Rex offers an excellent video from Dan Pink that argues that while rewarding people for many simple work tasks from the 20th century and before might increase performance, doing it for the cognitive tasks of the 21^st century does not work. The reason is that it narrows the focus and does not promote the exploration of options that can occur with other motivations. I have also found that it undercuts the team sprit and sharing that collaborative organizations need.Our recent economic downturn also shows that it puts too much weight on individual achievement even if it is counter to the success of the whole organization.

I think this makes sense.If you try to use performance incentives to promote enterprise 2.0 adoption, you need to be very careful that it does not reward the wrong behavior.It certainly needs to be aimed at overall team success if used at all.

So what does Rex offer instead? He writes, why not fun.Here I am completely onboard. I have often been involved in knowledge management implementations where we introduced fun as part of the awareness campaign.I will work even more if it makes the work more fun, such as meeting new interesting people to collaborate with and finding out more about your colleagues. In a minor way this is why I like to work with music as I get caught up in the rhythms of the sounds and works seems more fun.

Rex closes with a great video from Volkswagen that seals the deal. It shows how if you make one channel more fun it will trump the easier, formerly more popular, one.We should add the spirit of this approach to our enterprise 2.0 implementations. It should only help. 

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Since it may be hard to get everyone collaborating at once, how do you segment this into meaningful groupings? He offers some possibilities such as by geography, departments, and user created subgroups. Perhaps you might segment by feature sets or functionality, as well as. In this case certain people get wikis or microblogs.

I think the answer is all of the above. Most importantly, people in large organizations should have the opportunities to form their own groups. This approach has meet with great success at Booz Allen, for example.  Rather than organize collaboration along existing organizational charts than are subject to change, they organize it around communities of interest that reflect the capabilities of the organization and the needs of the market it serves. This allows for organic growth.

Since people can join more than one group they should also be able to collaborate in the many ways they form groups within the enterprise. In some cases, this might be by geography or department. A number of the collaboration suite allows for multiple ways to look at content and connections.

I think that feature or role use should be governed by task rather than role or position. Océ takes a proper approach as they try to educate employees on when to use what enterprise 2.0 tool for what purpose.  Booz Allen takes a similar approach with their change management efforts.

The challenges in implementing enterprise 2.0 are more around question such as the one Jacob raises to take proper advantage of the new capabilities the tools offer. 

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Here is a set of comments from an email group that I belong to. I have dropped the names and the names of companies (to protect the innocent) and vendors as this is a general discussion that goes beyond individual tools.

First Commenter: “We’re really interested in using (micro-messaging tool) and have a few people on it already. BUT, it’s yet another user interface, another site, another URL for people to remember and interact with! It’d be great if someone would reverse-engineer the core functionality into (collaboration platform) so we can have micro-blogging functionality in the same collaboration system…”

Second Commenter: “I’ve heard the same comment from people internal and external to (our firm). There is a population that sees integration of microblogging with other collaboration tools as necessary for far reaching adoption.”

Third Commenter: “There is a powerful analogy with Instant Messaging here. Most IM systems are no longer standalone but integrated with email and other communications systems. Microblogging is a technical functionality / human activity that’s part of broader set of technical functions & human activities rather than a standalone “thing.”

I am not trying to pick on the standalone micro-messaging vendors here, and there are quite a few now with excellent functionality. Twitter works fine as a standalone tool out on the Web. How would you counter these comments to define the role of standalone tools inside the enterprise? The questions are about usage and not features. They are certainly not tool specific.

I do not want to compare tools here but rather approaches and I am open to the idea that there might even be a role for both in the same enterprise. I can see an integrated tool focusing on messages around projects and other tasks handled by the collaboration tool and the standalone tool handling more general conversations within an organization.

In fact, another comment raised some excellent issues with the integrated approach. I am glad to be more balanced here. There were even more comments but this is enough. It was a provocative topic.

Commenter 4: “As more and more vendors start implementing “Twitter-like” functionality, the more segmented and Tower of Babel-like the social landscape becomes. This is not so much of a problem with features that are bounded by the corporate firewall (such as office suites are and collaboration may be) or where interoperation standards have been accepted (such as email).

But it is a serious problem when you are talking about lightweight, highly social activities. Although it seems like a good idea to integrate it with your other communication functions, what if it gets integrated differently with two existing functions? What if email and collaboration both integrate microblogging? Unless you have a single vendor for all your apps, you are going to have a conflict. This problem is exacerbated by the expanding and fluid nature of people’s social environment nowadays.”

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I have reviewed two of the nineteen they cover on AppGap (see Socialcast Brings Twitter Style Functionality into the Enterprise, Socialcast Adds iPhone and Gmail Plug-ins, and Twitter as a Business Application). The report covers 6 pure play tools, 4 open source, 3 enterprise-built (but may come to market), 3 integrated, 2 self-service and 2 that are labeled as pseudo. Since the report came out there has been a rise in integrated micro-messaging with platforms. For example see my recent post on the 15th, Rise of Micro-messaging in Enterprise Collaboration Platforms. The report provides an excellent framework to also assess these newer tools. The section on “what we asked and why” is especially useful for looking at any tool in this space. These are many of the questions you need to ask any vendor you are considering.

Advantages and disadvantages for each of the 19 are provided, as well as a comparative chart on the presence of useful features. Skimming these lists also offers you an overview of what is needed and lacking in this market space in general (e.g., directory integration, groups, location, sharing, and SMS. I am not going to get into the details as you should get the complete report from Pistachio. It is a free download.

The report concludes that microsharing is becoming a significant enterprise opportunity. “The communications and collaboration potential these tools have for leveraging personal and team effectiveness is dramatic. The applications are inexpensive to run, save travel, lost time, email and other costs, unlock latent value and hidden knowledge, and increase employee productivity, motivation, retention and career opportunities. “ They add at the end that they strongly believe this is the “harbinger of an enterprise technology shift.” I would certainly agree and recommend this report to get better informed on the opportunity.

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There have been many creative business uses of Twitter and a lot have been written about them so I will not repeat that stuff here. In these comments I am going to share my own personal experiences of twitter with business. I mainly do two things for business. I serve as a paid journalist bloggers for two blogs on enterprise 2.0, FastForward and AppGap, and I provide consulting to firms and individuals on their business blogs and other uses of social media. I will close with Twitter’s impact on these two business activities.

First, I want to make a confession. I used to make fun of Twitter. I compared the endless stream of 140 character bits to Luis Borges’ Library of Babel where, as the Wikipedia conveys his work published in 1941 conveys that, the “order of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless. Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the inhabitants believe that the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent thought. This glut of chaotic information was leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. But somewhere there was a book, the Crimson Hexagon, that contains the log of all the other books and the librarian who reads it is akin to God.”

When I made fun of the chaotic stream of chatter on Twitter, many of my fellow bloggers rose to its defense and urged me to join their conversations. Finally, I meet with several at a conference in Vegas and they showed me the Crimson Hexagon for Twitter, TweetDeck. Now I could bring some order to the chaos. I could segment the people I am following into manageable and meaningful subgroups. I began to use it more actively and discovered that it served several functions that I will describe. But I had to go to another tool to find value. One study said that Twitter provides the 37th best interface to its own data. This is one of two potentially fatal flaws that may send it to join Friendster.

First, I discover a lot of interesting ideas. I like the human filter aspects. When I first started my blog over four years ago, people knew I blogged and would email me interesting stuff to blog about. I said I had a human RSS feed and rarely had to go to mechanical RSS readers. Now Twitter serves this purpose even better as people I respect tweet about an article or blog post with links. As Dion Hitchcliffe said in a tweet, Twitter can serve as a useful filter as he would rather have info endorsed by people he knows. Twitter has become my main source for blog content but only through tweets that point to longer pieces.

Second, I use Twitter search as an alternative to Google search. It has not replaced Google, just supplemented it. Twitter search is for what is happening right now and Twitter makes it easier to engage the person sharing the content. I find it good for niche topics like agile development or cloud computing. However, Twitter’s range is fleeting and Google is still more comprehensive.

Third, like my blog, I use Twitter as a personal knowledge management system. I retweet interesting links I find from others and tweet things I find myself. Then I can go back to them to read later and perhaps blog on them. However, this is fleeting and exposes the second of the potentially fatal flaws with Twitter. It dumps its data index after three months so you cannot go back and find stuff beyond the rolling three month window. If I tweet about this conference or record links I had better convert the information to another format if I want to save it. In addition, the interface makes it hard to go back more than a few weeks away. Someone needs to do for Twitter archiving what TweetDeck did for immediate use or a better micro-blogging system might take over. I found my blog to be very useful in preparing for what I would say on this panel. Twitter was much less useful and only helped with stuff that happen in the past week.

I also used my blog to record my notes on the excellent conference sessions by Dion Hinchcliffe and Mike Gotta. But I used Twitter to let others at the conference know that they existed and received over 38 RTs of these alerts and a few came with nice additional comments. There was also a spike in page views for the blog with many coming from Twitter. The two channels complemented each other. Twitter does not replace blogs.

Fourth, like with blogs, I meet new people on Twitter and better engage with people I already know. I also can create greater awareness for what I write in other channels, primarily blogs. Twitter does not replace blogs because there is only so much you can say in 140 characters but it is good way to point to more meaningful content.

So how has this affected my business? First, as I mentioned before, it supplies many stories for my journalist blogger role. Second, I now advise my blog clients on how to use Twitter to compliment their blogging efforts. Just as I experiment with blogs to better serve my clients, I have been experimenting with Twitter for the same purpose.

I have learned a lot and that could be another session. But here is one example. With blogs it is important to think in terms of key words as one of the best ways to expand your audience is through search. You need to speak to search engines through these key words but not in a gaming way. You will (and should) get in trouble for this as HabitatUK found out. With Twitter, you can apply the same key word strategy but instead on focusing on choosing the right words for blog titles and other content, you focus on the wording of tweets and use hashtags in a meaningful way. I find that I often get new followers directly related to a hashtag I recently used.

But of course you need to provide some value to the readers you attract or it is a waste of time. I you are just offering another get rich on Twitter scheme you will only attract fellow travelers.

Twitter is currently raising the slope of unrealistic expectations for business and consumers. It has great potential but it needs to continue to improve of someone else will take micro-blogging to the next step.

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It is not a heavy duty project management application or something for the consumer web. It is designed for the typical business person who is juggling ten to fifteen things at once. Many people, myself included, use pen and paper to keep track of stuff. Some use email folders but these are disconnected. With Manymoon you can manage your own tasks and projects and also assign and share them with others and get activity updates. It can work within and across companies. The name comes from the observation that some people have used phases of the moon to track various aspects their lives. You can use Manymoon to track and manage your work life.

I spoke with Amit Kulkarni Co-Founder and CEO of Manymoon. They are located in San Francisco with offices in Union Square, lucky them. Amit said that Manymoon is designed to avoid the chaos of email. It is a social productivity tool that allows business people to share information (e.g., tasks, status updates, projects) with their connections (e.g., co-workers, partners and customers) in secure workspaces with control over access. The current version is free. They plan to offer an enterprise version on a subscription basis soon but will always also offer a free version. It is a SaaS application.

Amit walked me through the application. There are five major components: your bulletin, your project, your tasks, your documents and your connections. Everyone that you work with becomes a connection. This allows you to build a skilled based contact list that you can leverage at a later time on projects and tasks. The bulletin lets you see what is currently going on across your projects and tasks. You can see an example below. The bulletin looks a lot like the LinkedIn activity or the Facebook feed where you can view at a glance all the activity across all your projects, tasks and connections.

If you look in the upper right corner of the screen you will see a box with the question, “What are you working on?” This is a Twitter like micro-messaging feature. I really like that it is not a standalone application but integrated into the Manymoon platform. So you can tie it to tasks or projects and use the built-in permission levels and also have the security needed for an enterprise application. Messages occur within the context of your other work. Here is a screen shot of the micro-messaging window. You can see that you can limit who sees the message or you can share it with everyone. This can eliminate unnecessary email, IM and phone exchanges with colleagues to find out what they are working on.

The next function is tasks. Here you get a view of all your tasks across all projects. You can filter them by due date (today, this week, this month, overdue) and other priorities. You can set email notifications for yourself and others. It is also integrated with Google calendar. There is an email-to-task creation capability. You can forward any of your emails to task@manymoon.com and they will automatically be converted into a private task for yourself. The task page is seen below.

The next function is a page that organizes your work around projects. You can get an overview of all your projects and then drill down to the project home page for more details. The project page has the same four tabs (bulletin, tasks, projects, and documents) but now they are project centric, instead of person centric. I like the consistency of interface. You can also see the project team members and add new ones. You can rearrange the order of your projects through drag and drop. Here is a sample project page for an individual.

Manymoon also allows you to upload documents and attach them to tasks or projects. This works through Google Docs but Manymoon gives them extra context. In the upcoming enterprise version they plan to allow for uploads independent of Google Docs. Here is a sample document page.

You can see through these four views a consistency and simplicity of interface design. I think this can be the tipping point in using a tool like this. I have experienced some other tools that frustrated non-technical users and/or made the bar to high for them to get involved. Amit said they spent a lot of time on user testing to get to the current interface design and it shows. I think this simplicity may be a greater differentiator for applications in this class than features, as long as they cover the basics in a transparent enterprise 2.0 manner. Manymoon accomplishes this. It is listed on the Google Solutions Marketplace and has acquired some excellent customer reviews.

Manymoon has been in private beta for some time. They provide some examples of how the tool is being used base don this beta. I am always glad to see more enterprise 2.0 use cases so here are a few that have a social aspect.

An office manager has been using Manymoon to track and close the various tasks that all his co-workers have been assigning to him. They include: organizing an off-site meeting (reserving rooms, renting a projector and easel, ordering lunch) and preparing for an email campaign (get the list of recipients, get graphics from the designer, sign-off from the CEO).

A C-level executive is using Manymoon to gain visibility into and track the action items from a strategy meeting. He has setup a project called “Q1 Operational Plan” where revenue tasks have been assigned to Sales, lead generation tasks have been assigned to Marketing and product delivery tasks have been assigned to Engineering.

A sales executive goes through the same 15-20 tasks with each potential customer to ensure a consistent process. He uses Manymoon to setup a project for each customer and share it with internal team-members. This allows his internal team to help complete the tasks and also provides sales management with detailed visibility into each sales opportunity. Some of the tasks include: develop presentation, gather customer requirements, present to customer, send data sheet to customer, demo to customer and send quote to customer.

A customer who has a project out for bid has been using Manymoon to track the engagement with multiple vendors. The customer can now quickly view the status of each vendor engagement and comment appropriately. There’s a project assigned to each vendor and the customer can now securely track tasks (vendor sends the quote, vendor send the data sheet, he reviews the design, etc.).

I think Manymoon is a welcome addition to the enterprise 2.0 space. I like the mix of ease of use and sufficient functionality in a secure, but transparent, platform. It will be interesting to see how it evolves with its upcoming enterprise version. They have just released Manymoon Pro: it adds 3 GB of storage and SSL encryption for a small monthly fee.

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