Image via CrunchBase

There’s a ton of activity in real-time collaboration these days. With Office looming and IBM’s social push with LotusLive, companies have a lot more options when it comes to social computing and collaboration tools.

One of the companies with an increasingly attractive option is California-based Central Desktop. TechCrunch reported on some of its moves recently and I wanted to chip in with a few observations.

I’ve had some exposure to some of Central Desktop’s earlier incarnations and always liked its simplicity and pervasive use of RSS, essentially making everything a feed. And we all know [a little snarky] that feeds are the new inbox, right? But even early on, you got the sense that Isaac Garcia and company had a good handle on how syndicating everything could reap big benefits. It was one of the few platforms I used that brought RSS plumbing to the common user.

More importantly, Central Desktop brings real workflows and simple processes into its collaborative environment. When that’s exposed to users early on, most can quickly grasp how the tool can accommodate the way they work, not the other way around. That’s big.

As far as the industry goes, prospects for some of the stronger pure-plays look good, with several probably ripe for acquisition over the next 6-12 months.

Competitively, the collaboration road is much tougher for the smaller vendors to travel down these days, with larger enterprise vendors lurking at every bend.

But Central Desktop, Box.net and others can still carve out a niche in what’s increasingly a hybrid enterprise environment. IBM’s Cast Iron acquisition a few days back is evidence that on-premise and cloud solutions will continue to coexist for some time. It’s that heterogeneous environment that makes solutions from pure-play cloud vendors so compelling. Clearly, there’s more to just dropping in a SaaS-based solution, but they typically require less overhead than on-premise offerings.

And heck, if Central Desktop can capture even a small percentage of SharePoint-wannabe customers with tight pocketbooks, they’ll have more than a few good quarters ahead of them.

Central Desktop’s tool allows users to simultaneously co-author Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents in real time, as well as open and save files directly into the cloud.

Central Desktop says that their tool brings document collaboration to older versions of Office at a much lower cost than upgrading to the new version of Office.

Related articles

Image by George Dearing via Flickr

Last year I was working with a large brand and it was painfully apparent their internal collaboration pilot was doomed from the start. The eBusiness exec kept saying “we’re just not getting the adoption.”

When pressed on metrics and the objectives his company had outlined that could perhaps affect the work being done in various groups, the result was radio silence. A quick reality check showed the brand group had seeded a few blog and forum posts, created some user accounts, and proceeded to push out an email or two. Oh, and we were given 90 days to see if things worked.
I never could figure out how they expected anything to come out of the effort by dropping in some technology and encouraging people to collaborate.

The thing that brought that back to mind was a Forrester post from Nigel Fenwick on enterprise 2.0 pilots, essentially extending the commentary that centered around an Andrew McAfee post.

Fenwick shared three insights reflecting some of his research on “Successful Enterprise Collaboration Communities.”

• Ownership by the CEO and the senior executive team — being willing to drive by example and holding business unit owners accountable for adoption within their own lines of business.
• Hiring a manager whose sole role was to drive adoption and publicize wins. This person found people/teams who could benefit with tangible business results and got them involved. He then encouraged them to share their success stories.
• Getting the right technology in place to remove technology obstacles to adoption. (i.e., make it easy).

As McAfee and others have touted, you better have some buy-in and you damn well better be committed to doing things a little differently. Once the practitioners and evangelists leave the building, all the fancy tech and strategy can go out the door in seconds unless you dedicate the time and resources to help your employees understand how their jobs will improve. That doesn’t happen in 90 days..so keep your pilot-fighting game faces on.

The Tribune had an article recently highlighting how brands are wrapping Twitter into customer service activities.

AT&T chimed in here

“AT&T not only maintains a presence on Facebook and Twitter, but employs a full “blogger relations” team and utilizes YouTube.
“These are not PR people, they are real customer care managers who spend their days helping people via social media,” Roskopf said. “Posting on Facebook or tweeting will get you a fast response..”

And here’s one of the ways the ‘no frills’ bunch frames it.

“Twitter and Facebook are a great way to have your voices heard and a great way to voice a concern,” said Christi Day, an emerging media strategy specialist at Southwest Airlines. “I would say it is a large part of our customer communication strategy.”
The Dallas-based airline has two employees devoted to its Twitter page, and a team of three who monitor its Facebook fan page.

Every time I see these types of pieces, I think  of the handful of first-hand experiences I’ve had.

Not surprisingly, Comcast was the first real experience, followed by State Farm insurance and most recently Esurance. Most notably was the set of scenarios with State Farm.

My parents were flat out turned down for a new roof after it was destroyed by the hurricane a few years back. Of course I started venting a tad on Twitter for starters, and subsequently moved the conversation to their Facebook page.

Within a few weeks my parents were contacted by a ’special agent’ and magically the roof was replaced soon thereafter. Not trying to be big-man-on-campus by flexing my Twitter muscle, just pointing out how things have changed..whether you have 7, 7000, or 7 million followers is beside the point.  Companies now are listening. They have to. And it’s about time.

Lastly, as a sidebar that the techie in me couldn’t help but notice. Why is the Tribune still running their site on TypePad? It’s a wonder its newsroom can turn a profit after figuring in what it takes to maintain it.

I’ve been a big proponent of microblogging’s simplicity for a few years now. It’s one of those things that companies can launch very quickly and more importantly, transform certain processes. The case studies at a recent Harvard Business Review article reflect some of the common enterprise scenarios — reducing email, simplifying workflows and of course sharing ideas as we’re accustomed to on Twitter.

I’ve used Yammer pretty extensively and most of the organizations I’ve spoken to lean toward the other two [SocialCast, Socialtext] mentioned for similar capabilities.

At Meredith Corporation, the publisher of Ladies Home Journal and Better Homes & Gardens, microblogging tool Socialtext Signals is the platform of choice. Using Signals, the marketing function can post alerts to employees and partners on a wide range of marketing issues, such as researching competitors, brainstorming new ideas for a direct marketing campaign, or analyzing the outcomes of current campaigns.

Says Dave Ball, Vice President of Consumer Marketing for Meredith, “Signals allows us to break down the silos and easily share information with each other internally. We also use Signals to communicate with groups of external vendors, so we can brainstorm current campaigns with them, propose new ideas and share best practices. It is amazing how much we have cut down on email traffic while increasing our productivity.”

The quote below from Harris Diamond reflects a few things.

While most brands are implementing social communications programs using one or two social platforms, only a handful are thinking holistically about managing communications across all media and touch points.

1. PR is increasingly taking the reins of interactive media strategies. Their DNA is founded in communications..social media is online media and the latter requires the same best practices as the offline world.

2. The touch points Diamond refers to stress how organizations are hard-pressed to scale engagement. Right now, brands are bulking up customer service teams just to respond..and they’re learning as they go along.

3. There’s a tug of war going on between the best way for brands to harness and reach customers. Do you build a hub. Do you fish where the fish are? Because the answer is of course a resounding yes to both, it becomes a question of who can lead the charge long-term. You have to wear customers down (with substance) with the value you provide and that takes time.

Too many see the “social” elements of media as a quick fix.

Image via CrunchBase

Noted VC Fred Wilson had a good post this morning, urging the Twitter community to get the creative juices flowing. He outlined five areas where additional growth would most likely occur.

Perhaps the most intriguing are the Enterprise and Vertical segments. Wilson references CoTweet, who merged with ExactTarget recently, and alludes to Chatter from Salesforce as the standouts thus far.That’s a strikingly bare bin considering Twitter launched almost five years ago.

If that activity points to anything, I think it’s that cumbersome CRM applications are quickly becoming a thing of the past. In some ways, the activity stream has replaced the CRM-based message.

Furthermore, if you look at the newer breed of social software entrants, much of their approach is rooted in lighter-weight tools and plug-ins – perfectly suited for Twitter’s API and evolving framework. Gone are the days of big back-ends and custom connector architectures. The mantra is loud and clear now — coexist and ease in to my enterprise accordingly.

Also, one enterprise company I thought was conspicuously absent in Wilson’s enterprise group was Yammer. It’s hard to point to another company that’s had as much influence inside corporations as Yammer. I think its recent push into customized communities (think external extranets) paints at least a partial picture of where things may be headed – a blurring of the lines between internal and external communities. That’s a huge opportunity that no one’s cracked that I’m aware of.

And I doubt anyone you know could name one vertical player in the Twitter ecosystem a la Stocktwits. It’s safe to assume one will likely emerge from advertising or marketing as social commerce continues to grow.

The real opportunities in that space will be helping brands harvest intelligence from the flurry of online engagement that will happen in distributed networks.

Below are Wilson’s five areas.

* Social Gaming – There have been a number of attempts to build social game experiences on Twitter. But I’m not aware of any successes of scale like we’ve had on the Facebook platform. I think we will see it emerge soon.

* Verticals – We have some successes to point to here like Stocktwits for finance and Flixup for movies but this is a wide open opportunity in most verticals and we haven’t seen as much effort here as I’d have expected.

* Enterprise – CoTweet comes to mind as well as the efforts that Salesforce has made to integrate Twitter. This is a huge opportunity.

* Discovery – This is one area where there is a significant amount of effort.Hunch, Listorious, TweetMeme, Cadmus, WeFollow, and MrTweet all come to mind.

* Analytics – While Twitter will obviously be delivering better analytics to its users, particularly its marketing and business users

The thing I like about SocialCast’s approach is their lightweight strategy, dropping in around existing apps and platforms as needed.

Eric Schonfeld described their approached recently around the company’s  funding announcement

The startup’s service combines a corporate activity stream that ties into CRM and ERP systems with social bookmarking, Outlook and SharePoint integrations, mobile (iPhone and Blackberry) and desktop (Air) apps, and analytics.

The bigger software vendors will own the foundation for collaborative technologies — it’s smarter to coexist and deliver information in a platform-agnostic way.

I also noticed mention of an AIR and mobile app, which is equally smart. There’s a contingency of users that will drive adoption outside of the internal portal with mobile and desktop apps alone.

Image via CrunchBase

I kept trying to connect all the the dots around Google Buzz over the last few days and ran across this quote from Chris Messina.

“In fact, I’d argue that Buzz is as much about Google creating a new channel for conversation in a familiar place as it is about how we’re going about building its public developer surfaces. Although today’s Buzz API only offers a real-time read-only activity stream, the goal is to move quickly towards implementing a host of other technologies — most of which should be familiar to readers of this blog.”

That obviously speaks well to the "open web" movement and how Google is positioning its APIs. Whether or not dropping social elements in GMail is your idea of better collaboration, it’s hard to deny that familiarity with something as utilitarian as email breeds adoption.

But to think email is the only anchor the Buzz ship will hitch itself too is naive. Even if Buzz can make a permanent home in your inbox, that might be enough for it to make inroads against Microsoft and IBM in the messaging wars. In fact, just last week Gartner made some predictions about the forthcoming collision of email and social networks.

“By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.”

“Greater availability of social networking services both inside and outside the firewall, coupled with changing demographics and work styles will lead 20 percent of users to make a social network the hub of their business communications. Social networking will prove to be more effective than e-mail for certain business activities such as status updates and expertise location.
“The rigid distinction between e-mail and social networks will erode.”

With Aardvark in the Google arsenal, it immediately gets deeper into social search, mobile and more importantly sets the stage for biting off bigger pieces of the enterprise. Think about how Aardvark could easily be repurposed as a self-service support tool incorporated into the fabric of Google Apps — with Buzz as the interface to support systems or social CRM services. All of sudden, it’s not just email that’s housing all that collaboration, it’s just another interface.

Image via CrunchBase

Aardvark has released its white paper paper "Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine" and it’s a good read. I’ve used Vark for a while — mostly answering questions through its SMS interface.

Their iPhone app is well done but I don’t tend to proactively search its database or topics to seek out questions to answer. I also use Hunch sparingly and have signed up for Quora but haven’t seen its offering yet. I think it’s interesting to think about the possibilities of Aardvark and other geo-location apps.

As people check-in to venues, invariably there’s a slew of questions that Vark’ers could answer about purchasing products, menu selections, etc.. Social search is some respects, the new, new word-of-mouth.

87.7% of questions submitted were answered, and nearly 60% of them were answered within 10 minutes.  The median answering time was 6 minutes and 37 seconds, with the average question receiving two answers.  70.4% of answers were deemed to be ‘good’, with 14.1% as ‘OK’ and 15.5% were rated as bad.

One of the things I like about Ogilvy’s thoughts is how they make it clear that social media isn’t owned by one department or the other. That ownership volley is what costs too many companies precious time. It’s much easier to rally the business units that want to step up and commit resources and budget.

The other thing that stood out is Ogilvy’s Social Enterprise Change Framework. There’s simply not enough frameworks out there to anchor how companies can begin thinking about an interactive strategy. Hell, I still reference Forrester’s POST methodology for some of the sessions I’ve run. What the Ogilvy framework smartly outlines are the steps required for brands to establish “Centers of Excellence” – yes the COE is back. And it actually maps really well to the challenges I see in the marketplace. Without sharing the burden – ok,tasks – companies are easily victimized by the silo effect and just can’t scale social media expertise across the organization.

The “Action” step in the diagram shows how talent needs to be peppered throughout the organization. Which lines of business to start with can often be the most daunting exercise. It’s hard to look inward and admit your customer service sucks needs improvement, although half the Twitterverse probably already knows it.

And while “action” is the right word in this context, I’m seeing companies act with more preciseness these days, as if engagement strategies were planned for long-term sustainability. I know, what a concept, right? Part of it’s from earlier social media war wounds  and part of it’s due to the listening capabilities that are now utilitarian. What the Ogilvy whitepaper also largely underscores is how twenty-ten will be year that social media’s shiny new object affliction is finally cured.

Ogilvy Enterprise Social Media v1 0

Image by cambodia4kidsorg via Flickr

One of the other quotes that stood out was John Batelle’s prediction that the microblogging interface would change and “look nothing like a microblog.” I’d guess that has  a lot to do with the interface disappearing in some respects. By that I mean interfaces will be accessed through all sorts of services, applications and embedded widgets. And in a sense I think it’s already changed pretty drastically.

The other thing that almost everyone seems to allude to is how social media will become more entrenched in the inner-workings of companies – from their external communication practices to the way business systems are built, designed and deployed. 

That last part is why you hear so much about “social business,” which is a really tough thing to distill into something folks can understand.

If you stray too far to the technical, toolset, or process side, you sound like a business process re-engineering (BPR) evangelist. Jump over too much to the “social media” side and you quickly run the risk of being categorized as too fluffy or someone trying to socialize things that really don’t need to be social.

2010 Social Media Influencers – Trend Predictions in 140 Characters, by TrendsSpotting

Image by George Dearing via Flickr

• Forbes: A Year In Review: 2009 Social Marketing Trends [Jeremiah Owyang]
  (tags: social+media marketing+strategy trends Forbes social+media+marketing)

• The Top 10 tech trends of 2009 [CNN.com]
  (tags: technology innovation CNN trends)

  

• How Cloud Commoditization Will Transform Enterprise Computing [via Dion Hincliffe]
  (tags: cloud+computing enterprise+2.0)

Already a few have un-followed in less than a few hours..I’m heartbroken..really.

Posted via web from George Dearing dot com

Image by George Dearing via Flickr

• New Harvard Study: How The CEO Engages With Social Media
  (tags: marketing twitter socialmedia business media CEO harvard facebook)

• Search the Live Web with Two Simple Bookmarklets [Steve Rubel]
  (tags: real-time search google)

Image by George Dearing via Flickr

• 21 Enterprise 2.0 Success Stories
  (tags: enterprise2.0 casestudies)