Helping corporate communication find value with an #ESN

Photo by Eric Ziegler

In my previous post, I talked about helping team find the value in using a new technology.  In this post, I am going to focus on one very specific example. Helping a corporate communications team that is stuck in their old methods of communication style.

In the traditional corporate communications world, most teams are just familiar with the intranet and email as primary vehicles to communications. In many cases this specific team will resist the desire to change communication methods. My guess on why they resist? They don't see the value. They are uncertain and doubt that a new method might be better. As I stated in my last post, to help a team like this find value, their biggest concerns, their biggest issues with communication need to be understood.  For example, are they seeing a drop in people reading their communications?  Are they hearing that people only hear about events after they occur?  Are they hearing that people can't find appropriate content?  

So when a new technology like an Enterprise Social Network (#ESN) is implemented, identifying solutions that will reduce the issues they see today is a great way of getting a team like this to adopt the new technology. So the question is how can an ESN help corporate communications with these hypothetical issues?

By using an ESN to advertise and promote the latest news article or event, people visiting the ESN will start to read more of the content. It is a secondary channel to share and obtain a greater readership. And if done well, the reach of the message could be even larger, as people share and re-share the information.

In addition, by sharing out the enterprise social network, the sharing and resharing will have an impact on the ability for people to find the best and most appropriate information and content. Similar to the internet, social plays a huge role in how search works. And by having employees engage with the content will allow search engines to automatically assess the most important information and will allow people to find the content faster (through multiple channels including the ESN and search).

This statement might seem out of place, but ...  the concepts of traditional inside the enterprise marketing has to adapt. Especially as semantic and social in the enterprise collide. The quality of the content that is created is all that much more important.  The higher and more relevant the content, the more likely it will be found.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search.

Adoption is about helping to find value

Photo by Benjamin Ziegler

In the enterprise, when a new technology is brought in that all employees would use, the challenge is often not with the implementation but convincing all employees to adopt and use the new technology. A great example is an Enterprise Social Network (#ESN). How do you obtain adoption that meets your business needs and goals? Grass roots? Top down?

Often much of the effort of adoption center around some type of marketing campaign. And more often than not, to do the marketing of a new communication technology requires using the old communication technology.  eMail, intranet, etc. are likely the tools that will be used to market the new ESN. These are still important, but are there other ways?

One of the methods to help with adoption is to work with enterprise business units to help them realize the true value of the new tool. Find groups, small teams in the enterprise that will benefit from the new tool. Look for reasons they might not have realized were there to help them understand the true value of the new product. Listen to the employees of that team. Hear how they work, not just how they communicate. Look for opportunities of  how their jobs could be enhanced and then work with them over time to start using new techniques to make their work "betterer".

Trust in the Enterprise Enables the Flow of Information

Photo by Benjamin Ziegler

In David Amerland's book, Google Semantic Search, he references a research paper, Propagation of Trust and Distrust, by Ramanathan Guha. In the research paper, Ramanathan notes in his summary of results that "Typical webs of trust tend to be relatively 'sparse': virtually every user has expressed trust values for only a handful of other users." In closed environments there is a real need for wholesale participation in the system because that provides the connective matrix that helps generate trust.

Am I mistaken when I say that the enterprise is a 100% closed environment. Using Ramanathan's thoughts from his research, it is pretty easy to see that if you want information to flow in the enterprise, you have to build a level of trust within the enterprise between employees. As trust levels increase, flow of information between employees occurs at higher and higher effectiveness levels.

This concept does not just apply to Enterprise Social Networks (ESN) but it applies to the analog world and other technology systems. Obtaining 100% participation is easy when employees are in close proximity to each other but when people are spread across multiple floors, buildings and countries, obtaining 100% participation and building trust is much harder.

So if your employees need to trust people that are one floor above them or across the world, companies need to approximate close proximity. One of the best tools to use to enable improved communication through a trust network is an ESN built around virtual communities. Communities are places where people can go to share information about a topic of interest. These virtual communities can be for a topic like Java development or it could be about a project.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search - Amazon location 1680.

Trusting intranet sites to improve search results

Photo by Eric Ziegler

Authority of a site or page is crucial for determining how a page or a site will show up in search results. That is the case for the internet and that is the case for enterprise intranets.  So, how do you measure the authority of a page or site in an intranet? Can the interactions of employees on sites help determine the authority of a site? How much does trust play in the role of authority? If the employees trust the page, should that have an impact on the authority rank of the site? Can you measure how much employees trust a site?

My opinion? Yep.  

And in many cases there are ways to systematically determine the authority of the site because of the actions of the employees on the site. One way of determining if a site is trust worthy is to measure the frequency of employees viewing a site. As enterprises embrace social though, there is the huge potential on how improving intranet search results.

David Amerland's book, Google Semantic Search, talks specifically about the internet and the influence of social on search results. Specifically, he states that based on individual interactions (social included) the search results are influenced. The ideas discussed in David's book easily translate to an enterprise intranet that has an Enterprise Social Network (ESN). David's list of influencers include:

• Commenting in a blog post on the website
• Responding to comments on a blog post on the website
• Commenting about a website in social network
• Responding to comments about a website in social networks 
• Resharing the content of websites and adding a comment to the reshare
• Resharing the content of websites without adding any comment
• Following websites that have a presence on a social network
• “Liking” or “+ 1-ing” the content of websites
• Interacting with the social network posts of websites

Why is this list so important? Because the list provides a way for people to show that they trust the content. And if they show they trust the content, than the there is a higher chance that the page or site should have an increased authority.  And if the content has a higher authority rank, then it should show up higher on the search results.  Without this type of interaction, enterprise search will continue to fall short.  

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search - Amazon location 1560.

Reducing the Gap through Semantic and Social

Photo by Eric Ziegler

This comment was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search

As I think about semantic search and the value it can provide to an enterprise, I realize very quickly that enterprise semantic search is all about reducing the gaps and the distance between employees, groups, teams, departments, divisions. And combining the power of enterprise social with semantic search is even more powerful that either on their own.  These thoughts lead me to believe that it is all about getting people to realize and recognize that interacting, finding, discovering and interacting again is all about reducing the gap.