I’ve spent a few weeks now playing with Google Wave, and like most people who first encounter the service I started out deeply confused (see below for my exploratory exchange with Forrester RA extraordinaire Zack Reiss-Davis). As I got further into the tool I began to get a much better feel for the value it brings to the table. For a comprehensive write up see Daniel Tenner.

So what is the biggest frustration with Wave? It’s not integrated with my email. I now have two inboxes — three if you count Google Reader. Thanks Google. I have no idea when new Wave messages come in. Now admittedly this is a pretty minor quibble, but what I quickly came to realize, however, is that this problem of integration is a MUCH bigger problem than just two inboxes. What it means is that Wave will never take off as an email a stand-alone collaboration client.

Lets start with the assumption that Wave is the next paradigm in corporate email, IM, and collaboration. How will the tool be adopted? Presumably corporate IT will either proactively decide it has value or (more likely) cave to pressure from a subset of the business and start offering Wave or a Wave-like tool for employees. So what happens when the team that desperately wants Wave needs to collaborate with a coworker that doesn’t have Wave? That other employee is either SOL or he has to get his butt on Wave. That’s right, there is no clear way to use Wave in a mixed-modal environment — either EVERYONE is on or it’s simply not going to work. Having closely followed the enterprise software space for quite a while now I can assure you that no matter how much people dislike email you’ll have to pry Outlook out of their cold dead hands. To make matters worse its not like one single company can easily make the cutover either; if you abandon a traditional email client in favor of Wave you’ll constantly interact with customers, partners, and vendors who can’t make use of the Wave construct. Not too bad if you can mix traditional email and Waves into one inbox (which is undoubtedly coming) but how on earth do you invite someone into an in-progress Wave if they only have a traditional email client? (To see exactly why this is a problem take a look at Daniel Tenner’s writeup).

I have faith in Google’s ability to engineer themselves out of major computing problems, but I have yet to see them truly commit to a user experience and see it through to the end. Maybe Wave will be different, but I’m not holding my breath.

That all said, I do believe that Wave can be extremely valuable, but not as an email or IM client. Instead Wave should be applied to a collaboration environment like SharePoint or Jive. In this scenario we would abandon the Wave inbox almost completely and instead focus on creating and embedding individual Waves in workspaces and projects. Anyone with adequate permissions would be able to navigate to the Wave, comment, add value, hit replay, and quickly collaborate with colleagues. Here Wave is simply another content type. However even more likely is a scenario much like what SAP has already shown with its own Wave integration. Here Wave is simply the user experience on top of another artifact — in this case a business process modeling tool.

The Wave interaction model is very cool, and definitely groundbreaking. Advances like an appstore and federation will surely help push it along. But it will not kill your corporate email or IM; lets see what we can do with it elsewhere . . .

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Today is the second day of JiveWorld, Jive’s first customer conference here in San Francisco, and so far it has been an exciting mixture of my current role at Jive and my past role at Forrester. Yesterday I had the pleasure of joining Jive’s Executive Advisory Board meetings and ran into several customers who had followed my work at Forrester. That evening I bumped in to a pair of attendees from a Forrester client I had consulted for this past summer, and I also got the chance to catch up with the always insightful Susan Scrupski.

The best though was attending a presentation from Forrester’s Corey Matthews, the firm’s top Web Marketing Manager, who was presenting some of the results from Forrester’s own use of Jive SBS for its Forrester Leadership Board offerings. Shortly before his session Corey and I chatted a bit about Forrester and Jive, at which point Corey said something that really struck me: “You are now like the 10th person at Jive I know on a first name basis.”

I stopped for a second, replayed the previous 24 hours, and suddenly realized that nearly every interaction between a Jiver and a customer started with the Jiver greeting the customer by name. Yesterday: “Hey Jim, we’re getting that code ready for you later this week, I think you’ll be really happy.” Lunch today: “Jennifer, how is your rollout strategy progressing?” Hallway: “Mike! Its great to see you, how are you enjoying the conference?” You’ll have to trust me when I say this interaction is completely genuine too. Frankly the conference badges are microscopic — you couldn’t fake it if you tried!

I’ve been at Jive for about a month now and of all the wonderful things I’ve seen this is the most amazing to me. I promised myself I wouldn’t breathlessly blog about how great Jive is, but this post will have to be the exception; it’s too hard not to share the excitement of working for a company that truly cares about its customers. Though on the flip side, I’m horrible with names . . .

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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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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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Yesterday B.L. Ochman over at Advertising Age [UPDATE: Ochman is an independent blogger at What's Next and cross-posted to Ad Age. Sorry for the confusion] published a pretty good list of the Top 10 Reasons Your Company Probably Shouldn’t Tweet. The list has some obvious reasons – “1. You think using Twitter is a social-media strategy,” “8. You want to protect your updates” – as well as some useful reminders of things to avoid– “2. Every tweet has to be approved by legal,” “7. You think all that matters on Twitter is getting a lot of people to follow you.”

There were a few, however, that left me scratching my head. First, #3: You plan to use Twitter for nothing but broadcasting headlines or deals. This scenario is a popular one among companies as well as bloggers, and has good traction among users. Case in point: DellHomeOffers and Dell Outlet. The main draw in both cases are deals, plain and simple. While the venerable Dell Outlet does respond to questions directly and offers to help users, I’m going to go out on a very sturdy limb and hypothesize that of the 297,883 followers Dell Outlet has generated, maybe 200-300 follow for the non-deal content. The newer DellHomeOffers is deal content, plain and simple.

Last week Jeff Nolan wrote an interesting blog post titled Is Twitter Killing RSS? While killing is a bit over the top, I think the short answer is yes. Many companies in high tech products are finding that it is very easy and convenient to dump blog, wiki, discussion forum, and other content right into Twitter where more people will find and read it. Just keep an eye out for the telltale sign: from twitterfeed.

Next, #6: You think Tweeting as XYZ Corp. and using the company logo as your avatar might be a good idea. Organic conversations between real employees and customers is clearly laudable, and is typically the goal of a social media initiative. However, it’s clear there are some cases where customers want and need to connect with a “company.” Comcast Cares? While Frank Eliason, the main force behind the initiative, clearly identifies himself and does not claim to speak as “Comcast” it’s no mistake that his Twitter handle is not FrankEliason.

Further, look at Colonel Tribune, the mascot of the Chicago Tribune company. This fictional character does a nice job of aggregating content relevant to anyone living in or interested in Chicago and accretes value back to the newspaper, not an individual employee.

And what happens if you take a hands off approach to its logical conclusion? We end up with what has happened at Cisco and HP: practically every employee with internet access has set up a semi-official account, fragmenting the user base, and decreasing the overall corporate value. Its no shock that both companies are now working to rationalize the mess. Does it make sense to have one single account? No more than it makes sense to have one single company blog. But to let the gates swing wide open and declare you should not have an official corporate presence is reckless.

Finally, #9: You plan to track Twitter with Google Analytics. Ochman’s point here is not 100% clear, as it is difficult to tell if she is advising against tracking or against tracking with Google Analytics. But for the sake of discussion, lets assume the worst: That you should not bother tracking the impact of your Twitter initiative.

Well, no shocker here, this one is far from a best practice. Yes, the analytics are pretty poor today, and a simple analysis of followers alone is missing the point, however just letting it fly and hoping for the best is a quick path to frustration and, eventually, your CMO asking what all this effort has amounted to. Thankfully the usual suspects are working to provide a programmatic approach to Twitter analytics – WebTrends and Radian6 announced a new offering to do just that.

All in all, it was a very useful list and I recommend the read. Of course with a few caveats!

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I probably shouldn’t admit it in public — considering I’m a social media analyst — but I subscribe to the daily print edition of the Wall Street Journal. This morning I had just finished running through the paper when it realized that I hadn’t seen such a brutal collection of news about tech companies in quite some time.

To wit: Here are the headlines on the front page of the Marketplace section.

1. “In rare move, Microsoft is exploring job cuts“
2. “Nortel Networks files for chapter 11″
3. “Smurfit says bankruptcy is possible amid crunch” (Smurfit-Stone is a cardboard manufacturer)
4. “Motorola to cut 4,000 more jobs as cellphone sales collapse by half”

Of 23 total articles in the section, 9 (39%) were about tech companies and they were almost universally negative — and that doesn’t even include the front page article about Steve Job’s health. The only positive news was “IBM plans new center in Iowa.” Needless to say, the market is down, and the tech market is down right along with it. Granted Motorola and Nortel have been in trouble for a while, but Microsoft, Google, and Seagate are all well run companies. If there was any illusion that the tech industry might not get hit in the recession the Journal blew it away.

Rest of the tech headlines:

1. “IBM plans new data center in Iowa”
2. “Goolge plans 100 layoffs of recruiters”
3. “Bartz eases some hurdles to Yahoo-Microsoft deal”
4. “Satyam seeks leaders, names auditors”
5. “Growth in world-wide PC shipments levels off”
6. “Seagate slashes salaries”

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My guess is you have heard the news by now, but if not it is worth pausing to note that SuiteTwo — the Intel backed Enterprise 2.0 offering that launched in 2006 — has officially closed up shop. All things considered this is not much of a surprise. While the joint venture between NewsGator, SimpleFeed, SixApart, Socialtext, and managed by SpikeSource was a big showstopper when it launched, the offering never realized its potential and died a mostly silent death. To be honest I can’t remember the last time I spoke with a company that was even considering the product.

The main problem was not the concept – the market has aggressively moved towards suites of blogs, wikis, RSS, and social networking – but instead the execution. Though Socialtext founder Ross Mayfield always disputed the label, SuiteTwo never became more than a ‘Frankensuite,’ a group of individual applications duct-tapped together. While I’m looking out for recession casualties, SuiteTwo clearly had bigger issues.

For the few SuiteTwo customers out there now looking for another solution my advice is to examine your firm’s use of the technology and reach out to the appropriate component vendors. Unless your firm has been inordinately successful at integrating the entire suite into your processes, you are likely making most use of just one or two features, while the others are mere accessories. Reach out to the vendor of that one killer feature first; all the vendors involved are still around and most have matured their product sets to a level comparable with SuiteTwo anyway. In all likelihood you should be able to replace your existing implementation pretty seamlessly with what is now better software.

As for NewsGator, SimpleFeed, SixApart, and Socialtext: I would be shocked if they weren’t already picking over the carcass. There may not be many customers to grab, but those that are out there should be highly profitable – they know the tools are valuable, don’t need training, and will have a very short sales cycle. Happy hunting!

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Well here is a novel solution to the problem of too many “friends” on Facebook that you don’t really like or want to stay in contact with: sacrifice. This week Burger King launched a new ad campaign called Whopper Sacrifice where you sacrifice 10 Facebook friends and get a free Whopper. And they aren’t kidding, you really have to sacrifice them — the application brings up the actual “defriend” function in Facebook.

Naturally I had to sacrifice at least someone. Here are the screenshots:

I’ll sacrifice a few more and let you know it goes when I get my Whopper. Also, no hard feelings if you get defriended, it’s all in the name of research!

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Updated: Dennis Howlett writes in to correct the list. ESME is no longer associated with SAP. See here for the gritty details.

I’ve been spending time with the SAP/Business Objects team and was recently sent a long list of SAP communities and innovation projects. Its easy to write off SAP as inactive in the Web 2.0 space since it frankly has not done a great job of messaging to its initiatives. This list below should help change that percecption, even if some of the projects — ESME comes to top of mind — are ill-conceived. (Full discolsure: I needed a place to keep the list. Hopefully you’ll find it useful as well!)

Main communities:

· SAP Community Network (SCN) – http://scn.sap.com

· SAP Developer Network (SDN) – http://sdn.sap.com

· Business Process Expert Community (BPX) – http://bpx.sap.com

· Business Objects Community (BOC) – http://boc.sap.com

· SAP Ecosystem Hub – http://ecohub.sap.com

· Enterprise Services Community – http://esc.sap.com

· CW (Collaboration Workspace for private community discussions) – http://cw.sap.com

Key functionality/capabilities:

· Blogs - https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs

· Forums – https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/forums

· Wiki – https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/wiki

· Article Library (sort-able by various criteria such as: topic, date, author, industry…) - https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/articles-topic

· Events (especially SAP TechEd and SAP Tech Tour) - https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/events

Specific topics and programs that may be of interest:

· InnoCentive (innovation) - https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/innocentive

· Emerging or fast-growth regions / languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean…) – see language selector in header area at top of page / browser and also https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/category?categoryID=49&start=0 (China) or https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/category?categoryID=50&start=0 (Japanese) or https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/category?categoryID=51&start=0 (Korean) … Brazil (Portuguese) and others to be added in early ’09

· Social Media (Web 2.0) resources - https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/social-media

· Reputation management program (points for knowledge sharing) - https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/crphelp and https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/contributors-corner with sortable results by individual, company, date, subject area, etc. at https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/topcontributors

· Our work with the United Nations World Food Program to recognize the aggregate community contributions and give back to the global community described at https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/9999

· SAP Mentors (top contributors ++) - https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/sapmentors

· YouTube channel - http://youtube.com/user/SAPCommunities

· Docupedia (innovation example) - https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/u/44402

· ESME project (innovation example) – https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/10758 (Dennis Howlett ZDnet blogger) and https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/10080 (Dick Hirsch of Siemens)

· SAPlink (innovation example) – https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/4476

· DemoJam (innovation example) – http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=YIx_tsJ6IBQ

· SAP Developer Challenge (innovation example) - https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/wiki?path=/display/devchallenge/About

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