Jacob Morgan News & Articles

Jive has been making the news quite a bit recently. A few weeks ago, their CEO Tony Zingale said "Free products don't deliver. We can talk about free trials, free use models to get people to engage, but freemium in the enterprise -- write it down, it's dead." Then a few days ago Zingale said, that the notion of “Facebook for the enterprise” is also dead.

The most common types of manager resistance to enterprise collaboration that I've come across in my work are: not a priority, uncertainty about tangible ROI, uncertainty about overall business value, and lack of a supportive culture.

Let’s take a look at each one in more detail and explore how to deal with them.

A few weeks ago I wrote the first part of this series on how to evaluate collaboration vendors by looking at eight specific variables. Today we are going to take that one step further by actually comparing how a scoring model can be used to help your organization select the best vendor.

I’m sure you have noticed that many of the enterprise collaboration vendors out there are starting to look very similar; not just in appearance, but also in functionality.  

There are essentially four ways to go about implementing an enterprise collaboration initiative at any organization, each with their own challenges.

What makes an organization successful with enterprise collaboration? They follow these 12 principles.

A new book has hit the shelves this week. The Collaborative Organization, A Strategic Guide to Solving Your Internal Business Challenges Using Emerging Social and Collaborative Tools comes from Jacob Morgan, co-founder of Chess Media Group and if you are one of the many organizations struggling to understand how to be more open and collaborative, then you might just want to pick this one up.

When you hear “social business,” what comes to mind? Perhaps you think of a company that uses social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to engage with customers? Maybe you imagine a company that uses internal collaboration platforms to connect employees together? Still, maybe you picture a company that uses both, social media platforms to engage with customers and internal collaboration platforms to connect employees? What’s the difference between social business and Enterprise 2.0? What about social media? Social CRM? Social collaboration?

A few weeks ago we announced that Chess Media Group is conducting a survey on the State of Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration. The survey is going to be live for around one more week, and thus far we have around a couple hundred respondents from some of the world’s most well-known organizations around the world. The survey takes around 5-10 minutes to complete and is quite comprehensive.

Actually, I believe there are three types of communities: external communities, which are comprised of customers; internal communities, which are comprised of employees; and hybrid communities, which are comprised of partners and suppliers. Since most discussions are focused around either customer or employee communities, that is what I want to focus on here.

I find this to be a very interesting discussion in the enterprise collaboration space, especially since the topic of ROI is so oftentimes debated. Oddly enough though, we don’t hear enough about how failure is measured or reached. I heard Dan Heath (the co-author of Made to Stick and Switch) speak at a conference last year to a large group of retailers in New York; he used an interesting analogy which I think fits perfectly with the collaboration world.

The folks over at Useful Social Media put together an interesting report on the state of corporate social media. As the report states, the purpose is “designed to help companies understand the emerging trends and successful methods for integrating social media into your corporate culture.” The report is based on responses from over 100 corporate social media practitioners globally.

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of keynoting a conference in Slovenia about informatics. My presentation was all around how social and collaborative tools can provide business value within the enterprise. There were a couple of key points which I felt needed to be addressed.

 A few weeks ago, consulting and analyst firm Blessing White released its 2011 employee engagement report. As Christopher Rice, the CEO of Blessing White, states, “This report is designed to move beyond the high-level numbers to provide you with a framework that will help your organization to start moving the needle on engagement.”

I just finished reading the IBM report: From social media to Social CRM and the first thing that came to my mind was, “does IBM understand what Social CRM is?” My second thought was, “does anyone, including myself, understand what it is anymore (or what it was)?” What boggles my mind is that IBM titled the report “From Social Media to Social CRM” yet makes no distinction between either. The words “social media” and “strategy” are used throughout the report, as are “campaigns” which then makes you scratch your head and think, “wait a minute isn’t this about Social CRM?”