5 Reasons Why Salesforce/Chatter Could Win the Social Enterprise Battle

Balakrishna Narasimhan

With the introduction of Google+ for Google Apps customers last week, things have gotten a lot more interesting for companies who are trying to become social enterprises. Google+ comes at the social enterprise from the consumer side, just as Google Apps did. There are some notable advantages to this approach, that I highlighted in a recent piece for Mashable.

Yet when we talk about social enterprise, the first company we think of is Salesforce. Over the past two years since Chatter was first introduced, Salesforce has undergone a major transformation. Salesforce has gone from a CRM and cloud platform company to a thought-leader and strategic vendor in the social enterprise space. They’ve acquired a number of social technologies including Jigsaw, Radian6, Heroku, ManyMoon, Assistly and now have one of the industry’s most complete portfolios of social technologies. With that in mind, we’d like to take a look at five advantages that Salesforce Chatter (and Salesforce more broadly) have in the social enterprise space.

1. Chatter can take advantage of Salesforce’s install base: Chatter is completely integrated with Salesforce CRM. Since Salesforce CRM is used by over 100,000 enterprises, this is a massive captive customer base for Chatter. In the first three months since Chatter was introduced, more than 20,000 businesses adopted it and in the months following that, another 40,000+ businesses started using Chatter. This rate of Chatter adoption and usage is not surprising given that CRM processes are inherently collaborative and Chatter makes efficient collaboration with full business context possible.  At this point, a large percentage of Salesforce users use Chatter not only on their PCs but also on mobile devices where Chatter is fast becoming the primary way users interact with Salesforce.

2. Chatter is for people AND apps: While other social technologies focus on making it easier for people to share information with each other, Chatter also makes it easy for applications to share information with people. With Chatter, every object in Salesforce CRM, as well as custom objects in Force.com/Database.com apps can be social. This means that people can find and follow the objects that are most relevant to them and get the latest information in their newsfeeds. So, an account executive can follow accounts, opportunities and cases to stay up-to-date with what’s happening at their customers, and executives can follow sales and operational dashboards. Salesforce’s vision with Chatter is to bring the right information, applications, expertise and content to you, wherever you are.

3. Chatter is a social platform not a feature: Chatter is built into Salesforce’s Force.com platform at a every level of the stack. This means that enterprises and ISVs can build custom applications that are Chatter-enabled. We’ve seen the benefits of this first-hand with hundreds of custom apps that we’ve built for customers that are now social. In addition, ISVs of all sizes are starting to look to Chatter to make their own applications social. At Dreamforce this year, Concur, Workday, and Infor showed off social applications for time tracking, HR, financials and core ERP. With hundreds of ISVs in the AppExchange, Force.com/Chatter is poised to become the defacto standard for ISVs who want to extend their apps with social.

4. Chatter is part of a broader social solution for enterprises: Salesforce’s vision of the social enterprise is a broad one encompassing everything from what customers are doing on public social networks (Jigsaw/Data.com) to making internal processes social (Chatter/Force.com) to listening (Radian6) and engaging with customers on public social networks (Heroku) to making one’s own products social (Force.com/Heroku). With this broad vision and an integrated set of technologies to enable it, Salesforce has put together a complete solution for enterprises who want to become social.

5. Salesforce is completely focused on social enterprise: Salesforce as a company is rallying behind the social enterprise vision. It is the top-level message for the company and unites all their diverse products and technologies toward a common vision. Salesforce goes so far as to say that they’ve been “reborn social.” And unlike other social technology providers, Salesforce is 100% focused on enterprises.

With all of Salesforce’s considerable market presence, execution skill and resources behind their social enterprise push, there’s no doubt that anyone who wants to wrest it from them will have to earn it.

5 Steps to Getting Started with the Social Enterprise

Brandon Oelling (@cloudy2me) and Balakrishna Narasimhan (@bnara75)

Over the past few months we’ve talked a lot about what it means to be a social enterprise and how there are enormous benefits to those companies who are on the path to becoming social. This means not only changing the way your people work internally but also how your company interacts with customers, partners and distributors. It’s a major transformation, but as companies like Starbucks, Brown Forman, Avon and others have shown, there’s a significant reward in terms of efficiency, agility and innovation. As the Dachis Group eloquently puts it “The social business is alive with energy and big ideas - you might call it a Renaissance for the information age.” (more here)

So, how can you get started on the social enterprise journey? There’s a temptation to think that all it takes is buying a license to Heroku, Radian6, Chatter, Jive, Yammer, Box or some other app. But, becoming a social enterprise is much more about behavioral and process changes than it is about technology. Based on our own experience becoming a social enterprise as well as numerous client engagements developing social enterprise blueprints, we’ve come up with 5 simple steps to getting started. We’re going to focus on internal collaboration using Salesforce Chatter because we’ve found that’s a great place to start. However, these tips are equally applicable to rolling out other social collaboration tools.

1. Identify the use cases you want to target 

For an initial rollout focus on a ‘less is more approach’ by targeting 3 - 6 use cases. These should be clearly aligned with business objectives and the user communities that will benefit the most from breaking down existing silos of communication (email, instant message, phone, etc.).

Typically, these use cases involve improving collaboration across distributed teams, making it easy to find quality content, finding true experts, harnessing the power of the broader team or simply reducing email traffic. The key is to identify a function or process where collaboration will make a difference and then to understand in as much detail as possible the pain points that Chatter will address.

While this may seem obvious, this is the place where many Chatter rollouts fail. So, start by identifying the stakeholder groups and specific pain points you want to target.

2. Clearly define where Chatter fits in with other collaboration platforms 

Chatter typically doesn’t get deployed into an organization with no collaboration tools. It needs to fit in with other tools, whether it’s Sharepoint (yes, some organizations still use it!), email, instant messaging, or other social tools like Jive or Yammer. Understanding how Chatter fits in and integrates with the other collaboration tools that people use is critical to driving adoption.

3. Define initial rules of engagement for how to use Chatter

Chatter is a great tool that can be used in a lot of different ways - following people or objects, broadcasting information, collaborating within semi-private or private groups, tagging/liking/commenting on content and sharing files. But as mentioned above, Chatter needs to fit in with other tools that people are already using as part of how they work.

So, it’s critical to think through both the use cases or pain points that Chatter is going to be used to address and how this will happen within Chatter. This doesn’t need to be a major science project but simple guidelines, e.g., use Chatter groups for project or account teams, use Chatter for collaborating on work products but post to Sharepoint or Box.net once you have a final product. Guidelines like these clarify the purpose of Chatter and make a big difference to adoption and usage.

As with any new tool that’s rich with features, you need to make it easy for people to know why and how to use it.

4. Run a pilot with sufficient scale to work through the kinks 

Social collaboration typically requires a new way of working for employees. Piloting the new technology plays a critical role in clarifying the defined use cases, communications, training and end user support required for success. Pilots should be the centerpiece of any change management plan since they provide ‘real life’ feedback on what is required for a usable future solution.

A collaboration pilot requires a certain amount of scale so it's critical to have a sufficiently large user population involved in your pilot roll-out. Typically, at least 100s of users are required to experience the kind of social graphing that brings to life the benefits of social collaboration amongst groups.

5. Define your broader roll-out and change management approach

Once you’re armed with the learnings from your pilot, you’re ready to build your plan for an enterprise-wide rollout of Chatter. The principles are the same as any enterprise rollout so you’ll need to think about training, change management and phasing. In addition to these basics you’ll need to identify engaged executive sponsors, business unit level evangelists and active community managers. These visible evangelists are the lifeblood of the internal community’s continued relevance and are essential to its short and long-term success.

Once you’ve actually rolled out the solution, make sure that you track metrics such as # of users, # of groups, etc., so that you can see how people use Chatter and interact. Salesforce provides a Chatter Usage Dashboard to get you started.

All of this may sound hard but remember one great advantage with social technologies is that people actually enjoy using these applications. It’s a lot different than trying to get people to use SAP or Oracle. Good luck and you know where to find us if you have questions!

Workday Rising 2011: Workday Rings On-premise ERP’s Bell

By Balakrishna Narasimhan

With Workday’s latest round of funding and their $2B+ valuation, not to mention their 200+ large enterprise customers, there’s no question that they are one of the pillars of enterprise cloud computing, along with Salesforce, Google and Amazon Web Services. So, we wanted to take a bit of time to reflect on what Workday’s announcements at Rising mean for CIOs.

Workday’s announcements fell into four broad themes:

1. Workday is the center of a new ISV ecosystem: Workday announced new partnerships with Salesforce (for extensions using Force.com and social collaboration using Chatter), with Zuora (for integrated subscription billing), with Cornerstone (for integrated learning), and Tidemark (for enterprise performance management). Workday’s partnerships make it clear that while their focus is on core HR and financial management, they want to build out a full featured offering that goes far beyond traditional systems. With today’s cloud platforms, user-centric integrations that bring together relevant information from across SaaS applications can create a far more cohesive user experience than traditional “integrated” apps or suites. In essence, Workday and their ecosystem of cloud ISVs will be able to create a next-gen ERP suite that’s both richer and more usable than traditional application suites.

Blogging from Workday Rising: A cloud strategy to go with that blank sheet of paper

By Shannon Daly

We talk a lot about Workday as a partner, and the impact that Workday is having as a cloud service provider. But this week, at the annual Workday Rising conference, we’re attending as both a partner and a Workday customer.

Being a customer, you tend to ask different questions and pay attention to the keynote and news in a different way. Yes, we were excited about the new funding that Workday received as they go down the path of becoming a public company. Yes, we were thrilled to see lots of new advances in Workday 15 for both HCM and financials (we use both). To elaborate, things like the new integration with Salesforce Chatter, enhanced talent management, more powerful financial reporting and improvements in performance and scalability are exceptionally exciting.

While all these technology advances are great, the question they prompt for us is how can we apply these things in a way that betters our own HR and financial processes versus just doing the same old things more efficiently. After listening to this morning’s keynote, it was clear that the question for all attendees should not be “Can Workday technology execute existing HR processes?”, it is “How should we change our policies before implementing the technology?”

If you’re treating a new system with the same processes as your old one, what can you realistically expect the business benefit to be?

Workday tends to be ahead of existing HR processes in many ways - including some of our own. And that isn’t always a bad thing. We’re finding a number of people here talking about how it’s given them a chance to re-think and re-implement HR processes because their existing processes were too complex and convoluted to be effective.

As Aneel Bhusri put it during this morning’s keynote, “change starts with a blank sheet of paper.” He was talking primarily about the systems of the past, but that sentiment applies to so much more. If that blank sheet of paper is filled up with outdated, ineffective policies and processes, the technology implementation won’t do more than automate a bad process. For real change in the HR world, we need to evolve from our  legacy experiences and start with a blank sheet of paper. Workday didn’t set out to recreate the same old PeopleSoft system in the cloud, they took what they had learned over a few decades and started fresh. We should do the same with our processes.

Some select shots from the Workday Rising day one keynote:

David Duffield @ Workday Rising keynote

 

Beware the Fake Cloud!

 

Workday's evolving partner ecosystem

#FearTheCloud

Narinder Singh

Fear drives change like few forces in the world. Yet it is also often the source of paralysis that prevents action. How a person, country or company responds to fear can define whether they are remembered as heroes or just forgotten.

Most early conversations about the cloud revolved around perceived inhibitors - was it secure, safe, reliable? Then began the era of cloudwashing - every vendor putting the word cloud in front of their offering to capitalize on the cloud conversation’s momentum vs. the reality of their own offering. Now that reality is beginning to set in and people are seeing that cloud computing is ushering in a fundamentally new era of business and technology, the fear is around who will prosper, be left behind or cease to exist.

Here’s a look at three constituents who should be biting their fingernails, and some thoughts on if or how they might overcome those fears.

• Core Application Providers 
• CIO and the IT Department 
• The Ecosystem that Surrounds it All 

1. Core Application Providers 

Today, Workday announced a new round of funding for $85 million on a rumored valuation of nearly $2 Billion. At the same time, Oracle just announced they were acquiring cloud service provider RightNow for ~ $1.5 Billion.

As salesforce.com rose to dominate its category, skeptics said cloud apps were only for small to medium businesses. When large enterprises started to adopt SaaS, the skeptics fell back to “well, it’s ok for enterprise because it’s an edge app.” With Workday’s success in the realm of HR and Financials, that last floodgate is breaking and creating expectations that cloud will be the dominant paradigm for future business applications at companies of all sizes.

Now for the fear, Workday has at least a five year head start over legacy vendors on how to successfully create a cloud application for HR and Financials that can successfully support enterprises with thousands to even hundreds of thousands of employees. Whether they admit it publicly or not, SAP, Oracle and other traditional software providers are scrambling to figure out how to make up that difference.

Recently at the Gartner IT Symposium, I met a CIO to whom Oracle quoted an upgrade to their latest release which would take 2+ years and cost $20-35 million - after which it would be about time to consider an upgrade to Fusion. In the past his only choice would be to say yes, or defer for a couple more years. Now, he immediately went to Workday to analyze how their solution would compare. This story is repeating itself in every market Workday competes and will only multiply as they expand to additional verticals and geographies.

A normal reaction for legacy vendors might be to buy your way into the space. It’s what Oracle is attempting to do in CRM with RightNow (a move prophetically predicted by Workday Co-CEO Aneel Busri a few weeks ago). In core HR and Financials this will be much harder for anyone to pull off because there are far fewer enterprise-focused players. In addition, Workday itself has clearly communicated that it is not interested in overtures from legacy players. Its founders (Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri) came from Peoplesoft and created Workday after and partly because of Oracle’s hostile takeover of that company.

2. The CIO and the IT Department 

Very often discussions around technology disruption focus on the impact to other industries and how the world must change rapidly to incorporate new advances. A piece today in ZDNet entitled “Cloud Computing’s Real Creative Destruction may be the IT Workforce” describes the potential for cloud computing to significantly reduce the number of people needed in the IT workforce itself - something that scares the pants off many.

History shows that the status quo never persists, and those who do not make the leap should fear being disrupted. Recently, we have even seen a few high profile CIO departures because the pace at which they were driving change was insufficient. CEOs could see results from other companies showing what is possible in a cloud-centric world. The amount of operational support needed per unit of IT capacity will only move down, and multiplying this effect is not enough for IT in the future. Innovation must also flourish.

Many in enterprise IT organizations see cloud as a lifeline to the next decade of their careers. After all, IT as a function is better situated to change and can adapt better than any other part of the economy. Nearly everyone who began a career in technology inherently understands that change is part of the equation.

Effective CIOs and IT leaders will help their teams see the inevitability of change and provide them with the right kind of skills to be successful in their current organizations, or help them transition to other companies that specialize in delivering their expertise as a service (e.g. data center operators move to cloud providers). In a cloud world there are also communities like CloudSpokes which let developers participate in challenges to build their own skills, giving them a way to take control over the direction of their own careers. Communities like these also provide businesses with new ways to access cutting edge development (where they pay for output vs. input).

The flexibility and direct relevance of the cloud to the end customer, the social and mobile trends, and the ever increasing pace of business practices have the potential to make IT both strategic to and well understood by the business. But first IT must embrace, rather than inhibit, change.

3. The Ecosystem That Surrounds It All

In the last generation of enterprise applications, the Global Systems Integrators (GSI) were a critical enabler of the success of companies like SAP, Oracle and Peoplesoft (regardless of the pain they sometimes caused). In the cloud world, companies like Salesforce and Workday established independent credibility first and the systems integrators later attempted to hitch a ride.

Similarly VARs and pure resellers have a substantive role in distribution when software and hardware is bundled almost as a physical good. In the world of cloud delivery they must reinvent themselves.

Last week Dennis Howlett talked about the level of disruption possible in the coming years. In it he quotes a provocative piece from Larry Dignan (which in turn quotes the Gartner keynote):

"The strategies of IBM, HP, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Cisco—old standbys for enterprise tech buyers—should be viewed as “long-term risky,” said Sondergaard. Going forward, these vendors should be judged on how they embrace mobile, social and cloud. Apple and Google will be disruptive enterprise vendors. You’ll buy from all of them." 

If these pillars of the technology industry are considered “long term risky” isn’t it fair to expect that those whose entire business models are built around them are also at risk ? Deloitte and Accenture have well over 100,000 Oracle and SAP developers and tens of thousands of customers relationships based upon them.

To make it through this transition, ecosystem partners have to return to the focus of their business - their customers. Indeed, they will have to put the customer’s needs and priorities ahead of their own business structure in order to understand and adapt to the level of change required. Expecting the ecosystems that supported the last generation of technology to continue to operate under the old rules is naive and dangerous for enterprises.

Structural limitations and difficulties of legacy vendors wanting to change were laid out in our own Services 2.0 piece nearly five years ago, tied to the core Innovator’s Dilemma in a piece by Phil Wainewright 2.5 years ago which still holds true today. As one industry veteran described to me “even if it’s the rational action, cutting off your arm in hopes that you will survive seems foolish while you’re living the good life and too late once you’re taking your last breath.” After all, old habits die hard - for years after the invention of the car, horse and buggy accessory makers tried to sell you a whip for your car.

Clouds...They're Everywhere! Introducing “The Washies” Award.

By Narinder Singh

At the annual Gartner Symposium event, which draws hundreds of vendors across a variety of technology segments, it was hard to ignore the attention on cloud computing. Equally hard to ignore was the rampant cloudwashing happening here among traditional vendors and even some new providers.

Pick your cloud - public, private, personal, hybrid, pure cloud, part cloud. They're all here. From the show floor to the sessions, cloud has been used as everything from a noun (the cloud), an adjective (cloud hosting), an adverb (cloudily) - and as a way to inspire, impress, sell or scare. It'd be impressive if it weren't so confusing. It's no wonder IT professionals have so many questions, and why there are so many vehement arguments about the value of multitenancy.

That's why we're introducing "The Washies" -- an annual award given to the vendor who is the worst offender of painting over traditional IT technology with the word cloud, even though it offers little-to-none of the benefits that cloud computing brings.

The idea was inspired (by someone who will refuse to take credit) almost a year ago after we published our initial blog on cloudwashing. We held out on the award idea hoping that the act of cloudwashing would peter out after a while, but after what we saw this week and hearing the recent announcements from the likes of Oracle, it's clear that now is the time.

There are many vendors out there who have genuine cloud solutions that should be proud to use the word cloud to describe their offerings. These are the providers whose solutions help enterprises scale up and down easily, leverage shared resources to reduce complexity and innovate faster, and eliminate the need to manage commoditized infrastructure so teams can focus on new opportunities and trends. And some vendors shouldn't.

Just as the Razzies call out Hollywood's duds, this award isn't meant to be mean spirited. It's a way to poke a little fun, and call some attention to this questionable marketing tactic that creates confusion and missed expectations.

We'll be posting a voting form on our website in the next few weeks to get your vote, but first, we'd love to hear from you on the contenders. Who would you nominate? What prize should they receive in recognition of their efforts?

The Cloud Broker’s Role in Creative Destruction

By Michelle Swan

Gartner Symposium - one of the largest gatherings of CIO and IT leaders in the world – kicked off this week in Orlando, Florida. For a Silicon Valley-based company like Appirio that works with a lot of early adopters, it’s always interesting to step back and hear the concerns and hopes of the rest of the IT world.

Gartner Symposium draws IT leaders from around the world, across sectors, many of whom have budgets in the millions or even billions. So, when we hear Gartner analysts, a traditionally conservative bunch, tell people to “blow things up”, “embrace customer intimacy over business architecture” and “make cloud your first approach to computing,” it makes us want to stand up and applaud (some people actually did). It also makes us stop and think – what’s changed?

This is a group that two years ago advised us not to get "too far ahead of our skis" when talking about helping companies cloudsource 100% of their business.  Now they are advising companies of all sizes to take a cloud-first approach. Granted, there were many caveats to this in following sessions and we (along with I’m sure Gartner) think that few companies are ready to move their entire business to the public cloud today.  However, the message came through loud and clear. To build a post-modern organization that is agile and in touch with customers, cloud is a critical factor. It’s an enabler for the big trends we’re seeing around mobile, social and big data management.

The cloud – and the providers and intermediaries that help customers effectively use the cloud (which Gartner calls cloud brokerages)  – is a major component in Gartner’s battle cry for “creative destruction.”  Creative destruction is the process of destroying old ways of doing things to open up room for new thinking, kind of like controlled burns helping to clear the path for new growth, and it’s something to seriously contemplate.

Why “Desperate Acts of Creative Destruction” Are So Needed

There are many reasons why now is the time for creative destruction in IT. Why IT needs to be, as Gartner analyst Tina Nunno puts it, “less of a service provider and a greater leader.”

The biggest reason is that the expectations of IT’s customers inside and outside of the business have changed. The consumerization of IT and explosion of mobile and social technologies means you need to change the way you reach these customers. You must be where they are (which is everywhere), influence and listen vs. tell, and anticipate what they want. Otherwise, some companies may no longer be in business. Analyst Daryl Plummer (@DarylPlummer) puts it well when he says “Every one percent in customer satisfaction could add one year of life to your business - focusing on customer outcomes is your company’s fountain of youth.”

Technology – especially in tough economic conditions - can have a huge impact on business success.  According to Gartner, two-thirds of CEOs believe IT will make a greater contribution to their business in the next 10 years than in any prior decade. Yet IT organizations are at risk of being marginalized. By 2014, CIOs will have lost control of 25% of their IT spending, and it’s possible by 2017 that CMOs may have a bigger IT budget than the IT organization. Some argue that the shift in budget isn’t a bad thing (after all, HR doesn’t own all the headcount for a company) but if IT isn’t part of the conversation and helping contribute to the businesses bottom line, it’s going to lose a seat at the table.

The Cloud Broker’s Role

One of the biggest things IT can do is to evaluate how technologies like the cloud can help businesses align better with today’s reality. Take a calculated risk and blow some things up.

This sounds easy, but can be daunting (and even career threatening) without a little help and guidance.  This is where cloud brokerages or brokers come in. We use brokers all the time in our daily lives to make our lives easier, get something cheaper or cover our risks – whether that’s buying insurance, trading stocks, making travel arrangements, etc. In a world that’s as fast paced and complex as cloud computing, it makes sense for a similar role to emerge in this industry.  Someone who can help IT leaders who are intent on creative destruction to quantify and hedge some of the risk, to come up with a solution that may use a collection of cloud services, mobile and social technologies, or to customize that solution and connect it to existing processes.

So who is the best partner to help?  Is it the same traditional IT vendors or service providers that make their millions maintaining the status quo? Are they really going to be motivated to help you destroy the old way of doing something to make room for the new? Maybe. But it’s not going to be easy for them – or you.

Realizing the Social Enterprise Vision: Learning from Yahoo and Nikon

Balakrishna Narasimhan

In the wake of Dreamforce and all the talk about the Social Enterprise, we wanted to put the spotlight on those who are making the social enterprise vision a reality in their organizations.

Since we introduced our Salesforce/Facebook connector a few years ago, Appirio has been working with customers to make different elements of the social enterprise come to life within their organizations. Two such customers, Nikon Instruments and Yahoo!, Inc., shared their stories at Dreamforce 2011 talking about Chatter at Full Potential: Tools, Tips & Tricks.

Nikon’s John Bivona described his company’s initial challenges with Chatter after they simply turned it on without thoroughly thinking about how it would be used, who would be using it, or building a business case for the social enterprise. After partnering with Appirio to reintroduce Chatter to their employees, Nikon saw a huge uptick in communications. This included collaboration between distributed product management teams, cross-selling and collaboration among sales teams, and how employees interacted across the globe. They also customized Chatter to notify users via email as soon as they have been added to a Case Team for any given customer support case. This allowed cross-functional groups and geographies to collaborate in real-time to resolve customer cases more quickly and efficiently.

Hear more about what John has to say about Nikon’s social enterprise.


Yahoo! took a more methodical approach from the start. Tasked with replacing just one internal portal, Kristen Sanders quickly realized that Yahoo! was becoming buried under what she called “digital landfills”. Instead of replacing one outdated, difficult-to-maintain portal with yet another one, she spearheaded an effort to replace 12 internal portals with a single enterprise wide sales collaboration hub built on Salesforce Chatter and Content, called The Source. Partnering with Appirio early on, she gathered requirements from teams across the US, Europe and Asia Pacific and combined that intelligence with investments in change management to ensure The Source was a success right from the start. So successful in fact that everyone in the company is now asking for access to The Source.

Hear more about what Kristen has to say about Yahoo!’s The Source.


So what can we learn from these social enterprise pioneers? Three things:

1) Do not dismiss the social enterprise as clever marketing. Social business processes can change the game and those who fail to change can fall behind competitors who do.

2) Becoming a social enterprise takes more than enabling Chatter in your organization or buying a licence to Radian 6. The social enterprise requires you to rethink the way you engage with customers, the way you collaborate internally and even the way you build your offerings. It’s an enterprise-wide effort that starts with a plan and creates real business impact.

3) Experimenting is good, experimenting with a plan is better. Get started quickly, but make sure you take the time to understand your processes, policies, governance, culture and the way information flows through your organization. Getting concrete about how each will change as you adopt social technologies makes all the difference.

Follow these tips and you too could be on stage talking about your social enterprise!