Today we released Socialtext 3.0 to our production hosted service.  Socialtext 3.0 is a trio of enterprise social software applications  built on a common platform:

 

• Socialtext People - Putting social networking for work
• Socialtext Dashboard - Personalized dashboards with work-centric social update feeds
• Socialtext Workspace - Dramatic upgrade to the enterprise wiki for business people

 

There's likely to be a lot of press and blogger coverage about Socialtext today, and a lot of it is likely to cover our announcement of another exciting  product in the works - Socialtext Signals.   Most folks are likely to call it "Twitter for the Enterprise" but we are thinking about it much more deeply - particularly how integrating it with People, Dashboard, and Workspace will help make it much more of a tool that blends with the flow of real work, and not just another cool social app.  But more on Signals later.

 

Socialtext 3.0 has been in the works for awhile, and is the result of lots of learning from our innovative customers, input from our insightful advisors, adaptation of major social software trends in the public Web 2.0 world, and good old-fashioned home grown innovation.  But at all times we focus on making our products relevant and useful to business users, which builds on our years of experience delivering business value with enterprise wikis.

 

Our team has put together a lot of materials to introduce you to these new products and capabilities - and how they work together.   They'll be posted on the main www.socialtext.com website  on an ongoing basis - so check back to see what's new.

 

For our existing customers, we're completely refreshing the Customer Exchange www.socialtext.net/exchange - where we're adding lots of content to help orient you and your colleagues to the new user experience in Socialtext Workspace 3.0 with Socialtext Dashboard, as well as the benefits of blending these with Socialtext People .

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I love Geek and Poke and saw this recently: Geek and Poke

 

I think the concept of attention is a key way to think differently about social networking inside the enterprise.  As I already talked about in a previous blog post Will you be my friend yes or no? the explicit network ties between people who work for the same organization is nowhere near as useful or valuable as the implicit ones - it's not "who knows whom" (and the vanity rolodexes that people put together) but rather "who knows what" and "who knows who knows what" that helps people leverage the company's social network to personal and group productivity.  This implict network is primarily based on who works with whom - independent (but not exclusive) of official org charts. 

In addition to "who works with whom", we're enabling a different type of social capital and connections to emerge - "who pays attention to whom".  Given that the most precious asset that we all have is time, work effectiveness is often a result of how well can can find the most efficient paths to information, knowledge, assistance, experience, and context.  Socialtext People and Dashboard allow you to "follow" a colleague - which includes their work activity updates (not just status "tweets" but actual work - blog posts, wiki entries, people tagging, group/workspace membership changes, etc.).  This is subtly but powerfully different from how patterns emerge in Twitter.  People follow Twitterers because they find what they "tweet" about interesting or fun; Socialtext users follow colleagues because they find what they are working on useful, informative, and relevant.

Back when I was hired into Cisco Systems (September 1997) I remember being overwhelmed by its size, scale, complexity, and pace.  My wonderful boss (Howard Charney - one of the best executives I've ever had the privilege of working with) gave me some great onboarding assistance and told me that the best way to learn the business and the company and how to get things done was to first meet the right people.  He set me up with about 5 different peer VP mentors from different parts of the company.  I'll never forget the advice I got from one of them about the huge amount of information and trying to figure out what's relevant.  He told me to just subscribe to all the same email lists he did, and then unsubscribe from the ones that weren't useful or relevant to my part of the business.  I did that - which was enormously helpful - but I also did the same with 2 of the key direct reports I was now managing who were obviously savvy and effective.  This probably improved my onboarding by over 100% as "breathing their information smog" was a really focused way of figuring out which information firehose to drink from.  I've used that technique at almost every new job since then (although with more modern tools; Ross Mayfield happily donated his ginormous RSS OPML file to me, for example).  We think that "following" in Socialtext People will be even more useful, since you'll get alert feeds based on "in the flow work" from your social network.

So while the Geek and Poke carton is funny, I think the concept is sort of spot on if applied to the enterprise - following and paying attention to the right people can really make you more effective.

 

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There are some fascinating common questions that we get from customers who are excited by the potential of Enterprise 2.0 but who express some trepidation about what the path ahead looks like and means for their organizations.  I say fascinating because while on the one hand many people are hip to what is fundamentally different now - lightweight tools that don't get in people's way, a groundswell familiarity with Web 2.0 tools that have created a prevalent degree of comfort and facility with sharing (through user-contributed content tools such as Flickr), social networking (LinkedIn and Facebook), and "doing things in public" (activity feeds in social networking sites, blogging, and wikis) - many of the questions customers ask reveal the influence of what I think of as a "1.0 amygdala".  Old patterns that trigger fear lie deep despite agile learning in the higher levels of the brain.

Here are some of the more common questions I've heard:

How do I make sure people don't misbehave in public?

Both Ross Mayfield and Michael Idinopulos have written great posts commenting on the New York Times article about the U. S. State Department's Diplopedia wiki.  While I agree with everything they've said, I think there are also some more fundamental things to think about.  What keeps people from misbehaving in general?  Is it explicit rules with explicit penalities?  In broader civic society yes - but what about in the corporate environment?  Aren't general social norms and specific corporate culture stronger guidelines for behavior - and isn't the "enforcement" of that behavior much stronger culturally?  I've always been intrigued by walking into different corporate environments and seeing how quickly you can get a sense of the culture by just watching how people dress, how they speak in meetings, and how they talk to one another.  These are almost never prescribed through  "dress codes" or "communications policies" - they're much more environmental, learned through watching, transmitted through story telling, and "enforced" through typical social norms.

I would submit that Enterprise social software enables and strengthens this sort of cultural transmission and reinforcement, rather than dissipate it.  In our products we've worked hard to make sure that the identity of every activity is associated with that activity - which dampens the temptation to "misbehave".  And just as the group can edit typos and grammatical mistakes in a wiki, so can they collectively enforce social norms in the broader collaborative spaces.

How do I make sure it's not "Shelfware 2.0"?

With traditional collaboration software, adoption has always been tough.  Why?  Because 1. Unless the software provides value to the individual before or while it is creating value for the group at large, the return on investment at the individual task level is too low to motivate enough individuals to do anything, and 2. Unless the use cases for the collaborative environment are directly relevant to helping people get their jobs done, it will always be a special corner case that people feel they are doing "after hours" or as a "special project" or because "my boss told me I had to".

That's why we have singularly focused on identifying true business problems which can be solved through Enterprise social software solutions with specific use cases that are "in the flow" of people's daily work as opposed to "above the flow" of getting work done.  (See Michael's excellent post on this: http://michaeli.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/12/in-the-flow-and.html)  When collaborative use cases are truly in the flow of daily work, the ROI for each individual is higher, which drives participation, which fills the value balloon for the group as a result.

How do I stay safe and keep our IP secure?

This is a big deal, which is why we have extra security and privacy capabilities implemented in our hosted ASP service, and why we also have a unique SaaS appliance that gets deployed on premise with our larger customers but which provides the same continual software upgrade features that our hosted customers enjoy.

How much infrastructure do we have to build and customize before we can get started?  Do I have to do a big enterprise-wide "big bang" to truly get results?

We have a strong philosophical belief at Socialtext (validated through years of helping customers achieve success with enterprise social software) that there is a delicate balance between small, focused initial deployments and building "collaboration as infrastructure" and turning the whole company loose on it.  Our most successful customers have done a little bit of both - a highly focused set of initial projects with clearly defined business objectives and identified teams - with a parallel set of more lightweight projects that are deployed and relevant to a much larger population.  We often start with a template workspace to solve, say, a sales and marketing content problem (RFPs, collateral creation and review, competitive intelligence) while at the same time spinning up a "Wikipedia inside" to help with cross-departmental knowledge sharing, M&A integration, or preparing for a retiring workforce.

What's different about all of this is that the 2.0 generation of technology is so much more social than collaborative, by which I mean software that can provide value to the organization without the first prerequisites of explicit group creation and mandated cultural change, combined with the fact that people in general are much more comfortable sharing and "doing work in public".

So I encourage people to suppress the instinctive fear that is driven from past experience and reframe your questions in the context of a new generation of software and people's comfort with the software- while at the same time recognizing that culture, social norms, and how individuals fit in are still the same.

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At the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston I was struck by a few things:

• There were a LOT of serious businesses (and government organizations) there, and the customer attendance numbers were up significantly from last year. I was particularly impressed by how many companies sent more than one people to the conference and how well-prepared they were.
  
• It was amusing to watch a bunch of Twitter addicts go into withdrawal because the hotel's WiFi was so dysfunctional.
  
•  Customers seem to be moving from "what is it" to "what can I do with it" to "I have a problem identified and am looking for solutions".

It's this last trend that's crucial. This is what transforms an emerging technology category into a sustainable wave that creates success for both customers and for vendors. I'm hoping we can collectively move that trend along by moving the conversation to a pragmatic plane.

• There's real enterprise initiative stuff underneath the huge numbers. Most of the buzz that swirls around this space gets buried behind the really big growth forecasts and vendor buzz - but remember that these numbers come from real research and trends. Forrester analyst G. Oliver Young wrote last month that "56% of North American and European enterprises consider Web 2.0 to be a priority in 2008. A recent survey conducted by AIIM about Enterprise 2.0 applications found that 44 percent of businesses find the technologies "imperative" or "of significant importance" to their organizations.  
  

• Buy-side trends and customer success stories show it's not just buzz -- The barriers to Enterprise 2.0 are still strong. But Holbrook said hostile attitudes toward the technologies are changing. This year, he said, Enterprise 2.0 just might break free of its buzzword status. "I've seen a big shift over the last year or so where is becoming much more enterprise focused. It's no longer kind of a phenomenon. It's a trend that has legs and is not just buzz." Better still are a number of actual customer case studies hitting the market that show real results.
  

Innovation is coming back to the Enterprise.

I've had lots of conversations recently with people who are most jazzed by the Enterprise 2.0 wave because innovation and VC investment in the enterprise market has been so overshadowed by the consumer side of Web 2.0 When was the last truly innovative trend to affect end users in enterprises?
 
The Enterprise 2.0 movement is generating so much innovative energy - both on the vendor side (startups and large companies alike) and on the customer side - that it was the first time in years that I saw this much enthusiasm about enterprise software.

I'll be writing more about this in the next days and weeks and will flesh out some more reflections on what we're seeing in the market - obstacles, opportunities, and best practices.

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CIO Magazine just published an article "How a Marketing Firm Implemented an Enterprise Wiki" based on an interview with Neil Callahan, President of CoActive Digital.  It's a well-written article with some great sound bites from Neil, and I thought I would point out my favorite bits.  These are some great patterns of success that we try to model with most of our customers.

The business leader led

What excites me the most about this Socialtext customer story is that this whole initiative was driven with business problems and issues in mind, and that the business leader (Neil) has been able to keep that perspective front and center throughout the selection, decision, first deployment, and ongoing rollout process.  I can definitely assert that this makes all the difference in social software success stories; too many times I've seen intiative stall where it was a technology team-driven initiative who then shops around looking for business sponsors.

The business leader found the right business-driven use case and team to start with

"Callahan says that moving workflows and processes from e-mail to wikis would only work if there was a good internal use case.  So he turned to his business development group."

This is spot on.  Matching the team (including the personality of that team's leader, the existing internpersonal dynamics of the group, the work culture, and the business priorities of the team) with the initiative really helps in the early days.  It's exciting to see these projects take on a life of their own - the team starts with the right initiative, there's some pre-built content and structure to help them get going, and then their "in the flow" collaboration really starts to build out the value of their workspace - and then other groups quickly take notice and follow their example.

The business leader got buy-in from the group and didn't meddle

This is a hard temptation or instinct to avoid.  I often have to advise the "Executive Sponsor" at our customers to "sponsor yes, inspect no".  In other words it's great to be a passionate and visible champion for the social software initiative at a very senior level of your organization, but be thoughtful and selective about the degree to which you insert yourself into the flow of conversation and dialog that emerges - especially early on.  (Of course there is a wide spectrum of cultural starting points; there are many places where I think executive involvement "in the flow" wouldn't be disruptive.)  Too much senior executive involvement can sometimes intimidate the rank and file from getting their feet wet and "learning in public" - which is a good thing to watch out for.

I can personally relate to this.  When I first joined Socialtext I was raring to go and get involved in everything.  I was commenting on almost every new page, asking questions, adding comments, etc., all with the intent of stimulating and encouraging open dialog, discussion, and debate.  Then someone pointed out to me that until people got to know me better some employees might be a little reluctant to engage in a public dialog with the new CEO.  I wouldn't say I "backed off" as much as "clarified my intent" more, which created a better sense of trust and productive transparency.

Come to think of it, isn't that just classic leadership learning?

 

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Our recent announcements about Socialtext People and Socialtext Dashboard have given me the fun opportunity to demo and discuss our new social networking initiatives with a large number of existing and potential customers.  There's some consistent themes that come up in these conversations, often unprompted by anything I say:

• Many companies have been thinking about the business potential of social networking at work.  Several have even built out complete strategies and visions of what they would like to see working inside of their environment - not just in terms of a technology suite or stack, but also in terms of "fitting in" to their existing way of working.  This is really exciting!
• At the same time many of them have a hard time explaining internally how the most commonly known and used public internet social networking tools show how this would really work "in the real world" of their environment.  "Facebook is just for fun" or "How is that relevant to getting stuff done" or "what problems does that solve for me at work" are frequent questions that people either ask or get asked.
• One nerve that runs deep that our demo often touches comes to the fore when I talk about how we at Socialtext think really deeply and differently about the value proposition of social software in the workplace vs. on the Internet.  We think that the point is to help people and organizations get stuff done, which is dramatically different from "staying in touch" or "showing off how big your network is" or "hooking up".

What prompted me to write about this was a conversation I had yesterday with a new customer.  I was humorously talking about how the explicit "friending" gesture that's at the core of almost every public social networking site just doesn't work as is in the enterprise - after all we work for the same company, and the political ramifications of publicly visible "friend connections" is just subject to too much useless gamesmanship ("look how many execs I'm friends with").  We think the real potential of social software in the work environment goes way beyond explict graphs of "who knows whom" (or really "who says they know whom"), and should address much more powerful things like "who works with whom" and "who knows what" and "who knows who knows what".

My new customer told me I must watch a very funny video called "Facebook in the Real World" which is here for your enjoyment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrlSkU0TFLs

Meanwhile all of this thinking was strongly influenced by one of my most favorite recent reads - David Weinberger's book "Everything is Miscellaneous".  I recommend this book to everyone - but in particular because of his chapter called "What Nothing Says".  My key takeaway is that the implicit is much more powerful than the explicit, and that what I do is more meaningful that what I say about myself.  By extension, what others say about me is likely more relevant and trustworthy (usually) that what I say about me.  These social patterns are much more useful and relevant than explicit links between people who know that the links are explicitly public.

Anyway, enjoy the video.

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I'm really pleased to be able to welcome Julie to Socialtext's board of directors.  All the usual details are in the press release, but there's a lot more to this than what you can fit into a news release.

Julie and I have been swimming in parallel lanes of the same swimming pools for, it seems, our entire careers.  We've both been through the email, collaboration software, and enterprise business models routines, and we both still share a passion for how tremendous customer value and businesses can be built by enabling companies to harness their greatest assets - their people.

We reconnected after I joined Socialtext and I was struck by her breadth of experience, the wisdom and learnings she's gleaned through several different career moves, and the depth of her thinking and pattern-matching that is so important to real-world problem solving.  She's already added significant value through her insights, recommendations, and most importantly her probing "have you thought about..." questions that help us as a team stay on our toes.

I also wanted to state that I had explictly wanted to add a woman to our board - not for PR reasons - but rather because I believe that diversity benefits decision-making.  I've always believed that it's the best idea that should win, and that the best ideas usually emerge from a diverse range of inputs, models, experiences, and perspectives.  We're proud to be able to add someone like Julie to our team.

Julie was honored last week as the Alumni of the Year at her alma mater, and she was the distinguished speaker at the U of Alabama commencement.  Apparently she rocked the house down!

Welcome to the Socialtext team Julie!

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Website redesigns are always a lot of work, but in this case we had a lot more moving parts than usual.  We upgraded our underlying content management system, integrated our trial signup process with our new salesforce.com implementation, and transitioned over to a new blogging platform.

 

We are trying to apply our core agile engineering principles to our website work as well - in other words we are now in position to update and respond to suggestions and feedback on a more iterative basis - so we welcome your feedback.

 

Our recent new product launches (Socialtext 3.0, Socialtext People, Socialtext Dashboard) have been received enthusiastically, and our 4 Solutions are now now front and center on our web presence.  We'll be talking more about these more frequently, especially now that we've upgraded all of our machinery.

 

Feedback and suggestions on the new web site layout welcomed.

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