What social networking vendors offer, for businesses…

The social networking scene has taken the web by storm as Blogger, Wikipedia, Facebook, MySpace and countless others expand peoples’ reach way beyond their physical community to realms that span across cyberspace.

It so easy.

People create a profile and voilà!

They’re set to share content, ideas and opinions.

Social networking, especially for those who know their way around, is insanely cool. It’s no surprise that so many organizations are looking to setup their own, internally. Once a business social network is up and running, if it’s done right, employees and managers can connect among themselves with ease.

One theory, with regards to business social networks, is that good ideas get validated and bad ideas get discarded more quickly, which leads to faster product development — but it’s just a theory.

In general, companies will benefit, in various ways, from the content that’s being created, shared, added upon and archived for later use.

Any company can make social networking yield benefits but like most new things, it would be foolish to attempt to qualify its financial bottomline usefulness with hard metrics. For the time being, it’s more a matter of getting in early than trying to catch up, later on.

So assuming you’re ready to launch your internal social network, which solution should you choose? Well, that’s for the IT guys to decide but to get the ball rolling, consider the following vendors…

Drupal
- Open source.
- Great at community-driven sites.
- Blogs and profiles.
IBM Lotus Connections
- Paid software.
- Helps you execute tasks more quickly by using dynamic networks of coworkers, partners and customers
- Blogs, profiles, social bookmarks, communities and more.
Jive Software
- Licensed software or hosted SaaS.
- Integrates the “enterprise 2.0″ capabilities of collaboration software, community software and social networking software.
- Wikis, blogs, profiles, social bookmarks, tags, discussions and more.
MS-SharePoint
- Paid server software, MS SaaS or hosted by 3rd parties.
- In its own words: connecting people, process and information.
- Wikis, blogs, profiles and communities.
NewsGator
- Paid software. Extends MS-SharePoint.
- Empower employees, customers and partners to collaborate, communicate, and innovate in order to create business value through social computing.
- SharePoint add-ons for tags, tag clouds, expert search, discussions and more.
Scuttle
- Open source.
- Light on the more advanced features but does social bookmarking like it should.
- Social bookmarking.
Socialtext
- Paid hosted service or on-location server appliance.
- Used for all employees to get a collective view of what’s going on and share content.
- Wikis, blogs, profiles, social bookmarks and microblogging.
Telligent
- Lease the software or buy perpetual licenses.
- Designed for high-volume communities where performance and up-time are critical.
- Wikis, blogs, profiles, groups and communities, social analytics and more.

And as you continue searching for vendors, expect to find lots of other worthwhile finds. Keep in mind that the big software firms are currently being swarmed by waves of smaller firms offering solid codesets and eye-pleasing visuals so expect the heated competition to go on, for a while.

In case you were just thinking about this…

Yes, open source has an advantage over most paid and hosted solutions: it’s free!

It’s also instantly available through a simple download and there’s no licensing fee, whatsoever. If you can make up for a little less “business-class support”, open source scripts will likely end up being your first and all-time best choice. Keep in mind open source projects evolve all the time and all those upcoming updates will also be… free. Which is nice.

And don’t forget that open source projects usually come with mountains of useful plug-ins which add bleeding edge features to your core script. Plus the fact you can dive right into your code and tweak just about anything you want. No encryption here.

But perhaps open source is not your thing.

If that’s your case, paid scripts (or software) or hosted solutions is where you’ll most likely end up as very few organizations develop their own social networking engine from scratch.

With such solutions, the deeper your pockets, the more features you’ll get.

And you’re not too picky, customizationwise, you’ll be up and running rather quickly. Software as a service (or “Saas”) is where many mid-sized companies like to do business because everything’s hosted externally. There can be some cost saving at first but as the content volume grows, it can inflate the rent to the point where it’s not that much of a deal anymore so watch out for that. Do your mathematical projections before you sign-up.

Paid software is generally hosted in-house and it’s generally yours for life but remember that the upgrades might cost you a lot of dough, over and above all the other technical maintenance cost. Again, do your mathematical projections before rearranging your server room to accomodate a business social networking software solution.

If you still feel anxious about deploying a social network in your enterprise, seek help from the vendors themselves or from local IT firms which specialize in web 2.0 stuff.

All in all, if your organization is still unsure about wether it’s worth it to have an internal social network, consider that employees will get access to blogs, wikis and tools that let them communicate, collaborate and share information.

The real bottom-line question might be, how much is it worth, to your enterprise, to have its employees using applications it controls and manages? Once that question is answered, everything else aligns itself accordingly.

Tags: social networking, social networks, internal networks, company social network, enterprise, business, social networking vendors, ibm, lotus, jive, sharepoint, saas, hosted solutions, paid software, .net, microsoft, blogs, wikis, search, information, connect, share, content, server

Business social networking done right

There’s a lot of talk about the value of adding social networking to the communications strategy, in countless organizations who see the benefits but fear the downsides.

While there’s little doubt getting employees communicating with each other will help bring teamwork to a whole new level, allowing everybody the opportunity to contribute the organization’s success through blogs, wikis and such might generate some initial confusion.

The following five (5) best practices tips will help you ensure your business social networking project gets done right.

Test the waters
- People in the business world are asking themselves why they can’t have their very own Blogger, Wikipedia and Facebook, internally.
- If a company doesn’t take it upon itself to offer such tools, employees will find a way to do it themselves, through open source solutions or otherwise.
- Companies can try social networking with a low cost (or no cost) pilot, namely using open source scripts which are widely available. Hosted applications can also help.
Set modest expectations
- To get a project off the ground, don’t try to oversell it. Don’t promise executives that enterprise social networking will unleash, ignite or synergize anything.
- Pitch the project as a pilot. That’s very important. Insist on the option to walk away after a few quarters if it doesn’t work as expected.
- Describe one or two business improvements you think are achievable.
- Make sure to set reasonable goals in regards to user adoption and increase your odds for success by seeding an initial deployment among the teams who appear most eager to use these tools.
- Try to find a way to measure business value.
- Hard numbers might not be expected from a pilot -but- management will want to know the payback, down the line.
Don’t let fear stangle growth
- Some businesses are wary about letting their employees voice out, out of fear that they’ll say improper things. There’s also a fear that the “social” part will spin out of control.
- Even if you’re tempted to vigorously police employee-generaed content, resist that urge! It would have a chilling effect on participation and could tank the entire project.
- First and foremost, it’s a human thing. Employees need time to grow comfortable with speaking up, sharing ideas and participating in company-wide conversations.
- A social networking project will likely wither before it even has a chance of growing if people fear the throught police (don’t make “1984″, all over again).
Resist exclusivity
- Gated communities are what they are, gated. Don’t let that happen within your social network. That approach defeats the purpose of social networking.
- It’s a natural reflex to want all the named groups to be locked down but that will kill teamwork, team spirit and the social aspect of it all.
- Exposing discussions to a broader community has —a lot— of value. Never underestimate this.
Don’t forget about search
- Search underpins the value of social networking platforms. Poor searching (or indexing) tools make social networking less useful.
- As you look for social networking solutions, ask the vendors about their search capabilities. At first, it’s not very important but as content builds up, it becomes essential.
- Make sure the search feature allows for user-generated feedback such as tags and content-rating systems (it sometimes comes through the addition of plug-ins, and thats ok).
- A good search feature helps prevent your social networking platform from becoming another silo, so if possible, consider federated search. As such, your internal search engine should be able to index content in other systems, query 3rd party search engines and pull results from other information repositories.

Regarding search, you could also allow for external engines to query your internal indexes and content but given that we’re dealing with business social networks, that might only be a good idea for a few companies.

Business social networks are all about offering the state of the art in online networking inside the company so employees don’t have to venture outside for such features as blogging and wikis.

Furthermore, many companies are still clueless on how to transfer knowledge between more experienced workers and those who will (some day) replace them. Social networks can help with this by creating easily accessible archives of work-related content which, in time, might prove quite valuable.

Many businesses also use social networking for recruitment purposes. Internal promotion can be simplified and external recruitment of fresh talent can surely benefit from internal referrals. Human resources people usually have good words for internal social networks because, among other things, it empowers them with a powerful communications tool that all employees are likely to use.

It’s pretty clear that your own deployment will be customized to fit your own needs but overall, setting up a business social network will never let management indifferent.

So, go ahead and fire up your own enterprise social network. You’ll quickly see just how wise “your crowd” really is.

Tags: business social networking, social networks, socially, employees, employers, companies, enterprises, social nets, blogger, facebook, linkedin, twitter, wikipedia, blogs, wikis, archives, information archives, user adoption, networking, community, search engine

Social networking in business

Networking isn’t new.

Social networking is the online equivalent of a offline meeting where, among other things, geography and schedules wouldn’t matter. Now, that’s a weird concept for some C-level dinosaurs but for the tech-savvy managers moving up, it makes perfect sense.

At the very foundation of networking, there are two things: humans and communications.

In a business setting, a basic goal would be for ideas to be clearly communicated, among all “humans”, in the organization. A more advanced goal would be for those ideas to mature and turn into “value”, one way or another.

Blogs and wikis haven’t replaced email messages and chatting but they’ve definitely added shared spaces where project data (and ideas) can more easily pollinate, more often than not, in ways that were largely unpredictable. Putting the information “out there”, for an entire team (or company) to see is a powerful way to leverage teamwork.

Social networking for businesses see communities of interest spring up around subject matters rather than organizational hierarchies. If you’ve been in business for a while, you’re well aware that the best ideas don’t necessarily come from the “top brass”. Networking at all levels of a company smashes the invisible glass walls which have the bad habit of strangling innovation, big time.

Generally speaking, social applications provide business value by letting people add context to information stores which, in turn, helps others identify what’s useful to them — it also makes search results that much more relevant.

Social bookmarks are a nice example of this since team members can share the web resources they like and learn from others about web destinations that have been overlooked. After a while, the bookmark list becomes a real time saver.

Naturally, enterprise social networking helps people find and connect with co-workers through user profiles, expert search and social graphs that map out any employee’s connections throughout the organization. This, in and of itself, makes for a strong argument for social networking, in the modern workplace.

Finding co-workers with domain-specific knowledge, in just a few clicks, can really propel any organization to a whole new level of communications, productivity, teamwork and of course, profitability.

Some organizations are obsessed with the “dangers of wasting time” wrongly associated with social networking. But that’s very bad management since social networking is a communications enabler and as such, it’s built to help channel information to the right people, wherever the people may be in the organizational chart.

If you’re just starting out in the social networking for business “adventure”, make sure to take a look at the quality open source scripts that are available to structure your data into blogs, forums, wikis or just about any other way you wish.

Tags: social networking, enterprise, business, work, workplace, colleagues, co-workers, employees, team members, managers, c-level, executives, decisions, ideas, communications, information, organization, open source, blogs, wikis

Can independent blogging turn into… a real job?

Meet Adam (made up name).

He’s a smart individual with a general interest for life and all that stems from it. He likes to voice his own views and knows how to word them efficiently. He’s computer-savvy and knows his way around with such open source superstars as PHP, MySQL and WordPress.

He has this plan of getting quality information “out to the world” so he buys up a good domain name, sets up his own hosting account (or home server, whichever), installs the WordPress blogging script and launches his very first independent blog.

The word -independent- is very important, here. It means that Adam, our “example buddy”, will be able to manage his blog in any way he pleases.

He’ll be able to tweak his blog with any plug-in he wishes and will also be able to integrate pay-per-click advertising alone or alongside with more “traditional” banner placements (ideally bringing in a monthly revenue).

So Adam publishes his first 25 posts and already, some Google users are starting to notice his high-quality work. Let me insist on -quality- because without true uniqueness and added value, end-users will not waste time coming back to Adam’s blog, let alone bookmark it.

Like in all other aspects of life, sustained quality drives long term revenue.

Fortunately, Adam believes in his blog enough to continue investing time in it, even if the advertising revenue isn’t quite that spectacular, yet. At least, it’s not enough to live by. At this point, maybe Google AdSense brings in around $100 per month for pay-per-click “contextual” ads and the banners ads (let’s say there are 4 at $100 each) bring in another $400. It’s a good start but more work needs to be done.

Adam therefore continues to blog about what he loves but mostly, about what his users are looking for.

In a perfect world, a blogger should seek to either provide uniquely valuable information or, more to the point, solve one or many problems, for the end users. Doing that will built up a “reputation” for the blog as being “useful”. It will also significantly drive the traffic up.

Since good blogs usually have at least a 10% click-thru rate for the pay-per-click ads and that each of these ads pay out (an average of) 20 cents, if Adam’s blog gets 1,000 visitors daily, it can safely be assumed that it will generate around $20 a day, which translates into about $600 per month. Add that amount to the banner revenues which, at this point, may have doubled to $800 and you rise up to $1,400 in monthly revenue.

While that’s not enough to book that two week trip to Bali, it’s significant enough to be able to make ends meet — for a while, at least.

Now that Adam, our fictional blogger, has probably gone from a PR0 to a PR3 within roughly one month of hard work, his goal will probably be to reach (and stay at) the PR5 level, within a few more months.

To achieve this, Adam can simply leave “educated comments” in other blogs which happen to be well-regarded by both the end-users and the search engines. This will -naturally- enhance his own blog’s visibility, at no cost (other than his own time). Also, other smart people could, in turn, notice Adam’s blog (for the first time) and be compelled to leave a comment, too. These comments have the power to greatly enhance Adam’s blog value, for all further visitors who will see the post as having more depth… and influence.

From this point on, it should be fairly straightforward for Adam who simply needs to keep adding quality posts to his own blog -and- highly valuable comments into other blogosphere properties.

As the number of visitors crosses the 10,000 mark, on a daily basis, Adam can pretty much bank on a $200 a day revenue stream from his Google AdSense pay-per-click ads (for about $6,000 monthly) coupled with perhaps 12 banners generating $1,200 per month for a total of $7,200… month after month.

It goes without saying that Adam, our typical yet imaginary blogger, enjoys a nice life, financially speaking but also from a professional standpoint as he’ll likely be doing what he likes best, from home and on his own terms.

As time goes by, Adam may hook up with many other quality bloggers, advertisers and other “movers and shakers” who will keep turning out “new unforeseen opportunities” for him to better his blog.

This “fantasy blogging” scenario is made to follow real life metrics so it’s pretty clear that if you follow in Adam’s footsteps, you too could end up being able to make a (good) living off blogging.

As long as you focus on uniqueness, true value and long term revenue generation approaches, things should turn out just as you’d expect them to — akin to what happened to Adam.

Tags: make money with your own blog, blogs, bloggers, blogging, revenue generating blog, blogging as a career, blog job, working from home, working on your own terms, working without a boss, value-added blogging, quality blog posts, unique blog posts, online revenue, google adsense, banner advertising, monthly revenue, pay-per-click revenue, ppc advertising

More opportunities for Web 2.0 workers

Web 2.0 skills Enterprises are now expecting IT pros to leverage technologies such as blogs, social networks, mashups, wikis and RSS.

While Web 1.0 is set to be part of the digital landscape for a long while, the market has clearly shifted to Web 2.0 methods of interfacing with the users who, using the latest technologies, have much more control over the general flow of data.

The number of companies calling on Web 2.0 technologies to address problems facing their information systems is on the rise and IT workers should act accordingly by offering at least part of the skill set that the job market requires.

To date, most IT departments have resisted Web 2.0 tools, viewing them more as consumer-grade solutions which represent less interest than their other investments but 2008 might be the year all that could change.

According to Robert Half Technology, CIOs anticipate a 15% increase this year in the need for IT workers with Web 2.0 application development skills.

Web 2.0 technologies deliver considerable value for the money they cost so it’s no surprise that more businesses turn to “profoundly user-centric” methods of conveying “the right data to the right people”, in a way end-users are most likely to appreciate.

Enterprise inroads for Web 2.0 skills might first occur where information worker problems remain unresolved, such as help desk ticket resolution, IT project management, document tracking and email.

Also, wherever knowledge workers abound, expect IT departments to be hunting for talent capable of adding value to the company through the smart implementation of blogs, wikis and even RSS feeds.

Tags: web 2.0, blogs, social networking, mashups, wikis, rss, it, jobs, hiring

Google blogs all the time

Google It’s clear whatever Google says, Wall Street, Microsoft and basically the whole wired world listens.

Fortunately for “the rest of us” online citizens, there are ways to know what Google said, directly from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Mountain View’s finest Google bloggers inform and entertain us through a dizzying array of blogs which are listed here for your browsing pleasure:

This list may not even be complete so please, if you know about more Google blogs, please submit them! Obviously, as Google Labs come out with more exciting services, we can expect accompanying blogs will be launched.

Still, you have to admit, Google loves blogging!