In the past six months, Southeastern [a UK railway operator] has leveraged Socialtext Connect, a flexible and robust developer toolset built on our REST API that enables developers to socially enable existing systems of record, such as ERP, CRM, or content management systems. The Socialtext solution, now integrated into the Southeastern infrastructure, enables employees to access train status information on the fly, in real-time with visibility across the entire workforce. By providing Southeastern with a more efficient way to share knowledge, expertise, ideas and information, the company can more quickly respond to change and serve their patrons effectively.

And you thought social inside the enterprise was all about staff telling each other what they had for lunch?

Amazon reviews are just as likely to give an accurate summary of a book's quality as those of professional newspapers, according to a study from Harvard Business School.

Professor Michael Luca and his co-authors analysed the top 100 reviews from 40 media outlets, including the New York Times, and the Washington Post, between 2004 and 2007 for their paper. The academics used data from reviews aggregator metacritic.com, which summarises professional reviews and then awards ratings, if not given, based on content. They also looked at Amazon reviews for each title.

Although the study points out that there is "virtually no quality assurance" in Amazon's consumer reviews, which can also be "gamed" by publishers or competitors submitting false reviews, they found that, nevertheless, experts and consumers agreed in aggregate about the quality of a book.

Another piece of research looking at the reliability of information shared through social media. Earlier in the year, a report was published of researchers who looked at mining Twitter to predict the success of movies. The study was not so positive in this case:

Overall, the study found no clear evidence that shows a direct link between Twitter hype, ratings and box office sales.
“The most surprising finding was that Twitter data may not be representative enough of the total population, so it is somewhat risky to use the site for forecasting,” Sen said. “More sophisticated techniques may be needed to understand the applicability of such data sets, such as the metrics we developed to understand the extent of the difference between Twitter users and other online rating side users.”

search-volume forecasts will help spot consumer trends of this sort with increased precision. But the improvements they bring will be incremental. Sophisticated methods based on natural-language analysis of tweets, blogs, or Facebook pages, by contrast, hold greater disruptive potential. As users of social media grow accustomed to sharing highly personal information, apparently unfazed by market-research outfits like WiseWindow watching their every step, the feelings and intentions of hundreds of millions of people are there for data-hungry computers to see.

Remember, Google Sidewiki? I thought at the time that it would make a great way to help make intranets, including internal Web-based apps, more social and now it looks like Jive Software have provided this ability natively in their latest release. Why is this useful? Well, basically it provides a short cut to integrating systems of record with Jive's system of engagement platform to mix social collaboration with tasks.

Better than Sidewiki, Jive Anywhere appears to support HTTPS pages (which is critical these days for it to be useful, since most work systems are likely to be running on protected sites).

Jive Anywhere also takes the basic Sidewiki concept further by also integrating differently with different Websites. Examples Jive mention include Techcrunch.com, Linkedin.com and Salesforce.com where it may behave slightly differently.

I wonder if corporate system owners will view Jive Anywhere as vandalism, like people feared with Sidewiki? Personally, I think its a fantastic idea (but Google, take note about the execution).

For more thoughts on Jive Anywhere, see Charlie Hope's post and also Alan Lepofsky's analysis.

Adoption is a fulltime job,” said Staresina. “Forget if you build it they will come.

A quote from Emily Staresina about the SharePoint + Newsgator intranet recently implemented at Australian property development company, Stockland. Since they launched at the end of last year, about a quarter of Stockland staff have completed their Newsgator profiles.

An example

Recently, there was a large conference at work with many senior managers in attendance. Traditionally, the internal communications staff would write up an article after the event, post it on their intranet portal, and send an email to employees with a summary and a link.

This time, though, those same communications people selected more junior staff (outside of communications) to attend the conference and serve as roaming reporters. The reporters posted live updates throughout the conference using the firm’s new collaboration platform. Communications staff also posted but they added to the conversation instead of dominating it.

Now, without email and without searching, people at all levels from around the world were following the conference by following real people (“I felt like I was there”). And, more importantly, they were able to participate.

The graduates were particularly active, asking questions and contributing content. But senior people at the event also used the social platform, soliciting ideas and feedback, adding comments to other conversations. People discovered the hot topics via their newsfeeds, added comments and likes, and interacted with people across their division (and some from other divisions).

We’d never had anything like that before.

Better for the individual and for the firm

Far from being dead, the internal communications function at that conference became much more valuable. They went from producing impersonal content with few readers and zero feedback to using social tools and practices to engage a larger audience in more meaningful ways.

Whether you’re a communications professional, a senior manager, or just someone who has something to say, that kind of transformation is available to you.

If you’re still relying on people coming to you for your message (or visiting your portal or reading your email), then you’re missing one of the biggest communications shifts in history.

Great story about how social intranets are changing internal communications for the better. Don't keep you intranet stuck as a destination, make it a platform for employee participation.

Broadvision continue to improve Clearvale, their Elgg-based enterprise social networking offering. This recording of a recent Webinar covers current updates to the platform and there are a number of features worth highlighting:

• How tasks and actions are incorporated into the activity stream.
• Integration with Outlook that allows users to move email conversations into Clearvale.
• Widgets to display Salesforce reports in Clearvale.
• Analytics to support adoption.

Their adoption metrics are based on the concept of network usage and assess the value of contribution, using three measures: connectivity, activity, popularity.

The benefits of VisiCalc go beyond its humble origins as calculating paper. It represents a way of using computers that allows the user to ask 'what if' questions that would be too tedious to carry out by hand. Not only are such questions important in planning, they can be vital to the user in learning and coming to understand his own application.

Both the words 'serendipity' and 'synergy' are appropriate for VisiCalc. As VisiCalc evolved it showed us how effective personal computers can be as streamlined interactive tools. But, VisiCalc was not simply a lucky extrapolation of the basic ideas. Both authors of VisiCalc have extensive background in using large mainframes as personal computers and in creating systems to be used by large numbers of people with little training. Word processing background was of special importance since it provided experience in designing screen-based, highly interactive interfaces. More important for VisiCalc, it made us very aware of the need for a carefully designed and tuned user interface. This interface was constantly refined during the development process.

via frankston.com

I hadn't seen this paper by Bob Frankston before - presented in 1979 it introduced the world to a new fangled idea: the Visicalc spreadsheet. Apparently there weren't a lot of people around to hear the original presentation of this paper, but it is worth reading retrospectively. Diffusion of this innovation was slow to gather momentum, but some people could see the potential.

Why is this worth mentioning?

The personal computer it seams was a solution looking for a problem and the idea for Visicalc came from an idea for improving how individual people currently worked on tedious calculation tasks, rather then affecting the bottom line of a business. I particularly appreciate that the creators of Visicalc thought carefully about how users would interact with it and other software they already used (bearing in mind the limitations of the hardware at the time). In the end Visicalc didn't completely kill off the idea of either prepackaged solutions for personal computers or enterprise systems, but it is hard to imagine any business today where spreadsheets aren't still considered to be a critical tool. In many instances you could even argue that spreadsheets are more critical than any of the large, complex systems of record that many organisations invest in.

From this perspective, I can't but help draw parallels with social software and wonder if its a good idea that all enterprise tools have to solve single quantifiable problems?

BTW if you prefer, you can watch a 2009 re-reading of the paper by Bob Frankston - part 1 and part 2. You can find more Visicalc history on Dan Bricklin's site.

Hat tip David Weinberger.

Everyone talks about collaboration in the workplace today but what does it really mean? How do you get from here to there? Every snake oil salesman is selling social something: enterprise social; social learning; social CRM; etc. For me boils down to three principles.

In my post about Designing Social Workplaces, I discussed a model for collaboration built around social networks, observable work, and insights and analysis. However, I quite like the nuance in Harold Jarche's post, Making collaborative work work where he talks about stepping through Narration of Work, then Transparency and finally Shared Power as a basic roadmap for creating a collaborative workplace.