John Abele at TEDMED 2009

Why do we so rarely hear the word collaboration in health tech?

Salesforce Chatter

Who out there is using Chatter and has something to report about it?

This is a very promising solution for a lot of companies. It's sure way beyond Sharepoint when it comes to collaboration. And what a plus - in the cloud, no one knows if you're working on a Mac, for instance.

Is it true that the old world, non cloud sw vendors days are numbered? I can't see how anyone except a regulated industry would host Sharepoint over Salesforce.com's solutions.

Plus none of the old style vendors does as good a job of explaining what they do as Salesforce.com's simple videos do. Have a look:



I also like how they even use YouTube and allow you to share the embedded link. Many companies do not.

Here how Businessweek is (not very smartly) weighing in on Chatter here:
Businessweek
They don't seem to see how radically different a cloud solution like Chatter is (from Sharepoint) nor how much easier to use and look at Chatter is over Google Apps, strangely enough.

I haev only found press release-y reports on ReadWriteEnterprise and Techcrunch so far. No road testing yet. What about you?

Of course, Google Buzz looks somewhat similar to Chatter...but one has to dive deeper to really know.

There Must Be Something Here

In the Amazing Things You Must Have Department, the top spot must go to this new Sony device. I am not sure where it fits in internal communications and collaboration, but I am sure once you buy one, you will figure it out.

Technology: Humanity is Our Greatest Invention

Must see viewing about the role of technology in the world with Kevin Kelly at TEDxAmsterdam.

Getting to ROI

This excellent presentation from social media metrics expert KD Paine lays out what you need to think about in social media - what is it you are trying to measure. While it's not designed specifically for an internal communications audience, there is plenty of food for thought along those lines as well in this presentation.

See it here.

Cities Going for Google Apps

It started with Washington, DC in 2008 and now in 2010 the city of LA has joined the movement toward using Google Apps for the public's business. Moving into the cloud and specifically into Google's cloud seems like a smart move to me to position yourself as a smart city. it will be interesting to see how other vendors compete against this:





Of course, my favorite thing about Google Apps is the private label video capability (YouTube features in a private, closed environment). You get a completely configured, great video solution without having to configure and pay for what is usually an expensive add-on. The video channel also goes far beyond other private options, as you get the ability to rate, comment on and favorite videos (as well as upload) in a format that many people are already familiar with.

But the Google Apps direction in government does give rise to other questions: how will citizen based and 2.0 data movements interact with this system?

Intel Social Media Training

Out today: this excellent article in Harvard Business Review chronicling Intel's journey through the land of social media and internal and external collaboration. The company created a best practices group called a Center of Excellence and created educational programs for employees including:

"The Digital IQ courses cover such areas as:

Tweet Like You Mean It: The Right Way To Tweet Your Brand
The Importance of Brand Identity in Social Media
WOM (Word Of Mouth) The Anatomy of Buzz
Social Media Measurement
Viral Marketing
Mobile Marketing: Wide Reach of a Small Screen
China's Social Media Landscape"

A great model for others.

• Read article

You can also get the INSIDE SCOOP article from the company's own blog here.

A Post You'll Want to Bookmark

Here is the most useful blog post of 2010 to date - a list of dozens of Enterprise 2.0 success stories. Well done!

Microsoft Does Something Spectacularly Good

Go benchmark yourself - that's the bottom line of successful social gaming and many sites use this lever to accelerate engagement. Now it's being applied to an entirely new category of activities - workplace training.

Microsoft's introduced new metrics into using its software with the launch of Ribbon Hero (an odd name). For more, see here.

Knowledge Creation vs. Knowledge Management

I am going to make this required reading for clients...A lovely article from John Hagel and John Seely Brown in Harvard Business Review on creation spaces. People need to get over the email thing and understand the value collaboration offers.

A quote from the article:

"Creation spaces have the potential to generate increasing returns — the more participants that join, the faster new knowledge gets created and the more rapidly performance improves. They bring into play network effects in the generation of new knowledge."

I wouldn't agree that KM in contrast is only about document management, but that is the authors' problem. Knowledge management includes all forms of knowledge creation as well.

http://blogs.hbr.org/bigshift/2010/01/a-better-way-to-manage-knowled.html

How Intense Are Your Business Relationships?

A new cell phone ap called Scale (from Socialibrium) now lets you monitor the intensity of your work contacts.

See here.

What People Want from Social Media

This wonderful visual tells us what this group of 500 reported as the reasons why they use social media. Learning comes out on top primarily because that's what seniors want. Breaking this down on gender, women want most to use social media to socialize. Men are somewhat interested in learning, but seniors are very interested in learning. It's interesting that they could tilt the scales here to make learning the number one category.

The subpage on this site also breaks it down further. See here.

It would also be interesting to make the case that much of what is social is also about learning. Just different words to describe it.

Old Data, Fresh Take: Accelerating Knowledge

Love this piece from Stanford where researchers have taken correspondence from the Enlightenment to see how and where intellectual connections were made. As the press release from Stanford says, you can see in a moment what used to take a lifetime of scholarship to understand.

Microsoft Taking Enterprise 2.0 Seriously Now?

Read the latest in this Read Write Web article about Ray Ozzie's new E2 lab at MS.

A New Contestant in the Enterprise Collaboration Space

Cubetree presents tomorrow night in SF at the New Tech meetup.

For a preview of their product, see here:

Pam Featured on Fox News: What Online Video Can Do For Your Business

Read the Fox TV Small Business Portal interview with Pam on web video marketing for small business here.

Many of the same tips can be applied to internal collaboration videos as well.

Shift Happens: The John Seely Brown Shift Index Is the Year End's Best Reading

If you haven't read it already, run do not walk to read this intelligent birds eye view of the big picture of what's happening in business today. More powerful than attending any three day conference I know of, this is reflection on steroids and will certainly have an impact on how you see what's happening today.

Here's the link.

KMWorld 2009 Presentation: Role of Social Technologies In Search and the Organizational Impact

Here is the presentation from KM World on implications of social search. It also includes an updated version of social technographics from Charlene Li.

KMWorld 2009 Presentation: Role of Social Technologis In Search and the Organizational Impact

View more presentations from Charlene Li.

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, on Enterprise Apps at Google: Future Is Veddy, Veddy Bright

Google is very focused on the enterprise space going forward. Interesting to hear Schmidt talk about Google view of this market and the challenges CIO face, trapped in their 1980s architecture. Definitely worth a listen.

Amazing New Twitter Ap: Great for Your Business

The problem with Twitter is that 140 characters means haiku or link - i.e. you write something very short OR you link to a page with more info.

Screenr is a new ap designed to make - quickly and easily - little screencasts you can tweet - quickly and easily. It's like a micro version of YouTube but with screencasts.

See the one minute intro video here.

Could be unbelievably helpful for business...help desk is the most obvious function, but probably there are gazillions more. What ideas do you have about what you would use it for?