Every company wants to enable a knowledge sharing experience to create a social experience that drives sharing, connecting and sustaining a collaborative Social Culture. The key ingredients to a social enterprise are well beyond social technology tools. Enterprises that are becoming socially enabled are quickly learning that engaged people, simple processes and effective technology play an increasingly important role.

What does a social enterprise looks like?
An effective social enterprise benefits the enterprise by evolving itself organically to become a relevant, connected and involved 2-way interaction between publishers and consumers. In a social enterprise, people are at the center of sharing and collaborating with knowledge.

The social enterprise must include several capabilities:

• Generating content: Employees with subject expertise publish content using a process and technologies to collaborate; discuss and network with each other.
• Organizing content: Employees need a robust enterprise content management system with right surfacing experience such as search, navigation to increase discoverability.
• Contributing content: Employees need to see a priority in stories to acquire and understand knowledge easily.
• Sharing Content: Employees need social capabilities such as Like, Comment with each other.Measuring impact: Quantifying elements of the business receive the most positive results.

The KEY INGREDIENTS to make it happen are:
1. Part 1: Empowering people: Skilling Change Leaders & empowering individuals to enable the change and generate support for their organization to mobilize around their new experience.

2. Part 2: Simple Processes: Inventory analysis; cleansing content; developing topic ownerships, on boarding a division and communicating effectively
3. Part 3: Culture of Sharing & Simplification: Developing a mindset for sharing and consolidating the enterprise digital experience.
4. Part 4: Effective Technology: Enabling technologies & processes to maintain content.
5. Part 5: Impact & Measurement: Is the social working?

In the next few weeks, I will be sharing my recipe which helped transform a decade old knowledge sharing experience for Microsoft Sales Force.

More Resources:

“Knowledge is power” suffers a reputation as being one of those trite, throw-away statements.  However, it is unerringly true.  In the world of business, knowledge is one of the most powerfully assets you can leverage.  More important still is the ability to connect the right people with the right knowledge.  When you have talented individuals working with access to premium knowledge, your business will run exponentially better.

The Two Steps of Knowledge Connection

1. Knowledge Curator—the knowledge curator is the librarian of your organization.  Usually someone in a management position can connect individuals to the resources and knowledge they need.  This goes beyond simply connecting them to necessary project-based resources.  It connects them to knowledge which also expands them as an individual.  The content curator ensures that, even if the knowledge garnered isn’t directly business-applicable, it will benefit the company in some way.
2. Knowledge utilization—The knowledge reaches the point of consumption.  The individual grows and becomes a better employee through their continued intellectual development.

The company benefits when knowledge and resources are readily available.

• The customer, when granted as much knowledge as possible, is opened up to a new level of agency in their interactions with the company.
• The employee, when given the abilities, feels more confident and capable in their tasks.
• Management lowers the amount of work they’re forced to handle; the staff is knowledgeable enough.

The company runs more efficiently, the customer experience is amplified. The ROI from leveraging knowledge doubles earnings. A dollar spent building that base will put an extra dollar in the companies funds.

Something to Consider:  When have you recently contributed in your personal, or your colleague’s knowledge base?

Related Articles

• 15 Minute Assessment: Great assessment tool to determine the current state of KM at your organization.
• A Case Study : BP’s knowledge management strategy
• Enterprise Knowledge Management 2.0 – People at the Center

Picture Credit : Matthew Burpee

I am questioned multiple times around the value of social media inside the company. Does it really work? Which social media features on our intranet is the biggest hit with employees? Why are employees using social media?

My answer is simple: Social media totally works if it is used in the right way for the right activity. If you want employees to get things done through people, they should use social media tools as part of their engagement toolkit to achieve their outcomes.

Here are few resources that I have used for driving employee engagement at Microsoft e.g. blogging for communication, collective intelligence for research, microblogging for broadcasting and Q&A; finding experts via topic management; ideaxchange for ideas or simply chat – whatever the need I have to achieve my outcome.

Here are the social media related resources we have enabled to help employees realize their potential:

Improve Collaboration

• Private groups – We use discussion groups. We create private groups and invite individuals into a group discussion. This is good for internal teams working on similar projects.

Amplify Communication

• Blogging – We use blogs for sharing news, tips and resources. We focus our blogs with a clear purpose; allow commenting for employee to share their voice. This is implemented with a right editorial process and privacy rules to protect employees with any severe consequences to raise their voice.
• Microblogging – We use micro blogging for broadcasting, public Q&A and sharing resources. This is a big hit and helps us identify communities to engage. This is implemented with a monitoring process and messaging plans to increase the participation.
• Video – A platform like YouTube to share your insights and platform is really a good one. I believe it is a great way for employees to engage and share their voice.

Research to understand behaviors

• Collective Intelligence – we use collective intelligence technology to understand behavior and insights via blogs, distribution lists and feeds. This is like a research on employee conversations inside a company. It will work provided employees share their voice in public.
• Predictive Markets – I remember it was implemented however don’t have any bias around this technology. What I know is that this required a heavy process to make it effective.

Sharing ideas and knowledge

• Knowledge Sharing-We have a knowledge sharing experience for sharing content easily all in one place. I would say it is the best wiki style topic sharing on sales and marketing content I have encountered which has grown into a vital source of knowledge every day.
• Ideaxchange – This technology allows employees to get involved. You can suggest new products, promote favorite features, and preview upcoming releases.

We stitch many technologies together to help employees achieve their outcomes easily. However to make it sticky with your employees you need a repeatable and predictable process. Focus on the people and process, you can find the right technology in the market to solve the problem.

Let me know how you are using social media tools to drive employee engagement. Share your thoughts.

Marketers have THE power to create magic with words and images to change our perception. Imagine a world where marketerscan keep your sales pipeline full at all times. Imagine where marketers areable to create a brand promise THAT customers gravitate to. IT ispossible if they are given a chance and HAVE THE experience to deliver it.

Today marketers are highly scrutinized and they need justify by creating lots of content to show their value.  The pressure of creation forces marketers to create a lot of content and make it available in many environments which increases thecosts over time around maintenance and sustaining their content. This becomes a viscous cycle andcannot be managed in THE long run. We can end that cycle.

First you need to define the objective that help marketers to focus on sales and secondly onstandardization to reduce ongoing costs.

Today I will share insights that can help you reduce marketing costs by enabling a robust knowledge sharing platform for your organization.

Before you think about creating an experience,there are 3 things you need to know about Marketer’s DNA to provide a comprehensive solution:

• All marketers have a substantial ability to understand customer’s needs and willingness to share insights with stakeholders.
• All marketershave a substantial ability to change mind shift using words and video. Storage capacity is critical.
• All marketers need resources to do rapid experimentation to test their campaigns.

To make marketers successful and in turnhelp your company’s objectives, you need to focus on 4 critical capabilities for enabling the right tools for marketers:

• User Segmentation: Marketers needs all resources to segment their customers todo their daily activities. The effort should easily be integrated with a CRM system which includes contacts management, list management, and the capability to create content bysegmentation and executing campaigns across all assets. Segmentation is critical for marketers, so make it easy.
• Knowledge Storing and Sharing Center: Marketers need a simple and easy to use platform wherethey can store and repurpose LARGE pieces of content such as templates, videos,graphics, value proposition, testimonials, case studies etc., all in one place.Also make it easy to archive content.
• Knowledge Chat: Marketers prefer to connect with people easily. They prefer a real-time chatting environment to discuss, share, and communicate the right information at the right time.
• Marketing Tools Repository: Marketers prefer standard tools and templates to drive consistency and predictability. Providing an easy to access downloadable tools will allow marketers to design and implement best practices.

Let us know how you empower your marketers in your company. Love to hear your ideas!

Picture Credit : Choconancy

When you ask any employee about their company’s intranet, the words that express the experience are “confusing,” “too much stuff,” and “cannot find anything.”

Well, we all know why this happens. Most intranets only focus on featuring content. They are developed using complex systems without a clear master plan.

If we truly need a knowledge sharing experience which delivers knowledge at our fingertips at the anytime, anyplace then you need a unified knowledge sharing experience vision with a supporting business plan. The vision needs to be realized via a connected experience that can be accessed via intranet, extranet, cloud, mobile, desktop or embedded into applications. Well, it is simple to create once you understand the 4 building blocks that make the experience real.

Based on my experience, here are 4 building blocks that enable a compelling knowledge sharing experience for your employees:

• Generating content: To generate content, employees need process and technologies to collaborate, have conversation and network with each other.

• Organizing content: To organize content, employees need a robust enterprise content management system with right surfacing experience such as search, navigation to increase discoverability.

• Featuring content: To feature content, employees need to stories to acquire and understand knowledge easily.

• Sharing Content: To share content, employees need social capabilities such as Like, Comment with each other.

Here is a quick summary of business capabilities that you need to create compelling knowledge sharing experience:

To function properly, each of the building blocks needs to have complete business process and right technology innovation to create a knowledge sharing experience where employees can find right information at the right time to meet company’s objectives.
I am interested to learn about your building blocks for enabling knowledge sharing experience in your company. Share your thoughts!

Top 5 Insights - Chaitrav.com

Over the last year, I have been leading change to transform knowledge management for the entire Sales Force at Microsoft. As a result of this experience, I’ve learned that the journey to accomplish any desired business outcome requires a lot of patience, effort and time. The following are my top five insights that have helped me to get through the challenges that I’ve faced during this journey:

• Knowledge management means transforming your business productivity – I have realized  that transforming knowledge management requires a solid business case to justify business productivity. All of our effort was geared towards improving the discoverability of people and content which enhances productivity. In this, Search, Navigation and Content Management became an essential focus for transforming the overall knowledge management.
• Effective management of knowledge requires hybrid solutions involving both people and technology. This was a very tough one. I spent so much time on trying to figure out what we needed to deliver and what an experience to manage and share knowledge would be but in the end, the most progress came from working closely with IT partners and business stakeholders to define and agree upon business requirements and business processes. Only through this joint collaboration were we able to build an experience that would deliver the effective management of knowledge.
• Knowledge management is highly political: Everyone in the company owns knowledge and their perspective is the right one. If you don’t manage expectations correctly, you will be dealing with strong pushback every step of the way. My recommendation is to build a strong coalition. It is especially important to include those that are providing the strongest pushback, once those individuals are involved and share the weight of the change; they will understand the importance of collaboration and moving forward with solutions that meet all expectations. Pushback is always a strong indicator that something needs to be heard, if you start listening, you’ll find that everything will start to fall into place and your stakeholders will respect the process that much more. A knowledge management council is the perfect chance for this cross collaboration and it will inevitably guide the evolution of the experience.
• Sharing and using knowledge are often unnatural acts. The different needs for knowledge vary by different roles in the company. By enabling technology that allows for precisions, you add value to everyone’s daily productivity. In order to accomplish this, you have to define a process where users can easily get engaged, download the information they need, when they need it and also share their perspective on the content and their experience
• Knowledge management means improving knowledge work processes. Knowledge worker processes are rarely addressed in process improvement initiatives. We hear challenges as “Unable to find information or people”, “Search is not working” and “Navigation is very difficult”.  All these challenges are addressed by implementing better technology and stronger taxonomy. The root cause of these challenges can often be the poor segmentation of employees and their workload. Once you segment the employees into their appropriate workloads, you will be able to define a solution that will deliver knowledge in a way that can help them quickly accomplish their task.

To improve the business productivity through Knowledge Management, the mantra I follow is: Build a KM council and work together to build a case for change. If you or your team are doing it alone for your company, stop and rethink your KM strategy.  If you have the chance, let me know your insights on implementing knowledge management and sharing experiences for your company. What works and what does not work?

The future of marketing is personal.

The FutureOfMarketing.com, a free, one-hour, virtual micro-conference, which will bring 60 leading minds from an array of backgrounds together to discuss how marketing personalization technology can create more authentic relationships with customers.

It will be held at 1 p.m. EDT Tuesday, March 29.

To register for the free one-hour virtual micro-conference, visit http://futureofmarketing.com

In 60 minutes, 60 marketing leaders will share 60-second insights about the future of marketing and how personalization is changing the marketing industry at lightning speed.

The Future of Marketing II: Technology Driven Personalization will offer diverse opinions, strategies, tactics and case studies, leaving audience members with a clear vision of how to best plan for—and capitalize on—the coming explosion of personalized marketing.  Personalization technology is so effective, some corporations attribute personalized marketing to their ability to stay profitable even during the recession.

Here is how you can attend : To register for the free one-hour virtual micro-conference, visit ttp://futureofmarketing.com

Let me know your insights how you are using Personalized Marketing.

Related Resources:

• Recorded Conference
• Copy of the Conference Transcript

Mary Meeker, now at Kleiner Perkins and former Morgan Stanley analyst is famous for her amazing insights about the future of the Internet, the rise of mobile computing, and new business models to watch.

Here are some great insights from her presentation:

1. Mobile is global – 5 countries account for 46% growth
2. Mobile hit critical mass
3. Social networking accelerating mobile growth – Social Sharing + Relevant Search+Mobile Accessibility = Driving just in time knowledge sharing and deep engagement
4. Mobile commerce changing shopping behavior
5. Mobile Advertising a new opportunity to tap into
6. Digital and Virtual goods in action
7. Massive Opportunity…

Change Leadership is critical to keep up with the massive changes..

What did you learn from this presentation?

Related Posts

• Mobile Internet

2years ago, I met Per Werngren CEO of Idenet. He intrigued me with his partnering maturity model.  He taught me how to use the partnering model to build stronger partnership with groups inside and outside the company.

The partnering maturity framework has provided me a tool to choose a partner whose affinity for partnering is aligned with mine and prepared to make similar investments to co launch initiatives.

The framework is one of the the most valuable resource you will need. It helps you to nurture your partnership in a systematic way.  Today, I am so glad to share that the IDC report on “Partnering Maturity Model” is now available. This report provides the following content:

1. The Partnering Maturity Model, a framework of 10 business functions and 4 maturity levels that describes how channel partners can create successful and repeatable working partnerships with other channel partners

2. Detailed descriptions of each business function and corresponding maturity levels

3. Recommendations for channel partners looking to begin partnering and support partnering initiatives

This report costs 3.5K. If you need additional insights, you can reach out to per.werngren@idenet.com.

Let me know if you are interested with this report.

Smart partnering Case study : Facebook

People are the biggest asset. Networking is a great enabler, and the network effect is what we all want. To make people happy and create a network effect for a company is not an easy initiative. But, Facebook did it!

Facebook helps you connect and share content with people in your life.

The Facebook phenomenon has fascinated me for a while now. It has created the biggest network of people in the world, who connect and share their lives with their personal networks. Facebooks makes it relevant and easy for us to share our lives with loved ones.

So how did it create this?

The growth of Facebook aka network effect is based on four core principles:

Simple Experience: The design of the experience and core features was centered on the profile of the user. It provided web2.0 interactivity for any age group to communicate and share multimedia content easily. It made the interaction simple, by enabling common graphical user interaction and text link for navigation. It only focused on people, and how it could enhance their interaction with their network. You do get addicted to the experience once you sign up, right?

Creating the network effect by providing services that Facebook’s customer values and shares with their network: By enabling features like ‘share’, ‘give a gift’ Facebook makes it easy for people to further their
network. Facebook understands — that users invest a great amount of time to complete their profile and provides sticky features such as sharing pictures and content actively — to make it richer. This makes the switching costs for any user to move to other social platforms very high. Facebook innovated its technology to help the user build a rich content store, which is a brilliant idea?

Strategic Partnerships: Smart partnering provides you with an opportunity to compete against big players. Facebook strives to close many partnerships such as Microsoft, Zynga and MOL to place Facebook in the big league. It also strives to take care of its partners in a meaningful way.

Open architecture: It is all about how many people can collaborate and share their IP. Facebook has >15,000 third-party applications and adds more than 140 new apps a day. As the third-party applications are hosted on its own servers, it provides predictability and advantages for the site as well as its users.

Leading mobile transformation: With the rise of mobile, Facebook has allowed all the features required for us to stay connected with our network 24X7 via a mobile phone. As a pioneer at this, it has managed to gain a huge market share.

I will keep a close watch on Facebook’s strategies and share it periodically.

Let’s share our thoughts what you think made Facebook so successful?