[After a couple of years attending the Enterprise 2.0 show in Boston I decided to save myself the hassle of traveling cross-country and skipped the show this year. Turns out it was the best Enterprise 2.0 conference to date. My colleague TJ Keitt thankfully did attend and sent along the following impressions.]

Being Boston-based typically isn’t convenient for an analyst covering companies that congregate in Silicon Valley, which explains why this blog’s regular author decided to pull up his stakes and head West. But last week’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference happened to be held in my fair city, allowing me to drive 15 minutes to meet with vendors that would ordinarily require a six-hour plane ride. After spending two days cruising the pavilion where vendors showed off their wares to a business world at once fascinated with and wary of social technology, Oliver asked me to share my impressions.

Going to this conference, what I really wanted to hear from vendors was how you go about convincing end users to take up your blog, wiki, social network, etc. This is a question that has been coming up more and more as companies shell out money for solutions that will ostensibly make their employees more collaborative, only to find that just a small sub-segment of the workforce is actively participating. It is particularly troubling for companies trying to move their workers off of social technologies that they do not control, like Yammer, and onto solutions that they do, like the vendors on display at Enterprise 2.0.

Coming into the show I didn’t feel that the vendors had a particularly good answer. Walking away I was left with much the same impression. There wasn’t a clear sense among the vendors as to how to spur adoption, and some of the answers they provided were wanting. For vendors who target lines of business in a bottom-up manner, their schemes for viral adoption work so long as users actually take to it and the IT department doesn’t eventually shut them down in favor of an enterprise-wide solution. For those with a more traditional IT-centric selling scheme, their reliance on corporate standardization on their offering works only so long as end users accept it and don’t have workarounds that they prefer. What I did not hear from these groups are the three things that I think are crucial to encouraging use amongst the rank and file:

1. Helping business leaders map out what specific business problem the tool will solve. What we typically hear from information and knowledge management professionals is that there is some corporate mandate to “be more collaborative.” So, someone is put in charge of finding tools to make this happen. But without a clear sense of what “be more collaborative” means in the context of the business, there is no clear vision of who will be affected by the tool, what issues they face in their work and where a solution can begin to help the workers. [Oliver: I could not agree more. I hear from WAY too many businesses who's stated goal is to "collaborate better"]
2. Providing assistance in re-engineering the business process that will be served by the tool. When bringing in any new technology and telling workers to use them in their job, you are mandating that they fundamentally change the way they work. This can be especially hard for someone who has become accustomed to doing something one way over the last ten years. A vendor could play a significant role here if they are willing to provide the professional services to help a client figure out how to tune the business process to naturally route people to the tool without completely disrupting their work.
3. Embedding the tool within areas that the information workers live. Going hand-in-hand with the business process re-engineering is having the tool attached to the applications that the workers use in the course of their job. This is what makes offerings like EMC’s CenterStage and Microsoft SharePoint so compelling – the social tools are linked to the content that information workers are using in their daily job. This makes the experience natural and part and parcel of the assigned task.

Now, I am not saying that I did not see any of these things in the tools that I viewed at Enterprise 2.0. Most of the vendors had a story around the third point, but I did not see the complete vision – tying all three of these things together. For the point solution vendors, this combination of smart sales, consulting and product design can go a long way toward making them relevant as we race toward Oliver’s “Day of Reckoning.” And what could create excitement among those of us somewhat jaded from hearing the same pitch over and over is vendors coming up with innovative ways to address those three issues to drive end user adoption.

[Give TJ a piece of your mind in the comments or at tkeitt [AT] forrester [DOT] com]

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Chris Lynch over at CIO Magazine has a nice write-up on the Enterprise 2.0 market that is likely to ruffle a few feathers — Microsoft Sharepoint vs. Enterprise 2.0 Start-ups: Day of Reckoning Arrives. All in all the article does a very nice job of aggregating a diverse set of viewpoints and there are a few quotes from me personally (turns out I was the one to call Sharepoint 2010 a “day of reckoning”).

There are few things that do need a little clarification:

• The day of reckoning is at least a year off. SharePoint 2010 won’t be out this year, and it will take 4-6 months before a mass of companies actually complete their rollout. That said the SharePoint marketing machine will likely start working overtime in the next few months, so the impact will start to be felt before then. Then again I was speaking at the Gilbane Conference last week and noticed the Microsoft booth was still pushing SharePoint 2007.
• Existing Enterprise 2.0 customers will be unlikely to sink a lot of resources into switching. For companies like Jive, Telligent, NewsGator, and Atlassian the problems with SharePoint 2010 are going to crop up with new deal flow. It is unlikely that existing customers will jump at the first opportunity to take on a major transition that will require major IT resources, content migration, and (most importantly) user training.
• The market will be defined by incremental innovation for the foreseeable future. In the article Ross Mayfield, president and chairman at Socialtext, makes the important point that Microsoft is on a much longer development cycle than its smaller competitors: “A year ago, the idea of having micro-blogging and activity streams for the enterprise was a new concept. Well, that’s around the time they probably froze the spec for SharePoint 2010. Overnight, the demand for social software changed, and it will change again.” These innovations will have an impact on the usefulness and fidelity of Enterprise 2.0 tools, but I would not characterize these as major innovations; it seems unlikely that many companies will make a decision based on these incremental innovations.

Now, while I do believe that there is a base level of collaboration that will become a commodity (the broad collaboration that Microsoft and IBM will provide) there are some very important ways that the smaller vendors can stay relevant.

• Focus on the customer facing market. The customer facing side of enterprise Web 2.0 — the use of these tools by marketing departments — is going to remain hot, and differentiated, for quite a while longer. There is big business here and most vendors in this space already play in both camps.
• Tie the internal and external market together. Customer facing communities are great, but few thus far are having a real material impact on the business. Why? It’s a long manual process to take insight from the community and bring it into the business. Those vendors that can best tie these external marketing communities to internal productivity and collaboration communities will help their customers truly realize the value promised.
• Provide customer and partner communities. The extranet has long been the red-headed stepchild of enterprise collaboration because, frankly, its costly to get customers and partners working alongside employees and so far the tooling has been poor. That problem is rapidly disappearing and the vendors that can best equip their customers to get real work done with outside groups stands to make a lot of hay — and unless Microsoft changes its licensing model this is not a place it can compete.
• Get vertical specific or process specific. If the base level of collaboration is commodotized what is the next logical step? Get more relevant to the business. This will mean creating collaboration applications or modules specifically tuned to the industries and processes of the customer and providing a much improved out of the box experience for things like project management and innovation as well as a top shelf application for Law firms, doctor’s offices, and restaurants. NewsGator is already heading down this path with innovation and PbWorks is already heading down it for Law firms. Its a smart move and will save a lot of companies.

All told this market is set for a major change, and many of the vendors we know today will no longer exist — Microsoft is raising the bar and some vendors won’t get over it. But some will, and those that do should have solid businesses to show for it.

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Now that hockey and basketball have officially closed up shop I’m starting to tune back into baseball and have been pleased to find my Tigers in first place — in the worst division in baseball, but hey, I’ll take it. Its been quite a few years since I have lived in Detroit, so when the Tigers are in town I try to get to as many games as I can. When they aren’t I spend my time going to Giants and A’s games mostly when the weather is nice, a couple of top shelf pitchers are going, or I just need a baseball fix.

Tonight I’m going to see Randy Johnson. I’ve never had the opportunity to see The Big Unit in person and I am looking forward to catching one of the games best pitchers before he retires — even if he’s not quite as intimidating as he used to be. So, as per usual I went over to StubHub to find tickets. Now, in my view, StubHub is the best place to find tickets for the simple fact that it has an interactive map of what tickets are available (why Ticketmaster can’t seem to figure out this technology is beyond me). So, in just a few minutes I found tickets and was ready to roll.

So I clicked “purchase” and logged in. What did I find next in my purchase process, why the screen shot below (you may need to click in to see exactly what has gone wrong).

Now, I am a big fan of site analytics. Anything you can do to get a better understanding of how your website is working or how satisfied your users are is worth the effort. But I have to question placing the popup one-third of the way through my purchase! Now I know, the ForeSee popup is random, but come on guys, how hard is it to hold the survey until after I’ve completed what I actually came to the site to do. My guess is if you can hold on just a few more clicks you’ll get a considerably more response.

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Just in case you can’t get enough of me, my colleague Tom Grant recently interviewed me for a Podcast for his blog The Heretech where we talk about marketing, B2B social media, and trash on the East Coast. All in all it was a fun 15 minutes.

If you want to skip to where things get a little “off-topic” jump to 10:33 and listen on. You will be treated to Tom trying to claim that he can understand the suffering of Lions fans as a 49ers fan, me disabusing him of that notion, a short discussion of driving habits by geography, and why the pace of the West Coast feels about right.

The Heretech Podcast

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A few months ago I went looking for technology vendor Facebook applications and found one from Microsoft that had just launched: Microphone. At the time there was not much activity, but I recently checked back in and was impressed with (at least parts) of what I found there. Now, I should admit that I am grading on a curve here; most of the apps I found were miserable, like this one from HP.

So what about the Microsoft app works?

First, the entire application has a gaming element to it and they award prizes to the most active users. Time and time again we see that these sorts of competitive games resonate with users and Microsoft has done a nice job of taking advantage — if you notice the leader board is monthly, so no one should feel completely frozen out.

Second, they have taken steps to incorporate other social networks and communications tools like Twitter. Microsoft has taken good advantage of a SocialEyes application to scrape Twitter and bring the conversation into Facebook (see below). I’ve actually never heard of this company but LOVE the approach; has anyone out there worked with them in the past?

Third, they have focused on tangible business functions like market research. A lot of companies have made forays into Facebook, Twitter, and other communities over the last few years and thus far few have real tangible business value to show for it. With this implementation Microsoft has done a great job of keeping their feet firmly planted on solid ground, focusing on customer care and market research. I am likely a bit biased by the fact that I am a market researcher, but this aspect of the application is especially well thought out. For example we see Microsoft measuring customer reaction to recent television ads (see below). Admittedly this is not a substitute for real quantitative market research, since anyone adding the Microsoft Microphone application is likely a bit biased in the first place, but if done right it can provide solid directional data at almost no cost. The poll question about joining a programming competition is spot on — you already have a group likely to participate and this can be a great way to get their input.

Now, I would lose my analyst card if I didn’t lob at least one stone at Microsoft and this one (at least for me) is a doozy. Look closely at the Apple and PC TV ad questions. Notice anything? Oh yes, they inverted the scale from one to the other, starting the Apple ad scale at “Hate it” and forcing people to keep reading if they don’t hate it. For the PC ad they start at “Love it” and head back the other direction. Subtle, but a MAJOR problem if you are looking for objective research! Then again, maybe the marketing guys were looking to show some success to management, in which case, carry on gentlemen.

All things considered this is one of the best vendor Facebook applications I’ve seen and it should serve as a pretty good model for others, even those selling B2B — know your audience, provide them some value, provide them an engaging experience, and keep it grounded in real business needs.

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I’m currently at the Atlassian Summit catching all the updates to Confluence — one of the most popular enterprise wikis in the world — and generally taking in the scene of a small company that is amazingly open and customer focused.

This morning’s keynote was run by CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes and at the very beginning he ran through the corporate values for the audience of mostly customers and developers. He explained that the values had been set several years into the company’s existence when the management and employees got together to codify what the company was all about.

The results (censored for your protection, though they were out in all their glory in the session):

1. Open company. No bulls#!%.
2. Build with heart and balance.
3. Don’t f*!# the customer.
4. Play as a team.
5. Be the change you seek.

I spoke to a couple of Atlassian employees about the values and it turns out they are more than just vague corporate platitudes; they are often invoked to solve disputes internally, and to push employees to better performance.

Over the last few years customers have become increasingly demanding of their vendors, and are now expecting

• Visibility into the direction of your company
• Community that shares purpose and knowledge
• Influence in the future direction of products they care about
• Opportunity to learn from vendors and peer

The Atlassian corporate values do a nice job of mixing both increasingly demanding customer needs with corporate needs — customers for example don’t care about being the change you seek — and have lead a small technology vendor to an enviable growth rate, out-sized market position, and fantastically loyal customers. I’d say these corporate values are worth emulating; with or without the colorful language, depending on your audience.

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