Deploying, measuring and succeeding with Social Software

Ian McNairn, IBM SWG

What does success mean – critical mass? application use? customer delight? increased profit? in other words be clear what you want.

Know what to measure – communities and social networks are different things – determine the business outcome (look for linked indicators) – get clear about the changes you want to get – think about cause and effect. Just because it’s easy to measure, doesn’t mean it means anything…

Measure impact and usage – based on the business outcome. examples, Knowledge Currency, tagging, polls, linking, availability vs. time-to-complain

Pitfalls to avoid – don’t decide on metrics without thinking about context, don’t measure the past, beware “build it and they will come”, don’t try to boil the ocean, don’t expect all users to have equal understanding.

Deployment tricks to increase success – pre-populate with content, engage the members in interaction, on-demand in-context help, make enrollment easy, reward contributions by example.

Who’s Afraid of Identity?

Tom Ilube, Garlik

Garlik aiming at the “mainstream digital consumer”

Explosion of personal data on the web in last 18 months. Equivalent huge rise in ID theft.

Consumers don’t understand identity management…

But people make decisions about us based on our web status…

And then the talk ended – mostly a “here we are” pitch for Garlik without actually saying anything about what they do…

The Power of Film – Adding video podcasts to the communications mix

Joyce Lewis, University of Southampton

First video podcasting news service in any UK university (March 2006)

“People don’t care about cold facts. They care about pictures or stories” – Nancy Green, Donovan and Green.

ECS website has 827,000 pages(!). Video podcasting backs up a lot of the messages .

Inclusion and empowerment – for example, use of videos to support staff through a major upheaval after a key building was destroyed, adding emotional depth.

JE thought – how is this “Web 2.0″? – feels just like broadcasting to me…

Social Media in Action

Adrian Moss – BOTTLE PR and Focus Business Communications

Poundland Case Study – using social media to support a retail operation.

Number 1 single price discount retailer in Europe. IT driven retail distribution. Lots of short-run and end-of-line product.

Blog experiment to promote Xmas lines – aiming for <£1 cost per visitor

12k visitors in 10 weeks. <50p CPV. Lots of links from blog to company website. 100 active subscribers / Facebook friends. Typically each Facebook friend has 50-100 other friends. Echo chamber effect – 360% increase in referrals to website. Blog probably worth £0.5M already. Extrapolate to a full year, turnover ~ £1.5M <=> 0.5 of a store.

Key was planning. Audience, tone/style/format. Core objectives: engage with key targets, regular posts (3-7/wk), note new product lines.

Lessons: listen to feedback, adjust and adapt go with the flow and the rules, if you make a mistake, acknowledge

KM Goes Social: From KM 1.0 to KM 2.0

David Gurteen

Impact of social tools on Knowledge Management – growth of “KM 2.0″

Techno-centric KM (tools) vs People-Centric KM (attitudes, soft tools)

KM in the doldrums – over-promised, under-delivered in business terms

Social tools are fundamentally about sharing knowledge – personal/social KM! (but not usually coming from the KM community or tool vendors)

Everything is 2.0 now – i.e. participatory. Can be seen as disruptive and subversive.

Combine people-centric KM and social tools to form KM 2.0

Managing tacit knowledge

KM as part of everyday work (thinking out loud) rather than extra work.

Floor comment from Ian Hughes – the importance of allowing lurking as a way of building comfort.

Business in Virtual Worlds, How we got here with Web 2.0

Ian Hughes, Metaverse Evangelist IBM

• What are metaverses and virtual worlds and why are they at a social media conf?
• And why do IBM care?

It’s all about people… In virtual worlds the visible presence and (e.g.) body language provides strong social signals.

Fundamentally no different from blogs, IM etc – still about people and conversations

About user-created content – just like blogs / wikis / flickr

Real-life sensitivities – e.g. the tribute band U2 in SL… except that U2 and the record company seem to have worked out that this doesn’t hurt the U2 brand.

But online reputation counts… identity is important, but some protection in people recognising imposters through inconsistent behaviour.

Intraverses – virtual worlds inside the firewall

Virtual World Guidelines – treat it as a new country, learn and observe, connect and talk with fellow (insert company name), act with integrity, it’s the internet – beware and be broad-minded…

“Web 2.0 is Web Do”

Technology Brings Power to the People

Crispin O’Brien KPMG

Recent survey published – Enterprise 2.0 The Benefits and Challenges of Adoptions

John Chambers CEO Cisco – Cisco moving into enterprise Web 2.0 because old space they compete in is becoming too crowded…

So what has all this stuff got to do with business? And what do you let through the firewall?

Internal benefits – find stuff, keep track of what we know, share who and what we know

External benefits – get really close to customers, harness ideas (LOTS of ideas), find and nurture partners / suppliers

The human dynamics of encouraging people to share and contribute – possibly tie in some part of reward to sharing behaviours?

Email and intranet is bilateral, sequential, run centrally and DULL

To find stuff we use Google – why not use those sort of tools in business

Corporate blogs – ideally uncensored…

Controlled collaboration – walled gardens

The power of tagging.

Innovation and sharing – successful companies of the future need to take heed of all their stakeholders.

There are risks of course, but need to update the controls and risk management.

Facilitating Open Innovation in A Distributed Community Using Free Social Software Tools

Claire Reddington, iShed & Ed Mitchell, Ed Mitchell Consulting

iShed is spin off from Watershed media centre in Bristol, to bring together media and R&D – investing in 6 SMEs to research into media blue sky stuff – including Aardman Animations.

Have used project blogs etc. for years. This time wanted to do something different.

Media Sandbox – looking at pervasive media – want to create a commmunity of interest and support a community of practice.

Quoted Charles Leadbetter

Three year project – three times one year. Want to learn and adapt.

Blogs, mailing lists, 3rd party apps like flickr, physical gatherings, workshops etc.

Preparation, launch event, open innovation, progress and final results…

Collaborative R&D with small SMEs is a big thing – they find it hard to make space to do this blue sky thinking.

By the community for the community – the media community helped shape the criteria for grant award

Question they posed – how can this online stuff help us measure (various success criteria)

Social is Good for Business: Snockles

Neil Burton, Web Spiders

Enterprise Snockles – a corporate version of Snockles – yet another social messaging app which looks like another Twitter.

Aimed at creating a corporate social network to build better commercial and team relationships, improve knowledge management, build communities, speed up innovation.

Web and mobile phone integrated.

Key thought (JE) – why would I want my employer to own my social graph?

Case Study: A Whistlestop Tour Round Web Marketing 2.0

Will Wynne, ArenaFlowers.com

“Old” web marketing – paid search, natural search, retention marketing, PR, Affiliate Marketing, Comparison Shopping, Conversion Rate. Cost, Competition, Risk, Growth, SEO Optimised page <> Friendly page.

Using social media – video

Host clip of a BBC story, “About Arena” video, Show the team, shows that they do their own flowers, used for job ads, embedded in eBay listing using www.vzaar.com, total views 5k. Blog alongside the main site – good google juice, good for morale, human face to business, 4 times the £/page of rest of site. Fun app on Facebook sending virtual versions of the products and sending traffic to main site.

Backend systems are all web-based, faster to change, cheaper to deploy.