While doing product demos on the tradeshow floor of Web 2.0 Expo, we witnessed an interesting phenomenon. As soon as one person started to watch a demo, a few more people would join in. Then a few more. After a few seconds, we'd have a crowd.
Why does this happen? Because people are interested in what other people are interested in. The same affect can be witnessed as long lines form to get into the hottest new club, or as you look in the window of a crowded restaurant and decide you want to eat there.
This "crowdification" also happens with social software tools, where as more people become active in a system, the more value the system has. Kick Start The Process
At our demo booth, when we had a few quiet minutes, we would have one of our staff pose as an interested party whom I would demo to, and inevitably a crowd would form. So how do you get this type of traction for your company's internal social software tools, such as blogs, wikis, microblogging, groups, etc? You do the same thing. Find a few key people who have an interest in seeding the conversations/content. They are often called Champions or Evangelists. Have them start to participate, and make sure their contributions provide value to their colleagues. Those people will then respond, either by adding to the existing content (edits/comments/links), or even better adding new information of their own. One person will turn into 3 or 4, which will then turn into 10 or 12, and then the crowd will form.
So don't simply roll out new tools, make sure you have the leaders in place that will encourage others to follow. This will help a crowd form, and make your new social software platform the hottest club inside your company.
I’m Disappointed In Snow Leopard
Wed, Mar 17th 2010 12:10p Alan Lepofsky I know I'm late to the game, but I finally upgraded from Mac OSX 10.5.8 to 10.6.2 last night. One of the new features I was the most excited about was "Sort your Spotlight search results by name, date modified, date created, size, kind, or label." Sadly, it does not work as I (nor many other upset people posting to various forums) expected. As you can see below, the only sort options in list view are name, date, and kind. Size is greyed out. Size is an extremely useful search parameter, [read] Keywords: apple
applications
mac
201
I’m Disappointed In Snow Leopard
Wed, Mar 17th 2010 11:30a Alan Lepofsky I know I'm late to the game, but I finally upgraded from Mac OSX 10.5.8 to 10.6.2 last night. One of the new features I was the most excited about was "Sort your Spotlight search results by name, date modified, date created, size, kind, or label." Sadly, it does not work as I (nor many other upset people posting to various forums) expected. As you can see below, the only sort options in list view are name, date, and kind. Size is greyed out. Size is an extremely useful search parameter, w [read] Keywords: apple
applications
mac
349
Enterprise Microblogging - Where Everyone Can Ask and Answer Questions
Fri, Mar 12th 2010 4:00a Alan Lepofsky In Star Trek, the crew of the USS Enterprise could get an answer to almost any question, simply by asking out loud. Each week viewers witnessed inquiries such as "Computer, how long will it take to get to Epsilon Vega at Warp 6?" or "Computer what is the average airspeed of an unladen swallow?" Back in the real world, we are not quite there yet, but we're pretty damn close. Via countless websites, search engines, and social networks we have almost unlimited information at our disposal. [read] Keywords: connections
email
enterprise
facebook
google
macbook
microsoft
networking
twitter
24
Sharing Status Updates Reduces Duplication Of Work
Tue, Mar 9th 2010 5:40p Alan Lepofsky Last week I wrote Using Social Software To Accelerate Business Performance, as the introductory post to a new series where I'm going to discuss how "Enterprise 2.0" tools provide benefits in the business world. I'm going to begin the series today by discussing the internal use of microblogging, which enables people to openly share short messages with their coworkers. For those of you unfamiliar with microblogging, the most widely known example is Twitter, where you enter "140-character or [read] Keywords: email
enterprise
instant messaging
office
social software
twitter
270
How Sharing Status Updates Can Help Your Colleagues
Mon, Mar 8th 2010 9:10p Alan Lepofsky Last week I wrote Using Social Software To Accelerate Business Performance, as the introductory post to a new series where I'm going to discuss how "Enterprise 2.0" tools provide benefits in the business world. I'm going to begin the series today by discussing the internal use of micro-blogging, which enables people to openly share short messages with their coworkers. For those of you unfamiliar with micro-blogging, the most widely known example is Twitter, where you enter "140-character o [read] Keywords: blogging
email
enterprise
instant messaging
office
social software
twitter
170
Using Social Software To Accelerate Business Performance
Fri, Mar 5th 2010 2:50p Alan Lepofsky One of the main themes of the "2.0" world is the shift to more open sharing of information. In our personal lives, that shift is fairly well understood and accepted. Pictures are shared on Flickr. Videos are shared on Youtube. We talk about our lives on our blogs. We say what we're doing on Twitter. We even tell people exactly where we are on Foursquare. Our lives are an open book, for friends, family, and sometimes even strangers to see. In the business world, many companies are just [read] Keywords: email
enterprise
social software
twitter
34
Socialtext Launches 4.0
Wed, Mar 3rd 2010 3:40p Alan Lepofsky Today we launched Socialtext 4.0, which makes it simple for people to form groups around common goals or areas of interest. Groups can share information, ideas, and status messages via microblogging with Socialtext Signals, and create wiki pages, spreadsheets, and blog entries in Socialtext Workspaces. "The focus of our enterprise social software has always been to accelerate business performance for our customers, by giving their people new ways to share knowledge and expertise," says Euge [read] Keywords: collaboration
application
enterprise
security
social software
twitter
wiki
57
How General Motors Uses Socialtext for Its RD
Mon, Mar 1st 2010 5:43p Alan Lepofsky At Lotusphere 2010, General Motors spoke about their use of Lotus technologies to enable internal collaboration. Some of you sitting around me heard me politely say "and Socialtext." What I found funny about the GM talk was how they emphasized the Volt, which is the result of the work of GM's Research division, which uses Socialtext. Of course big companies often use more than one vendor, so no big deal. "To address the difficulty in getting researchers to interact with each other at the s [read] Keywords: collaboration
lotus
lotusphere
community
office
280
Very cool new 3D History Browser Plugin For Notes
Mon, Mar 1st 2010 10:20a Alan Lepofsky As reported on Niklas Heidloff's blog, Hiroyuki Okamoto has created a very cool 3D history browser for Lotus Notes. It currently only works on Windows, so even though it emulates the carousel feature made popular by Apple, it does not yet work on Macs. I don't know anything about Eclipse plugin development, but I thought the point to moving to Eclipse was for cross platform support? What is it about certain plugins that cause them to not work across OSes? Also, is there anyway for the [read] Keywords: lotus
notes
apple
development
eclipse
openntf
262
Zen - This is the way all software should work
Mon, Feb 22nd 2010 11:50p Alan Lepofsky I don't promote products often, but after 5 minutes looking at Zen, I wanted to tell people about it. Zen is an online tool for project management that follows the Personal Kanban methodology. I'm just starting to learn about this, but I can see how it could really help me manage my tasks. Zen's UI is clean and gorgeous. It is so easy to use that there is no need for training or help. I found the selecting/highlighting of objects, collapse and expanding options, drag and drop, to al [read] Keywords:
