I have been quiet over the last two weeks trying to get some work out the door before i headed out for a nice long holiday- not really paying myself as i have promised because i knew the payoff would be worth it.

Turning off corporate email until the 10th of September- how liberating it feels!

Will blog, twitter, facebook and whatever strikes or doesn't strike my fancy as i travel around. Enjoy the last days of summer my friends!

My friends and work colleagues Lou Paglia and Greg Merkle are having a very interesting conversation about text analysis tools and how they help one of the core users of Factiva products- the "Researcher".

The Workplace Blog by avenue a razorfish is one of the regular feeds that i read and today they pointed to a post that highlights seven global blogs that are targeted to topics about intranets including usability and IA topics that can be quite useful if you are interested in enterprise intranets.

One of the sites that was highlighted was the Intranet Blog which i have read for a while. They always post interesting case studies which provide a good overview of what companies are doing on their intranets and highlight technology challenges and opportunities like this post about alternatives to personalization that comments on RSS and mashups as new important solutions in this space.

At the end of last year, I worked very hard alongside some colleagues at Factiva (Dow Jones) to coordinate a roundtable event to discuss Social Media with thought leaders in the Bay Area. The thought to have the roundtable came to me after speaking with Jeremiah Owyang and sharing my frustrations with the fact that every time i met up with people who were talking about Social Media, I always wanted my Factiva Insight product folks in the room- to listen and participate in those conversations. So what i managed to do was bring them West using a combination of social media itself (i blogged, reached out to other bloggers via comments etc) and good old fashion networking (i went from pub to pub in San Francisco- seriously i am not kidding) to engage members of the community that i knew would make great participants. We also reached out to a handful of local clients that we knew where dealing with these issues internally.

The location was a wonderful place called Zibibbo's in Palo Alto, CA where the food was incredible and the wine nicely poured...and what a great crowd we managed to get.


What were some of the questions we were/are trying to answer during this roundtable ?

- Do you believe Consumer Generated Media is important and should be measured?
- Who is creating Social Media? What are they creating? And is the who more important then the what?
- If you are producing Social Media as part of your PR/Marketing plan, how will you measure ROI?
- Do you think that Social Media needs a structured, mutually agreed upon measurement techniques and metrics (e.g. MSM's ad value equivalence and article impressions) to make monitoring a more serious practice?
- So what should be measured, and how do you want it delivered?


One of the agreed outcomes of the roundtable was that we would produce a white paper of the information that we gathered along with our co-author Jeremiah Owyang. Well for months and months i have been bugging (read harassing) Marketing about this white paper and when it would be finalized. Well as you know, Factiva has gone through a lot of corporate changes- we officially became Dow Jones in January and then five months later the news about the News Corp acquisition- well i guess they have all been busy. I am sure i have made more then one enemy being a pestering little bug- oh well i hope we can make up soon.

So the final outcome is this report authored by Matt Toll of our Marketing group and Jeremiah Owyang. You can Download the Report here: “Tracking the Influence” (PDF).

Since the event- many of the participants have continued to talk and address issues of social media measurement- some of the companies that participated have implemented strategies that they continue to refine. The white paper has some good thoughts and ideas by the participants and we hope that their voices are heard. As Jeremiah describes it, the white paper serves as a good primer for those that are new to the concept, or for those who need to start deploying a program but also provides a good insight into what was going through on minds on that day in December of 2006.

Additional information about the roundtable is available on the Factiva Roundtable wiki that was used to coordinate the event and provide a place for reflection afterwards. More pictures from the event here and shortly if i ever get to re-re-encode my video files i will post video clips of the participants.

and some final words?

I have posted often on social bookmarking especially in the Enterprise space because i believe it is one of those 'Web 2.0' applications that will eventually become common across all enterprise tools. Mashable always has great list of services and this one provides a comprehensive look at social bookmarking tools across both consumer and enterprise solutions.

The list also includes social news sites like digg and reddit that allow users to rank and promote content as well as a sub-category of social bookmarking sites with clipping features like clipmarks (which has a recent pairing with Forbes).

While cruising around the Mashable site i also found this well done video to use as an introduction to social bookmarking if you are trying to introduce the concept.

I wasn't aware that blogs where being acquired- by traditional media companies but according to Mashable that seems to be the case. They posted today that New York Times has acquired its first blog with its acquisition of the Freakonomics Blog. For the authors of Freakonmics it is full circle as the original chapters of the book actually appeared in the New York Times magazine.

I visit the the Freakonomics blog often and it always as a lot of comments- a very engaged audience so defiantly a good acquisition for the New York Times as they continue to provide new value to their users.

Update Aug 9th- According to paidcontent NYT did not acquire the Freakonomics blog but formed an alliance.

Lot's of chatter today around Google's new feature that will allow only 'the people in the news article' to add comments to articles that are aggregated in Google News. Here are two examples that the Google Blogoscoped blog pointed out.

When i saw it this morning i thought it was an interesting use of social media and still believe so-but as i think about it and read a bit further about exactly how it will work there certainly seems to be some potential issues. Things like what Gabe Rivera left as a comment on TechCrunch that Google doesn't allow other aggregators to crawl their site although now they are now hosting original content and probably should. Since Google gets its content by aggregating across thousands of online news sites and there is constant battles about the right to do that- they should probably open up this orginal content back- but who knows maybe the content will be useless in the long run?

i think that it is interesting that Google is going to try to be some sort of 'editor' of the global online news. Thinking about traditional media there are usually two types of ways that someone 'associated' with the article can respond and let the audience hear their voice. The first is to contact the media outlet and request a correction or clarification. I tend to browse these section of the papers and there always seems to be something that needs correction sometimes important information. The second is to write a letter to the editor. Both of these however become physically separated from the original source- either printed in the next day publication (for newspapers but could be months for other types of publications) and essentially the editor of that publication who is ultimately responsible for what they printed has the last word on what they choose to publish on behalf of the person responding.

So will it be scalable - and will Google have to open it up to let the original sources get to that content? Either way- kudos to Google for pushing the envelope and looking a user generated content differently then what other news sites are doing.

I am a sucker for things like this and always find good ones over at the J-Walk Blog. Via GlassGiant.com it is easy to create a custom computer keyboard. Of course on the same site i found a morse code translator- can you hear me beeping? Sometimes i forget how fun the web can be for dorks like me.

Shel Israel, co-author of Naked Conversations points to the voice of the future employee with his post on 'Let me Blog." I completely agree with both Shel and Kyle who is currently doing an internship at our local NBC station (did you know that NBC11 now has chat with the 5pm news? cool stuff). Kyle is a journalism student at San Jose State University. A couple weeks back, I was at the San Jose Social Media club event and met Kyle briefly when we took a tour of the studio- he cracked me up when he said that he was hoping an earthquake or something would happen so he could see the 'action' buzz of the newsroom (i personally can live without that buzz).

Future employees (and many suffering current ones) want to be able to participate and innovate in the ways they are used to outside of the corporation. It could be blogging, tagging, video creation, mashups- whatever just let them be. Enterprises that create environments that allow for this within their confine (there has to be some based on business laws etc.) will not only get the best new future employees out there but will inspire their current ones .

I have handed out 10 copies of Naked Conversations to customers and colleagues- it is a powerful book with a great title for conversation. I have one copy left from the last batch i bought which i am saving to give to a financial services customer who is itching to blog about his business but is getting the squinty eyes from PR. I am hoping to see Shel and Robert over the next few days so they can perhaps add some personal thoughts to inspire and give him courage.

(Photo by Scott Beale from the book launch party- February 2006)

I have been on an Enterprise Mashup kick lately because i think it is an important technology for information delivery in the enterprise so i have been keeping eyes open for enterprise use cases to validate some of my thoughts on using mashup technologies in the enterprise. Via an article in the Wall Street Journal comes a little insight into how a global enterprise -Audi a German automobile manufacturer - is using an Enterprise Mashup server from Kapow Technologies to perform competitive analyses.

Developers at Audi recently built a mashup that helps product managers for the company's A-series line of autos perform competitive analyses. The mashup draws data from 20 different sources, ranging from Audi's inventory system to demographic figures on German Web site Spiegel Online.

Audi's product managers used to check each of the 20 sources individually and copy the results into spreadsheets. While the task was time consuming and inconvenient, Audi's information-technology department didn't want to pay as much as $500,000 to combine all of the data into one application using traditional software-integration techniques, says Anton Hermann Kramm, a member of Audi's IT management team.

Additional Kapow customer stories can be found on their customer reference site providing short snippets of some fairly large enterprise customers as well.

I am often asked how i keep up with so much content. The truth is a combination of the tools i use and the time i spend. I use multiple tools to consumer the hundreds of RSS feeds that i subscribe to and utilize various methods. One of the tools i use is Google Reader.

I have posted before about how i think that Sun Microsystems gets it especially the OneStop folks. The OneStop Secret Sauce public blog always provides insight into implementing 2.0 strategies into the enterprise and over the months they have brought in more authors to the blog like Christy Confetti Higgins from the Sun Learning Services (which i think used to be called the Sun Library). I guess i am one of those non-Sun people that follows it and i always recommend it to customers that are looking to implement 2.0 tools like Wikis as part of their enterprise content creation and delivery.

This week Paul Diamond posted about some of the upcoming enhancements that they are looking to provide. Although he does not go into detail (perhaps they will in future posts) it is extremely useful if you are just starting with your Wiki strategy to keep this items in mind as you set your implementation and adoption strategy.

Paul Diamond writes:

Our plan is to:

• merge OneStop and CEpedia into a wiki with access control so that not just anyone can edit everything (after all, you wouldn't want me to be updating anything remotely approaching technical content - trust me on this), but updates are easier and therefore more frequent.
  

Some organizations (i would venture to say many) are going to find that an overall free for all might not be the best approach. It isn't because you are afraid that a content producer is going to create 'bad' content with dirty words- but because authority and trust are key to effective uses of content in the enterprise- one slip and your audience will go elsewhere. so think ahead what type of access control you will need.

• We also want to host this outside of our intranet so that initially our partners can also have access, including update capability where appropriate. Over time we would like to share as much as possible of this information with everyone, but that will take more "cleansing" of what information should be public knowledge and what needs to be restricted

Sun, like many technology companies in the valley have a huge channel/partner network that does a lot of selling and services of their core businesses. Obviously there is a huge need to be able to share information with partners- but it must be the right information. Take for example a common piece of collateral like a product technical scope sheet. It could essentially have three different 'formats' a client facing one that provides high level features, a partner one that provides more details and partner pricing information and a direct sales one that could be the most comprehensive. In most of today's enterprise- marketing is most likely producing three types and posting in three different areas. If you think through some of these content strategies up front you won't have to deal with the 'cleansing' that the OneStop team is going to have to address. (btw a great resource on unified content strategies is Ann Rockley's book Managing Enterprise Content.)

• Additionally, we are introducing various Web 2.0 concepts - tagging, RSS / Atom aggregation, AJAX, voting/comments to drive search results, etc. so that we obtain the benefits of this more participatory technology (aka the Wisdom of Crowds) at the same time as understanding how to leverage this technology better for our customers.

Excellent-looking forward to hearing more about these implementations. OneStop alone (not sure about combined OneStop and CEpedia audience) has over 10,000 users out of Sun's 35,000 employees- that is a healthy audience that probably expects only the most innovative ways to consume, create and deliver content and this team is going to give them what they need and the best part is that they are going to continue to share how they do it with the public.

Dion Hinchcliffe again provides us with an excellent write up about Enterprise Mashup tools- providing what seems to be a comprehensive list of Enterprise grade Mashup tools. I just wish i had more time to dig deeper into the ones i know and investigate those on the list that i don't know anything about.

I agree with Hinchcliffe that this is a very promising space and like i wrote when i highlighted BEA's Aqualogic new enterprise social computing services last week, i am really looking forward to working with clients that are utilizing enterprise mashup tools and looking to include content that they might be getting from content aggregators. News consumption (be it mainstream media or new media) usually has a very personal component related to what the business purpose that user is utilizing the content for- tools that let the Lines of Business define the unique 'usage' models of multiple types of content will further increase the value of that content as part of standard business processes.

I have been blogging since i made made my trek across the country when i moved to the Bay Area in February 2005- it started out as a way to keep in touch with family and friends and then i found myself blogging to keep in touch with my former East coast clients to share with them the things i was seeing on the West coast. Quickly my blog turned into a good way to communicate with my new clients on the West coast, the tech community, my company co-workers around the world and a way to completely bore the hell out of my friends and family who were expecting pictures of me surfing and living the San Francisco lifestyle but instead have to read about Web 2.0, social media and general grumblings about information delivery in the enterprise.

There are certainly other work colleagues of mine that are 'business' bloggers but none of us are currently under a Dow Jones domain- they are personal blogs that address business issues and trends that we are all interested in. When i started blogging, i was part of Factiva which at the time was a Dow Jones & Reuters company and had a blogging policy and even a CEO blogger.

At the end of last year, we became fully owned by Dow Jones and one of the first things i asked our PR department was about the DJ blogging policy. I am still waiting for an official Dow Jones blogging policy but was told to follow the employee code of conduct as a rule (honestly i think that all companies should have an official blogging policy and have been ancy about not having one over the last 8 months). If you are a regular reader of my blog, then you know that i try not to talk much about the Dow Jones corporate business or try to be overtly pushing products that we sell- for example i have hardly touched this News Corp situation on this blog (i have however Twittered about it but that is a closed network of those i consider my trusted friends some which are also clients).

The other day i was talking to my friend Jeremiah Owyang as we were coming out of a Social Media club event in which he had just been on a panel on business blogging in the enterprise. I told Jeremiah that our Client Solutions marketing group was producing a new quarterly newsletter and they had informed me that they wanted to highlight my blog. It has also been featured on the InfoPro Alliance newsletter that Factiva produces mostly for their information professional audience. Jeremiah thought it was great that Dow Jones trusted me enough to publish my site to their customers, but since he has been following my blog he can understand why the content i produce is valuable to the organization- i think it is pretty cool as well that they trust me.

Just today at the New Tech Meetup in San Francisco- where the topic was Women in Tech- Lorna Li asked me what i blog about- my standard response is that i blog about information delivery in the enterprise and it is a way for me to be part of the community that discusses issues important to that market segment while connecting with customers.

i don't get paid extra to blog about things that might bring revenue to the company or induce engagement with communities of importance to us, i do it because i truly enjoy it and it brings me immense pleasure when a customer or colleagues say to me- yeah i want to talk to you about that post about bla bla bla or i have been looking forward to meeting you- your blog is very interesting especially that post about bla bla bla.

I like think of myself as a corporate blogger that is trying to fit the Community/Evangelist Role that Jeremiah commonly speaks about- but i certainly feel that i could be doing much more. Part of it is time constraints and being overworked- i can't tell you how many times i come home with a great idea post that i start to write and then get wrapped up with some work project or simply run out of steam to continue thinking about work- so i try to pay myself and tell myself that i am blogging here for daniela not for Dow Jones- they are just one of the beneficiaries.

But the bottom line is that i am proud that my blog gets highlighted in a corporate newsletters from Dow Jones- it is through Social Media (my blog) that as an employee that is not at the executive levels that typically gets the public ear through mainstream media- I am able to communicate with the marketplace- i just wish i had more time to do it because it seems that almost everyday i say to myself 'if only i had the time to blog about this...'.

Oh yeah and something else to worry about-let's see if News Corp has a corporate blogging policy....if not maybe i will just convert this blog to focus on delivering information to enterprising cats.