enterprise2open links's Network

Bulletin August/September 2009

The pattern language that Erin Malone and I are working on (inspired by Christopher Alexander, Ward Cunningham, the Gang of Four, Jenifer Tidwell, Matt Leacock and Bill Scott, among others), describes patterns we've observed roughly sorted to focus on three major elements of our concept model: people, objects and relationships. Over several years, and with input from many people, we gathered a large list of potential patterns to investigate, and so far we've codified 96 of them, with 56 other principles and practices, and five major don'ts, classified as anti-patterns.

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Members help members in USAA’s online forum

"San Antonio-based USAA Savings Bank, which provides financial services to military personnel and their families, recently ended two months of weekly sweepstakes to promote their new Member 2 Member forum. Within USAA’s website, members can use the Member 2 Member forum to ask and answer questions, ask for help, and to share their USAA banking experiences with one another."

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Reality Check: You’ve got to feel very confident in your products if you’re going to let people rate them publicly online. If you don’t get the ratings you expect, you’ll either get your act together…or kill the ratings/reviews feature — fast.

Management- vs. employee-driven community involvement

"How do you decide what cause or causes to support? You have essentially two alternatives for this internal process: top-down or management-driven, and bottom-up or employee-driven. What are their pros and cons for you as a company? What’s the optimal way to decide on the direction of your strategic cause marketing?"

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Strategic alignment with a cause relevant to your business benefits your company, as it creates a consistent affiliation with the cause in the minds of your stakeholders, including your employees. A company-wide cause allows employees to feel a part of something bigger than themselves, and focuses everyone’s effort in a single direction
The top-down decision-making process comes with drawbacks. By default and most importantly, it excludes employees from having a say in your company’s community involvement.
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- It may also limit the pool of available talent for your company to people who support your cause.
- Giving your employees the power to decide what causes to support offers you a top-notch opportunity to make your employees feel they, their say, and their work matters. Rather than imposing the decision on them, it positions you and the company as the support platform for their decisions.
- Bottom-up decisions diffuse the focus of your overall strategic cause marketing.
- You can align your company with a strategically relevant cause and open the process of deciding which particular organization(s) to support to a cross-functional team of employees.
- Empowering employees to be engaged in the community can be a cause in itself. At the top you make the strategic decisions to 1) be involved in the community as a company, and to 2) align your company with your employees’ charitable or community interests.

Initial review of 12Sprints.com

"12Sprints.com is a project from the Business Objects group at SAP, and seems to be related to a concept SAP previously called “Bridge Space.” Bridge Space was a concept demo a couple of years back at SAP to promote immersive meetings, collaborative decision making tools, linking applications and data into planning and decision-making processes, and just generally making decisions more transparent, collaborative, process-oriented, data-driven, and actionable."

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While a social tools user would have no trouble picking up the basic use of 12Sprints.com, a less savvy user will struggle, and even a very experienced social tools user will almost certainly miss much of the capabilities of 12Sprints.com due to lack of instructions, tutorials, examples, and help.
The tools provided for collaboration, decision making, assignment of tasks, sentiment management, etc. were nicely laid out, performant, and stable in my use.
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- Another way 12Sprints.com reminds me of Google Wave is that the system is extensible by developers. 12Sprints.com includes a RESTful API for extensions, which allows developers to build additional UIs for users, or to populate content from an application rather than just manually.
- I think I would use this system if it were a collaboration tool attached to a business process in SAP, or a report in Business Objects.
- I could imagine using a tool like this to allocate raises and bonuses, manage a discussion around invoice verification and approval (or rejection!), strategic sourcing decisions, or next year’s budget, but only if it really worked dramatically better for me than the tools I already know how to use – e-mail, word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation tools.
- In the end, 12Sprints.com seems like a good tool for planning and capturing meetings, and supporting collaborative planning and decisions. To really get the value out of this tool would seem to require a good deal of discipline

Inside Word: How The Big Search Engines Should Rank Tweets | paidContent

The Inside Word is a weekly feature that looks at compelling industry debates and discussions unfolding on the blogs of employees at digital-media companies.

Blogger: Hutch Carpenter

Position: Carpenter is the VP of product at Spigit, which sells social software to businesses; it has raised $14 million in funding

Blog name: I’m Not Actually A Geek

Backstory: All three major search engines have begun to feature “real-time” results from Twitter over the last several months. Microsoft’s Bing kicked things off in late October when it added a page that showcases the “hottest topics” from Twitter. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) added real-time updates from Twitter and other sources to its standard results pages last week. And Yahoo, too, added Tweets to its results pages this month for some “buzzing topics.” All three companies say they incorporate both the timeliness and the relevance of a Tweet when determining whether to feature it. But some critics have argued that the sites don’t do enough filtering.

Blog post: Carpenter, who writes frequently about Twitter on his blog, offers his own recipe for how Tweets can be incorporated more effectively.

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Ulrich Beck im Interview: "Die Spaltung wird sich verschärfen" | Wirtschaft | ZEIT ONLINE

"Soziale Unruhen und ein ohnmächtiger Staat: Der Soziologe Ulrich Beck erklärt im Interview, welche Konflikte er 2010 erwartet und wie die Gesellschaft damit umgehen soll."

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Fatale Fehler - medium magazin - medien journalismus zeitung print magazin radio tv online

Interview von Ulrike Langer: "Wie das Internet die Unternehmenskommunikation und ihr Verhältnis zu Journalisten verändert: Thomas Voigt, Kommunikationschef der Otto Group, über die Do‘s und Don‘ts der PR."

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2010 Predictions for Communications

Todd Defren: "This is a guest post by Lou Hoffman, CEO of one of our competitors, the Hoffman Agency. Lou blogs at Ishmael’s Corner.

Why allow a competitor to use my space? Why not? It’s a new world. We can claw & pound away on the battlefield and still be friends in the blogosphere. Also, he asked nicely. "

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Management’s Dirty Little Secret -- How to Increase Employee Engagement

"Given this, why are we complacent when confronted with data that suggest most managers are more likely to douse the flames of employee enthusiasm than fan them, and are more likely to frustrate extraordinary accomplishment than to foster it?"

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Here’s what the researchers discovered: barely one-fifth (21%) of employees are truly engaged in their work, in the sense that they would “go the extra mile” for their employer. Nearly four out of ten (38%) are mostly or entirely disengaged, while the rest are in the tepid middle.
Just this: in a world where customers wake up every morning asking, “what’s new, what’s different and what’s amazing?” success depends on a company’s ability to unleash the initiative, imagination and passion of employees at all levels—and this can only happen if all those folks are connected heart and soul with their work, their company and its mission.
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- In every industry, there are huge swathes of critical knowledge that have been commoditized—and what hasn’t yet been commoditized soon will be.
- To escape the curse of commoditization, a company has to be a game-changer, and that requires employees who are proactive, inventive and zealous.
- Problem is, you can’t command people to be enthusiastic, creative and passionate.
- My conclusion from all of this: first, engagement is essential to the competitiveness of every company and every economy—and we need to be doing a whole lot better than we are. We’ve got to get management’s dirty little secret out of the HR closet and into the boardroom.

The Customer Revolution: How can we prevent a Social CRM bubble?

"The fact remains however, that there was a CRM bubble and it burst. For many years CRM was a dirty word. I worked with a number of customers 5-8 years ago who refused to use the term "CRM" and instead referred to it as "Loyalty", "Customer Management" etc. It has only been in the last couple of years that the term seems to have bounced back and removed it's negative connotations. CRM is now seen as a positive initiative, crucial to supporting customer retention and growth strategies and Social CRM is a natural extension to the topic, embracing the customer's new control of the conversation."

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Nothing like enough attention was given to the people / change aspects of customer-centric transformation. I have personally seen call centre agents with a shiny new CRM system, hang up on customer's as they answer the call in order to try and get their AHT down! Incentives drive behaviour more than any technology.
I've seen lots of product demonstrations where vendors pitch an offering to listen to customer feedback, connect to the twitter fire hose etc. Few articulate the reality of how that insight can be used to improve products, processes and the customer experience as that involves far more than just technology.
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- The viral effect may tempt marketers to view "Social" as simply another low-cost channel to bombard customers with Spam… if this sounds familiar then STOP and consider your usage of Social Media.

Items from 12 people enterprise2open links follows

Bulletin August/September 2009

Members help members in USAA’s online forum

Management- vs. employee-driven community involvement

Initial review of 12Sprints.com

Inside Word: How The Big Search Engines Should Rank Tweets | paidContent

Ulrich Beck im Interview: "Die Spaltung wird sich verschärfen" | Wirtschaft | ZEIT ONLINE

Fatale Fehler - medium magazin - medien journalismus zeitung print magazin radio tv online

2010 Predictions for Communications

Management’s Dirty Little Secret -- How to Increase Employee Engagement

The Customer Revolution: How can we prevent a Social CRM bubble?

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