• Tweeting Your Way to the Top | PRWeek US
  Good business scenarios for using Twitter.

• Tweeting Your Way to the Top | PRWeek US
  Good business scenarios for using Twitter.
  (tags: brand+monitoring microblogging microsharing pr2.0 twitter)

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1. Prioritize Your Business Objectives & Pick Your Target

Most likely, you’re not hurting for ideas from your user community to do something online. It’s the “something” that can present a problem. In short, make sure your business objectives map to specific company goals. If the CEO’s goal is to reduce support costs, you might want to start with customer service and work through the organization from that vantage point. You should also think about how to gain cross-departmental leverage with your approach. Just because customer service has blogging capabilities doesn’t mean the same process and platform can’t be used by sales and marketing.

2. Start Small And Build Incrementally

As the saying goes, don’t bite off more than you can chew. Invariably, creating content, developing the right user experience and managing content will take longer than you think. Often, it’s better to look at online community efforts as unique programs with unique requirements. Marketers know there’s no one size fits all anymore. In fact, more communities and brand messages are dictated and delivered by the customers themselves. With that approach, you can build, test and deploy smaller projects that allow you to re-direct and re-prioritize in midstream.

3. Set Realistic Goals And Expectations

Decide what you’ll measure. Ask yourself if you could walk into the CEO’s office and deliver tangible evidence that your online community is helping the business. While everything can’t be proven by hard numbers, you can show how your content is consumed, how the market perceives your products, or how sales now has a 360-degree view of your customers. And keep it simple. One organization’s goal was to increase the number of customer testimonials it could garner over a 6-month period. As a result of engaging with its customers online, the company was able to convert those participants into brand advocates.

4.Identify Your Partners

While you may consider yourself the SuperStrategist, you can’t do it alone. Fortunately though, access to world-class technology is no longer your biggest challenge — it’s human capital. While many times marketing will own the brand or community initiative, there’s a few more moving parts you need to be aware of. Technology-wise, do your homework and talk to a few analysts and end-users in your vertical. You’ll quickly find the platforms and tool sets have matured rapidly and will give you most (if not all) of what you need out-of-the-box. Strategic alliances can range from content partners and advertisers, to PR firms and other SEO or social media marketing firms. Odds are you can do most of the heavy lifting and planning yourself, but having a strategic resource to bounce things off and help you build a longer-term roadmap is key.

5. Develop a Community Roadmap

Again, think of your community with longer-term lenses. Don’t get too crazy, but take your wish list and siphon it down into manageable parts. For example, if your goal is to get every executive blogging, make sure you’ve developed an onramp for different skill sets and adoption paths. The approach you used to get the early-adopter execs creating content might not work for others. Less sophisticated users might prefer you show them how to upload a Video blog (Vlog) after you’ve taped them. The community roadmap will be your primer for how things will be delivered, sustained and measured. Marketers should also engage with toolset vendors’ professional services teams. There’s a good chance they’ve built their own roadmap.

6. Develop a Marketing Plan To Rally The Needed Support

Some of the toughest marketing you’ll ever do involves converting the naysayers or those satisfied with the status quo. Internally, market to those executives with phrases like:

• -“Do you know what our customers are saying about our products?”
  -“I want to reduce our support costs.”

“Are we capturing the right intellectual capital to speed innovation?”

Externally, always be ready to answer the question – “What’s in it for me?” Some findings show that as little as 1% are super-users, so be thinking about the value proposition for passive users and lurkers. Think about your users’ technographics (Forrester term) here. If you’ve identified your super-users, there’s a good chance they’ll be on the lookout for your Facebook page or RSS feed. Conversely, late techno bloomers probably won’t mind an opt-in email campaign.

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• Morgan Stanley | Mary Meeker's Web 2.0 Summit Presentation
  Good data on technology landscape, includes trends and adoption statistics.

• Morgan Stanley | Mary Meeker's Web 2.0 Summit Presentation
  Good data on technology landscape, includes trends and adoption statistics.
  (tags: mary+meeker web+2.0 tech+trends technology)

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• Dell Unleashes The Community Part 2
  Dell launches its new community on the Telligent platform.

• Dell Unleashes The Community Part 2
  Dell launches its new community on the Telligent platform.
  (tags: telligent telligent+clients dell)

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• Wikis, social networks should find 'significant success' in enterprise
  Forrester on enterprise 2.0 adoption. SoNets and Wikis are ones with the most upside.
  (tags: enteprise+2.0 forrester web+2.0)

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I’m blogging this from the Wordpress app on the iPhone. It’s partly for the test but mostly because I’m anxious to talk about some big news Telligent is announcing tomorrow. Let’s just say that it will deepen the relationship between two very innovative Texas-based companies. Look for some formal releases around 3pm CST tomorrow!

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1.Plan Your Community Around A Purpose       

We can thank Gartner for amplifying this one. Too many times marketers and brand managers get the GMOOT syndrome ( Get Me One Of Those) when it comes to online communities. Look across your business and identify areas where better communication and engagement with customers and employees could be improved. Many times an external community can serve multiple business units. For example, product marketers gain valuable customer feedback on how to position and develop new offerings while sales can harvest feedback and loop that data into the sales process. And don’t leave out inward-facing communities. There’s real movement from corporations that want to use the intrinsic value of collaboration and community to improve specific internal processes. Many times an organization realizes it’s a heck of a lot easier to pilot things behind the firewall. Another bonus is the bottom-up adoption and visibility you’ll have as you plan your external community.

2. Find The Influencers Or Brand Advocates

Content is again king, but not just content, quality content. We (Telligent) see micro-communities emerging almost daily that address very targeted issues and topics. Marketers needs to be smart about identifying influencers and customer evangelists. Just because someone is a prolific blogger or media creator doesn’t mean they’re best suited to serve your constituencies. Also many marketers overlook off-line participants, in other words, those that may not be digitally savvy or “joiners” as Forrester describes them. Remember, the offline world is where word-of-mouth resides.

3. Consider A Platform To Generate Media & Manage Your Online Programs

It may seem a bit ironic that the “choosing” step is a bit understated since I work for one of the toolset vendors (Telligent),but it’s by design. The platform is the enabling technology so It shouldn’t become the focal point of your community initiative. Don’t let features drive your community strategy.

4. Inventory Your Content Assets

When developing a community strategy, many times marketers and communication professionals realize there’s plenty of content right under their nose. Think about how to rejuvenate customer testimonials in more interactive format. Heck, invite the customer to blog with you. Better yet, film them and video blog it. You might even want to survey your business units and ask them what content is important to the business. After that, think about how to get that content to the web where it can educate prospects and customers, spur conversation and drive brand visibility. Lastly, after the content audit, put a plan in place to sustain the development of future content. Make sure you use the tools during the process. In other words, don’t let users create content in Microsoft Word and email the document. Better yet, have them blog it.

5. Develop a Measurement Approach

If you can’t measure it, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. But first decide what you need to measure. It’s much more than page views today. Your community strategy should establish metrics that map directly to your success factors. If your goal is to use social media to nurture the complex enterprise sales cycle, make sure you can track customer touch points between prospects and your sales staff. That may be something as simple as showing the downloads of the latest white paper or views of a recently taped interview with a product evangelist. If your prospects are interacting with your content, there’s a good chance they’re interested in your products or services.

The good news is that there’s plenty of business intelligence and analytics toolsets available to assist you in developing your measurement processes. Picking the right tool will provide you with the data you need. It’s then your job to use that data to drive additional engagement. If your last product release caused your forums to light up with fiery and negative comments, you might want to rally engineering and take a look at your roadmap. Because you measured the earlier feedback in your forums, you’re now armed with the data you need to show angry customers how version 2 will make their lives easier. Lastly, don’t forget about tracking offline interactions and campaigns to your community initiatives. Research shows customers will often start offline and move to digital environments. Have a process in place to greet (and track) your prospects as they enter your community. Some will get there through traditional media (TV,Print,Radio) and other by word-of-mouth. Either way, you need to know the entry points (medium) so specific media investments can be budgeted and prioritized.

We’d love your feedback on what else you’re doing to plan your community efforts.

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Perhaps I was a bit long-winded, but nevertheless I’d love to get your comments on an upcoming Telligent webinar. We’re sponsoring a session with BtoB Magazine on Oct.16th with Francois Gossieaux, one other TBD and myself. We’re working to finalize the title, but it’s safe to say it’ll have a lot to do with choosing a white label social networking vendor.

But hey, it’s not all about the technology. We’ll also explore some tactical things you can do with the toolsets and discuss the best way to build roadmaps that take advantage of what vendors offer in the social software sector.

What are you interested in learning?

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Hat tip to the Twecosystem (again) for pointing me to this gem from David Meerman Scott speaking at the Inbound Marketing Summit earlier this month. He was asked “How do I make the case to start doing inbound marketing in my organization?

Rightfully so, he takes a jab at some of the traditional ROI questions and compares them to real-world situations.

“What’s the ROI of putting on your pants in the morning?” and “What’s the ROI of the army of Guatemalan landscapers now raking the bushes around the building?”

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georgedearing’s video profile

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The release a few days ago of Telligent’s newest product, Community Server Evolution, an enterprise 2.0 platform, got me thinking about the business possibilities and opportunities it enables for the practitioners and evangelists driving all this activity. While much of the discussion around community platforms focus on technology, instead, let’s talk about what community platforms can do for your business.

1. You can finally feel confident about starting an intranet initiative

It’s different behind the firewall. In fact, most business people will tell you it’s quite a challenge mimicking some of the things we take for granted on the consumer Web. Typically things like search, usability and basic collaboration are expected in anything that even smells of the consumer web. So why do we all give in when the experience shifts behind the firewall? We’re making sure you don’t have to give in. Once you’ve established how you intend to transform the way you collaborate, most community platforms will adapt with you.

2. The pulse of your organization becomes much more visible.

It may sound a bit cliche to talk about the pulse of a company, but with Enterprise 2.0 applications it’s almost eerie the things you can extrapolate when you see a bird’s eye view of an organization’s activity. Within seconds I can see who’s connected to who, how many discussions are taking place, or the statuses of my departmental colleagues. Once you start to see how connectedness drives conversation, you can glean intelligence from those interactions.

3. You’ll accelerate the way you find resources and expertise.

Information is the lifeblood of today’s organization. If you can’t filter the flow and capitalize on the important bits and bytes, you’re at a competitive disadvantage. With online communities, the gold nuggets of information come in the form of activity streams, rich user profiles, and answer-rich forums and message boards. It’s not that you’ll rid yourself of those hallway sprints to find Jenna in Marketing, it’s more about being prepared to ask her the right question at the right time.

4. You’ll have one-click access to fundamental Web 2.0 applications like blogs, wikis, forums and groups.

I don’t mean to harp so much on the technology here, but we’ve found that online communities are a great way to provide a hands-on rollout of social computing 101 exercises. In a short time, you’ll be able to stitch together quick scenarios for various departments that paint the bigger picture of how all this stuff actually helps them do their job. I can tell you first hand that community usage will equate to all sorts of creative ways to share information, connect, and communicate. And isn’t that what we’re all striving for after you strip away all the Web 2.0 hyperbole?

5. You can easily incorporate your day-to-day activities and enhance your workflow — instead of disrupting it.

This is a big one because we all know a big Achilles’ heel of any software or services rollout is adoption. For us social media users, adoption comes day one. When you’re provisioned as an employee, community integration with the intranet is a big part of that onramp. The fundamental things you can quickly accomplish — building your profile, blogging, joining a group, etc — all become a part of the way you work inside the firewall. You quickly find yourself easily cutting and pasting content and letting that content live where it needs to live. The world of file shares and dormant repositories of data become a thing of the past because valuable artifacts and discussions can be surfaced via tagging, voting and threaded discussions. And if you’re a SharePoint user, you’re sure to like the expanded capabilities related to blogging, wiki publishing and a cool email gateway that allows you to post and respond remotely to forums. How’s that for flexible workflow?

6. You’ll have the IT group on your side when you decide to champion an Enterprise 2.0 approach.

You know who you are. You’re the tinkerer, the strategist, and the solo freedom fighter dead-set on making the mess inside the firewall a better place for knowledge workers everywhere. You’ll have the confidence to strut into the IT group’s weekly meeting and prove you won’t be making their lives miserable. After your IT team sees the back-end and how easy online communities are to deploy, they might even bring the donuts to your weekly meeting.

7. You’ll have the line of business execs in your corner when you pitch the CIO on enterprise and intranet 2.0.

Before you head to the CIO’s office, you’ll be armed with case studies from happy business people that loved the Evolution use cases you (IT) had them adopting in a matter of hours. It shouldn’t be a surprise that you IT types like modern community platforms. They set out to make it as easy as possible to incorporate a lot of the tools and tasks you need to deliver services to the business. IT users love to have hooks into things like Active Directory, Exchange and the portal de jour, SharePoint.

8. You’ll reduce your email.

It’s interesting how our company nicely stigmatizes email. Fact is, with Enterprise 2.0 applications you quickly learn when email is inappropriate or just doesn’t cut it. There’s really no reason to email someone when you can post a message to a Group or Forum, see a colleague’s status, or skim a blog or wiki post. If anything, Evolution will open your eyes to all the options you have to communicate and collaborate.

9. You’ll reduce your meetings.

No really. On numerous occasions I’ve circumvented the dreaded “I could’ve avoided this meeting” syndrome. With Web-based collaboration tools, there’s plenty of ways to become a real self-service employee and find the information you need. That means having actionable content that’s timely, accurate and even archived for future reference. We like to describe this as surfacing your valuable corporate intelligence and activity. For example, if you’re trying to schedule a meeting with Mike in Product Engineering and notice his user profile status says “finishing up client specifications doc”, you might want to avoid sending that Outlook meeting request. If you had an RSS subscription to Mike’s blog, you would have had that insight.

10 . You’ll have some innovation on display as you try and recruit all those Gen Y Workers.

Across the board you’ll hear companies, especially large ones, stress the importance of recruitment and retention of younger workers. How can you expect to lure the youthful digital natives if you can’t build the right village around them? Evolution provides a helluva start to the blueprint.

11. And finally, you can actually be a part of the conversation instead of just watching it on the sidelines.

Have a gripe about something that doesn’t work? No problem, you have all sorts of ways to submit feedback. You can find an appropriate group, participate in a specific forum, or create a blog post that’s highly visible across the community software landscape. Flexibility and understanding the way people interact and engage in digital environments underscores much of the vision those of us have in Enterprise 2.0 tools and community platforms.

Did I get your attention? Email me if you’d like to arrange a briefing.

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I ran across this Sapient (NASDAQ: SAPE) sponsored survey recently that asked more than 200 CMOs and senior marketers what they’d like to see from the agency of the future. Based on the survey results, Sapient Interactive created a Top 10 Wish List for Agencies of the Future.  I took a few minutes to add some of my thoughts. I’d love to hear what you think of their list.

1. Greater knowledge of the digital space. With more than a third of marketers surveyed revealing that they are not confident that their current agency is well-positioned to take their brand through the uncharted waters of online digital marketing and interactive advertising, it’s clear that agencies need to have a greater knowledge of the digital space in order to thrive. In fact, nearly half (45 percent) of the respondents have switched agencies (or plan to switch in the next 12 months) for one with greater digital knowledge or have hired an additional digital specialist to handle their interactive campaigns. Further, when it comes to an agency’s area of expertise, 79% of respondents rated“interactive/digital” functions as ‘important/very important.’

No big surprise here. The agency carousel continues to spin around as new digital czar’s take hold of a brand’s strategy and interactive firms continue to try and evolve at breakneck speed. I think laying out the types of digital knowledge that companies are asking for would help here. I know a lot of people that have a good grasp of certain online tools and services, but  that doesn’t mean they have the vision to tie it all together. In a recent client meeting, we described this as “digitally managing a unique program.”

2. More use of “pull interactions.” When trying to engage consumers with their brand, 90 percent of respondents agree that it is becoming increasingly important that their agency uses ‘pull interactions’ such as social media and online communities rather than traditional ‘push’ campaigns.

We’ve all beaten this dead horse for several years now. A more helpful analysis would be to explain the value of creatively mixing push and pull approaches. A good example is how savvy digital marketers and community managers use email marketing to infuse fresh discussion points into brand conversations. When it’s done right, a timely email that summarizes a community’s events or latest updates can re-invigorate or remind members that things are still shaking.

3. Leverage virtual communities. An overwhelming 94 percent of respondents expressed interest in leveraging virtual communities (public and private) to understand more about their target audience.

There’s no doubt about this one. But we’re not just talking about building an online community or simply observing digital natives in their natural state. It’s a combination of observation, participation, and certainly engagement. Put as much thought into how you’ll engage with your audience as you did when you were trying to find them.

4. Agency executives using the technology they are recommending. Ninety-two percent of respondents said it was ‘somewhat’ or ‘very’ important that agency employees use the technologies that they are recommending. For example, it is important that agency executives regularly use Facebook, Flickr, wikis, blogs, etc. in their personal social media mix.

You mean there will actually be a job left for an executive that doesn’t competently possess enterprise and web 2.0 DNA? I doubt it.

5. Chief Digital Officers make agencies more appealing. Forty-three percent of marketers surveyed said that agencies with chief digital officers are more appealing than those without.

This sounds good on paper. My guess is you’ll get ad agency personnel with just a enough digital chops to fill the role short-term. Longer-term staffing of Chief Digital Officers will become stable when additional consolidation happens in high-tech PR and Advertising industries.

6. Web 2.0 and social media savvy. Sixty three percent of marketers surveyed said that an agency’s Web 2.0 and social media capabilities are ‘important/very important’when it comes to agency selection.

This one’s becoming more and more easier to spot, or should I say expose. Dig deeper than seeing whether the agency blogs or creates its own widgets. That means moving beyond the what (blogging) and pushing the agency to show you the how. Today’s socially adept agency can not only demonstrate effective blogging, they can map it back to  a broader social media strategy.

7. Agencies that understand consumer behavior. Seventy-six percent of respondents deemed this as an ‘important/very important’ aspect of their agency’s online digital marketing and interactive advertising area of expertise.

The bigger, more traditional agencies will have a leg up here. But make sure they can help you delineate offline and online behavior. I’ve seen data that shows how drastically the two can be, particularly if you look at social networking.

8. Demonstrate strategic thinking. Seventy-seven percent of marketers surveyed ranked strategy/brain trust capabilities at the top of their agency wish list.

This one might be the most obvious. Strategic thinking is clearly one of the main reasons you hired your agency. Usually, you can size up their strategic value pretty quickly. Think about the last program you launched and track it back to the documented recommendations your agency proposed. Often times you’ll find the strategy that was pitched looks a lot different on the back-end. That means your agency might be learning on the job — and on your dime.

9. Branding and creative capabilities. Sixty-seven percent of respondents ranked branding at the top of their agency wish list while seventy-six percent ranked creative capabilities as ‘important/very important.’

This one’s really straightforward as well. The social web has turned the brand manager’s world upside down. Make sure your agency can craft a brand strategy that takes your customers into account. In other words, it’s not just you managing your brand today, it’s also your customer evangelists.

10. Ability to measure success. It’s no surprise that marketers want an agency that can report on where campaigns succeeded, fell short and where they should be fine-tuned. Sixty-five percent ranked analytics at the top of their agency wish list.

I can’t stress this one enough. If your agency can’t create a framework for how success will be measured, you’re in trouble. Make sure you have some metrics in place and put the hard court press on your agency to show you the tools and services they employ to ensure results can be tracked and measured.

To receive a copy of the full-text survey, you can contact Gail Scibelli at gscibelli@sapient.com.

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• Survey Reveals Brand Marketers' Top 10 Wish List for Agencies of the Future
  Digital DNA continues to top the list.

• Survey Reveals Brand Marketers' Top 10 Wish List for Agencies of the Future
  Digital DNA continues to top the list.
  (tags: digital+marketing agencies surveys interactive+agencies analytics)

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I pulled the buzzwords below off a poll that Internet Evolution started running a week or so ago. My personal pick is “monetize”. I guess it’s because that’s the one I’ve heard the most over the last year. If you can define each of them, you have my permission to use them — sparingly though.

Which is your least fave?

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Below is some quick information I compiled recently after a conversation with one of my Telligent colleagues, Mike Johnson. Mike works in Telligent’s Interactive Gaming group and is working on a corporate blogging project.

In his words:

“The executive wants to launch a blog and he’s excited about it, but a Corporate Communications staffer is a bit hesitant because she’s not sure what the story would be on a weekly basis.”

Ah, the dreaded, “we have a smart executive that can actually talk about our business but I’m not sure if he actually will” fear.

In my experience, it really comes down to institutionalizing that commitment as you move toward high profile corporate and leadership blogging. I’ve listed some things to think as you consider your own corporate blogging initiative.

-Discuss the topics to be discussed and decide the amount of depth to be explored.

- Create and publish an editorial calendar. This creates some transparency internally and will put the right pressure on the executive to get it done.

- Pull in the Corporate Communications and Legal group early to set some guidelines and discuss best practices.

- Perform a content audit that covers not only existing content that should be surfaced, but external content (RSS feeds,blogs,industry sites) that needs to be distilled down by the executive.

- Perform a broad-based analysis of other peers blogging in the executive’s circle. ( Telligent recommends using a social media monitoring tool to provide ongoing insight and conversation monitoring)

- Decide who else will be involved in the executive’s workflow. In other words, make sure there’s a community manager to perform day-to-day activities like moderation, posting, etc.

- From a technology perspective, make sure you have a sustainable plan for extending the blog’s reach. Too many times, the technology has limitations that hinder the ability to wrap other community elements around the executive’s blog.

- Have the executive and the blogging team talk to customers. Think of this as a blog-oriented focus group. Many times the company’s customers will have specific business issues and challenges they’d like to see a real executive address in a public forum.

- When all else fails, start the blogging initiative behind the firewall and help your executive get comfortable with the process. If it crashes and burns, you’ve only got internal egg on the executive’s face.

And while I was compiling the content, I started by performing some quick Google searches and then moved on to more specific tag-based searches for things like “executive blogs” and “corporate” blogs”. Those two tasks uncovered the links below:

Baseline Magazine article on executive blogs:

Delicious search for “Executive Blogs”.

5 corporate blogs that built buzz (Dell is a Telligent client)

I hope you’ll provide some feedback as you flesh out the pieces of your own social media strategy.

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I continue to like T. Boone Pickens’ communication strategy. While it helps to have deep pockets, you still have to pull it all together and execute. His so-called “army” is actually doing a lot of the heavy lifting itself with all sorts of digital tools and services that spur the creation of consumer-generated content. Over the last 48 hours there was a battle brewing over whether or not NBC would show a recent Pickens’ ad.

Below was the first message I saw early this morning. I didn’t realize that I was a half day late seeing the initial email message. The first blog post was this:

We have four new ads which are either on the air, or ready to go on the air. The ads have been “cleared” by every network… except for NBC which has refused to clear a :15 second ad about Iran.

Right when I was about to post this, I circled back to the site and saw a more recent blog post that updated the situation.

On Wednesday the Pickens Plan Army engaged in a battle against NBC. The network had refused to run our 15-second ad talking about how Iran–IRAN–is moving quickly to CNG-powered vehicles so they can free up their oil to sell it to us at $120 per barrel.Guess what: We won the battle!By Wednesday evening, NBC had re-examined its position and told us they WOULD allow our ad to run in its original form.

There’s no questioning the web’s impact on things like this. Call it social media, citizen journalism or what have you, the fact remains we’re in the midst of some big shifts around traditional media. The winds of change are here.

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Hat tip to my fellow Telligenti Jim Gross for pointing us to a recent video interview conducted by Uberpulse at a Dell event in San Francisco. Open (minds, finds, conversations) emphasized a quote from Lark below that portrays Dell’s reliance on social media to drive its marketing strategy.

The social media stuff is probably the most important thing we do today, from a marketing standpoint. A lot of the other elements of our marketing mix has sort of become more and more transactional and more and more tactical in nature. The social media stuff is much more strategic… It’s about how to use social media to power the fundamentals of the business. That’s what we’re focused on.

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I presented some thoughts on choosing a white label social networking platform recently at Adtech Chicago and thought I’d elaborate on some of the pitch points. You can tell the focus drove deeper than product comparisons and suggested a more thorough look at the vendors themselves. How do they use their own product? How do they go to market? Who are their partners and how do they play off one another to create value?

What’s The Platform’s Sweet Spot?

Does the vendor’s strength play unevenly towards certain elements of social computing. In other words, did they start out as a blog provider and magically reinvent themselves as as a platform play?

Can They Play Inside and Outside the Firewall?

The lines between external and internal communities are becoming increasingly blurred. If your vendor doesn’t have an answer for playing nicely with SharePoint and can’t turn that around and go external, move on.

What Are Their Social Media Credentials?

You can quantify this pretty easily. Do they blog? Are they good at involving customers in the conversation? If they haven’t synchronized their own communications, there’s a good chance they can’t do it for you.

Is The Platform Geared For Particular Verticals?

Did the vendor grow up in a particular industry? If so, you might find the product cluttered with unnecessary or thin layers of specific applications you don’t need. You’d be surprised how much big paychecks from certain clients influence a product roadmap.

A good sign of a platform’s maturity is how many partners have latched on. The key here is to let the solution providers, integrators and digital agencies make the platform hum. While most of the time you can find a good contingency of subject matter experts (SMEs) on the vendor side, the channel is the ecosystem that makes things tick.

Have They Worked With Agencies Before? 

What About 3rd Party Alliances?

This is critical as you expand your online efforts. Whether it’s a CRM integration,or an e-commerce application, the odds are you’ll want to extend your social computing platform as your community grows. Take a close look at who the vendor goes to market with and how they leverage each other.

Send me your questions, I’m putting together a second version now.

First posted on the Telligent blog.

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There’s certain times when you have that gut feeling about something. That time when you just know there’s better ways to do things but you can’t seem to decipher the right approach to get there. One shift in today’s business landscape that doesn’t make it any easier is enterprise 2.0, big brother of its more publicized and consumer-oriented Web 2.0.While few of the digerati would ever debate enterprise 2.0’s worth, a lot of businesses still struggle with where to start or how to build a team of technical communicators and media creators.And if you’re a buyer, you’re acutely aware of all the tool sets, software and services at your disposal,something that certainly doesn’t help enterprise 2.0’s signal to noise ratio.

So how do you 2.0-ify your approach to do doing business inside the firewall?

* Start with clear-cut business objectives

This is one you’ll hear us harp on. Too many times we see businesses rush towards technology and tool sets before ensuring there’s a comprehensive look at what the business really expects to gain from an enterprise 2.0 project. A lot of times it can be simple objectives like cutting down on the number of weekly meetings or reducing the amount of emails sent. For every departmental batch of emails you show me, I can give you plenty of ways to move that information into a more conversational and interactive channel with things like blogs, forums, or a wiki.

* Educate and inform

This is your chance to use enterprise 2.0 techniques to socialize your goals internally.Don’t push out an email and cross your fingers you’ll get responses. Create a blog and show the skeptics how easy it is to create content and receive that content automatically through RSS.

* Find the right people

One of our recent webinars with BtoB Magazine included a poll question that asked more than 1000 attendees about their biggest challenge related to creating an online community. Almost 30% said personnel and staffing is the biggest roadblock they’re facing as they develop an enterprise social media strategy. As you put together you’re plan of attack,do an analysis of your colleagues and map their skills back to a social media task or activity. If Jane in corporate communications is almost too good at articulating her thoughts in long emails, there’s a good chance she could lead some of your blog efforts. Let’s call it the social computing “skills audit”.

* Focus on the low-hanging fruit

This one’s about looking at your business processes and figuring out simple ways to incorporate some collaboration and conversation. Marketing, sales and corporate communications are good candidates to get on the enterprise 2.0 bandwagon because the flow of information tends to be fast and furious and collaboration is essential. As you begin socializing enterprise 2.0, make sure you quickly identify the pain points of each group. Try not focus on the technology too much until you have things teed up and can demonstrate how processes will be improved.

* Think of your vendor as a long-term partner. It’s about more than technology.

As you develop your enterprise 2.0 approach, there’s no doubt you’ll need to supplement your talent pool with things like professional services or strategy. The vendors (like us) are often times the best source of readily accessible horsepower. Look beyond vendor roadmaps and dig for subject matter experts (SMEs). These are the folks that have been in the trenches and can quickly identify and uncover industry standards and common practices to build a strategy around.

What else would you add?

Technorati Tags: community+server,social networking,community+server+evolution,enterprise+2.0,web+2.0,telligent

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