Last week, Seth and I were fortunate enough to be invited by our friends at Social Driver to the Out for Business conference hosted by The National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce in Las Vegas. This conference and the NGLCC bring together LGBT business owners, entrepreneurs, corporate partners, and supplier diversity experts. The list of corporate sponsors that are looking to support LGBT businesses was impressive, with names like Target, Southwest Airlines, Metlife, Capital One, Apple, IBM, Toyota, and Cargill, just to name a few.

We had a great time presenting at the Marketplace Expo, attending the keynote speech by Geri Jewell, and meeting all the fabulous folks from the NGLCC. NationalField supports LGBT business owners and entrepreneurs and it was great to be able to spend the week in Vegas with such talented, driven, intelligent individuals.

Congratulations on a wonderful conference NGLCC and we look forward to what you do next.

I have heard it all my life and now more than ever I know it’s true: It’s the little things that make the biggest difference. A simple thing like being notified in-app when activities that are related to you occur can completely change the way you use a platform.

• They make it easier to keep track of interactions with other people and to access those interactions.
• They encourage you to communicate with one another
• They build your awareness of what is happening on the platform

Each day when I log into Facebook or any other social platform, I take these types of features for granted. That is likely why, when I set out to build a Notifications feature on NationalField, I thought of it as a minor upgrade. It turned out to be much more than that.

Planning, designing, and building notifications ended up being a bit more of a lengthy endeavor for me. We have a lot of different types of users, groups and organizations on NationalField using an abundance of different subsets and configurations of features. Every organization has different expectations when it comes to what types of events should create a notification and who should receive each notification.

Each feature has different kinds of data that data can be interacted with in different ways. I set out by identifying the times I want a notification, based on how we use NationalField internally. This gave me a base list.

After establishing my own use cases for NationalField, I used the email notifications as a baseline for what users already have and will expect. After this I sent my prototype out to our Quality Assurance, HelpDesk, and Product Management staff for use and testing. Each team identified a number of other use cases that had come up in conversations with clients, help desk tickets, or their own usage.

After incorporating all of the feedback of the testers, I am confident in our initial release of this game-changing feature. Internally we have already seen how the simple ability to see who has interacted with you recently can change the amount and quality of communication and interaction within our team.

We think that the finished product looks great and I, for one, am excited to see it in action. We look forward to your feedback.

WHERE: NationalField’s DC Headquarters

WHEN: Thursday, July 28 – 6-9pm

ADDRESS: 1801 Connecticut Ave. NW (IMPORTANT: entrance is on S Street immediately adjacent to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse)

METRO: Dupont (North exit)

WHAT: Symonfy2 DC Launch Party, NationalField-style

RSVP HERE

Here at NationalField, we believe that the next move for organizations is to figure out how to harness the exciting power of social networking for their business.

Business Intelligence meets Social Business
Businesses are good at collecting lots of data and storing it in databases, but managers are overwhelmed and unable to make effective decisions based on that data. NationalField brings companies a campaign mentality that leverages people to reach shared and comprehendible goals, consistently tracked by reporting metrics and realtime qualitative feedback.

This enables the type of dynamism that puts innovation into action, spurring growth in productivity, and creativity among employees and team members.

Networks where everyone can see everything doesn’t work for business
A social network where everyone can see everything is not ideal in an environment where different people need to see different data. But even more than that, flat social networks simply aren’t smart enough for the needs of organizations. They have no built in hierarchy for management purposes and make information exchange incredibly inefficient.

There aren’t metrics that make it possible for people on the frontlines to quickly understand how much they’re contributing to the overall mission and for people at the top to instantly see what happened that day.

“The Information Age,” but smarter and less overwhelming
The Internet overloads us with all types of information. NationalField makes the information that you receive relevant to you. NationalField uses the excitement of social networking to gather social business intelligence, helping companies to run more like campaigns with rapid data delivery tailored to each individual user.

The Information Age is moving too fast for businesses that rely on monthly or quarterly reports.

We’re here to help.

NationalField’s Summer Tech Mixer is July 21st!  Come join the @NationalField team for a late afternoon techie hangout!  We’ll have beer, pretzels, and kinect complete with Dance Central.  What more could you ask for on a Thursday?  So gather your engineering team (or just yourself) and come chill with us.

This event is free but you must RSVP here to attend as we plan to hit capacity in our space.

WHERE: NationalField’s DC Headquarters

WHEN: Thursday, July 21 – 6-9pm

ADDRESS: 1801 Connecticut Ave. NW (entrance on S Street immediately adjacent to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse)

METRO: Dupont (North exit)

WHAT: Tech Mixer, NationalField-style

TWEET & POST: Tweet & post about it with: #nfmixer 

RSVP HERE

About a week ago, I was doing my normal Tweet-surfing between tasks when I ran across a tweet from a friend at Zaarly.com. The tweet mentioned 3 things I enjoy: BroTime, Music, and Chiddy Bang. I took a look at the link, completely unaware that social media was about to take on a whole new meaning for me and make its way into one of the most important parts of my life: Music.

I have spent most of my career listening to LastFM, Pandora, and most recently Grooveshark, but I have always felt like something was missing. Sometimes I didn’t like what they were suggesting to me. Sometimes I didn’t know how to find the music I really wanted  to hear, or I wanted other people to hear it with me, or I wanted to stop driving and just listen to some different types of stuff.

On Turntable, 5 DJ’s sit in a room, playing whatever is in their queue, and people can vote their songs up or down. User can follow DJs, or even have their turn at a turntable if they want. This is helpful when a number of people are in a room, listening to music, and want to take some turns playing music.

Today, I sent an invite to the entire NationalField team. I have to say it has boosted the moral in the office. We are all playing the tunes over our speakers, voting each other up, down, etc. It is really nice to be able to listen to the same music at the same time and use the in app chat, as opposed to us each being an island unto ourselves with our headphones on, really ignoring one another. Its also nice to not have to trust someone to play good music… the voting really makes this a game changer! (Join our room if you want to check it out: http://turntable.fm/nationalfield)

When I think about how the social wave has swept over me, I am really amazed and overwhelmed. It has made its way into every part of my life, and with NationalField, it is even a huge part of my work life. I can follow friends on Hulu or Netflix and see what they are watching and with Google Latitude or Foursquare I can see where they are are any point in time.

Now social is changing and more than sharing, we are collaborating and crowd sourcing. With apps like Turntable not only can I share what I am doing with a link, I can share realtime what I am hearing, and my feedback makes a change instantly.

All of these social platforms and apps make a difference in how we operate and communicate in our daily lives. Each of these platforms and ideas change the way I approach my work, the way I interact with and communicate with coworkers and improve how close we are as a team.

It inspires me to help NationalField change the way communication, data, and information is consumed and collaborated on in other organizations. Turntable is just another example of  how social interaction and collaboration could have been improving our lives forever now, if we just embrace it.

Here are some of the cool projects our team worked on last Thursday night::

 
• NationalField in multiple languages? In the span of just a few hours and in one night, @JustinTLewis, our co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, brought internationalization to NationalField. Editing thousands of lines of code in more than 200 files, he rewrote major sections of the Platform to support multiple languages. He even started translating the site into Spanish and French! (If you know other languages or would like to help us test our translations, let us know!)

 

• HTML for Dummies! Co-founder @AharonWasserman pitted two non-developers, @EsleySvanas and intern @brianc61 against each other in a race to complete their own personal websites, learning basic HTML and web skills in the process. (see esleysvanas.com or briancollopy.com)

 

• @itrebal mashed up our issue tracking, version control, code review, and automated testing systems to create a new internal dashboard for the engineering team that shows the status of each one of our development branches, whether it’s failing automated tests, if it has passed code review, and if it has made it through QA. It’s called “Brunches” and is written to update in real-time so of course he wrote it in node.js!

 

• Also in node.js – we love real-time! -, @dcmotz put together a realtime visualization that shows where on NationalField individual users are spending their time. It’s pretty sick.

 

• Improved performance. @travib refactored some of the codebase to make some sluggish parts of the application lightning fast. While refactoring often has no effect on the typical NF user, it improves our ability to iterate quickly and add new features in the future.

As the night bore on, some engineers relocated with their laptops and pizza boxes to the roof of our DC office.

Hackathons are an opportunitity keep NationalField creative and forward-looking and we think that our engineers have the ideas that will move this company forward. And though this was just one company-wide all-nighter, featuring 13 pizzas, “Sweet Child of Mine” blasting on speakers, and this video (http://bit.ly/DI0wX), it gives you a little window into the culture of our team here at NationalField.

A couple weeks ago we started rolling out the largest update to NationalField since we started on the Obama campaign in 2008. I’m happy to report that we have completed the rollout of the new NationalField to all users on all networks.

Over the last two years, we’ve found that the number one reason people use NationalField is because they need a simple way to take all of the data they have – conversations, documents, emails, metrics – and put it in the context of the people on their team or in their organization. With this update, we set out to change the way people work by building something that combines the relationships people have at work with the data they need to do their jobs.

Understanding the relationships that people have at work allows NationalField to create a real-time stream of data that is customized for every individual user. We call that mapping of the relationships you have at work the Social Hierarchy. It lets us shows you how you fit into your team, the data you need to do your job, and makes it incredibly simple to connect with other people and start sharing what you’re working on, ask and get answers to questions instantly, and share documents with others on your team.

We’re really proud of how far we’ve pushed the boundaries of technology with this release. We rethought almost every part of the Platform and laid the groundwork for some exciting new changes to come over the next several months.

As we push this update live we’re reminded of how far we’ve come since we started on the most innovative presidential campaign in American history. Today NationalField is being used by many different types of organizations well beyond politics all around the world. Teams are connecting with one another in completely new ways; they’re unlocking data that previously was hidden away in spreadsheets, email inboxes, and databases.

But we know that there’s still a lot more to learn about the relationships that people have at work and even more data that we need to help organizations unlock. We hope you’ll keep following us as we continue on this journey and we can’t wait to show you the other exciting stuff we’re working on!

If you’d like to start using the new NationalField with your team, sign up for free!

Justin Lewis is co-founder and chief technology officer at NationalField.

For the last year or so we’ve allowed users to access NationalField through a secure connection but we did not force their connections to be encrypted. As of yesterday, if you attempt to access NationalField over a non-encrypted connection, we will automatically reroute the connection to HTTPS, making it impossible for users to access NationalField over a non-secure connection.

When you access NationalField now, you will now notice a secure padlock on each page. This lets you know that your connection to NationalField is secured over a 256-bit encrypted connection using HTTPS.

This is particularly useful for users who access NationalField from public locations such as coffee shops, airports, mobile devices, shared wifi connections, and other internet connections where you may not be able to guarantee a secure connection to the internet.

We are continuing to introduce additional functionality to increase the security of all user accounts on all networks and will update this blog as we complete the rollout of more of these security features.

Justin Lewis is co-founder and chief technology officer at NationalField.

And now the Stream is becoming even more useful—with Influence Boards. We’ve introduced a new way to identify the people in your organization who are having the greatest impact. For the first time ever, you can see whose ideas are creating the most buzz, whose questions are generating discussions, and who’s making valuable contributions to their peers. Allowing you to visualize what is actually happening in your organization—as it happens.

It’s just one more way NationalField helps you instantly see what’s happening in your organization.

We are constantly working to help you see your organization in exciting new ways. And even as we continue to add powerful new functionality, NationalField continues to be the most intuitive product your organization will ever use.