Social software in business: from pilot projects to enterprise-wide adoption

Panelists

• Lee Bryant - Director, Headshift
• Olivier Creiche - COO, Six Apart Europe
• David Fitch, Director of Knowledge Management, Simmons & Simmons (law firm)
  
• Adam Tinworth Head of Blog Development Reed Business Information

It's all about the tools, baby. Blogs, wikis, podcasts, Web 2.0 - that's all well and good, but what software is the best to install, and what are the best ways in which to use it?

Bryant: An overview of tools...

• Lee says we now have some mature tools in the enterprise social software space - Confluence, MovableType, Blogr, SuiteTwo, En.terpri.se, ThoughtFarmer, SalesForce.com etc etc but "it ain't what you do it's the way that you do it - what's what gets results". Headshift will soon publish an online library of use cases in internal comms, marketing and PR and social networks. I'd suggest you check out any of the above, by the way.
  
• Glad to see Lee mention Ning - a quick 'n easy way for people to create free, on-the-fly "social networking' sites. There is an element of YASN (yet another social network) here - every man and his dog at the moment is launching a MySpace clone for all manner of verticals. But opening a Ning site might be a good way to dip your toes in thew water before getting serious and engaging a company to build a professional strategy or product.

Creiche: For the unintiated, Creiche's company, Six Apart, makes blog software - specifically, Movable Type, Typepad, Livejournal and, of late, the easy-to-use Vox.

• UK media are ahead of those in other nations - most outlets are now publishing weblogs, Creiche says. In the US, Six Apart software powers Huffington Post and Washington Post
• Case study, Citrix: The company felt that there was a lot of knowledge in the firm that was being lost, so they built a tool to gather and store knowledge somewhere other than email inboxes. "They've been rather successful"
• Case study, AEP: 20,000-employee firm "wanted to prevent emails being the central repository of company knowledge because it's not shared and is lost the day people go away". AEP rolled out Mobvable Type with the goal of giving every employee a blog - there is, apparently, a "growing number of requests for blog creation internally".
• Marketing & Community:-
• Case study, Arcelor/Mittal steel merger: Created a Movable Type blog, ArcelorMittal.tv, to "communicate internally to their employees but in a public manner" to "be very open" about the merger process and answer questions, "confronting openily all issues and questions raised by employees, investors and other stakeholders". Resulted in 15,000 videos viewed per day
  

Fitch: Blogs for communications in a firm with 1,100 lawyers....

• Simmons & Simmons has rolled out "new lighter tools to communicate and share with one another".
• "Fitch says one of the big issues is the time it takes, with particular tools, just to write and publish something. "Blogging has changed that because it enables you very quickly to capture things on the fly and make them available in very short periods of time."
• "The investment was zero" because they used open-source software. Started with six internal blogs. Now they want to put together a real business case.

Tinworth: Reed Business Information rolled out internal blogs and wikis...

• Adam, as the longest serving personal blogger inside Reed, was picked to develop a wider internal blog comms programme.
• "There is suddenly a hunger for [people] to talk to each other behind the scenes."
• Education: "We're not centrally dictating. Anyone in the company can come along to a meeting. By getting people within teams who happen to know a little about the tools and rules to lead, and to show others what to do, they achieved some growth quite quickly.

Q&A...

Got to applaud Bryant for saying all this technology is really all about the people at the end of the keyboard. "With social tools, you get immediate payback because you use lightweight tools to organise information in a way that means something to you." Example - social tagging (picking your own keywords to identify and structure the information you post, not having to adhere to a hierarchy picked by those know-nothings in the IT department).

Representative of BT asks if all this new stuff means "the end of internal communications" as we know it (and I feel fine). Paraphrasing Lee Bryant: "Every generation of technologists see themselves as Luke Skywalker zooming in to destroy the Evil Empire" - but it's more about "layers".

Mike Butcher asks how the existing knowledge in company intranets can be adapted to new wikis. Fitch says we'll all move to "using the web to create communities of collaboration" - from a situation where companies have relied on static intranets for the last eight years.

Bryant says out-of-date material will simply naturally "fade in to the background".