkedIn, Facebook, and others into the Connectbeam platform.” He later adds that his firm has “tried for years to build a skills database to let folks connect with each other - the tagging within Connectbeam has really fulfilled that function. Senior leaders (direct reports of CEO) are using the system to some extent - and want to foster more connectivity amongst individual contributors throughout the company.”

You can see the whole post at Minnebar: Social Search in the Corporate Environment on Blog Herald. Thanks to Matt and Rich for the coverage. As their site states, “The Blog Herald was founded by Duncan Riley in March 2003 as a premium source of blog and blogging related news for bloggers. It was the first blog dedicated exclusively to the news of the blogosphere and remains the longest (and largest) standing resource of its kind.” Matt Craven is the former editor & publisher of The Blog Herald. Currently, Matt is the co-founder of Bryghtpath LLC, a boutique web 2.0 firm located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He blogs at Telegraphik & The Blog Herald.

Rich Heog also covered his Minnibar talk on his eContent blog in the post, Managing Your Most Important Asset: Knowledge, with photo of the presentation. We continue to appreciate his coverage of Connectbeam..

Daniela Barbosa Chitchating about Information Delivery

Daniela Barbosa writes the wonderful blog, Chitchating about Information Delivery. The very prominent blog, ReadWriteWeb recently named her one of the Seven Leading Corporate Social Media Evangelists. It said, “Daniela Barbosa is the Business Development Manager, at Synaptica, a division of Dow Jones Client Solutions. Barbosa is one of the most prominent advocates of semantic technology and data portability inside of a legacy institution. Her personal blog leverages almost every bleeding edge web technology you can think of.”

Her blog also includes a beautiful banner of photos across the top and then excellent content underneath with a lot of cool widgets running down the right column. I need to ask where she got some of that stuff. The archives go back to February 2005.

Daniela gives bloggers some good advice in her post, I Knew There was a Reason I Never Started Smoking, I Was Waiting for Something Better. She writes that it is important to understand the behavior that drives people to read blogs if you want to make them successful. Then Daniela covers a small sample study she found on the blog, Paid Content. Many of the bloggers were more obsessive than me about reading their favorite blogs but the idea that stuck out for me was the comment by one of the respondents that she quotes, “Rather than focusing on helping readers wade through a deluge of information content, one could envision tools that focus on the reader’s relationship with the blogger or allowing more fluid, nuanced interactions between bloggers and readers.”

Daniela went on the think of some ways to expand the engagement between readers and bloggers such as matching the readers 'Attention' to specific blog posts so the first posts the visitor sees when visiting a blog are the most relevant to them based on their current attention profile, allowing readers to comment beyond text for example with video replies, and allowing 'real-time' chat on blogs once you post some content.

I find the first one the most intriguing. You can do that manually now in a primitive by going to the categories on this blog that interest you but a more sophisticated multi-dimensional tag-based profile might provide better matches. We also have Google site search on this blog to help you find past content that is off the front page. Perhaps adding more social features like we do with the Google Search Application for the enterprise might enrich the readers experience and the connections with other readers of the blog. When we integrate Connectbeam with Google Search Appliance inside the firewall the combination provides additional ranking based on number of times tagged. This Google integration also offers related tags, related users, and related communities. You are able to see who else did the same search, what they found, what they thought about it, and are provided with the ability to contact this person with a similar interest. What do you think? Daniela asks for more ideas and I do also.

Connecting Social Networking and Social Bookmarking

According to many surveys, including the Forrester report I recently commented on, social networking is on the rise within the enterprise. I will continue to discuss our new directions on this blog, as well as general thoughts on our industry, but before going on, I want to share our fundamental belief about how to make social networking effective within the enterprise. It has to be built around business information access and discovery. This is why we integrated social networking and social bookmarking within Connectbeam from the start. As we mention on our web site, our goal is to connect people with ideas. We do this through four interrelated approaches: social bookmarking and tagging that leads to information discovery: social networking that leads to people discovery: expertise location that leads to communities of interest; and collective intelligence that provides the most relevant search results and their social context. We see these connections helping people within our clients to solve their business problems. We have found that Connectbeam spreads virally across an enterprise as people see the results of connecting the information and social sides of search. It makes enterprise 2.0 concrete without referring to the term or needing to propose the concept in the abstract.

We work in a standalone mode or integrated with other enterprise applications such as Portals like Sharepoint, Enterprise Search sytems like Google Search Appliance, FAST, and more, to add social context to search and allow for more social networking around search for information. I have covered the Sharepoint integration elsewhere. We also connect with Google Search Appliance, and FAST to provide additional ranking based on number of times tagged. This Enterprise Search Integration also offers related tags, related users, and related communities right within these enterprise search application front-ends. You are able to see who else did the same search, what they found, what they thought about it, and are provided with the ability to contact this person with a similar interest. Just as with our Sharepoint integration, our Google and FAST integration takes the Google Search Appliance and FAST even deeper into enterprise 2.0.This Enterprise Search connection not only integrates social bookmarking with social networking, but it also integrates social networking with search. These are just two examples of how we integrate with existing IT applications. I will cover the full spectrum of our integration with spans beyond portals and enterprise search into additional enterprise IT applications in subsequent posts.

We also wanted to take a novel approach to implementation to be more competitive with the large players entering this space. With a rapidly changing technology, we did not want clients to have to deal with implementation and deployment (getting the application up and running) concerns and face any issues with upgrades. This is why we created a hardware and software solution combined, packaged and delivered as a turn key Appliance that allows for a real plug and play solution to get things not only inside the firewall but also inside the box. It also enables one click back up and restores, one click upgrades, and automatic authentication to your enterprise directory services. We have been pleased that a number of the very large enterprises have adopted Connectbeam. Given their respective markets, these clients have appreciated the security, control, and flexibility around deep IT integration that the box offers, as well as our basic social software functionality.