The emergence of popular social technologies like Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz have thrived in large part by adhering to some standards and formats (like activitystrea.ms, OpenSocial) that make it easy to move information in an out those sites from other places around the Web. As the report mentions, Facebook and its 500 million users who utilize the Facebook News Feed is the most recognized example to mainstream Web users. When people log on to Facebook, they can see both people and system generated messages. A people generated message would be John “uploaded his photos from his vacation to Thailand” or that “Natalie is now friends with Chris.” A system generated one could be “ReadWriteWeb published a new whitepaper.”

Now, businesses and technology leaders inside companies of all sorts have learned that people can consume information around them in the same way. Rather than tab-toggle to various applications all day, employees should be able to select what information from colleagues and systems across their company they want pulled to them. It allows them to see that “John edited the Q2 marketing plan” or that “a new record was created in your Oracle CRM system.” This will make their core business processes more flexible, and in line with the way we expect to consume and act on information.

Oh wait, that was still geeky. Oh well. I tried.

On a personal note, it was a pleasure to work with the ReadWriteWeb team. I really enjoyed dusting off my old skills and working on a long-form, published piece of writing for such a great outlet.

The answer to the question is complex, and it’s increasingly becoming more pragmatic: You must start with LOBs if you want a social software implementation that derives meaningful business value, but you need to involve IT if you want the technology woven into the fabric of your company’s long-term architecture.

Early on in the process, LOBs unquestionably make the best champions for enterprise social software because their pain points are so plain to see. They live them everyday. A sales team loses a deal when it didn’t communicate with the right people in marketing. An engineering group lets down an existing customer because they didn’t solve her problem or question fast enough. By not having a place to ask questions openly, share expertise, and find the best people and information to do their jobs, these employees missed out on key business opportunities. The detrimental effects of these broken communication and collaboration processes cause LOB heads to recognize the merits of social software faster than most. They become the best advocates to find social software that helps them solve these specific business challenges.

But IT becomes an important player, too, especially at large companies. Obviously, they help ensure best practices around administration and security. However, since some software as a service (SaaS) offerings have matured to the point that they can handle those functions just as well, the more important role IT will play comes in the effort to make older, traditional enterprise apps social — by integrating them with the LOB’s social software platform of choice.

This middleground approach of LOB champions, coupled with involvement from IT at the appropriate times, has unfortunately not been embraced widely in the Enterprise 2.0 market. Many have opted for one extreme or the other. On one hand, you have those who ignore IT by providing free apps that require a company to pay just to get control of the domain and accounts that their employees signed up for, and traded corporate data over, without permission. That is not a freemium model; it’s a SaaS sales by extortion model.

The other model is just as ugly and even more expensive: A traditional IT-centric roll out. Most often, this social software was built with developers rather than end-users in mind. They try to forcefit new technologies into an old collaboration model, while completely ignoring open Web standards that ensure these applications can hook into others in a vendor agnostic environment. Worse, since LOBs don’t drive the selection and implementation process, you risk deploying software that they will never use to solve their business challenges. As Gartner pointed out, 70 percent of these implementations fail, and it’s really no wonder why.

So my advice is to strive for the middleground. The risk is lower, and the benefits will be both immediate and long-lasting.

Enterprise microblogging, in particular, makes e-mail and IM more useful.

But choosing the proper communications mechanism now can be confusing for people. Many have tried to answer this question of IM vs. microblogging vs. e-mail, but if they had done so adequately, people wouldn’t still be asking about the differences. So now, with absolutely no presumptuousness, here is my stab at it.

What e-mail is good for:

1. E-mail is good for closed communications, addressed from one-to-one or one-to-few. The information being traded you don’t feel is relevant — and never will be relevant — to a larger group.
2. Communications that are granular in focus or formal. Some examples: A letter to a boss or HR, or a thank you note to your friend or grandmother.
3. Communications where people live in separate networks, and the hassle of creating a new network to support their communications doesn’t seem worth it.
4. Everybody has it.
   
5. Platform independent.
6. Accessibility (it’s free on the Web) and push notification means a huge swath of people have it on their phones.

What microblogging is good for:

1. Open conversations. With microblogging, you post information into the stream openly for people to see, not just the precious few you remembered to CC in an e-mail.
2. Awareness. General status updates are very helpful on the day-to-day at work (“heading to meeting with the client” or “editing the press release”). IM isn’t as good for this, either, since status is more a state of being (“busy” or “available”) and has less context. Even customized status in IM isn’t very visually appealing because it’s not in a flow-based design.
3. Opt-in model. People can subscribe to your updates. With e-mail and IM, you have no choice in the matter. (“push versus pull” is in the industry jargon for this).
4. Discoverable. Microblogging is searchable and captures information for everyone in your network to see. With e-mail, people can only search for things in which they were addressed in the message.
5. Forcing succinct thoughts. While there will be more debate about the 140 character limit of microblogging messages (as fashioned by Twitter), the constraint keeps musings at a reasonable length and prevents the long rant e-mails that generally don’t add much to the collaborative process (you see a similar thing happen in forums). Microblogging actually can be a good way to gauge what conversations and ideas deserve longer form, and someone can post a link to a web page, wiki or blog where people who are interested can engage more deeply.
6. Doesn’t turn people into information janitors. In both e-mail and microblogging, you will see information and noise not relevant to you. The main difference? Since microblogging is a flow-based app and less structured, information you don’t feel the need to address can keep on moving, eventually going out of sight and out of mind. With e-mail, every message requires attention in some way if you want to keep your inbox a usable place. That doesn’t necessarily mean you must reply. But you will spend time deleting, unreading or putting messages into nice tidy folders. Email is, after all, beholden to a paper/filing cabinet metaphor. (Could be the reason Gmail is the only usable e-mail service since it departed from this slightly).
7. More casual communications etiquette. There’s more pressure to respond to both e-mail and IM than microblogging. If someone you know or work with decides to e-mail or IM you, you feel inclined to respond even if you’re not interested or don’t have time. How many times do you say, sorry I haven’t responded to your e-mail? With microblogging, the app’s design causes people to — pardon the hackneyed expression — go with the flow. If you don’t respond, it’s nothing personal.
8. Ability to get answers without interrupting people. Ties into point #3 and #7. When you encounter a business problem and you don’t know who to ask, microblogging is great for questions because of this opt-in model. The people who don’t know the answer let it pass; the person who does replies for everyone to see. That reply is also searchable for the future.

What IM is good for:

1. One to one conversations. Similar to e-mail. Think your typical IM chat with one co-worker or family member where information you share is only pertinent to each of you.
2. Banter. We like to talk about the weather, last night’s game, the show we saw, or the general things that we’d talk about if in person. In fact, it’s better that a lot of this stuff go into IM rather than disrupt the stream in microblogging and e-mail with crap no one would want to search for later.
3. Close relationships. We IM with people we know pretty well, either personally or in a business context. For the latter, our business would have to be frequent to warrant IMing.
4. Really half-baked idea generation. While I like to use microblogging to tap my peers expertise and build on an idea, sometimes I need to work an idea out by spewing prose onto a page with a couple colleagues in real time before I can condense that thought into a simple sentence. IM is great for this.
5. Pairing. I don’t mean two developers sitting at the same computer. If you’re working on, say, a wiki page or a blog post with a co-worker, and want to discuss the next thing to add, IM is nice alongside the app.

The choice between all of these technologies, and when to use them, could evolve over time. I’m curious to hear people’s thoughts.

/cgl

Scott Schnaars of Socialtext on the initial discussion with organizations about the need to purchase social software:

1. First, assess where Enterprise 2.0 is on the list of buying priorities. For example, deploying Windows 7 could be top of mind, so find out where you stand before you can have a conversation about the value of Enterprise 2.0 technologies.
2. Identify where pain points exist. Regardless of the amount of users you want to give access to enterprise social software, there are two areas where social software that can help drive business value: a) to fix broken informal processes and b) formal processes that exist inside organizations. An example of an informal process would be employees drowning in e-mail for processes that have no home in another system. An example of a formal process would be if people across departments are spending too much time trying to coordinate with each other on joint projects (update meetings, company materials, etc.)
3. When talking to a stakeholder or buyer, ask the question: “In a year, how can we measure whether or not this was a success?”
4. Example of key metrics: TransUnion saved $2.5 million from its use of social software. Why? They collaborated in a central area online to solve some technical problems that were occurring with their internal systems. By coming up with innovative ideas collectively, they avoided buying new hardware to solve the problem.

Chris McGrath of ThoughtFarmer

1. McGrath says, “we sell top down.” And at the top, a primary consideration is SharePoint.
2. If you’re a Microsoft shop, you need to have a SharePoint strategy and understand how Enterprise 2.0 technology and social software fits into it. How is this going to integrate with SharePoint? When would you use SharePoint? It needs to be part of your sales presentation as an Enterprise 2.0 vendor.
3. How can you leverage existing investments in legacy technology (again, SharePoint being a component).

Tom Kuegler of PB Works

1. ROI is critically important
2. Don’t shy away from saying why social software is a replacement for existing technologies.
3. Start with bottom-up approach. Prove success at a departmental level, and then you have value that you can show people at the top.
4. “You have to bring it back to numbers. If you can’t bring it back to numbers and do hard ROI, then stop what you’re doing because you’re wasting everyone’s time.”