Congratulations (sort of) Motrin:

You are trending on Twitter!

Congratulations Motrin…

I’m going to take a wild guess that McNeil Consumer Healthcare, a Division of McNEIL-PPC, and their agency of record (Taxi NYC, from what we can tell at the moment) are not carefully monitoring Twitter right now. I’m also going to guess that you’re going to hear a thing or two more about this in the business press (WSJ, Forbes, AP, NYT) before it subsides.

The Fuss.

Many moms (and dads) who blog and tweet and are fans of “babywearing” are finding this Motrin ad (currently it’s right on Sunday afternoon it was pulled from the Motrin.com home page, which was more or less down for the next 16 hours and now displays their apologia) patronizing and disrespectful of the practice of babywearing. It’s kicked up some relatively strong feelings among the community, and a resulting loud racket on Twitter and blogs. (I’ll disclose: 1) I agree the ad is a bit dumb, 2) that I was a babywearer, and 3) that frankly, carrying those g-dmn “bucket style” infant carseats wrecked my back way more than any of my slings and backpacks ever did. But that’s not the point.) UPDATE: Follow the Twittering here. Skimbaco (Katja Presnal) compiled the Twitter screenshots and babywearing photos video below, and collected a long list of blog responses, including her original post. (Found via Jet With Kids)

The Reponse.

On Twitter right now, nothing has appeared from Johnson & Johnson, McNeil Consumer Healthcare, Motrin or Taxi.

Huh.

The Lesson.

Even if your brand or agency isn’t ready to engage formally and integrate the business applications of Twitter throughout your campaigns, community building and other market engagement efforts, you need to get clued in — fast — to the reasons, times and ways that you can listen. Maybe you’re not even ready for full-time social media monitoring. That’s your call. But not tuning in while you launch a new tactic borders on gross negligence, in this day and age.

Rolling out a new tactic is THE most important time to lend an ear. Smart SuperBowl advertisers could have gained instant consumer feedback on their efforts during the game last year. After every ad Twitter lit up with opinions. Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang prepared this formal analysis based on responses sent to his experimental account @superbowlads. His colleague (who co-authored Groundswell) Josh Bernoff shared his assessment here. Searching or watching Twitter’s search tools for your brand at the moment your ad aired would have yielded even more results.

I’ll update this post as I hear more, and when the companies involved begin to respond. Meanwhile, if your company doesn’t have a good understanding of how your full range of market engagement needs to be informed by sensitive consumer sentiment engines like Twitter, you might want to give your agency a call.

Coda

(Evolving: I’ll spare you all the “UPDATE” notations)

• Lesson #2: the Twitter chatter is not to be dismissed as an angry mob. There are TONS of productive ideas being shared. The company that listens, learns. (and, earns!)
• AdeleMcAlear Searched YouTube for “Motrin baby ad” and noticed the protest videos have already been up for 12 hours (at 3:30 EST Sunday), including Twitter screen shots. She also uncovered this blogger’s (awkwardly self-promotional) report that she called Taxi’s Director of Corporate Communications at home who had not, then, heard of the fuss.
• McNeil marketing VP responds. In an email to Katja Presnal:
  

We believe deeply that moms know best and we sincerely apologize for disappointing you. Please know that we take your feedback seriously and will take swift action with regard to this ad.

• Later, McNeil posted that apology on Motrin.com
• Seth Godin weighs in: not a very useful apology.
• Josh Bernoff breaks down the events, and agrees with Godin.
• Jeremiah Owyang’s analysis with screenshots and brand impact context

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To Claude Malaison and his team at Webcom Montreal, congratulations on a successful conference and thanks kindly for the privilege of speaking.

I spoke (no shock) about microsharing, interpreting some of the “big picture” business potential for this audience of Canadian business and government leaders.

My slides are below. I’ll add the video as soon as I can get it to offload from my camera.

Off to Defrag, but here is a quick peek at enterprise microsharing late entrant Co-op, which launched October 20th and narrowly missed inclusion in the Enterprise Microsharing Tools Comparison report we released this morning.

My first impression is that Co-op is a bit like Status with time-tracking and an agenda view, but until we can dig in more I’ve added them to the matrix under the pure-play classification.

Integration with Iridesco’s other tool Harvest means time tracking in Co-op can be used for invoicing. They point out that microsharing can eliminate or reduce routine “status” meetings, and the agenda feature looks especially helpful for this.

Here’s the run-down:

Name: Co-op
Company:
Description: Co-op is a “casual” communication tool for small teams with built-in time tracking capabilities.
Inside Firewall: Will consider if there’s demand
Directory Integration: No
Twitter’s Functions: Most
Groups: Yes
Location: No
Sharing: Links
SMS: No
IM: No
Desktop Client: Future

Smart-phone App: No
Twitter Integration: No
Underlying Software Platform: Ruby on Rails
API: Soon
Twitter Compatible API: Future
Largest Company: N/A
Largest Group: N/A
Pricing /month: Free
Additional Notes: Integrates with Iridesco’s Harvest, a time tracking and invoicing tool. Agenda feature allows teams to plan out their days together, sharing who is working on what and what they will be working on later.

Related posts:

• Enterprise Microsharing Apps: Read All About Em
• Enterprise Microsharing Reading List

Want to talk to us about enterprise microsharing for your company? Please let us know.

WE HAVE LIFTOFF

This post officially launches our first research report on the 19* applications vying to bring Twitteresque networking and communications inside the enterprise.

Download the .pdf here or use Scribd to view, embed, share or download. You are welcome to share it freely within your organization and networks.

Enterprise Micro Sharing Tools Comparison 11032008

Read All About Them (coverage of each application, from all around the web)

This post is an (evolving) index to blog and media coverage of the applications profiled in the report. It’s striking how much more coverage some applications have received, and while we’re not sure that’s a reliable mark of their suitability for the role, it’s certainly a marketing advantage.

What We Did
We compiled 19 criteria and basic information from 19 applications. Our work combines survey results, independent web research, verification of new features and analysis of how the 19 applications relate to one another and the marketplace.

We did not yet fully demo each application and we’re not choosing favorites in this preliminary comparison. We do mention observed advantages and reservations, and suggest six categories to distinguish between the applications.

We’ll cover much more on the rationale for enterprise microsharing, use cases, case studies, trends and future speculation in future research, on the TouchBase Blog, in speaking engagements and in client work. For the time being, I’ve compiled an Enterprise Reading List which ran as a post last night and has a permanent home under the Microsharing menu, above.

Have Your Say
Please ask questions, discuss the report and suggest future criteria and research topics in the comments here.

APPLICATIONS ON PARADE
Nevermind what we think, what have the pundits said?

Pure-Play Microsharing

Twitter
So much has been written about Twitter, Let Google be your guide.

Present.ly
Webware review, CNET by Rafe Needleman
Present.ly Takes On TC50 Winner Yammer, TechCrunch by Don Reisinger
Present.ly packs a solid punch against Yammer, ZDNet By Jennifer Leggio
Is Yammer Bad for Business? Robert Richardson

Communote
Enterprise Microblogging Ein Neuer Hype? by Dirk Roehrborn
Communote Presentations on Slideshare
Microblogging for the Enterprise, SocialMediaCamp, London

Trillr
Trillr Usage Inside Coremedia

Iron Feed (nothing available)

Enterprise Microsharing

ESME
ESME Enterprise Social Messaging Within an Enterprise SOA Framework, ZDNet by Oliver Marks
ESME: Is This What an Enterprise Twitter Could Look Like?, ReadWriteWeb by Marshall Kirkpatrick
ESME Enterprise Microblogging and Real World Business Problems, by Dennis Howlett
Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment by Anne K Petterøe

BlueTwit

Big Blue Embraces Social Media, BusinessWeek by Stephen Baker
Social Networking: The Twitterverse Debates
Porting Twitter Script for Ubiquity to BlueTwit
Twitter Behind the Firewall (Photos on Flickr)

OraTweet

OraTweet: Tweeting in the Enterprise
OraTweet Bot, an XMPP/Jabber Listener for Twitter
Social Observations, OraTweet Edition
On OraTweet and Open Social
OraTweet, Oracle’s Enterprise Microsharing Application, TouchBase Blog by Laura Fitton

Open Source Microsharing

Identica
Taking on Twitter With Open Source Software Daniel Terdiman, CNET
Twhirl Gets Pushy with Identica, CNET Webware by Rafe Needleman
Cooking With Linux: Warp Speed Blogging Marcel Gagne, LinuxJournal
Open Source Microblogging May Become Twitter Fallback, Ars Technica
Identica Federated Twitter, ReadWriteWeb
Identica is More About What Comes Next, by Chris Brogan
The Problem with Identica is…, TechCrunch

Jisko
Jisko the Open Source Microblogging Application
Jisko: Competition for Identica?
Jisko: Twitter Clone

Yonkly
Major Update to Yonkly: Widgets, Ads & More
Yonkly Groups and new Look
Backup Your Twitter Messages @ Yonkly

OpenMicroBlogger
OpenMicroBlogger Monetizes with Opening of App Store

Psuedo Microsharing

Prologue

Twitter - Public Timeline = Prologue, Mashable by Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins
Prologue Theme for Wordpress: is it a Twitter Killer?
Part Twitter, Part Basecamp, All Business, VentureBeat

Status (Status Blog is The What)

Integrated Microsharing

Socialtext Signals
Socialtext 3.0: Will Wikis Finally Find Their Place in Business?, BusinessWeek By Rob Hof
SocialText 3.0 blends Facebook, Twitter, and the Enterprise, TechCrunch by By Steve Gillmor
Exclusive video: SocialText brings enterprise Facebook and Twitter to wikis by Robert Scoble
Socialtext co-founder: Enterprise Twitter isn’t enough By Rafe Needleman
Socialtext Signals Marks Wiki Provider’s Entry into Enterprise Microblogging By Clint Boulton
Socialtext enters Twitter for the enterprise sweepstakes By Larry Dignan

Socialcast
Socialcast is FriendFeed for your business, CNET Webware by Rafe Needleman
USA Today (Quotes client Hot Topic)
Intranet Journal: Socialcast Harnesses Power of Online Conversations
NASA Case Study Presentation from KM World
A Social Function, Business Trends Quarterly Magazine by Analyst Jon Arnold

HeadMix
Best Buy’s Enterprise Twitter, ReadWriteWeb by Laura Fitton

Self-Serve Microsharing

Yammer
Yammer Launches at TC50: Twitter for Companies, TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld
Yammer, a Twitter for the Enterprise, CNET by Rafe Needleman
Hmmmm Yammer, by Daniel Siddle
Mahalo on Yammer
Yammer TechCrunch50 Profile
TechCrunch50: 10 to Watch

QikCom
QikCom Adds Its Own Twist To Enterprise Twitter
Five Questions With: QikCom
Mahalo on QikCom
Competition Heats Up in the Enterprise Twitter Market

*And then there were 20. Not getting off easy, nope. In a perfect illustration of how dynamic this segment is right now, we noticed Iridesco’s Coop just as our research went to press, but were unable to get in touch with their team over the weekend to administer the survey. More to come on that soon.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Enterprise Twitter heats up with Present.ly
• Enterprise Microsharing Reading List
• Weekly Wrapup, 15-19 September 2008
• Company communication improvement: Yammer and Present.ly

Enterprise Microsharing Tools Comparison

Directly download the .pdf: Enterprise Microsharing Report

…or use the options below to view it online, embed it on your blog or email a copy. And please feel free to contact us about microsharing at your company. For use cases and more information, try this enterprise microsharing resource list.

1. Read it online using Issuu

OR

2. View, embed or download the document from Scribd:
Enterprise Micro Sharing Tools Comparison 11032008

View Fullscreen at Scribd

OR:

3. View and download the updated Comparison Matrix only at Scribd

View the Scribd matrix document full screen
Enterprise Micro Sharing Tools

Future in-depth research will include detailed reviews, market assessment, screenshots and case studies where available. At every stage we will provide free summaries, single-purchase reports and the option of subscribing to current ongoing analysis. We will also be rolling out additional research products including case studies, recommended best practices and interviews with CTOs, CIOs and other technology professionals in the space.

Almost all Pistachio research includes free, publicly shared information and insights. The exception is privately funded research which will only be publicly released with the express permission of our research clients.

We’d love to talk to you about microsharing at your company.

this page is a work in progress…

Some Good Overviews:

• Trends to Watch: Twitter in the Enterprise; Will You Twitter Inside the Enterprise? by Jevon MacDonald
• Learn at All Levels: Enterprise Micro-Learning; Are Employees Twittering Away Productivity? by Marcia Conner for FastCompany
• Enterprise Microblogging as a Corporate Tool
• It’s like Twitter, but for the…
  
• Enterprise Microblogging: ein neuer Hype? Ja und Nein. Von Dirk Röhrborn, Communardo
• Is the Enterprise Ready for Microblogging Tools? by Aaron Strout and Joe Cascio for Mashable

Clint Boulton: Gartner reports that Twitter and Facebook are being used productively in the Enterprise. They also argue against banning Facebook and Twitter use at work.

So How Does This Work?
After reading Something New Under the Sun and How to Hit the Enterprise 2.0 Bullseye by Andrew McAfee, I scrawled:

Wow. This so precisely aligns with my thinking on the potential value of enterprise microblogging. What he’s put into words about weak ties, querying the corporate “social network” for business intelligence, having spaces for unstructured collaboration, could all be done in a corporate microblogging space. The importance of ‘converting a potential tie’ and helping people stay on top of their networks of loose ties maps perfectly onto the Twitter “Village”/Fox Taming metaphor that I’ve talked about before.

Case Studies
EMC’s use of Twitter by Len Devanna
How Twitter Can Work in a Corporate Environment FastForward Blog on Zappos
Best Buy’s Enterprise Twitter on Read Write Web
Microblogging in the Enterprise Case Study: (Janssen-Cilaq and Jitter)

• Jitter: Experimenting with Microblogging in the Enterprise
• Writeup by Janet Clary
• Trends in the Living Networks writeup by Ross Dawson

Product Posts With General Descriptions

• Socialtext Signals launch roundup
• ESME: Is This What an Enterprise Twitter Could Look Like? - ReadWriteWeb
• Business microblog tool Present.ly is smarter than Yammer

Mainstream Media Coverage

• CNN Putting Twitter and Facebook to Work
• Claire Cain Miller in NYT’s blog Bits asks Will Microblogging Make You More Productive?

Some History
With all this “new” talk of Enterprise Microsharing, it’s funny Twitter itself started as an internal communication system for the guys at Odeo. It worked so well they shifted focus to produce Twitter.

But it was a while later before serious discussion of “Enterprise Twitter” crept into the conversation. Like any good innovation, the idea pops up in parallel in many minds at once. Here is Niall Cook writing in June 2007 about internal business use of Twitter.

Bill Ives wrote Twitter Enters the Enterprise on September 5, 2007, but the blog and post he’s responding to are gone. JP Rangaswami writes in late December 2007 about the inherent difference in communicating via microsharing vs. email, and follows that up with thoughts on Publish-Subscribe and ways collaboration could play out. His thoughts in Twitter and Agile are worth quoting:

What I see in Twitter is this: The ability for members of a distributed peer workforce to describe precisely what he or she is doing, and to share that description.

Out of this, I can foresee enterprise magic happening. Geographically dispersed team members are able to help each other out because suddenly they have line of sight of each other’s tasks, activities and processes.

Shortly after, Daniel Siddle provides examples of how an enterprise Twitter could be used, including something like the status channels - information feeds employees will want to check regularly - that we recommend to drive use, especially in early stages of deployment. Dennis Howlett covers one of SAP’s early experiments with Twitter in the Enterprise and reflects on some uses, and Curt Monash shares what improvements he would make and how Twitter could be useful in the Enterprise. His follow-up Enterprise Twitter includes a good index of other posts until then.

Please check out our report Enterprise Microsharing Tools Compared

Disclosure: The author, Dennis Howlett is part of ESME’s core team and helps to promote/evangelize the project. TouchBase Blog welcomes those affiliated with an application to guest post about their application, provided there is full disclosure of their association and a distinct effort not to write advertorial copy. Submit such requests, leads and tips for guest posts here.

My last post discussed the value of eventtrack as a service that sits on top of many microblogging and content services. It allows me to ‘track people in the moment’ and so get a feel for what is happening at specific events. But what about solving real world business problems? The research consistently suggests that 80% of what knowledge workers do revolves around problem solving of one kind or another. In times past, we would turn to Joe or Betty as the ‘go-to people’ who knew this or that system and could instantly pinpoint a solution. While that is still possible, it is no longer optimal, especially in large, distributed organizations.

We all use email, yet the amount of material coming at us is overwhelming. We don’t have the attention bandwidth to parse the flow let alone spot the digital red flags business colleagues may be waving in our direction. We certainly don’t have discovery mechanisms that will help surface the right solution at the right time. The question then becomes, “how might microblogging help and differentiate against other methods?”

In the last few months, we’ve seen the emergence of many contenders for enterprise microblogging services aimed at solving this problem. Most start with the premise that microblogging behind the firewall needs to be a private affair. In my opinion, most other services are no different to private Twitter and if that was all there was to it then we’d be done. But it isn’t.

Microblogging behind the firewall is a whole different world to the public fire hose that is Twitter, and to that extent, that’s where the similarity ends. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t take some of the concepts behind Twitter and apply them to new services. For example, the ability to discover others through the ‘follower’ connections people make is a valuable element in Twitter’s proposition. It taps directly into the idea that networks have intrinsic value. How might a group of developers go about creating something that has the utility required? Why crowdsource from within an existing community? That’s what happened with ESME.

How and Why We Started ESME

While the full story is outlined here, the short version goes something like this. A bunch of SAP Mentors were idly ruminating on the topic at Plurk. Within a matter of days, the germ of an idea exploded into a full-blown project with contributors coming in from India, Peru, Norway, Austria, UK, Spain, Germany and the US. It doesn’t get more distributed than that! We were off to the races. Wind the clock on a couple more days and one of the team suggested giving the project a goal of entering SAP TechEd 2008 DemoJam at Las Vegas, Berlin, and Bangalore. That gave us less than three months to go from idea to product.

In time honored enterprise software development tradition, we lashed together a breathless promo video (see above) and started cracking code. Unusually, the development team brought in business process experts and business user types (like me) right from the get go to help sketch out the business scenarios we’d need to consider.

Our principle design goal was to develop something that went way beyond private groups. We needed to think about how a microblogging service might sit within identifiable business use cases. That’s because business will only buy into a solution where there is a clear and obvious benefit. In other words, we were looking to provide the context for a solution that delivers faster, better, and cheaper (yes, you can have all three) solutions to business problems. Rather than go for a broad brush solution, we decided early on to tie what we’re thinking about to SAP. Why?

• The group are mostly SAP Mentors, so why go elsewhere?
• The team understands the different SAP systems and especially those used by large enterprise
• There’s a community of 1.3 million developers to tap into
• SAP touches around 50% of the world’s IT at some point.
• The SAP customer community represents a universe of potentially 12 million users today
• SAP acts as a natural magnet for developers who want to do ‘edge’ stuff
• SAP’s Imagineering Group which deals with ‘edge’ development could become a locus for attention
• There was an opportunity to tap into new development environments like Adobe Flex, AIR and frameworks that are designed for this type of application
• Developing against SAP meant that we could automagically take advantage of existing enterprise class security and process models with which enterprise users are familiar and comfortable

All these factors meant that we are able to directly address the largest ecosystem of packaged business application users on the planet. They would guide what needs to be done rather than us scratching heads.

What We’ve Developed

The initial scenario was one where a sales portal was failing and users were going offline to manually complete sales orders. The person running the portal was unclear how to solve the problem and needed to reach out to co-workers for a solution. That scenario has been modified, but you get the general picture.

Developing ESME to the point of getting an alpha release was challenging, largely because of the time constraints but it got done and was generally well received. While we had high hopes for DemoJam Vegas, ESME didn’t win. But we learned a great deal. It is clear, for instance, that the SAP geek community is not familiar with microblogging, so the concepts were not understood. We reckon maybe 5% of the 6,000 attendees had a sense of what Twitter is about.

That is a common problem for edglings and serves as a timely warning for those expecting these services to simply proliferate inside the enterprise. Adoption is an issue. Yet we have found that certain large organizations are very interested in taking this forward. I can’t name names, but we have received enthusiastic feedback from five major groups and are now in the process of rolling out pilots where we expect to see business use cases as the trigger for adoption and feedback.

What else did we do? Most of this is not immediately obvious because we’ve gone to great lengths to hide complexity from the end user while making it as easy as possible to onboard organizations that wish to test ESME.

• ESME is currently open source. You can get the code, hack it and play around to your heart’s content. If you want an intro, then check out this tutorial. But don’t expect support today. We’re still working on a business model which is much more complex than simply applying a per user/per month license model or a supported option.
• We used OpenID rather than username/password because that is inherently more secure. Initially I was against this idea because I’ve found OpenID a bit clunky. Today I wouldn’t have it any other way because it saves me so much effort.
• We developed clients for the web, AIR, SAPGui and SAP’s Web Dynpro client so that users have choice. A mobile client will come in due course.
• We have track so people can follow topic tags.
• We are developing the concept of actions so that people can choose to take a topic offline to another medium such as email.
• Users can pull whole conversations out of the flow to see the context.
• We are working on managed groups so that where necessary, Chinese walls can be erected inside highly regulated organizations.
• We have audit and traceability, vital for SOX and other forms of compliance.

What’s next?

We continue to develop business use cases for ESME and offer those as development jump off points both internally and externally. We’re listening to early users as a way of gauging what needs to be done, setting priorities, and creating a sensible roadmap for the future. We’re thinking more about how ESME can be embedded into business processes beyond simply mashing it up into a desktop or web client.

Finally, while we remain closely aligned to SAP and its community and have retained the karma that a committed group of individuals can generate, ESME can be used inside other technology environments because the major components are modularized.

Dennis Howlett is a full time researcher, consultant and blogger on enterprise software whose primary outlets are at ZDNet. He is part of the ESME core team.

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• Is the Enterprise Ready for Microblogging Tools like Twitter?

Guest Post by Mike Keliher

“Teamwork” courtesy of DavidBole on Flickr

Albert Maruggi and I have started working with a new client, a brand new Web start-up, and we’re already seeing some folks mentioning the client on blogs and in Twitter conversations. Beyond that, we’ll obviously be working with a Web-savvy crowd, so having a strong presence in these online communities is important.

“Being on Twitter,” then, is a given. When we have four people on the team, both at our firm and at the client company, who are actively monitoring and interacting via Twitter, the challenge is how to work with a single account profile while still conforming to these amorphous norms that “govern” the Twitter community.

The CEO of Client made sure, early on, to sign up for a Twitter account with Client as the username. A good start. The @Client Twitter profile hadn’t been used much yet, though, because building their product, their Web platform, has been the focus of their energy. So we’re basically starting from a blank slate.

However, as individuals, those of us on the “Twitter team” are fairly active Twitterers under our own names. That’s an asset, as we each have a fair amount of rapport and credibility built up. We’ve demonstrated, at least to some extent, that we “get it.” We’re not just swooping in to “do some PR,” “drive some traffic” and move on to the next thing.

It’s a good thing to have so many people interacting on behalf of the client, and we’ll all surely continue to do so under our own names. But for some of our work, we’ll need to operate under the obvious and official @Client profile. The challenge is to make sure the people we’re talking to know who they’re talking to. Personality and identity on Twitter, as is the case just about anywhere, are important.

So how do we plan to handle this? Well, for starters, we want to make it clear that the profile is staffed by a team — even going to far as to change the display name to “Client.com Team.” Additionally, we’ll change the brief bio section to say something to this effect:

Info about Client.com and [the subjects dear to their hearts], from @[ClientCEO], @albertmaruggi and @mjkeliher.

We’ll also make a habit out of signing our tweets with our first name or our initials, so people will know who wrote each one. For example, my tweets might look like this:

Client: Client.com is looking for usability testers. If anyone in the Twin Cities area is interested, let us know. -MJK

I stole that trick from the team that twitters for NPR’s “Bryant Park Project.” All good ideas are made to be stolen, right?

Speaking of which, we’ll round out the tactics for twittering as a team (alliteration!) by using the all important URL field of the Twitter profile to paint a full picture of the twittering team. Laura “Pistachio” Fitton was the first person I saw do this. The URL field of her Twitter profile points to a page on her site that serves one purpose: welcome people who have checked out her Twitter profile and explain a bit about who she is and what she does.

In the case of my client, we’ll have a page that explains, in very personable, conversation language (sadly, a scarcity in the worlds of PR and marketing) who we are and why we’re twittering as @Client. After all of the above, it will hardly be new information, but it is an opportunity to put a little more meat on the bone and offer more detail and color than the miniature Twitter profile section allows.

Have you done anything similar to this? What’s your approach? Any ideas to improve this method? I’m eager to hear some other insights.

“Teamwork” courtesy of DavidBole on Flickr

Mike Keliher lives in St. Paul, Minn. and works in public relations for Provident Partners. He also helps produce the Marketing Edge podcast with @albertmaruggi

Image via Wikipedia

IBM’s got BlueTwit. Oracle’s testing OraTweets. SAP’s experiments include ESME, SAP Talk (laconi.ca), ShoutIt and apparently others. Yammer has an ad-hoc base at thousands of companies. But so far, no large corporation has rolled out microsharing company-wide.

Enter Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt, Best Buy’s Senior Managers for Social Technology, and better known as the guys who built Blue Shirt Nation. Drupal-based Blue Shirt Nation went on to become the prime internal enterprise 2.0 case study in Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s Groundswell. Now they’re about to launch Mix, an enterprise microsharing application to better network, problem-solve and share ideas among Best Buy’s 160,000 employees. Around 24,000 employees are already active on Blue Shirt Nation, so the conditions are ripe for Mix to become widespread.

Gary and Steve took time recently to tell me more about Mix, HeadMix (the application it’s built with) and their plans for a “mobile Blue Shirt Nation.”

Until a few weeks ago, there weren’t many publicly announced applications that could do something like this. When did you start looking for a provider to build an internal “Twitter” for Best Buy?
We started talking to Headmix in March or April of 2008.

You’d personally just started on Twitter then, so how did you know what you were seeking?
We’re both social bookmarking junkies because sharing links is such a fast, easy way to share ideas. You just smack somebody with a URL. So we wanted something like that for Blue Shirt Nation. Something that combined mobile access with simple link sharing.

We also knew that for Blue Shirt Nation, the adoption rate drops off fast as you climb the hierarchy. Executives just don’t spend a lot of time using their browsers. Mostly, they’re attached to smartphones and Outlook, with some General Managers texting. So other than the short formats, the idea of a device agnostic network was appealing.

The other group of employees we want to reach better are General Managers in the stores. They don’t have a lot of time, but they might be able to fire off an update while they’re walking from the front of the store to the back. Again, looking at Blue Shirt Nation, the majority of use (by retail staff) is during breaks and before or after work. So for this group also, we wanted something with mobile access.

How closely will Mix integrate with Blue Shirt Nation?
We looked at a deeper integration and ended up with something simpler. It will look like BSN, and the applications will keep each other informed, but Mix will function like the mobile arm of BSN.

What’s the time frame for rollout?
It’s coming very soon. One big hurdle has been waiting for carriers to give us the short codes. That was long wait. There’s also been a lot of technical work on integration and authentication. By mid-to-end October we’ll have it live within one territory (out of 8).

How do you plan to manage the rollout?
Within that territory, we’ll focus General Managers, store GMs, territory managers, district managers — about 200 people. Really, we’re still wrestling with the rollout plan. Some mix of internal communications, Blue Shirt Nation, territory meetings, enterprise events and email.

Do you think it will be easier or harder than rolling out Blue Shirt Nation?
Harder actually, because there are more choices now of where (employees) can go to communicate online in general.

What do you think of Yammer?
We’ve seen some activity on it. A lot of excitement and conversation at the beginning, but then it tapered off. People didn’t want to maintain their Twitter and their Yammer accounts.

Also, we see a problem with Yammer. There are what, 160,000 employees at Best Buy? It’s like a few of you are thrown into a dark room together. You don’t really know who anyone is or who to trust. You’re told it’s okay, they’re all employees, go ahead, talk. But trust is an issue. Who are these people? How do we know them? What can we say?

What factored into the decision to build out Mix using Headmix?
We liked that it’s simple, but had the extra features when you wanted them. It sounds goofy, but we really liked the Outlook plugin — that’s where our employees live. That will make it easier to use. We really enjoyed getting to know the developer team and we’ve liked how flexible the application has been for moving data around and having different features.

We wanted to be able to make changes really fast, and had usually gone with open-source systems for other projects. But in the last 4 months the UI, features and data structure have been very flexible.

What’s Headmix itself built on?
Ruby on Rails. Ben Moore is a friend-of-a-friend met via a Ruby users meeting.

What else can you tell us about Headmix?
It’s a different but familiar feature set to Twitter — a few more places that you can click. We don’t have it set up to talk to Twitter but it could be integrated. There will be something like groups - channels, to use Headmix’ term, that act like containers for discussion. It’s behind a lot of security and encryption but it’s still an SaaS model. Location won’t be in the initial rollout, but might be in the future.

What has been the corporate perspective on doing this at Best Buy? Was it a hard sell?
Headmix has some good demo videos and was cool about explaining basically what it does — “here’s the cool use cases we see, etc.” We were able to talk about use cases and they were willing to adjust. Potentially this is just the advantage of working with a startup.

The initial assumption was that it would be hosted within Best Buy. But as is the case with a lot of enterprise systems, we had to look at whether we could really support and host it in-house, more politically than technically.

So many companies miss “Just Try It.” Nobody wants to just go ahead.

That said, we’re in a unique situation with BSN Labs — we essentially have a license to try pilots and see whats going to take off. So the conversation was, us: “We’re going to have a mobile version of Blue Shirt Nation.” Management: “oh, cool.”

People have stopped asking us about metrics, measurement and goals. They see that it’s a cost of doing business. Nobody questions whether you need to have phones anymore, its assumed.

Nice position to be in.
Whatever happens, it’s going to be cool to try it. We’ll learn something. Sometimes, the bigger things get the more fear it will fail.

I expect to see blowback on a lot of this stuff by next March. “I don’t need all this stuff.” People are going to start stepping back some. Enterprises are getting hammered so hard right now to try all this stuff. There will be some cutting back in what they can do, depending on what’s working.

Thanks guys. We look forward to hearing more.

More about HeadMix from our Enterprise Microsharing Tools survey:
HeadMix Inc.’s mission is to help employees collaborate and work more effectively by discovering knowledge that trapped inside their colleagues heads. It’s a lightweight, on-demand, easy-to-use messaging platform that promotes intuitive knowledge-sharing inside the enterprise via the web, email, mobile and SMS.

With HeadMix, users subscribe to other employees and/or relevant groups/topics allowing them to stay connected with the content that is most relevant. Questions get answered sooner; key conversations can weave into the workday; and news travels faster. HeadMix connects employees and makes them more valuable to other employees and their customers.

Features:

Deploy inside firewall? No. Most of Twitter’s functions? Most. Groups, Location and a Desktop Client? Yes. Integrates with Twitter? No. Size of largest company? 150,000 SMS? Yes. IM? Future. Built on: Ruby on Rails. Links and media sharing? All types. API? Yes. Largest trial group? 20,000. Price/user/month: based on active users only. Twitter-compatible API? Yes. Smartphone applications? Future.

Other notes:

• Fully integrates into enterprise daily existing workflow
• Ability to integrate custom applications
• Make customers’ existing apps more valuable by adding a social layer around them via email (Outlook), Sharepoint, etc.

Mix will be the first major retail microsharing rollout at a giant company. We’ll have more on HeadMix in our eBook Enterprise Microsharing Tools Compared. Register here for your copy. It’s free.

Yesterday in rolling out Socialtext 3.0, there was a small (but much echoed) mention of their coming enterprise microsharing application Socialtext Signals. In our Mashable post last week, Signals was the 15th “unannounced” enterprise microsharing service. I got a sneak peek at Signals in July during Brainstorm Tech and have looked forward to more.

This is not “just another” enterprise Twitter clone. In addition to a look at what’s new and different about Socialtext Signals, this post (it’s the nature of such an emergent space) also includes a fair amount on what we believe enterprise microsharing can become.

THE ANNOUNCEMENT
Socialtext CEO Eugene Lee points out:

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.

Socialtext Signals is just briefly mentioned in the official release and remains in private beta. Co-Founder Ross Mayfield’s blog post provides the most detail on Signals. Choice quotes “get answers without interrupting people” and “Socialtext Signals is social messaging for the enterprise connected with context” sum it up nicely.

What you say and what you do
Socialtext Signals tracks what people are saying and sharing and Socialtext combines that with what people are doing and working on. Capturing pulses of relevant work activity, not just what people think to post, makes this a more integrated work tool.

Using it internally we’ve learned how different usage is from Twitter… because it is in the context of a company. The social patterns of what people say and share has taught us a lot about potential use cases. …Socialtext Signals will provide an integrated user experience across Socialtext Workspace, Socialtext Dashboard and Socialtext People.

They observed improved signal-to-noise ratio - and less risk valuable information will be lost in one missed signal -because multiple actions can be expressed in one signal, and because ensuing conversation around important points amplifies those signals.

Microsharing with Context
Because signals are linked to profiles and to collaboration within the Socialtext 3.0 workspace, they start from a rich contextual baseline. Context can also be explicitly shared in the content of the signal or the link included. Activity in the system generates a feed that’s part of the microsharing environment.

Context and being a part of the fabric of people’s work increase microsharing’s value and make it more genuinely the connective tissue we envision between individuals and teams.

Get answers without interrupting people
He recaps how Twitter is a surprisingly effective and efficient way to find answers, information, people and solutions, and frames Signals’ value in similar terms.

You are tapping into the collective intelligence of participants. Rapidly. And without the costs associated with other communication mediums for asking people questions. This is because the constraints of microblogging actually support efficient communications:

• Messaging is in near real time
• Messages are kept to 140 characters, the length of an SMS message, which encourages brevity, summary and linking
• While you can view all messages, you follow people to create a custom feed of the signals from the people you want, leveraging the social network as a filter
• In most use cases, Signals is implemented as a “Reply-Optional” medium
• @Reply conventions reveal when a message is directed to you in public, while letting others add value or benefit from the conversation

“The broader values include speed of communication, knowledge sharing, context sharing and collective intelligence.” This value - problem solving with fewer interruptions and more reach into networks of loose ties - will be even greater for “process-specific solutions.”

BLOG COVERAGE
Larry Dignan’s writeup for ZDNet echoes the importance of context, which “could be what separates Signals from efforts like Yammer and Present.ly.” But reserves judgment on market readiness:

That doesn’t mean micromessaging isn’t important. In fact, it could be a big deal inside a business. But it could also be a mere feature to be integrated later by the likes of Oracle and SAP. Is Socialtext a groundbreaking, but way too early company in your enterprise?

Rafe Needleman’s CNET Webware reviews of enterprise microsharing apps (Yammer, Present.ly, Socialcast) his Socialtext signals writeup does not disappoint:

…just giving users a Twitter clone doesn’t solve the dual problems of information overload on the one hand, and personal isolation at work on the other. He believes that the most important communication between workers in a company is what they are doing. “When I work,” Mayfield says, “I’m sharing knowledge as a byproduct of getting work done. In the enterprise, what someone does is more important than what they say.”

Clint Boulton spends most of his Socialtext 3.0 column writing about Signals as opposed to the launched suite. He quotes Mayfield:

“The conversations on Signals are very different than what you would find in a more public Twitter. It’s different because it’s within the context of an existing organization trying to get things done. Twittering without context is just frittering your time away.”

“When I work, I’m sharing knowledge as a byproduct of getting work done. In the enterprise, what someone does is more important than what they say.”

And he nicely sums up Socialtext Signals’ market position:

I’m glad to see a contemporary groupware company like Socialtext taking the longer view of the Twitter concept than upstarts like Yammer and Present.ly. In this space, I’ve been a fan of Socialcast more than those apps, because it’s based on the larger vision of integrating information from numerous group applications. That’s what Socialtext is doing, too, and it’s the right thing for business.

Dennis Howlett, writing at ZDNet, is deeply involved with conversations about enterprise microsharing in general and is personally involved with ESME. He had some good responses to Larry Dignan’s piece, and makes a bold statement “I believe this is one of the most important additions that company has made in its evolving enterprise 2.0 platform.” He also restates an anecdote that one-time Gartner analyst Erik Zeller predicted that “supply chain problems could be solved through some form of instant messaging.”

Steve Gillmor, writing at TechCrunch, added the context of interoperability:

The forthcoming Signals API will support the Twitter API, making it easy for IT to leverage the broad pool of third party micromessaging clients such as Twhirl and compatible tools from loosely federated Laconica-compatible servers. Social Signals goes beyond the current Twitter architecture with channels, essentially groups th