OneStop Secret Sauce

I’m part of a Collaboration 2.0 group which started on linkedin, and was moved over to yammer. One of the rules of the group is that you need to work at a big company and do this stuff for a living. This is a great premise! The owner/moderator is thoughtful and engaged, but the group doesn’t see a lot of traffic.

Why is this?
I believe there are a few reasons. (I’ll of course relate this back to OneStop.)

1. The feedback loop is not well defined.
2. The value proposition is not crystal clear.
3. There isn’t enough in it for me.
4. Metrics

Feedback Loop:
I’ve posted twice to the group. I thought the posts were insightful and would get a discussion going. No responses. I need feedback! Apparently the “what’s in it for me, let’s use the acronynm WIIFM” quotient wasn’t high enough for people to respond.

Value Prop (WIIFM)
I’m part of a half dozen linkedin groups. The vast majority of the posts are from consultants. The value prop for them (WIIFM) is that they are trying to raise their visibility level, (their web based stock price so to speak) and indirectly line up some work.

I started to get active on linkedin when I thought there was a chance my job would disappear. Would I have reached out otherwise? Probably, but not as aggressively. Would I have joined Collaboration 2.0? Not sure. I would probably have monitored (or lurked) to pull out good ideas.

I initiated my blog when I was up for a promotion to Principal Engineer. I didn’t do it out of the goodness of my heart or that I was inately keen on community contribution.

Organizational Credit
One of the reasons people bother to author OneStop pages is that it’s cool. (WIIFM++) They get their pictures at the top right of the pages they author, and become much more visibile in their area(s) of expertise. Most of their managers are supportive as it’s obvious that this sort of information sharing is of high value add to the company. However, this value add need to be demonstrated through…

Metrics
When you see a couple of hundred hits on your page every month it becomes much easier to make the time. It also become much easier for your manager to support your efforts.

At the upper right of the header for this blog it mentions that “carefully crafted processes to make this work in the enterprise.”. Part of the process is rules of engagement. For most communities there really isn’t enough WIIFM, at least from the start. In many cases participants need to get “organizational credit”, or maybe just a direct push from their managers, to participate.

Sub theme: Connecting My Professional and Personal Lives?

Wow, Salesforce.com really has it together! I recently finished Behind the Cloud, by Marc Benioff and was blown away. These people really understand community and collaboration, and how to leverage it effectively. Marc’s very readable book is organized as a series of 111 plays (as in a football playbook). He catalogs how to build the entire business, but the playbooks on Sales, Marketing,and Technology are especially rich with collaboration examples.

As I was trolling through my morning news I was drawn to the TechCrunch Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010. Number ten is:

If you are reader of this blog you noticed I started getting excited about  Twitter and Facebook in April of 2007. My enthusiasm quickly waned as most of the social networking tools did not seem very relevant to the enterprise. I got a little tired of reading the “I’m taking my daughter to the dentist” tweets. We’ve been experimenting with a twitter clone, internally, but it hasn’t gotten much traction. (We’ve been able to search it in real time for the last 18 months. )

One of the more popular features on OneStop (read about OneStop in prior postings) is the Worth a Look section on the homepage. I try to post 3-5 items day, mostly current news items that are related to Sun. Part of my role is the “synergizer” and “consolidator” of interesting stuff. I spend a couple hours a day aborbing news. This ranges from the sources listed in Daily News in my prior post (Reading Recommendations From People You Trust), to Google alerts, to dozens of internal aliases at Sun. This also enables me to ensure that OneStop has the appropriate breadth, and the right products and technologies are covered. My thought is the users (Sun employees, mostly SEs) are busy, don’t have an hour to spend, and find the highlights useful.

Maybe too much background, but yesterday I was posting a Worth a Look item and thought “this is silly, why am I not posting this item to Facebook or Twitter?” so it will get picked up automatically by interested consumers. (Including my wordpress blog at http://mikebriggs.com). The answer of course is that some of the items are not appropriate for outside the Sun firewall.

Will the Semantic Web solve this problem? Will content be consistently tagged with group and access control information, perhaps utilizing SecurID? Some sort of AI needs to be built in, as tagging everything manually is incredibly burdensome.

The lines between our personal and professional lives are blurring, but it still seems necessary to have distinct contexts on both sides of the enterprise firewall. Will Sales Force Chatter help fix this problem?

Voracious readers, don’t you love seeing a list of Must Reads from someone you trust, who has interests similar to yours? Whenever I see such a list I get all excited, login to half.com and buy most of them. I’m a big amazon fan and find the ratings and reviews very useful, but there is no substitute for that recommendation from someone you admire.

Note that people you respect and admire is not necessarily the same as the list of your friends, or is even a logical community or group on facebook or linkedin. It often isn’t someone you know personally.

Recommendations often come from blog posts, but they are scatter-shot. One of my favorite bloggers is Brad Feld a VC at the Foundry Group. He posted a list of his favorite books about a month ago, and I gobbled them up. He (fortunately) has a Books link on his website.

So this is the OneStop Secret Sauce blog, mostly about Building Web Community (@Sun). How do reading recommendations fit in?

Isn’t this a natural for some sort of community? It’s not a community as per facebook or linkedin, but there should be some way to consolidate reading recommendations. Therefore, we’ve established a community on SunSpace called “READ”, and we’ve seeded it with the reading lists from a bunch of notables.

For this community we hope to leverage the organization, in particular roles and job titles. The assumption is that many people will care about the books a Principal Engineer is reading, at least the technical ones. I’m interested in the business books that the execs are reading. To take this a step farther, I also care about the news sources (blogs, etc.) that the people I respect consume.

It’s important to include meta information about the books, particularly date and a short description. Categorization (and soon tags) will help a lot.

The tables below are on the Mike Briggs page of the READ community, categorized into Daily News, Business Related, and Fiction or Just Good Reads,  Sorry, the community is only available on the Sun internal network. Maybe Brad will do one for his large external audience.

Daily News

Business Related

Fiction or Just Good Reads

dis·in·ter·me·di·a·tion [dis-ˌin-tər-ˌmē-dē-ˈā-shən] According to Wikipedia, disintermediation is the removal of intermediaries in a supply chain: “cutting out the middleman”. This morning I ascended the bully pulpit and gave our team a speech as to why our OneStop pages are an order of magnitude more popular than other pages we produce. (We produce pages for different sites/user communities including the public, partners, and sales people.)

As I’ve written about, prior, people like OneStop because the content is complete, accurate, up to date, and is in a consistent format. Easy enough, right? Not really. The question is, what ingredients are necessary, in the secret sauce, to produce this quality content?

Ownership
The page(s) need to be owned by the content expert, or minimally some who is well versed in the content AND in the needs and expectations of the users. On OneStop we have the person’s name, picture, and country flag on the page. The quality of the page is a direct reflection of the author.

Disintermediation!
Most of the sites our group works with are based on a structured update process. The content creator needs to submit a request with the update. It then goes through a couple of people for approval on correctness and completeness, and then goes to a web person for posting. This process can be time consuming, and often something is lost in translation. On OneStop the owner does the actual posting. The corollary to this rule is that it Needs to be Easy.

The owner needs to be a user
The best pages are the ones that the owner uses every day. This is the only was to get a gut feel for whether the page works. Are the items in the right order? Is it easy to find the highest priority items? Are there bad links? Is response time fast? Is the page always available? Many of the best pages on OneStop are authored by SEs. As SEs talk to customers every day, and use OneStop to look up information to support these customers, they can do an optimal job of creating a page that is useful for other SEs.

Needs to pass the what’s in it for me test

It can be a decent amount of work to maintain a popular OneStop page. Having an author’s name and picture featured prominently on the page gives credit where credit is due. Note that in a intermediated site the content contributor is often invisible.

Working feedback loop

I’m a glutton for feedback. [Particularly positive feedback. ] Bloggers are heavily reliant on comments and stats, often via google analytics. Internal content contributors often aren’t so lucky. On OneStop we make a big effort to make as much data as possible easy available. I think of it as positive reinforcement.

Ask the users
On OneStop it is necessary to login, so we know who views, updates, and comments on a page.
In my experience, users love when you reach out to them. It shows you care and want to increase the quality and effectiveness of the page. There is always what I call a gem in the responses, a really good idea that you can readily implement.

As a closing thought, I like to emphasize people over tools and mechanism. It’s not that I don’t like mechanism, I’m a huge google fan (search, gmail, talk, reader, docs, etc.) However, I’d bet dollars to donuts that the developers use almost all the tools – on a daily basis – to do their jobs. See owner needs to be a user above.

Web heads refer to the term wiki gardening. This is basically controlling the content in your wiki. Wiki gardening is easily manageable for wikis that are internal to an enterprise, but is more challenging for wikis that contain company content that is shared with partners and customers.

Sun has a large and vibrant website for partners, called Sun Partner Advantage Membership Center or Partner Portal. Partners can utilize the Partner Portal for everything from pricing information, to training, to product and program information. “The Portal” , in general, utilizes the walled garden approach. The Sun Partner  team both accepts and solicits content, massages it appropriately, formats, and publishes it. The advantages are obvious. The content is consistent, reasonably up to date, and only the appropriate content is shared.

But wait! There are occasions where more and better resources are available to employees, than partners. This is because publishing content to an internal wiki (yes, I’m referring to OneStop. This is the OneStop Secret Sauce blog after all.) is easier. It’s much faster as there is no process or approval involved, and there are no worries about confidentiality or appropriateness of content. There are no forms or mechanism, it’s basically WYSIWYG and update in place. It enables Self publishing so that the content expert is able to make the changes directly. Nothing is lost in translation, as compared to content making it’s way through the process.

With our PartnerSpace project we hope to offer the best of both worlds. The goal of PartnerSpace is to make appropriate partner ready content that is behind the Sun firewall easily available to partners. The core of PartnerSpace is an easily consumable (by content providers) set of publishing guidelines. These guidelines include:

1. Publishing Rules, including privacy and confidentiality guidelines.
2. Content traits, as we need to happily coexist with PartnerWeb.
3. Style suggestions, for consistency.

Perhaps the most important part of PartnerSpace is the definition of roles. Each wiki page, or family of wiki pages, that are made available to partners has a moderator. Content creators and owners stage a page in a Sun only area, and only when it is scanned and approved by the moderator does it become available to partners.

OneStop for Partners is the first instance of the Partner Space project. We are already seeing interesting phenomenon that we didn’t expect. It turns out that some of the low hanging fruit is content that doesn’t  fit easily into the existing Partner Portal or Sun organizational model. Two examples thus far are the Partner HPC Resource Center and the Solutions area. We are moving aggressively to complete OneStop for Partners with the traditional core of product, technology, and program information.