Yammer or SharePoint 2013 for the Social Enterprise?

In buying Yammer last year, Microsoft pretty much acknowledged that it dropped the ball on social and needed to bring in external reinforcements. Acquiring Yammer also fits well with the new cloud services approach of office 365. The vision according to Microsoft is cloud first. They love the ability to roll out changes and fixes on a faster pace, but mostly, they love the business model.

At the same time SharePoint 2013 includes a much improved set of tools for social collaboration including a brand new activity stream app. So what should you use? Yammer or SharePoint 2013 built in social tools?

Here is the timeline and guidance as provided by Microsoft:

If you are a SharePoint cloud user – go with Yammer. There is a basic integration available now with the promise of single signon in the fall. They also promise updates every 90 days.

If you are an on-premise user (and most companies are since SharePoint 2010 online was not very good..) and moving to SharePoint 2013, the decision is a bit more complicated.

Yammer offers an existing app for SharePoint 2010 that can be integrated in if you are a paying Yammer customer, but nothing yet announced for SharePoint 2013.

So the only option really is to deploy the SharePoint social services unless you are already using Yammer Enterprise and can wait if/until they support 2013.

The longer term roadmap beyond 2014 is cloudy as well. Yammer is a cloud offering and will clearly be tightly integrated into office 365 but as much as Microsoft would like to, not everyone will get on their cloud platform that quickly. In all likelihood, Microsoft will continue to support and even release new version of SharePoint on premise but certain aspects will likely not be improved much and Social seems one of them. Yammer will become a selling point and an incentive to go cloud.

Another interesting point is how will this work for Hybrid Deployments and how migration to the cloud will handle the social data or be able to migrate it into Yammer. We’ll have to wait and see..

For more details see the official blog post from Microsoft and an interesting post on ZDNET on how Microsoft approached social for their internal Intranet, apparently using both models and giving users the choice when creating a collaboration site based on their primary need – document based (SharePoint) or activity stream (Yammer). Now, if only one site could do both..

From Web Analytics to Customer Intelligence

We recently were invited to present internally at a prominent health care payer network about the rapidly changin role and importance of web analytics. Gone are the good old days when it was enough to just run a log analyzer or put a simple tag to collect all the information needed about the interactions a customer has with you. Analysis used to be limited in scope and focus on a handful of parameters that could be optimized, such as bounce rates and conversion rates, by tweaking the checkout flows and usability improvements.

Not that conversion rate optimization is less important today but as customer interactions focus less and less on just the company website, the new critical need is to try and get a coherent picture of general customer behavior across all touch points. Instead of trying to infer customer thoughts and concerns through their clickstreams, many are now openly expressing needs and problems through social media.

This goes beyond “cross channel marketing” into the new area Forrester and others are now calling Customer Intelligence (CI). Similar to the way business data evolved from simple reporting into Business Intelligence (BI), as customer data gets more complex and varied, putting everything together and drawing conclusions and trends from it will need to employ similar methods and tools.

This is primarily a mindset change from the somewhat passive “analytics” to the broader and much more active role of managing and providing customer intelligence.

The expectations from Web Analytics professionals and systems are changing as well from the cyclical analysis and response to the providing of on demand, immediate intelligence for both individual and aggregate customer needs and problems. In some companies this evolved into a real “command center” that has 24/7 monitoring and interaction tools to listen, interact and respond to customer needs.

There are a few challenges that mark this transition:

• Quantity: The quantity of interaction points is exploding due to social media, online videos and mobile devices.
• Traceability: It is very hard to identify users across various media. Mapping a web user to a Facebook account or twitter feed is not always possible.
• Immediacy: There is an overwhelming need and expectation for immediate response.

Here is a conceptual diagram of this new reality illustrating all the new interaction points being consolidated into the central Customer Intelligence and the introduction of the analytical services that can be used to optimize the user experience.

These analytical services can work on both an individual and aggregate level:

• Individual: If we can aggregate customer data and interactions from different channels, this will dramatically improve segmentation, insight for sales and customer service professionals interacting with the customer, and services that can target offers or content in real time based on user past interest and behavior.
• Collective intelligence: By looking at customer activity across all channels we can:
  • Optimize targeting through the different channels and our investment in them
  • Improve recommendations
  • Identify trends
  • Identify problems / issues / sentiment changes and address them quickly.

To start implementing Customer Intelligence, the process is now becoming quite similar to implementing a BI solution

• Expand use of social listening and data capturing tools and store their data
• Adjust data models to accommodate multiple user identifiers, channels, devices etc.
• Redefine KPI’s
• Define and implement analytical services
• Adjust reporting and analytics
  • Real time
  • Dashboard level

The Web Analytics vendors are starting to step up and offer tools and support for Customer Intelligence. In upcoming posts we’ll look into WebTrends, Omniture, Google and IBM to see how their offerings stack up and the type of solutions they support.

Are eCommerce prices getting too dynamic?

This holiday season I was looking for a specific toy as a gift. I did a price comparison and found it had the lowest price at the Toys R’ Us site. When I went back to make the purchase just 2 hours later, the price has jumped up by 50%. Now I had to do my comparison all over again. That was frustrating to say the least.

This is the latest example of Dynamic Pricing. It’s been around for a while but mostly in scarcity driven industries like airlines and hospitality / entertainment. Here the rules of the game are clear, inventory is limited, it has an expiration date, securing a sale in advance has benefits and discounters can help you sell last minute excess inventory.

Now back to our dynamic pricing for $50 toys, other than a few highly desirable toys before Christmas, this is not a scarcity market. Special sale, timed sales, loyalty coupons and all these dynamic promotions are confusing enough but serve a purpose. Not being able to do a simple price comparison and place an order is annoying and will impact the buying decision. If there is always the possibility of a lower price just around the corner, then let’s wait.

Target had recently announced that it will begin price matching for all products, even against amazon but details on implementation are a bit fuzzy.

As dynamic pricing gets more widely used and noticed by consumers, how will they react?

Here are a few suggestions for retailers considering or implementing dynamic pricing strategies:

• If the products you sell are of a limited quantity, knowing how many are there (at this price) is very helpful. What Orbitz does for example (only 3 tickets left at this price!) gives the consumer valuable information and an incentive to act fast.
• If a price is reduced for a period of time, let the consumer know for how long it will stay at this price. Again, enables decision making.
• Shop with confidence. While guarantees against future discounts are problematic, consider offering this to members of your loyalty club. The same way a great sales associate will tell you a sale is starting next week and he will hold the items for you so you can pick them up at the lower price, rewarding the best customers with price assurance and advance knowledge of sales will go a long way.
• If you are putting an item below the competition, make it known. Consumers may doubt it but if they check and found it is true it will build trust.
• Try not to put items that are dynamically priced into an email. Since you have no control over when the consumer will read the email, they may be viewing pricing that are no longer correct.
• Feed the aggregators and comparison sites as soon as changes are made.

The key theme here is that dynamic pricing can be great if the buyers are given enough confidence and information to make decisions. Otherwise it may just make the the consumer even more hesitant to click the “Buy” button.

The new Arms Race: Social Customer Care

How quickly should your company respond to a question or a comment in social media? Unfortunately, many companies I know will respond “Never!”. It is a sentiment we hear a lot that most of the online complaints are from a handful of trouble makers and response will only make it worse.

Well, sorry guys but customers now expect quick and effective response to social media and companies that are not gearing up to meet these expectations will be left far behind.

A recent survey done by Social Habit found that 32% expect a response in less than 30 minutes, and a total of 42% expect a response within the hour. 24/7. How are major brands doing in their social response times? Social Media Influence has a great infographic that shows some brands social activity and response times. Wal-Mart responds in an hour and a half but to only 7% on inquiries while Target responds in 2:48 hours to 85%.

It seems like this is a new arms race and everyone expects these response times to go down and % or requests addressed to go up. Like all social media activity, the consumers and big brands lead the way but once the expectation is there, smaller brands and B2B companies will also be expected to meet these new standards or risk a customer satisfaction issue.

This is especially important for companies that see Service as their competitive advantage like agent based insurance companies, services companies and luxury brands.

A few guidelines for effective social customer care:

• Listen! Effective listening and feeding of social inquiries to the customer care team is a must. Even if you choose not to respond, knowing what is said in a timely manner is critical
• Connect the social listening and response management to your CRM. A large portion of complaints is related to recent purchases or an attempt to contact customer care in other ways that did not get results. CRM systems need to include a place for other identifiers for customer in addition to email and phone number. Facebook name, Twitter Handle etc. need to be part of the user profile. A social inquiry needs to be seen in context and the activity recorded for future interactions. This level of social customer intelligence is going to differentiate companies that do it right.
• Direct service activities to a separate channel. To avoid cluttering the main FB and Twitter feeds with customer issues, create a special account for it and clearly set expectations as to when it is active. A great example is what the Microsoft XBOX team did on http://twitter.com/xboxsupport

  

• Set internal standards for response times and integrate these metrics into the overall customer care KPI’s.

For other examples of brands doing it right see this great post. HBR also has an interesting, more structural post on the topic.

10 Best New Features of SharePoint 2013

The new SharePoint 2013 was just reached “Release To Manufacturing” stage! It is available for download now to MSDN subscribers and slated to be officially released in Q1 2013.

To celebrate, we thought to share some of the highlights in this upcoming release. While SP13 builds nicely on the foundation of previous versions, it does offer plenty of cool new features / improvements for business users to get excited about.

So here are the top 10 in no specific order.

1. Cloud First: while SharePoint was part of Office 365 for some time now, it was a limited experience. SP13 is promising the full experience in the cloud + regular release of improvements and enhancements.
2. The Newsfeed: taking the best from Facebook and Twitter, the new Newsfeed is the centerpiece of SP13 social push. The foundation was there in SP10 but you needed an external component like NewsGator to make it work. Now you’ll be able to build your network, follow colleagues and post / search the newsfeed at different organizational levels. #hashtags for all! For more..
3. Communities: the other new social feature is the ability to create communities. A community (as separated from a project team) is for getting a group of people to collaborate more freely around a topic and share expertise. Built around Discussions, it expands them into seeing members, their contributions and allows easy formation of expert communities. For more..
4. Cross site publishing allows for the first time to share content across sites, site collections, applications and even farms. We built a custom solution for this for an insurance company that wanted to post new forms to the public site, Agent portal and Intranet in a single action. Now it is built in. For more..
5. Search had received a major upgrade. The acquisition of FAST was finally integrated into the main SharePoint search resulting in a long list of great improvements such as: Search for conversations, videos and reports, visual results and in-page previews, context sensitive sorting, advanced filters and of course, better performance, API’s etc. for More..
6. SharePoint Apps!: one of the major changes to SP13 is the concept of apps. Apps are just like they sound, web applications that can be packaged so users can add them to pages or use them from within SharePoint. Not that different from the concept of solution packs before (line the Famous Fab 40 that were discontinued in SP10..) of packaging your web app in a web part. The new model does have a few advantages. It gives users more control on apps to use and while IT can still approve apps, they do not need to install them for users. It can also make internal applications easier to find and reduce redundancy. For more on apps see the Microsoft SharePoint apps blog.
7. Simple project / task management: for complex project management you still have project server but it is an overkill for most simple projects. The new team site template includes the ability to manage tasks, deadlines and a simple work breakdown structure for a project team. It generates a personal and a group view of tasks and timelines perfect for keeping everyone on time. For more..
8. Enterprise eDiscovery: one of the essential requirements for ECM in this age is a good eDiscovery mechanism to ensure content related to litigation or information requests can be executed efficiently and across all information repositories. SP13 is adding a new eDiscovery center that would make this a lot easier. For more..
9. New Usage Analytics and useful views: Microsoft is replacing the SharePoint analytics with 2 new tools: search analytics and usage analytics. Usage analytics provide more detailed view of how SharePoint is used and even better, adds up to 12 cutom events to be added and tracked without custom tagging. You can also use the data collected from these tools for useful views such as Most Popular, Popular Searches ect. For more..
10. Better support for digital assets: there is no longer a need to create a special media library for digital assets. Once enabled, audio, video and other rich media can be added to any library. For more..

Is the 1-9-90 rule for social participation dead?

It has long been an axiom that getting people to participate in online communities is hard, and the 1/9/90 rule helped explain why. 1% will be die-hard content creators, 9% will participate and 90% will be passive consumers and sit on the sidelines.

A recent BBC study claims the old rules are dead and that a whopping 77% of adults should be considered participators in some capacity. Interestingly, GigaOm pounced and claimed the old rules still apply.

I think the BBC research is on to something and that the online participation patterns have changed. Few of the things may have contributed:

• Consolidation: social networks such as Facebook and Twitter consolidate for us updates and posts from multiple communities and allow us to respond directly from there. You no longer need to go and check on 7 different communities to see what is going on.
• Ease of content creation and sharing especially from mobile devices. Probably too easy if you ask me. if you allow it, your phone will post your location, the pictures you take and more without even asking. The success of Instagram is just one example. Being connected 100% of the time allows us to interact 100% of the day.
• We are not anonymous anymore. It has been a slow change but if the late 90′s were about virtual identities and avatars, now we interact as real people. It may look like a small change but the whole nature of online interaction shifted from an outlet to interactions we wanted to have outside of our normal (and sometimes restrictive) social circle to where now most of the online interaction is with our social circle. More and more the online communities and social networks augment and extend our real relationships with people and brands.
• While some people who came to the party felt a bit out of place and stayed close to the wall for a while. After some time you realize that keeping to yourself in a social setting is not very nice and that people actually notice. If you are part of the community, participation is now expected.

So if the BBC is right and we should be expecting more participation what does it mean for businesses?

Business social participation may still be closer to the old rules because they do not reflect a close knit social group but as more people become comfortable in sharing it will start to have an impact.

Internally, collaboration and social networking with colleagues will eventually follow the same pattern of heightened participation if you allow the same enablers. Aggregate and consolidate activities and updates so they are easy to access, make it easy to respond to them and embed interaction and sharing everywhere in internal web applications, sites, tools etc. Making sharing a social norm may not be too far off.

Externally, in addition to the brand enthusiasts and deal seekers there is now a potential in making a lot more people participants

• Think about creating content that people would want to share. Too many websites and social media sites focus on the marketing side “what we have to sell”. Cool or useful things to do with the product or that are just related to the category will more easily be viral.
• Many websites have added sharing and likes to their pages but few take it to the level of actually allowing specific questions or comments through social networks on content or products.
• Think mobile sharing. From QR codes in trade show booths to special coupons for scanning or photographing in the store. Even my dentist has a promotion for getting free whitening pen if you scan a code and like him on Facebook. Brilliant.

Share More: a framework for enhancing collaboration

In a great study, McKinsey and Company published last year they showed how companies that use social and collaborative technologies extensively (networked companies in their terminology) outperformed traditional companies. They called it “Web 2.0 finds its payday”.

So if you work for a networked company – congratulations. Now if your company is part of the vast majority of companies struggling through some forms of collaboration but not seeing enough benefits, how do you get to the payoff stage?

In this following series of posts, I’ll try to offer a methodology and examples for how to do just that. Elevate the level of collaboration and create a fully networked organization one step at a time.

We call this process Share More.

The premise is simple, for each business area or function, find a real world business challenge where collaboration can make a difference. Implement it. Move to the next one.

Creating the overall framework is like creating an association wheel for the term “Share” in the middle:

Sharing can be with just a few team members or with the whole company. It can be internal or external. If you stop and think about all the interactions you have in a week, which causes you the most pain and time? Can these interactions be made simpler using technology? Can you Share More?

The first Share More solution I’d like to address is process and workflow solutions.

Share Process

Process and form automation is all about tracking and control. The real dramatic change is in giving managers and administrators visibility into every step and log of every change and update. It can also speed the process up and save effort in typing information into other systems, initiating emails or filing paper into physical files.

We’ve worked with a large hospitality organization to automate all HR and Payroll related forms through the use of InfoPath and SharePoint and learned a lot of valuable lessons that can be valid to many a process automation:

• Strongly enforce data integrity: Most forms are created to collect data that will be fed eventually into another system. Therefore data input must come from the same source system it will end up in. Values and choices have to be restricted to valid combinations and open text fields limited to a minimum. The cleaner the data is, the less trouble it will cause down the road.
• Know how organizational and reporting hierarchy is maintained: While you may know what system holds the organizational reporting structure, knowing that it’s 100% accurate and maintained up to date is a lot harder. Since some forms require sending confidential information like salary for approval, the wrong reporting relationship can compromise important information. Consider masking personal or confidential information if it is not essential for the approval requested (while the data, encrypted, can still be part of the form)
• Don’t over customize: like our beloved tax code, approval workflows can get extremely complicated and convoluted as organizational politics that evolved over the years created special cases and more exceptions than rules. Codifying these special cases is expensive and prone to change. Consider it an opportunity to streamline and simplify the rules.
• Augment with stronger 3^rd party tools: while the core systems – like SharePoint contain built in (and free) workflow mechanism, it is limited in the control, flexibility, scalability and management as it comes out of the box. Some 3^rd party tools like Nintex and K2 BlackPoint provide added flexibility and scalability. For a price.
• Version deployment: Forms and process will change. How will updates be deployed without interfering with running flows and processes?

In future posts I’ll explore other opportunities for Sharing More including Sharing Insight, Sharing Responsibly and we’ll look into specific opportunities for collaboration and sharing in insurance and healthcare.

Keeping it Fresh: The 6 Pillars of Web Content Governance

Content. It is the bane of existence for web marketing managers everywhere. As soon as a new site is up and running, the content is getting old in inaccurate by the minute. Chasing business owners to revise, update or write new content is a constant struggle. To make it worse, many areas may not have an owner at all..

Fancy CMS systems were supposed to solve all that with expiration dates on content and distributed ownership but the tools themselves are just the means. People still need to use them.

That is where Web Content Governance comes in.

Web Content Governance is the overall approach to the way content is created, managed and maintained intended to ensure consistency, accuracy, relevance and compliance. It generally comprises of 6 main components: Process, Structure, Policies, Standards, Ownership, Processes and the Systems that are used to enable, enforce and automate them.

The details of each component vary between companies but generally include the following:

• Process
  • Creation
  • Updates
  • Retention / expiration
  • Archiving
  • Workflows:
    • Editorial review
    • Legal review
    • Brand Review
    • Publishing
• Structure
  • Content classification
  • Media types
  • Taxonomy and Metadata
  • Hierarchy and inheritance
• Policies
  • Legal
  • Security
  • Data collection
  • E-mail
• Ownership
  • Roles
  • Permissions
  • Escalation
• Standards
  • Brand Guidelines
  • Content guidelines
  • Accessibility
  • Legal
  • Copyrights
• Systems
  • Content Management System (CMS)
  • Digital Asset Management (DAM)
  • Document Management
  • Business Process Management (BPM)

Few tips and tricks

1. Assign a bad cop. A senior enough executive who would be the enforcer.
2. Build a team of champions. Department of area champions who have enough familiarity with the tools and can provide knowledge and communication channel to different business units and groups. The team should meet on a regular basis.
3. Use automation. The ability to set content expiration is a great way to ensure all content is looked at (however briefly) regularly.
4. Don’t relinquish control over the last step. Someone from the centralized web / marketing team should still review every page before it is being published

Rise of the networked Enterprise – Web 2.0 finds its payday

McKinsey & Company published their yearly study of Web 2.0 adoption in the enterprise as they’ve done over the last few years. In addition to the interesting data and continual growth of use, they tried to use some statistical analysis to correlate the level of use and adoption to company business performance.

The results, while far from being statistically conclusive, do show that companies that have extensively adopted Web 2.0 and collaborative technologies (they prefer using the term “Networked Enterprise” to the traditional Enterprise 2.0) perform better than their less networked peers.

It’s a great validation to what many of us practitioners in the field see as obvious. More information sharing, transparency and collaboration increases knowledge dissemination and empower better informed decisions. Taking these approaches out to customers and partners can only have positive effect.

Few things I found noteworthy in the results:

• The ownership of internal collaboration at 61% of responding companies was in IT, not the business or corporate communications. This leads in many cases to a tool based discussion and decisions rather than how can these tools best serve business needs employee needs. Overall lack of ownership is still one of the biggest problems we are seeing. One of the most important steps a company can make in promoting the importance of collaboration is assigning clear ownership.
• The biggest benefits come when companies use collaboration technologies both internally and externally. Business processes are complex and span multiple stakeholders. Companies that are able to automate and refine these processes and interactions see returns and this is very encouraging.
  
• Success and adoption comes from putting Web 2.0 technologies “in the line of business”. If use of collaboration tools is not an additional tool or task but where the work is done, it will be used. If documents are only stored in SharePoint folders rather than in file shares, reports uploaded vs. emailed etc. everyone will get used to it quickly.
  
• Social Networking being the highest used web 2.0 feature at 40% adoption. The term Social Networking itself is problematic as it can be used to describe many different types of interactions, from facebook to the SharePoint “colleagues” but there is no doubt that the immense popularity of these tools outside of the enterprise is having an impact, at least on what people think the priorities should be.
  

What’s ahead?

So how will social technologies evolve in 2011? It seems like the trend of adopting successful consumer tools and bringing them to the fold will continue. The gap is still huge and for most companies, even getting to a reasonable level of sharing still is in the future but some likely candidates include:

• Full adoption and usage of smartphones as working and collaboration tools, not just email.
• Location a la 4square
• Collaborative editing with office 2010

Top Web Technology and Marketing trends for 2010 part 1 – Social Strategy and Infrastructure

I was at Barnes and Noble over the weekend and browsing through the business books section could see only 2 types of titles, books on the financial collapse and guides to social media marketing. Both are selling well I hear.

It’s good to see that after some significant doubts, corporate America and small businesses alike are engaging users on social media sites and twitting away. Unfortunately, what we often get is a complete schizophrenic approach. The corporate website is all law and order, control and command broadcasting carefully crafted and designed branding messages and product introductions. Then we have the social media wild west where everything goes, no rules exist and chaos reigns. Living with a split personality is hard and as Nestle recently found out, trying to enforce brand guidelines on Facebook can backfire at you.

As mentioned, there are a bucketload of books that will teach you how to engage and utilize social media, use it to form personal relationships and provide value add rather than just another outlet for PR.

I think a more urgent task we have is addressing the challenges of changing the purpose, structure and utility of public websites to adapt to the new social reality. Frankly, even after 6 years of “web 2.0″ most sites are still pretty static brochureware, but the Social revolution is changing that quickly. Even though not every company will want to cancel their website and send users to Facebook instead as Skittles did for a few months, there is much to gain from trying to marry the two worlds.

The goals of the public website have not really changed: create a positive brand experience, attract and convert new customers, retain existing customers, make it easy to do business with you and provide great service anytime, anywhere. Now adding the social layer on top of that elevates it to a whole new level. It also requires a new and maturing technical infrastructure and tools to manage this experience.

Adding the social layer can take many forms but done right it will make every website more relevant, accessible, personal and effective. The tools to manage this new environment are still evolving and maturing but the next releases in all product categories will include a social integration layer.

Before embarking on the next iteration, every website owner must examine and decide: “How social should the company’s site be?”

Here are some guidelines for different models of social integration

1. Divide and Conquer: create separate destinations for different types of interaction but make them distinct from the main site
2. Complete control over brand experience: build the brand site into a social community
3. Co-Promotion: link and syndicate content from site to social media, promote social media activity on site.
4. Aggregation and context: aggregate relevant social media to site from multiple sources
5. Integrate and Connect with Social Media: create a seamless experience and leverage identity and existing relationships

Of course, these modes are not mutually exclusive and can be used for different part of the site or in evolving fashion.

For more on these topics, I’m doing a webinar on 3/31/10 on best practices of social integration and will bring some examples. To register go here.