Rhymes with Cars

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Turning the Guns Towards Redmond - #df10 #e20

It takes stones the size of King Kong to point your guns in the direction of Microsoft, but I believe that is exactly what Salesforce did yesterday when they announced Chatter Freemium.

Of course, Marc Benioff has some big stones. He took on Siebel and kicked their ass pretty good and they, at one point, were the big ape on the block.

A lot of people immediately quipped how this was going to be devestating for Yammer (here, here, here), but really, the real enemy for Salesforce is SharePoint, not Yammer.

First of all, when you choose a competitor, you don't pick the smallest, newest kid on the block, which is what Yammer is. You pick the biggest, baddest mo-fo around, and in the case of collaboration software, it is SharePoint (see Behind the Cloud on how SFDC picks competitors). Not only is SharePoint the biggest and baddest (worst?), but it is also the antithesis of what Salesforce is all about. SharePoint is big, clunky software that is hard to install, expensive to manage, impossible to keep current and no one likes it.

Get it?

Here is the real issue - everyone bitches about adoption of SharePoint. Everyone knows that no one uses it because it is a nightmare. CIO magazine writes:

80 percent of respondents with SharePoint access continue e-mailing documents back and forth, even though SharePoint software was designed to prevent this clunky process.

That is embarassing, but MSFT doesn't care because they either give a huge discount because their customers are on an enterprise license or they promise the world and that it will all be fixed in the next point release.

You know what doesn't have an adoption problem? Salesforce. Most companies say "hey, if you want to get paid, you have to use Salesforce". They say it to the sales team, the marketing team & the support team. It is an easy way to encourage adoption. If your opportunity isn't in Salesforce, you won't get paid on it. If your working a case and you want to get paid, make sure it is in Salesforce. Try that with SharePoint and you'll have a mutiny on your hands.

Added bonus - once you get those teams on board, teams like Finance, who need to see that the deals are there and Product, who need to help with support all fall in line and use the system too.

No adoption problems there. Where you do have a problem is in things like finding people, having a quick conversation, editing a proposal or building a team to work on an RFI. These are all business processes that would have historically happened in SharePoint, but along comes Chatter, which does, per TechCrunch:

Profiles

Status Updates

Real-Time Feeds

File Sharing

Groups

Filters

Invitations

Chatter Mobile

Chatter Desktop

To me, that sounds an awful lot like what SharePoint has done in the past with more social functionality than SP2010 has to offer, plus faster development cycles and a more supportive development channel.

While I'm not predicting the immenent demise of SharePoint, I do believe that SFDC has a great opportunity to strike a massive blow to an important piece of the MSFT picture.

Am I crazy? Is this right on? Let me know your thoughts in the comments and tell me what you think.

Tagged Microsoft Salesforce.com dreamforce enterprise2.0 sharepoint yammer

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Is the Future of Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Mechanical Turk?

Over the past week or so, I've had some fascinating conversations about the future of Enterprise 2.0. Where is the market going, what will be the major trends two or three years out, the usual coffee conversation.

What has come up a couple of times is the idea of using Mechanical Turk in an enterprise environment to help accomplish all of the work that a company needs to complete to be successful. Yesterday at breakfast, my friend JJ Chacon asked, why a whole company couldn't run in a Turk like environment?

While I think that we are still a few years from it happening, the way that companies, especially small companies are outsourcing, I could see some companies launching over the next 10-years that try to build and manage their internal processes via the Mechanical Turk (or similar) engine.

This is something that would be really simple to accomplish, too. What is Turk but a job board and payment engine? Why couldn't it be set up behind the firewall, for security sake, and list all of the tasks that need to get done to launch a product, run a sales team, build a marketing plan, etc.

There is beauty in the autonomy of MT. I look for jobs that I'd be interested in, I do them, I get paid. It is the way free markets should work.

In fact, I'd say that sales teams are already using the general principle. My comp plan dictates how I get paid. I get paid different rates for closing business of different types based on the importance of it to the company (new, upsell, renewal, self-generated, lead, etc - typical SaaS sales comp plan stuff). You could put the company comp plan in to Enterprise Turk and make everyone a sales rep.

For example, let's say, as a company, you really want to do a deal with ABC Company, simply list that you'll pay a premium of $5,000 (or whatever it is worth) to get a signed contract with ABC and see what happens. If I'm the receptionist, but my brother works for ABC and I see a 10% or more kicker for doing a deal with them, I'm going to hustle a bit to get that done.

Got a marketing plan you want to build, but need some type of guidance on the effectiveness of each medium? List it on Enterprise Turk (ET). As VP of Marketing, I'll pay $10 for advertising kits from each of the top 100 publications in 'X' industry. I'll pay another $500 for someone to take all that data and sort it in something manageable. I'll pay $1,000 for detailed competitive research for a new product launch.

You could even set it up for employees so that when they have a task that they don't want to do (I'm looking at you expense reports), they can list it on Enterprise Turk - $25 to take a pile of receipts and enter them in to the expense system.

Do I believe that ET is going to be the future of the enterprise? It already kind of is. We are paying people for behavior in their own department. We do it in bonuses, MBO's and commissions every month, quarter & year. Why not expand it out to the tired, huddled masses of the rest of your company to get stuff done.

During one of these conversations, a friend told me that the demographic for MT is bored, white collar workers. They aren't doing the HIT for the money, they are doing it because it takes away from the day-to-day tedious nature of their jobs. This study by Panos Ipeirotis seems to back that up. Bored Gen-Y'ers trying to get more out of their day in the corporate world.

Companies are outsourcing more and more for specific functions. It is only a matter of time before all of these outsourced services are insourced to people that want to do these jobs at a competitive rate, but have the advantage of knowing the space better and will ideally hold corporate secrets, secret.

What do you think? Is Enterprise Turk the future of the workspace? Will our kids be piece mealing marketing jobs? Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

Tagged enterprise2.0 future mechanical turk outsourcing

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Putting Email In It's Place - My SCU Presentation

I had a great time yesterday presenting 'Putting Email In It's Place' with Terri Griffith at Santa Clara University. I always have a tendency to be a bit hard on myself when I present and I'd give myself a mid-low 'B', if I had to grade myself. Ideally, this will turn into something that I do once a semester with Terri and I'm looking forward to teaching future classes. Here is my presentation:

Putting Email In It's Place

View more presentations from schnaars.

UPDATE - The awesome people at Slideshare put me on their home page as a featured presentation. Love them...

Tagged Santa Clara University Social Networking email enterprise 2.0 enterprise social networking putting email in its place

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Put Email In It's Place

day 13 - you should know.... Originally uploaded by .lisakimberly.

Are you sick of being copied on email threads where you really shouldn't be? You know, 'cause FYI or people want to keep you 'In the Loop'? Do you spend too much time searching for that old email about that old project for that new employee? Do you get more than 50 emails a day? Are most of them occupational SPAM? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you need to put email in it's place. Come see me speak at Santa Clara University with Terri Griffith and learn about how email got to this point and how Enterprise Social Software can help to reduce the glut.

Tagged Santa Clara University Social Networking email enterprise 2.0 terri griffith

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SocialText Microblogging Appliance Delivers at Twitter for your Intranet

I've been really excited about this latest announcement from my company, Socialtext. So many organizations are looking for a micro-blogging platform, but don't want a.) it hosted in the cloud or b.) a full collaborative suite. As a customer of mine said recently, micro-blogging is the gateway drug to social networking. Today it is 140 characters, tomorrow it is blog postings and wiki edits. SocialText.

Tagged Social Networking Socialtext collaboration enterprise 2.0 microblogging twitter

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5 Reasons That Google ChromeOS Should Focus on SMB, not the Enterprise (at first)

As always, Sameer Patel has a great post on Enterprise 2.0 and the impact that Google's announced, but still vaporous, operating system. He even paints a fantastic picture of what having Google Chrome OS would / could look like in the enterprise:

Google packages up a Netbook with ChromeOS, Google Apps, Umbrella Analytics, Google Gears and and Wave-enabled Enterprise 2.0 capabilities. The full enchilada along with a developer platform to enable customization for specific use cases in the enterprise. Now that’s a software distribution model that in theory can give SharePoint bundled with Exchange, a serious run for its money. And that also speeds up commoditization of Enterprise 2.0 solutions.

Which would be awesome! But again, Google is talking about 2010. We know that Google apps stay in beta for about a millennium, so assume that Chrome OS is actually ready for prime-time in mid-2011. Sprinkle some Google Wave on that, which also won't be ready until 2010ish, and all of a sudden we are talking about stuff that is 2 years out. Cool stuff, but so are flying cars. No enterprise is investing in Google Chrome OS or Wave until late 2011. Flip the equation on it's head though and rather than focus on enterprises, focus on absolutely owning SMB. If you have less than 50 employees, Chrome OS, with the apps package that Sameer laid out, is a no-brainer.

With self-service, SMB is a much easier market to penetrate. Small businesses don't have large IT departments if they have any IT department at all. Really small businesses are just a few folks trying to deliver a service that they are good at and don't want to have to deal with hiring some guy at $100 an hour to ensure that the drivers on their XP system work with the new color printer that they just got. Small businesses don't care if a service is in the endless Google beta cycle. They want to know if it works? Is it always available? Is it relatively secure? Can I afford it?
Google Checkout and Payment Systems are already there. Google has the payment system figured out. Buying this stuff will be insanely easy. While at the same time being able to provide Checkout to a wide number of small businesses to help modify their payment system out of the box. This could be a huge thorn in the side of PayPal.
Open Source will create an abundance of apps. While it will take forever for the enterprise to bring ChromeOS on board, because it is open source, there will be a ton of applications for SMB right out the gate. Think about Google Forms, Google SFM, Google Finance, Google Tax, the list goes on and on. Companies like DreamFactory will make a bunch of easily ported applications and development tools. Think of iPhone apps, but with more power. Go into the Chrome Store (like Force.com), find your apps, order them and pay via Google Checkout and they are already running. Again, keep it simple for the small business owner.
SMB doesn't care about beta - I mentioned it above, but most people recognize that Google beta and other beta aren't the same thing. SMB owners want their machines to boot up, they want to be able to access their apps, they want their data to be there. If GMail's beta period is any indication to the performance of ChromeOS in beta, there won't be any issues at all.
Google can connect SMB's together via Wave or Orkut. It's been amazing that MSFT hasn't figured it out yet. If you own the OS, you should own the social network. Xobni recognizes that the best social network is in your inbox, but imagine being able to easily connect to other like businesses. How powerful would it be if auto body repair shops were able to connect to other auto body repair shops to share ideas, trade parts, develop joint marketing plans or make referrals?

It's a long way out, but it was a big announcement this morning. I don't know if it was a nuclear bomb, as TechCrunch called it, is quite right, but it certainly was big and will be a thorn in Redmond's side for the next 18 months.

Tagged & Others GOOG MSFT YHOO chrome os dreamfactory enterprise 2.0 google sameer patel small business techcrunch

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Why Sales People Need Social Media

If you are in sales, you need to read this white paper put out by Axel Schulze and his team at Xeequa: 10 Reasons Sales People Need to Care About Social Networking [PDF]. It offers a number of very compelling reasons why you, as a sales person, need to leverage social media as much as possible. Some hits:

A) All of the following 10 aspects have one common objective: Create a better customer experience for your clients that allows you to compete in a smarter way with a much higher degree of effectiveness. B) The “Social Media Question” is not whether you or your company is ready. It is whether you or your company can catch up with your customers who are already there.

Today, prospective customers (like all of us) search the Internet, read blogs, forums & group discussions, ask questions in their social networks, join on-line communities, and, in the end, know very well what they want, where to buy, and how much to pay. The more significant the purchase, the more completely the customer educates himself.

All in all a social media savvy sales person has 3 major advantages over the one who care less: 1) They know much more in much less time about the same customer than their competitor 2) Even more important, that same customers knows so much more about the sales person and where and how to reach them, that the competition has a hard time to even have a conversation. 3) A positive relationship between buyer and seller has begun, even before any direct contact or face-to-face meeting The rest of the paper is excellent. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Convince your boss to let you use this stuff. It will make you a better sales person.

Tagged Social Networking axel schulze enterprise 2.0 social media

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Socialtext - Emerging Tech Winner

Coming off of a great Q4, my CEO, Eugene Lee, asked everyone on the sales team to write a quick blog post about what they were most proud of that the team accomplished in the quarter. I'm probably going to keep that as an internal blog post, but at the beginning of December, Silicon Valley Business Journal named Socialtext as the winner of the Emerging Tech award for 2008. So that is definitely something to boast about a bit. I was especially happy to see that Socialtext beat Zimbra in the category. Don't get me wrong, I love Zimbra. Think that it is a great product, but Zimbra was the last Yahoo! property that I worked on prior to leaving to come to Socialtext. In fact, I was even having some conversations about transferring over to that business unit permanently. Not that I needed my decison to join Socialtext validated, but beating Zimbra is pretty sweet.

About 70 percent of searches on a companywide intranet are people searches, Mayfield said. But invariably those searches are futile, according to the IBM Global Human Capital Study 2008. Of 400 human resource executives surveyed at 40 companies worldwide, only 13 percent said they are “very capable” of locating an individual with a particular area of expertise within their company. “Without a system to capture and catalog specific backgrounds and skills, matching employees to positions can be a hit-or-miss affair dependent on anecdote and who-knows-whom,” the study said. Enter Socialtext’s products. Employing social networking and wiki technologies as means of collaboration and knowledge-sharing provides an avenue to discover expertise within your company by increasing the transparency of what people know, how they apply it to their work and how they can apply it to yours.

Over time with continued collaboration, employees can create a knowledge repository to browse and search through.

So that is nice. I was also really happy to see that my friend David Thompson over at Genius also won the award for best internet technology.

Tagged Socialtext david thompson enterprise 2.0 genius zimbra

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Don’t Build Your Roof Before Your Walls Are Up

Evaluating social media for your company is very different from evaluating most other technologies that you’ve deployed in the past. The difference is that, in order for social media to be successful, it takes people. I was in a meeting today in which a prospect was walking me through how they typically do software evaluations, including a proof of concept. This person was really forthcoming with details and explained how, in a recent proof of concept for an email encryption solution the company selected a preferred vendor and a back-up vendor, installed the system internally, rolled out to a handful of users, then ran a survey to get their opinion. The whole process took about a month. It was a great, methodical way of rolling something like email encryption out to several thousand people. He wanted to do it again with Socialtext. Unfortunately, this type of implementation doesn’t work with social software. Social software requires people to be successful. Nothing sucks more than a social network with just you in it. Remember when you signed up for Facebook and didn’t know anyone and didn’t understand why anyone would spend time there? That will be your enterprise social network with fewer than 25% of your employee base. Now you have tons of connections in Facebook and you can’t get enough of it. Your company’s social network should leverage the same principles. More people = more value. It also takes a bit more time than traditional technology does to get a good sense of how effective it will be. Trialing traditional software is a pretty binary experience. It either works for your people or it doesn’t. You know pretty quickly whether or not it is a 1 or a 0. Did it install? Check. Did it work in all supported environments? Check. Does it work as advertised? Check. Social software will do pretty much everything that you expect it to do from an architectural stand point, but if no one uses it, there is no value. You can’t learn that over night. So how do you have a successful implementation?

1.) Delineate WHO from HOW - How your implement social software is your roof. Who uses it and why is your foundation. Who you partner with are your walls. Don’t build your roof first, then your foundation, then your walls. This works with traditional, installed software but the analogy breaks down for social software.
Before you even begin to work with a partner to supply you with social software, you need to know why you want it in the first place. Collaboration isn’t an answer, it is a result. People collaborate today using phones, email, faxes and smoke signals. Define several specific goals, (i.e. The sales team will use this to share competitive intelligence) and success metrics (i.e. We will have 100 pages and at least 3 anecdotes of sales people winning competitive bids based on information in this system). Until you know these variables, you have no guidance. You have no foundation and your roof and walls will collapse.
2.) Give it time – I always advise 12-months to see value, but you can probably get a good idea in 6. You’ll have no idea after 3. You have to consider that, in a strong roll out of a solution, you will provide people with some initial content so that they aren’t staring at a blank page, you will have some templates so that novice users aren’t starting from scratch, the platform will be integrated into your existing services, people will be trained, etc. Even in the best of cases, people using this system will just start socializing after 2 – 3 months. Ideally, if enough people are there, they will really be cranking in 6-months. In 12-months, you’ll know definitively if it is a success or not.
3.) Feed it People – Like Soylent Green, successful social networks are made of people. If you have a 3,000 person company, you will get little to no value out of a 50 person deployment. There simply isn’t enough critical mass to make it successful. Let freedom ring and make it available to as many people as possible. Your defined use cases and success metrics should justify the investment and the nuggets that are discovered will be icing on the top.
4.) Don’t Bake Until You Know What You’re Hungry For – With traditional software, it is easy to do a bake-off between vendors. Pepsi Challenge style. You install a few things, try them out for a few days and decide what you like best.
Shopping for social software is more like buying a home than a soda. You do your homework before writing an offer. You discover if you like the neighborhood, the school district, shopping near-by, property taxes, your neighbors, parking, weather, how much maintenance will be required, HOA fees, etc, etc. The challenge that you’ll see if you try to Pepsi Challenge social software is that you’ll roll it out to 25 or so people, let them bang on it for 3 months, but because there isn’t content and not a big enough user base, no value will be seen and you’ll be back to square one in six months. Even worse, your business users will have adopted their own, siloed systems to actually get their work done.

Implementing a social network in your company can have amazing ramifications to your business. At this point, it’s been proven to make a considerable difference to revenues, profits, productivity and morale. However, if it isn’t implemented properly, if you focus on building your roof and walls before your foundation, it will be shaky at best and ultimately crumble and you’ll scratch your head wondering where you went wrong. What are your thoughts? What has worked or not worked in your experience deploying these solutions?

Tagged Social Networking Socialtext adoption enterprise 2.0 implementation

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More on Getting Smart People to Share

I spend a lot of my time talking with organizations about how to encourage adoption of social media tools amongst their employees. Lately, the conversation seems to have turned to why it is hard to get smart people to share their ideas, thoughts, brainstorms & suggestions via social media. The general feeling is that older workers are going to be less inclined to use these types of tools, but it isn’t just the baby boomers. It is entire organizations. Moving from email and siloed data stores to a global collaboration platform is a significant cultural change. It is a change for the better, though, and as more people recognize the efficiencies of social media in their personal lives, the more they will bring it with them into the workplace. But how do you get smart people to share? A lot of people question the tools and say things like ‘Oh the boomers will never use this stuff.’ I don’t really buy that. In fact, I’m pretty certain that my 85-year old, stroke inflicted grandfather would learn to juggle chain saws on hot coals if it meant that the croquet players stayed off of his grass tennis courts . It isn’t the tools. Don’t get me wrong, a shitty tool can significantly impact adoption, but I’ve seen how SharePoint gets adopted and things don’t get much worse than that. So it isn’t the tool. What is it? The problem isn’t the tools. The problem is a lack of goals (or too tightly defined goals) and a lack of passion. Collaboration without a goal = FAIL . I’ve seen people spend countless hours sharing ideas and trading stories in everything from NFL chat rooms to cancer support centers. Sharing is in our DNA. Goals around collaboration are difficult to define and people love independence. If you need me to go to the supermarket and pick up chicken breasts for dinner tonight, no problem. We will have chicken breasts in the house before our general dinner time. I have a goal and some general direction and flexibility. Now, if you tell me that I need to go to WholeFoods, on Bascom, and give me turn by turn instructions and explain that you only want free range organic chickens that are massaged by eunuch monks once a week, I’ll probably just go to the local Safeway and grab Foster Farms because, hey, chicken is chicken. Goals for collaboration in your organization are the same way. People in your company collaborate today. Don’t believe me, ask people what they are doing for lunch. Odds are, they will go out together and come up with great ideas on how to make things better in your company. They will talk amongst themselves and nothing will ever get done, because these people don't have the outlet or direction to share these awesome ideas. In order to get people to collaborate, using social media, you just need to get them going. Give them tools that are easy to use and a clear goal of what success looks like (go get chicken for dinner) and let them go. You will be amazed at what forms. A deeper sense of trust, unique communities and a culture that continues to foster a sense of trust and sharing. Goals for collaboration shouldn’t as ambiguous as ‘I want my team to collaborate and magical stuff will happen to our bottom line’. Likewise, they shouldn’t be so directed as people just think that it is another corporate standard that will waste their time. If you want someone’s opinion or ideas, generally, all you need to do as ask. Social media provides a great opportunity to develop that conversation between all of your employees. A different problem is passion. People must have a level of passion for success of their community, their department, their company for enterprise social media to succeed. If they don’t have this passion, why bother? It is the ‘What’s in it for me’ element to collaboration. As a company, as an employer, as a person, it is your duty to ensure that your team has a passion for what they are working on. A partner can’t give your team this passion. This has to come from within. The good news is that passion breeds passion and passion is addictive. Starting an internal book club social network let’s people share ideas and discuss books that are of common interest to them (passion). They are dipping their toes in the water. Can they develop a similar passion for a project that they are working on? Maybe not everyone, but if one person is passionate about a topic enough to set up a community to make her voice be heard, that is a community that will be successful. What is the takeaway? Good Tools + Defined Goals + Passion = Success What do you see as the success factors for social media at your company? Leave me a comment. Alan Lepofsky was crucial in developing this post. Thanks, Alan.

Tagged Social Networking enterprise 2.0 goals passion sharepoint social media social networks

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