Online Social Networking & Business Collaboration World – Enterprise stream Part 1
I’m at Day One of Online Social Networking & Business Collaboration World, where I’m chairing the plenary sessions and enterprise streams.
Other posts:
RIchard Kimber, CEO of Friendster, presentation
Rebekah Horne, head of Fox Interactive Media Australia and Europe, presentation
Francisco Cordero, GM Australa, Bebo, presentation
Ross Ackland, Deputy Director, World Wide Web Consortium
Laurel Papworth, Director and Social Networks Strategist, World Communities
Paul Marshall, CEO, Lassoo.com.au
Partner event: Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum on 24 February 2009
Enterprise stream – Part 1
Chris Knowles – Heinz Australia
We have four key initiatives:
The scoup: Intranet-based blog (on bloggingengine.net)
The sauce: Intranet-based wiki (on docuWiki)
Spillin’ the beans: Extranet-based blog (on SquareSpace)
ForBaby: Internet-based social network (on Ning) – 360 people active
Lessons learned:
* Each community is unique. Almost half of office workers at Heinz are over 40.
* Get to know them, what they like and don’t like.
* Take nothing for granted.
* Make the entry barriers as low as possible – simplicity is critical – stick with essential features to begin
* Social media is time consuming
* You are responsible for managing reputations – make the time to read the content and be prepared to undertake diplomatic missions
* Incentive is everything – why should they participate? It’s completely different inside the enterprise and in external communities.
* If your CEO blogs people won’t comment on it
* I guarantee that your IT department is running a blog or wiki.
* ‘If you’re not embarrassed when you launch it, you’ve waited too long.’
* Manage expectations and expect to fail.
* Have several possible uses for a tool (branding, feedback, product testing etc. etc.).
* Make sure that those that count understand the Ladder of Participation
* The number and volume of information flows increasing dramatically
* Loss of control on creation of new flows – people will do it once they can
* Answer rather than ask questions
* Keep on the 3 Es: Evangelizing, Encouraging, Educating
* Need to keep pushing to do more, reward contributors (for external people we send hampers and they write about that, for internal people we put their photo on the home page)
* Identify and work with early adopters
* Use blogs and videos to explain how to use the tools
* Buy yourself insurance: Put ‘Beta’ on everything
Andrew Mitchell, Urbis
Cultural attitude in team of experimentation. Want to improve how we work, making tomorrow better than today. So we are experimenting with a wide variety of Web 2.0 tools ourselves.
Our wiki journey began around 3 years ago. Started with PMwiki, got traction with our GIS team. Didn’t have the librarian on board, but that changed when shifted to MediaWiki.
Agendas and action are very useful to have in an open space – it’s a no-brainer. Idea capture and generation – just stick it in a wiki. Procedures are absolutely natural for a wiki.
People Finder is internal directory. Project Finder won Gold Intranet Award. Enhanced based on user feedback. Conversations emerged on the wiki, replacing email to some degree.
Built common view on what were important themes, by people compiling front page of wiki.
Comparison and revision history allows view on what activity is happening on the wiki. People need to feel comfortable changing things, knowing that it can be taken back to how it was before.
What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) is very important. Don’t have that on MediaWiki.
Some pages are ‘lasting truth’. Some are ‘past truth’ – useful, not timely, but could still be useful. Some are ‘collaborative truth’ – very useful for us.
Need to be very explicit with new staff members about appropriate behaviors on wikis. The spirit of the original team is not always obvious. It’s about communication.
Incomplete is very much OK for wikis in our team. Free-form is fine – sufficient structure will emerge. Some mess is OK.
