Social Media Inside the Firewall

October 23, 2007 · Comments

corporate group
Imagine that all these tools we use regularly were adopted inside a corporate setting. How would work be different? What would be the new use cases? How could you keep Corporate IT happy, productivity high, and complexity low? Here’s a rough sketch of how I imagine some of it working, performed “in media res,” as if this is all implemented and I’m merely reporting what I observe visiting this mid-sized enterprise company. I’ll annotate a bit, just in case. Note: all of this stuff technically works today, but requires integration assistance.

Monday Morning

Sonia gets in early, and slots her cell phone in the charger caddy at a free work zone. The nearby desktop VoIP phone smells Sonia’s phone via Bluetooth, and adapts to receive Sonia’s calls. (unified communications). She pulls out her laptop to check her corporate Twitter and notes that Shashi’s bringing muffins, and that Israel will be in late judging by how late his Twittering went last night about the server mesh crashing. (Sonia’s Bluetooth tells the laptop to send SMS messages to a window there- more unified communications). She notes that her Twitter back to Shashi goes text-to-speech, and that tells her he’s driving. Good! She’s hungry.

Monday Before Lunch

Sonia videoblogs a product update for the folks at Glass Egg in Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam), using dotSUB to translate from English to Vietnamese. While she waits, she translates a few videos into Ukranian to keep up her social networking standards there. When the video is ready, she uploads it to her corporate Blip server, and Minh will see it on his Google Reader dashboard when he checks in a few hours. Video helps because Sonia slices in visuals to go with the dotSUB translation.

Monday After Lunch

Out of the office, Sonia spends a few hours at a coworking office that has a networking relationship with her corporate firewalls, and loads a virtual machine off a thumb drive. She does a few quick Seesmic updates for a client meeting later that week, and sees one from Israel asking her if she wants a new “skin” for her Aeron chair, holding up a sample. She logs out and checks the team news feed, notes that Minh has blogged a long ranting scrawl of text, with the most important point at the end. Check her Casgle when she gets back to home base. Sonia peeks at her local RSS and sees two audio updates in podcast form, which will be good for her run later tonight.

Monday Mid-Afternoon

Sonia Pownces some CSS suggestions over to Shashi for his wife to add to the website demo site later on, and then he gives her back a new mashup of Punjabi beats with old country singers singing over it. She posts links on her blog for offtopic (so the CFO and COO don’t get bugged by it- they’ve opted out of the musical variety of mashups), and then notes that her COO’s daughter has sent a Facebook message. The message reminds Sonia about the surprise party for tonight. Sonia buys a bunch of songs from iTunes using the COO’s Last.fm Facebook app as a guide, so she’ll have appropriate party music for later that night.

Monday Late Afternoon

Israel reports another crash of the virtual environment, acknowledging that its their code, not the virtualization software. He Twitters the outage, piece by piece internally, and gives his multi-status app (custom) a public report that the servers are acting wonky. It goes out to Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, Pownce, and onto the corporate Tumblr blog, which is just a thin RSS sliver of status alongside the regular blog. Israel drops regular Seesmic video updates to show Sonia that he’s calm and has it under control (the visual helps more than a tweet), and she feels comfy heading out to the COO’s party.

Before Bed

Sonia reviews her Google Reader corporate dashboard for all the RSS of everything put together all day. Shashi’s already shipped off an annotated version of the most relevant to Minh’s other team (transcribers and updaters) to build the wiki knowledge base up with the latest. Marinka in sales gets an SMS that the wiki has been modified, should she be out on a call with clients, and Sonia writes up a quick external blog post with a few choice Seesmic clips of Israel doing a Jimi Hendrix air burning guitar impression over the rack of servers that refused to properly run his bad code. Not a bad day, all in all, and the COO loved her musical choices. Natch.

Quick Review

In my story, Sonia and her team use a variety of social media tools in a corporate environment. There are a few threshold crosses into the wild Internet (dotSub and Facebook, for instance), but for the most part, this presumes internal, enterprise environments.

What do you think? Does it make sense? Could you see this implementation being useful at an environment you’ve worked in or work in now? What am I missing? Which technologies did I miss, and which don’t belong in the story?

Thinking of how social media impacts and potential empowers businesses is another way to consider how you might take your skills and abilities and consider implementing them. Imagine what any of these applications feel like inside a data center, under your team’s control. It could become messy quickly, or they might stay lightweight and easily manageable by most users.

What’s your take?

Photo credit, Jakob Lodwick

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  • Do you really think email will fall by the wayside? I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, just curious to hear what else you might have to say about that.

    If email dies because people can't use it effectively anymore (bloated inboxes, spam, etc.), what keeps that same thing from happening to other inputs (twitter, facebook, etc.)? Is it because the user gets to decide who can reach them and who can't?
  • Chris, what you're describing is best-case scenario. There are plenty of people in the enterprise who are older and not used to computers - much less social networking. There's still a great digital divide in this area. We'll all get where we need to be eventually, but we're not there yet.
  • I think the key is to provide an easy means to identify someone's preferred contact medium. Forget about trying to train people to use things they aren't comfortable with, simply let them know what other users preferred methods are. They'll dovetail at some point.

    Once again, we begin to get a diaspora of devices...but that's where aggregators like Meebo, Trillian etc. could take it to the next step. Or internal comms pages, where we tie in the widgets for the various services our people use.
  • Wow, I want to work there. I already do a lot of this stuff personally and for my blog and podcast, but to be able to use the tools I already do with my job would be great. I am lucky though in the fact that a prospective employer seems to be pretty forward thinking. The owner is on facebook and twitter and I'm trying to get a job there by showing them that there are several ways to cover news, especially using new media.
  • Chris, Great post! I love it when someone tells a story to illustrate how all the moving pieces can be used. I think the reality is that pieces of this puzzle *need* to be implemented behind the firewall... or else the workers will just use "consumer" tools out on the Internet (thus introducing security and privacy concerns for the corporation). Yes, the Gen Y and younger crowd just assume these tools will be available... so do we hyper-connected ones of older generations! (I don't quite think of myself as "old", but I *am* the same basic age as you, eh? And we're not exactly "young" anymore, at least physically! ;-)

    And yes, I did notice your omission... as the younger crowd says, that's only for communicating with "old people" (where "old" = anyone over 25).

    Thanks for the great post,
    Dan
  • Some really great comments here. A lot to consider.

    What's interesting is that most of you pointed towards the enterprise's disinterest in trying something new. I can see that would be a factor in introducing something new. Specific to that, it was interesting that lots of people mentioned that corporate IM wasn't widely adopted. I've seen a lot of cases where the corporate InfoSec policy that went along with the corporate IM would scare anyone away from using it, so I buy that.

    @Marina- I think this calls for you writing your own variation on the post without an office. Believe me, I'm all for the death of traditional work environments in lots of cases. I just figured I didn't want to blow people's minds ENTIRELY with one post.

    @Pete- I don't think SharePoint is synonymous with all the other tools mentioned. I think it's one implementation, but when I tried it, I felt stifled and just reverted to using web apps.

    I think one important point Pete brought out was the Generation Y and younger just use these tools without thinking.

    Did anyone catch which technology I didn't mention AT ALL? Hint, it's a 20 year old technology.
  • Hi all,

    I agree largely with Stephen Collins.

    Here in Sweden I work with several big multinationals and they are curious but terrified of social media.

    The main fear is bad fallout from allowing people to post their comments and opinions, both within the company and from outsiders. To a large degree the root of this fear is bad relations (real or imagined) between management and employees and that allowing blogs (or commenting in some other way) will be like opening Pandora's box.

    I think corporations need to address this problem thoroughly before they can move onto social media tools.

    It is also a fear from decision makers within the communication department that social media might backfire and they will be blamed (and loose their jobs).

    Another major problem that I see again and again, is the "won't" policy of the IT departments, i.e. they will not introduce anything new no matter what. Ambitious project leaders know it is useless to even ask for the tools they need so they start a wiki, a blog or a project management place somewhere else using Web 2.0 tech.

    Of course this cracks corporate IT security polices wide open and introduces social media tools to a large group of corporate employees that leads to a bigger internal pressure to implement them.

    All in all, I think that corporations need to embrace social media tools sooner or later to stay competitive, but it will be slow. What's needed most of all is for someone in top management to take an interest and be a trailblazer. Neither the IT deparment nor the communications department hold much clout in large traditional organisations.

    I wrote a post last week about if slow technology adaption will make it harder to recruit. Read it and give me some good comments! http://businessbydesign.lidne.com/index.php/bus...

    :-)

    Annika
  • An interesting set of scenarios. The problem? As someone else pointed out, getting people to use tools that are outside of their comfort zone is a tough job. Most people here at UWE will use Office, email, perhaps peek at the intranet. We've been trying to get people to communicate using SharePoint 2007, using the MySite/MyProfile functionality. Slow take up, even though they get a blog, wikis, lots of Facebook style functionality. The reason? It's outside their level of comfort, for now. One tool that is at present in transition from not used to being used is corporate IM. Thats a good 10 years after the technology became available! That's just the staff by the way. Our students adopt all technologies straight away.
  • This is definitely a wish list of how the enterprise can use social networking. The things I like are the corporate Twitter (the folks at Twitter should think about selling this to corporations). It would be perfect for status updates not just from those you are working with but various systems and applications as well. This also is the up-to-date way to find out what someone is up to. A friend of mine works at a company where every one's Outlook calendars are open to everyone in the company. I think that is very intrusive as I maintain one calendar. But if I could update my corporate Twitter to say that "I'm in Chicago today" I don't have to send emails or call folks to let them know.

    Internal Facebook is great as well as in large companies where project teams are spread across various geographic areas, you may not ever even meet your team members. You would be able to associate a face with the emails and voice you hear over the phone. I like the Seesmic scenario as well for the same reason. At one company I worked for our projects always had people from different geographic areas and it was especially hard after the company implemented hotelling - no one was ever at the office. Most times, I never met the entire team. I drove 100 miles each week to work with those that were closer because even in the electronic age relationship is key. When they don't see you, you don't exist. We also did a lot of video conference calls so I get the video. Also with email many times, it's hard to get where someone is coming from - your interpretation may be completely different than the meaning of the email.

    I like the blog as well because that would be a way for employees to showcase their accomplishments and projects. It might also give some insight to a person you might have to work with. It is most difficult working with people you don't know over email and the phone without knowing anything about them. One thing that bugs me as a techie is knowing what a person's background is as it is important when I have to explain something to them. At my current company, everyone has a bio posted and that helps a lot.

    While I don't see the point of connecting with random co-workers on the public versions of Twitter, Facebook, etc. I can see the usefulness of having internal corporate versions of these tools. Of course, corporate adoption wouldn't be immediate but for those that do, I can see their productivity increasing. If you get teams full of folks using social networking tools, I can see all kinds of new synergies being created. But then, we still can't get some people to use the corporate IM. :(
  • Great stuff. Let's get HR into the act with some social bookmarking:

    In response to an earlier phone call, Sonia receives a notification in her RSS feed that her Benefits Manager has added some links to her collection of private bookmarks.

    Sonia quickly scans the new links. Just what she needed, a list of clinics that treat social-media-induced stress disorder. She'll read the details later from her Blackberry while she watches her son's soccer game.
  • Interesting. Here are some thoughts.

    You verbed a lot of technology. Just something I noticed, and it's easy to do, but it has some implications, eh? For the sake of brevity, I'll speak only of Twitter. Using Twitter for corp comm is a tough one. I do it to a degree, have pinged @nieskowitz at 6am to see if he could do a demo to some folks on the east coast. Got a tweetback in less than ten minutes. Impressive. Beyond that, the risk of IP loss, brand mangling and such are pretty significant on an open system such as Twitter.

    Next assignment: transition plan. The challenge I see in bringing this to a reality is a cultural one. The issue being not so much that a biz culture cannot adopt this type of workflow, but rather a cultural journey that every staff member would have to embark upon. That would be purely magical, but the realist in me gets a bit skeptical. Here's why: at best I have been able to successfully convert only a small percentage of people to social tools in my current and past roles. A Jaiku thread I had with Jason Wehmhoener re: this topic http://jasonw22.jaiku.com/presence/14504530 and a link to the wikipatterns 90-9-1 Theory http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipattern...

    I think that 90-9-1 is the general case for biz collaboration in general. That said, 10% is a pretty low bar for making social media effective in the workplace.

    It's hellish getting people to use Sharepoint. Maybe that's because Sharepoint is not a good enough tool, but there may be other reasons as well. It wasn't that long ago that email was something of a pain to use due to lack of adoption, was it?

    Lovely thought though. And I was not joking about the transition plan. Big question: how do you drive adoption of disruptive things that make complete sense but require a leap of faith? Especially at work!
  • Chris this is great. I'm going to mention this in my SAP Global report
  • I like the integration of Bluetooth a lot. I need to do that more in my home office. (I was interviewed for an article on web work this morning and mentioned that Twitter gave me a new project/idea every five seconds. Thanks for yet another great one!!)

    I still see a lot of separation between work and life -- she might listen to an audio update on her iPod during her evening run, but if you maintain a corporate Twitter/Pownce/Blog/Google Reader/Gcal/etc. and a personal one, that's a lot of overlap. I've discussed personal v. work Twitter feeds with other Twitterers and those conversations thus far have ended with the decision that the Internet is making it harder and harder to put those kinds of walls up.

    Why is Sonia even *in* the office? And why do they have firm office hours that someone can be late for?

    Why does she use Pownce? I know Pownce can send files and Twitter can't, but I could FTP the file in 0.002 seconds and Tweet the URL. A large corporate environment should limit the # tools they use to those that sync seamlessly with one another. (I have personally tried to sync Pownce and Twitter and given up. Maybe if it worked...)

    I know Seesmic is the new thing. I haven't yet been filled in on the idea behind it, and I support everyone working in the way that's best for them, but ... I'm a corporate efficiency consultant with lots of clients around the country, and I never, ever, ever want to receive a video of anything that doesn't absolutely have to be video. Status updates should be text, and ongoing working relationships should build the trust that someone can handle a crisis, not my wasting time listen to them talk to me via video. Sorry, but I'm just not getting this new video trend.

    You asked for holes, so there ya go. Very interesting concept, although I would like to see a huge movement away from traditional corporate environments like that altogether.
  • Chris,

    sounds like too much of an open working environment...but I do think that this is the direction most office work will be moving: moving voip locations, moving workstations, more audio and video on the internal 'net, more daily intercommunication (beyond Outlook or Lotus Notes) across global distances.

    ..alex.
  • Chris, your vision matches mine, even if largely it's pie in the sky at the moment.

    Here in Australia we're mostly 18-24 months behind where the US is on corporate social media uptake. Those of us involved in social media here are still trying to convince our clients of the benefits of changing corporate culture to consider these ideas and tools and building the sharing and openness into corporate DNA such that the risk aversion inherent in many businesses sees social media as a benefit rather than as a source for leakage of corporate data.

    It's largely about trust in your people to act like adults and implementing a technical infrastructure that reflects that trust. Presently, much of what happens here is still about blocking at the desktop or corporate firewall, treating people like naughty children and adopting a position about one's own role where control and possession of information is where you define your value, rather than seeing value in the sharing of what you know and defining your future value by what you are yet to contribute or create.

    We'll all get there - US, UK, Australia and the rest - but we've a way to go yet, unfortunately.
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