New Socialcast Features

New Social Business Intelligence® Date Selection Capabilities
A new date selection tool has been added to Socialcast’s exclusive Social Business Intelligence® (SBI) suite of analytics. Now, administrators can easily pull data from convenient pre-selected time periods, or choose specific date ranges. This gives administrators complete control in selecting the dates for further analysis of their community’s activity.

Social Business Intelligence® surfaces the people, conversations, and topics in a community to measure the power of an organization’s collaborative efforts. This tool allows community administrators to discover the most important topics and conversations being discussed by the community. Social Business Intelligence® is a Premium feature available in the Premium Hosted and On Premise (Behind the Firewall) deployments. To add this powerful suite of analytics to your Socialcast community, click here.

Post Messages Into Any Group Regardless of Membership
This new feature allows all community members to post topics, questions or comments into public groups that they are not members of. Now, a user from the sales team can ask a question or post a comment inside the engineering group without having to become a member. These messages, once posted, will appear in that user’s home stream, allowing them to participate in the conversation further. The goal of this feature is to allow users to access experts in a field, making Socialcast a more powerful resource for knowledge-gathering.

• Broadband data speeds have reached 90 percent of business establishments
• Wireless broadband is available in all major metropolitan areas
• Mobile voice services have saturated all industries
• Mobile and wireline prices have dropped rapidly with the elimination of usage charges and ubiquitous “unlimited” plans
• There has been wide adoption of subscription-based services such as voice over internet protocol (VoIP)

The surfacing of the mobile workforce has changed the way many brick-and-mortar companies conduct business. No longer do the walls of the company indicate the boundaries of communication.  For example, companies often strategically place key personnel in remote locations to provide a personal touch to customers.  The ability to reach-out to a company’s customer base first-hand, while seamlessly communicating with corporate headquarters, extends customer interaction beyond company walls.  Companies also frequently permit telecommuting, allowing employees to be virtually present yet physically remote. The result is a truly mobile workforce that makes getting work done faster and more efficient thanks to technology.

According to Insight Research Corporation, the mobile workforce would not have been possible without these essential certain elements converging and becoming available:

1. Mobile Services: Both wireless and broadband services
2. Devices: Cell phones, PDAs, notebooks, and wireless cards
3. Service Control: Management of wireline, wireless, office/remote access in a seamless service offering
4. Enterprise Applications: The business processes that are automated through mobile access
5. Business Application Platforms: The foundations and interfaces for building enterprise applications over a converged wireless and wireline network

With extensive advances in business communication infrastructure and mobile technology, companies are now promoting the expansion of their mobile workforce.  Cited in a study by the Telework Coalition:

• 89 of the top 100 U.S. companies offer telecommuting
• 58 percent of companies consider themselves a virtual workplace
• Only nine percent of employees work at headquarters
• 67 percent of all workers use mobile and wireless computing

This data shows that the mobile workforce has quickly become more than just a buzzword, but actually is now a reality for a majority of employees.

Additionally, the definition of a “mobile employee” continues to broaden with rapidly changing technology and services. A mobile worker used to be just the business traveler, sent on planes and trains to conduct business before the weekend approached. But today, every employee has the potential to be mobile. Empowered by devices like the iPhone™, iPad™, and Android™, these mobile tools offer huge productivity benefits with real-time information exchange and increased efficiency for every employee.  According to a study by Pew Internet, employees at businesses using mobile technology are seeing a major improvement in work efficiency:

• 80 percent say that mobile technologies have improved their ability to do their job
• 73 percent say these technologies improve their ability to share ideas with co-workers
• 58 percent say these tools have allowed them more flexibility in hours spent at work

These improvements in work efficiency have suddenly released a paralyzing kink that has limited the free flow of information in the communication pipeline. However, despite the vast improvements that have been made, companies and employees are realizing that the mobile workforce isn’t nearly as empowered as it may appear on the surface. The reason? Critical business applications used every day were never developed for remote or mobile access, making them void of a mobile layer or interface. They are completely inaccessible to the mobile workforce, only available to those back behind the confines of corporate headquarters. Employees working at home, from a hotel, at a client location, or even on an airplane are unable to access valuable information from ERP, CRM and accounting software, for example (cloud-computing applications excluded, of course). Now, despite tremendous infrastructure improvements, the flow of critical information from these behind the firewall systems to the mobile workforce is kinked, causing delays and inefficiency. These business applications are inherently missing a layer that untangles the knots and lets information flow freely. It’s the one disadvantage of being a mobile employee – you’re left in the dark without access to the information needed.

Or are you? There is a solution to this challenge of information flow – Activity Streams. Activity Streams provide an otherwise non-existent layer of visibility on top of these critical business applications, surfacing relevant information to mobile workers in a mobile-friendly interface. Activity Stream software aggregates important information from these tools and make their data visible to mobile infrastructure in real time. Instead of requiring costly and often impossible upgrades to ancient databases or tools, Activity Stream software sits on top of these systems and floats relevant information to each individual user that needs it. It is a social layer that plays “middleman” between the mobile worker and the company system, passing information back and forth with ease. The result is a mobile workforce that can tap into crucial business systems with security and simplicity, further increasing productivity and efficiency. Now, it’s time for the next step – as companies increasingly promote and embrace a mobile workforce, layering on Activity Streams will become a crucial step to empowering these employees.

Sources: Gartner, Nielsen Wire, Pew Internet, WSJ, Insight Research Corporation

About a decade ago, my first “corporate” boss Jennifer gave me my first “corporate” responsibilities as an entry level PR employee at Nickelodeon. It seemed simple enough:

“When you’re done writing the press release, email it to me, and copy Blaine and MaryAnne.”

My eager, novice ears heard the instructions and I did just what I thought was expected – I emailed the release to Blaine (the Assistant), Jennifer (the Director and my boss) and MaryAnne (the VP). In that order. It was alphabetical, I thought, and probably the right way to get this information to everyone. To my boss, however, I had made the mistake of undermining her authority by failing to respect the reporting relationship via email.

I didn’t realize until later that day what a mistake I had made. As a new employee fresh out of college, I didn’t realize that there was a hierarchy to email communication. There are signals sent with every email that floats into an inbox – and the “to” and “cc” fields sometimes speak volumes more than the actual written words themselves. Like the nuances of grammar in the English language, where emphasis can be added for effect by slightly different placements of a comma or an adjective, the entire meaning of an email can be changed based on who is listed first in the “to” field, who is copied, and who is completely omitted. In email, meaning is derived heavily from how the corporate hierarchy is included and arranged.

The introduction of public, asynchronous communication systems into the enterprise has not only shifted how we communicate, but to whom we communicate. The question then arises – do the same rules of the communication hierarchy apply inside enterprise communities? Should employees always address higher-ranking executives before middle management when posting to a community? Should they “cc” or “mention” someone’s boss when offering praise inside the network so that the deserving employee is sure to be recognized? Overall, do we respect the traditional rules of email, or do we break free from them with the mentality that social communities are inherently different?

I argue that tools like Socialcast should continue to respect the corporate hierarchy and that users should be addressed with respect to their position. But every company is different – and this may not be the case across the board. What do you think? How does your company treat the addressing of employees inside social communities?

New Socialcast Features:

New “Helpful Links”

A new “Helpful Links” section has been added that allows companies to link to internal and external resources. The links are managed by system administrators, and enable relevant training and resource information to be available at any time inside the community. This feature can be accessed through the admin panel, under the “helpful links” tab. Once entered, the links will appear in the upper right-hand side of the main page for all users.

New Applications Link

A new “Applications” link has been added to the top of the Socialcast Community, providing quick and easy access to integration tools like Outlook, SharePoint, Blackberry, iPhone and more.

New User Profile Field

An additional field has been added to a user’s profile page to enter the name of his or her manager. This field helps communicate a company’s organizational structure.

Updated Group Directory

The group directory has been updated to show more information on the community’s groups. Now, the group directory displays the number of followers and messages in each particular group. A new and easy layout has been implemented, making selecting and joining public groups simpler.

“Likes” Initially Only Show for Users You Follow

Now posts that contain “Likes” only show the names of people a user is following. All other “Likes” from users that are not followed are aggregated into a numerical count, and can be viewed by clicking on that number. This eliminates the number of “Likes” shown under each post for large communities.

Keeping Comments Collapsed

When comments are collapsed and a user adds an additional comment, the message will no longer automatically expand to show all comments on the message. This helps users keep their place in the stream.

Updated Mobile Web Platform

Socialcast is also releasing a new mobile web version of the community. Android and other mobile platform users will have improved access to Socialcast communities via their mobile web browser. The mobile web version features many of the same capabilities as the web app, but is optimized for mobile devices. To access a Socialcast community on a mobile device, go to http://www.socialcast.com.

Adoption of the SaaS model is rapidly increasing across the world. Analysts at Gartner research predict that by 2011, 25 percent of new business software will be delivered by SaaS. Further, a Network World magazine article titled “The Future of SAAS” predicts that:

• 75 percent of U.S. businesses will implement at least one SaaS application by 2010
• 30 percent of new business applications will be SaaS by 2012
• Middle market and large enterprise companies will use an average of seven SaaS applications by 2010

There is a dichotomy that exists, however, between the usage of SaaS and the security of SaaS applications. The above predictions demonstrate that companies are indeed increasingly using SaaS options while trusting their valuable IP to responsible SaaS providers. At the same time, top data security experts are still debating on whether SaaS providers are responsible enough, and secure enough, to handle sensitive intellectual property (IP) like pharmaceutical, financial or government data. This debate shouldn’t limit a company’s exploration and use of the SaaS model, but it does require an understanding of how SaaS works and what security concerns and issues could arise.

SaaS Security

The SaaS model stores a company’s data in a location that isn’t controlled by that company, and then sends the data through the public internet for use by the company’s employees. This model opens up sensitive IP and data to potential risks found on the web but not necessarily behind a corporate firewall. If a SaaS provider is not following industry best practices, a company could be putting itself at risk, which could expose sensitive IP and data to the web.

However, reputable SaaS providers and industry leaders have developed strong security methods and best practices to keep a company’s IP and data safe when using the SaaS model. Therefore, when evaluating and selecting a SaaS provider, companies must confirm that these security protocols are being followed. At a minimum, a company should ensure that these key areas are covered by a SaaS vendor:

1. Are data access controls in place? Company data is stored off-site at a location where others could have both physical and digital access to it. Being sure that a provider has restrictions in place for access keeps data out of sight.
2. Is SSL used for all data transmission between the host and the user? All data transmitted via SaaS travels through the public internet and is susceptible to security attacks. SSL encryption makes intercepted data unusable.
3. Are data centers prone to physical peril? Data centers should be located where they are not susceptible to natural disaster. A Hurricane, earthquake, flood or tornado can cause damage to a data center and your IP and data. The data center should have a redundant power and backup system, eliminating disruption in service and data loss
4. Has the data center passed a SAS-70 type II audit? A SAS-70 type II audit is widely recognized as the industry standard because it represents that a service organization has been through an in-depth audit of their control objectives and control activities, which often include controls over information technology and related processes.
5. Who owns the data that employees share, and what can the SaaS vendor do with the data? This is an important set of questions. Companies must carefully read through a vendor’s Terms of Service and be sure that the rights of ownership, usage and access to SaaS-hosted data are always granted to the company, even if the SaaS service is free. Does the vendor have rights to analyze data without permission, or market to end-users without restriction? More importantly, how does a company access and retain data in the case of a litigation hold, for example? SaaS vendors should have policies in place for dealing with these questions.
6. How is the SaaS solution integrated with an existing infrastructure? A poor integration into an existing infrastructure can deflate a new software solution at a company. Adding another layer to an already overloaded desktop can make integration and adoption cumbersome. SaaS vendors should have integration options into existing software packages that blend the SaaS solution into current work-flows, not impede productivity.

Ultimately, there are thousands of reputable SaaS providers that can be trusted to partner with a company on its software deployments in the cloud. In addition to the physical and virtual security layers set in place by a vendor, a company should understand that general responsibility and vendor reputation are critical components that must be evaluated as intensely as the quality of the SaaS software itself; SaaS requires that a customer inherently trust its SaaS vendor to store, maintain and protect the data that is critical to business operations. This is a decision that requires deep understanding of the solution and the vendor’s reputation, employees and experience. After a few conversations with the vendor, and documentation to confirm the technology in place, a company can deploy on a SaaS platform with confidence.

Sources: Gartner Research, CIO Insight, CRM Forecast, Find Accounting Software

The term “viral” can be synonymous with “chaotic” just as much as it can be with “empowering” for employees. There are dozens of software tools on the market that allow employees to create private networks for collaboration, either with or without formal company support.  Many E2.0 practitioners and passionate employees believe that employee-generated and self-managed collaborative spaces are the next wave in corporate communications.  However, successful employee communities don’t just rise up from the ground without a proper foundation – they are built one step at a time in measured, well-planned steps.  Unless an employee community is aligned with a company’s business drivers, it runs a great risk of becoming just a virtual water cooler that falls outside of the sanctioned – and legal – boundaries of a company’s communication system.

Socialcast believes that there are four key requirements for successfully establishing an early employee community:

• Clear Goals – the community must have both near-term and long-term goals driven by business processes and operating metrics. Early goals will be less concrete, while long-term goals will be metric-driven
• Rules – boundaries for participation must be set; this is, after all, an enterprise communication tool, and what is shared has lasting implications for the employee and the company
• Leadership Involvement – both formal and social leaders should drive early traffic and set the precedent for participation. This will encourage employees to get involved and use the system
• Education – Not all employees are alike in how they work and what they do. It’s critical to share best practices, ideas, and opportunities unique to each team’s function, job type, and skill set in order to optimize how the network is used

When an employee community is created without guidance, without leadership involvement, and without the blessing of IT, it can quickly become problematic. When companies don’t own the data that their employees share, and when employees begin conversing with one another on company time, about company topics, in an unregulated environment, the possibility for human resources, legal and privacy issues is high. It’s a risk that large companies simply don’t need to take.

Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V., more commonly known as Philips, is a multinational Dutch corporation with 116,000 employees that has exemplified the right way to foster viral community growth. After launching its Socialcast community through Internal Communications and IT, the network grew exponentially over the first month exclusively through viral employee invitations. Nearly 12% of the global workforce joined in immediately from these invitations, setting a promising foundation for future growth via formal communication channels.

After just six weeks in production, the fully sanctioned network saw the following early data points:

• Adoption on May 2, 2010: 450 employees
• Adoption on June 14, 2010: 9,125 employees
• Growth: 1,928% in 6 weeks exclusively via employee viral invitations
• May 2, 2010: 105 public groups and 40 private groups
• June 11, 2010: 379 public groups and 164 private groups
• Cross Pollination:
  • Approximately 3 answers provided for every question asked inside the network
  • 37% of questions were answered by employees with a different job function than the asker
  • 25% of questions were answered by employees operating in a different sector of the business than the asker

Factors that contributed to the rapid adoption and usage of the Philips community included:

• A comprehensive, continuous education campaign led by the Internal Communications division taught employees of the value of and expectations for participating in the community
• Board of Management, Healthcare leaders, and other highly specialized employee groups were provided with unique one-on-one education sessions targeted to their field
• Global executives personally invited employees to join them in public and private arenas for moderated, topic-based discussions mapped to business needs
• The community was branded to look and feel just like other Philips communication channels, instantly establishing legitimacy
• Employees were encouraged to offer Kudos to one another to foster engagement and enhance the cultural benefits
• Long-term plan was put in place to ensure that the network becomes a true activity stream engine with integrations into Active Directory, enterprise search systems, Intranet connectivity and CRM databases

Philips did “viral” correctly. Employees weren’t just left on their own to establish and grow a network without formal company support, and they didn’t create an unofficial water cooler without a business purpose. Instead, Philips harnessed the intense desire of its workforce to collaborate and created a sanctioned, official employee community that met the security needs of IT (in a European Union-based private cloud) and established business drivers. At the same time, Philips recognizes that it’s still learning as an organization when it comes to social media. But, it sees the vast potential and is taking careful, measured steps to accelerate at a pace for which the organization is ready.

While the formula can be modified and adjusted slightly for any company, large global enterprises cannot depend on bottoms-up and grass-roots excitement to build a viable, compliant, secure community for long-term use. It’s beneficial to help employees drive innovation with social communication tools, but at the end of the day, they must be governed for the benefit of both employees and companies.

In the Outlook connector, messages from your Socialcast community will stream into dedicated Outlook folders, where you can read, respond and share new information directly from your inbox. Now, with the ability to “like” comments directly from the updated Outlook plugin, a new social layer has been added, giving users the ability to show their support throughout an entire discussion, not just with an initial post.

Release Notes

• Reduced storage
• Multiple computers can sync with one mailbox
• Compatible with the latest .NET framework
• Eliminated sounds when navigating or clicking links

Email no longer rules the communication dictatorship in the office. In the past several years, new forms of communication have begun to appear, pushing email off its throne. Gen Y helped usher in this shift, using new tools like Facebook and Twitter to reduce their dependency on email to communicate. The general corporate population has simultaneously lost its patience with email’s “in your face” nature; since email addresses tend to be public knowledge in a company, internal email systems have essentially given permission for any employee to contact another and demand a response. Our patience is worn thin, and the alternatives are now clear. We’ve begun a revolution that will put email in its place: in the ground.

Now, it would be naïve to say that email is going to quietly accept its death sentence and leave us to bask in our newly found productivity. What kind of villain would go without a fight? Email may be dead, but it’s not going to disappear. Email is like a zombie or a vampire – it’s going to hover and haunt us when we least expect it. The living dead of communication forms, email will cling ruthlessly to its final breaths as Activity Streams methodically take their place as the dominant form of corporate communication.

There are a variety of key components to the death of email and rise of Activity Streams. Today, we’ll examine some of the key workplace communication issues that are driving this fundamental shift.

Information Overload

Email has created an overload of unnecessary communication. On average, corporate email users sent and received an estimated 160 emails per day at the end of 2009¹. With this vast number of messages demanding our attention, email clients haven’t adapted to the increase in traffic, leaving inboxes full of messages that are ignored due to a lack of workflow management capabilities. This information overload has become a productivity drain, triggering nothing more than a conditioned Pavlovian response to read and write when the proverbial bell tells us to do so.

Information Fragmentation

Email by nature must have defined recipients, making messages a unilateral communication tool that doesn’t leverage the collective intelligence of an organization. It’s a very one-to-one system, making who you know more critical than the information itself. The result is that information silos exist across organizations, making knowledge unattainable to others who could benefit from shared data. Further, all email is identically weighted, providing no hierarchy of importance on a per-message basis. Users must rely on a subject line or little red flag to signal urgency or importance, and even these signals can be abused. How does one know which emails to read, and what information must be shared right away? Oftentimes critical messages are lost amongst heavy email traffic, eradicating the urgency of a message altogether.

Information SPAM

For most of the past decade, email has typically been a free form of communication. But like anything free, it has been misused and taken advantage of. For example, the real epidemic of SPAM affects all email users, and continues to require more and more resources to combat it. It’s estimated that 68.6% of arriving email is SPAM¹. Filters have helped weed through SPAM, but often run the risk of relegating legitimate email to the SPAM folder. Even worse, some SPAM attempts to cause harm to your system or obtain private information. SPAM has eroded our trust in email, causing us to expect that a large quantity of our incoming messages will be illegitimate.

“Occupational SPAM” is a real problem in most organizations as well. This type of SPAM comes from messages that well-meaning or unknowing senders think are important, but actually cause chaos and information overload for recipients. Corporate email inboxes are littered with “CC” and “Reply All” messages sent to dozens and even hundreds of colleagues, even though they have no relevance to most recipients and are viewed as a nuisance. Habitual abusers inside a company will eventually be overlooked altogether as recipients start to ignore messages from the worst offenders. This becomes a problem when the offender actually has something important to say, but is ignored.

New Communication Growth

Despite these shortcomings, the email user base continues to grow. At the same time, new types of communication are growing at a faster rate. According to Nielson Co., in August of 2009, 276.9 million people across the U.S., several European countries, Australia and Brazil used email, up 21% from 229.2 million in August 2008. In the same time period, users of social networks and other community sites grew by 31% to 301.5 million people. These networks have provided a new form of communication that is being adopted at a much faster rate than email. These new networks have provided society a new way to share and consume information, delivering on expectations about when and how data should be delivered. Have you noticed how we tend to want everything faster? This is a product of our real-time culture, ushered in by social networks.

In a time when society has become impatient with waiting for anything, why are we still waiting on email? Social networking sites have given us the ability to communicate on our time, and more often than not, it’s real-time. Email simply can’t accommodate this new need for right-now information. Social networks have eliminated the need to write an email to friends and family, and have empowered us to consume the information if they choose, when they choose. In the same vein, social networks can help organizations solve many of email’s shortcomings.

Activity Streams: The Email Killer

A communication shift is happening as users look to blow the top off information silos and let knowledge flow freely without the constraints, frustrations and loss in productivity email brings. The solution to the information overload, fragmentation and spam epidemic is Activity Streams. The real email killer, Activity Streams are the future of communication, uniting people, data, and applications in a real-time central, accessible, and virtual interface. Think of a social network where every user, system, and business process could exchange up-to-the-minute information about their activities and outcomes. Now, instead of pockets of knowledge, employees will have one central nervous system that unifies every piece of an organization’s information.

Activity Streams will fundamentally change how organizations function, unlocking the vast amount of information generated by everyday operations and making it instantly available across previously defined boundaries. Activity Streams humanize every process inside an organization, adding a social layer to data and opening up real-time collaboration. This new found freedom of better information flow will be the nail in the coffin for email. Email will continue to haunt us as we experience the communication revolution happening with Activity Streams. At the same time, we’ll begin to thrive as we witness and experience the renaissance of social enterprise communication, moving closer each day to email becoming a burden of the past.

NOTE:
1. Jones, William P. “Keeping Found Things Found” 2008

You can ‘like’ a comment by selecting ‘like’ next to the time stamp of each comment.

New Socialcast Features:

Multiple Group @Mentions

Ever wanted to alert multiple groups in your community of a relevant message? With this new feature, getting relevant information to multiple groups has never been easier. You can @mention multiple groups by typing the @ symbol and the group name, just like you would if you were sending to multiple users. The message will be posted to each group, getting your relevant information into the community.

New Profile Layout

Wouldn’t it be nice to know what users and groups other members in your community had in common with you? Now when viewing users’ profiles, you can view which users you both follow and groups you share. Users’ activity streams also show in their profile, along with a button to quickly @mention them. Viewing the new community member profiles makes getting to know other users even easier.

Improved Workflow

Losing your place in the community to create a new group, web feed or custom stream can interrupt your workflow. Now, instead of a new page opening, a window will overlay over the current page to enter the necessary information. Once complete, you will be returned to the page you were working on.

Other Enhancements

• When posting in the community, “you” has been replaced with your name
• Look-up users in your community by email