Chapter 5:
The New Work - Content Nation Transforms the Future of Today's Enterprises

In many ways publishing as we have known it for centuries made the world's leading enterprises what they are today. If, as some say, knowledge is power, then managing the publishing of content has been the key to power for many enterprises. Major organizations have had the resources to equip their staffs with information from their own organization and from outside of their organization in ways that others cannot afford to do easily. From papyrus scrolls to the printed edicts of kings and queens to typed memoranda to photocopying to emails to electronic databases and Web sites, publishing has driven the ability of large organizations to assemble information that helps them to make effective decisions and that enables them to acquire and retain power, leadership and influence.

But something is happening in enterprises and in public institutions where many people work today. Publishing content remains an important part of a work force's life, but a fundamental shift is underway in how publishing provides advantages to their organizations. Proprietary information such as trade secrets, high-level executive memos and confidential reports remain closely held in today's organizations, but increasingly success is coming to those organizations that know how to use the rapid dissemination and sharing of information in their organizations to succeed. Oftentimes the lines between their own organizations and people from other organizations and the public are becoming blurred as organizations rush to succeed in global marketplaces that favor having people on all levels of an organization aware of the most recent insights inside and outside of their organizations and ready to put them to use.

In other words the global economy and the increasing importance of powerful local economies needs the strengths of social media more than ever. The rise of social media in business and public institutions is in some ways a natural outgrowth of how things have gotten done in human society from its beginnings. "It's not what you know but who you know" is a familiar saying used to remind people at work that having the right personal connections can make or break your ability to experience professional success. But the phrase is taking on new meaning in the era of social media.

In the more paper-driven days of office work people would receive important memos via inter-office mail, oftentimes passing a single document from one person to another. Who got that document when and how was oftentimes related to social connections within an organization. Business cards from contacts were coveted and held closely in private collections. Even when electronic information began to penetrate many large organizations the electronic databases of one part of an organization were not always willingly shared with another part of the same organization. Emails, which were supposed to improve the immediacy and openness of communications, did so in some instances but oftentimes emails simply underscored existing "who you know" struggles inside and outside of an organization.

Large organizations were created to take advantage of the combined knowledge and insights available in their staffs through well-managed hierarchies but found themselves in ongoing internal struggles for power, based oftentimes on the availability of information from one group or another. Publishing technologies, the means by which hierarchies managed their power through controlling the distribution of information, became tools of inner warfare as much as to support efforts to conquer markets and other external goals.

Enterprise Publishing: From a Tool of War to a Tool of Collaboration

In his classic 1943 book "The Concept of the Corporation " author Peter Drucker credited the hierarchical command-and-control structures of the powerful 19th-century Prussian Army as having served as the model for managing modern industrial organizations. The management tools to turn a group of people into a successful war machine became the management tools for commercial success - and with those tools came the use of the hierarchical command-and-control structures of war for both internal and external business goals. Publishing tools were a key component of that effort.

In the Internet-driven era of the 21st century, though, Peter Drucker's analogy to military organizations as a model for corporate organization faces an interesting evolution in how large military forces organize for success. Modern military organizations are more efficient than ever, to be sure, able to deliver highly sophisticated weapons to targets almost at will throughout the globe: the mass-production of sophisticated weapons and the command-and-control systems to support them have been perfected.

Yet in spite of these sophisticated military systems much of today's emphasis in modern military organizations is on "asymmetrical warfare," fighting opponents with ample supplies of light, inexpensive and plentiful weapons who can blend into landscapes and populations at will. To better enable military efforts against such opponents modern military organizations are deploying new hand-held and helmet-mounted information systems that enable front-line personnel to communicate with one another and with their commanders far more effectively and to respond to battlefield conditions with more autonomy. Military logistics systems are focused on rapid deployment of resources to multiple battlefields for asymmetrical warfare, requiring more distributed control of rapid decision-making. Eliminating "the fog of war," the confusion that exists when communications break down between personnel during battles, places a premium on people sharing knowledge and collaborating on solutions as rapidly as possible. There must also be in modern warfare a stronger emphasis on learning how to build trust and effective communications with indigenous people: traditional warfare may last only a short time while occupations of enemy territories can last indefinitely.

As it is in warfare, so it is in business and in other institutions in which people must work together towards a goal: collaboration via social media is enabling more rapid responses to asymmetrical threats and opportunities. To survive and to thrive the people who are in these organizations are learning how to use social media tools to share the right information with the right people at the right time and to build the right relationships with the right people at the right time. In doing so the outlines of successful enterprises are changing rapidly - and new kinds of work patterns are supporting the rise of new types of organizations that can respond successfully to quickly unfolding situations in the workplace. The concept of warfare still drives much thinking in today's workplace, but when today's opponents may be tomorrow's collaboration partners for innovative approaches to their goals, victory is relative to many different players - many of whom will benefit through social media communications.

Old Goals, New Tools: Tapping Social Media for Productivity and Innovation

The appeal of social media may not be apparent immediately to anyone who has had to deal with the ins and outs of enterprises both large and small. With so many tools already in use for creating and consuming content in the enterprise - email, Web sites, printed memos, databases, copying machines, internal libraries - why would yet another source of information help people to become more productive? A recent study by the professional services firm Accenture noted that 59 percent of 1,000 surveyed middle managers in large companies miss information that might be valuable to their jobs almost every day because it exists somewhere else in the company and they cannot find it.  In addition, 53 percent said that less than half of the information they receive is valuable. The tools of enterprises that were supposed to improve productivity - email, central computer databases and PCs - instead turned out in large part to be tools of mass information production churning out reams of information for people ill-equipped to absorb it all. Instead of content, people got noise and unabsorbable information.

The largest culprit in this mix has been email. As one of the earliest technologies used for personal electronic publishing, email remains the most popular resource for transferring valuable information from one person to another in today's enterprises. But being the one messaging system that unites internal and external resources, it gets overused and abused all too easily. A 2006 study by Harris Interactive of 2,400 U.S. adults found that 59 percent of those who use e-mail at work admitted to wasting a lot of time searching for lost e-mail. To add to the lack of focus produced by email, 61 percent of e-mail users at work in the Harris Interactive survey admitted also to using work e-mail for personal reasons. With the ability to publish to many people via "Carbon Copy" ("CC") lists and to "Reply to All" on long lists of people copied on an email, it's clear that email is a tool that helped to automate unproductive publishing patterns of the past while missing new opportunities for more effective ways to organize communications for more productivity.

Murry Christensen, Director of Learning Technologies at JetBlue University, is assembling a wiki-based learning program to be delivered across JetBlue's complex organization. He notes that the desire to adopt these technologies stems from communication breakdowns caused by e-mail, such as when people failed to forward critical information to the right staff members. "E-mail is unstructured and ephemeral," Christensen says. "With blogs and wikis, you can capture process improvements more visibly."

Information from social media sources outside of an organization are also becoming a key component of the flow of information into enterprise decision-making, complementing and enhancing traditional sources of business information. Newstex, for example, is a company that licenses content from selected influential weblogs and other social media sources isuch as the Twitter social messaging service and distributes it to other information services. Major business information providers such as LexisNexis and EBSCO license content from Newstex and make it available to their clients as an integral part of their information services. Ensuring that information is available from all of today's influential thought leaders is a key component of executive decision-making today - and social media is an increasingly important part of that mix.

Enterprises Invest More Efficiently in Productive Communications Through Social Media

The need for improved publishing tools is very clear in today's enterprises - and they are beginning to respond with major investments in social media. A recent survey by Forrester Research showed that a majority of global companies with 20,000 or more employees were already purchasing new social media technologies for deployment inside their enterprises. Notably only 20 percent of small businesses were purchasing social media services inside of their company. Why the small percentage of social media technology purchasers in small businesses? Because many of them have avoided the need for investing in social media technologies internally by investing in Web-based publishing services already on the Internet that can be used for business purposes.

Alacra, a growing company delivering content services to major enterprises, is an interesting example of a company that was able to use existing social media services on the Web very effectively. Barry Graubart, Vice President, Product Strategy & Business Development for Alacra, explained to me recently how Alacra made the transition quickly to social media tools: "As a small company, we had no intranet. There was no way to easily share information among employees other than email.  One day, as I was doing research on a new market, I wanted somewhere to store the research so that I could share it with colleagues in product management, sales and marketing. Rather than going the traditional IT-driven intranet approach, I signed up for a Jotspot [wiki] account (before Google acquired them) and started to upload a bunch of documents.  The best part was that we had no internal meetings or debates about whether to launch an intranet or what needed to be on it.  It was basically a three-minute discussion between [my CEO] and myself; five minutes later, I'd entered my credit card info and started to add info. About a week later, when I had reached critical mass, I sent around an email telling everyone in the company that we now had an intranet."

While many larger enterprises still invest in installing their own social media software to tailor it to their own internal needs Barry Graubart's experiences point out an important factor for social media: with many social media services being offered as online services or as software with a free license for its use by most organizations, many growing organizations may never develop the elaborate information technology infrastructures that larger organizations have maintained for decades. Instead, they may evolve as organizations that have always used Web-based social media tools to improve their productivity, allowing them to invest far less in the "mass production" of information for the sake of information and far more in efficient information sharing and publishing through social media services.

Thinking of Peter Drucker's comparison of businesses to military organizations, you might say that companies like Alacra are to today's large enterprises what today's grass-roots warriors are to today's large military forces: equipped with light, inexpensive, rapidly deployed technologies that enable them to scale up rapidly to meet their objectives before larger opponents can react to them effectively. The ability of new generations of potential competitors to scale their internal operations rapidly via social media may be one of the more compelling motivations for larger organizations to consider investment in their own social media tools.

Content Nation Enterprise Rule #1: Social Media isn't about technology. It's about adapting to more effective patterns of communication being adopted by competitors.

Why Social Media for Work? Key Benefits of Social Media Publishing for Enterprises

Social media succeeds for any number of reasons in helping enterprises to communicate effectively. Here are a few of the key reasons why today's social media publishing tools offer vast improvements in communication productivity to an organization over time:

• Effective social media tools enable people to choose who they want to be in their circle of communication. One of the enormous weaknesses of earlier personal publishing technologies such as email is that they make it very difficult for an individual to define the people from whom they'd like to receive communications. Spam, CCs on emails, unsolicited communications from salespeople - it's very hard for an individual to control who provides them with content. With social media, the idea of an individual controlling their communications rather than an institution, is paramount. There are millions of people who could possibly contact me via the Twitter messaging service or LinkedIn or Facebook or any other number of social media services - but unless I choose to allow them to contact me then I will not hear from them. Enterprise-class private messaging services such as Reuters Messaging apply the same concepts with more robust security and administrative controls to satisfy investment bank clients. Senior executives have assistants oftentimes who can screen telephone calls and bring communications from important people to their attention: now anybody can have similar screening of communications via social media to keep them focused on the right messages from the right people.
• Effective social media tools enable people to publish to whole groups or organizations rapidly while reducing overload and disruptions. While some social media tools enable people to filter out communications from others, tools such as weblogs and wikis can enable people to publish content to anyone who can reach their publications on the Web or their enterprise's own networks. In some instances social media tools can be configured to enable restricted access to published content, but even then it's typical that there is universal access to that content amongst a known group of people. This can have a profound impact on people who adapt to this more public style of communications. Instead of pushing mass communications into personal communications channels social media allows mass communications to be picked up easily by anyone who has access to them and to efficiently leverage personal communications into broad communications when appropriate. Once people get used to the idea of certain publications being widely available, either inside an enterprise or on the Web, then they learn that anything that they publish could be read by many people - a concept not always clear in email communications that get sent at first to one group and then to a much wider group by others. This is creating a new generation of publishers in enterprises sharing information more widely and more effectively inside and outside their organizations - and spreading productivity and innovation in the process.
  
• Effective social media tools make it easier to collect and organize communications from internal and external sources.
  Social media tools provide the ability to filter content published by people on an opt-in basis using standardized technologies to collect content from a wide variety of sources. Social media tools enable the collection of information from specific sources by just about anyone without a lot of technical knowledge. Instead of visiting individual weblogs, for example, someone can "subscribe" to a feed of content posted to that weblog and have it delivered automatically to a Web page, a mobile device or their email. Status reports, project updates, management messages - all these and more can be posted wherever an individual needs them most and organized in any number of display configurations.
  In many instances leading news services, corporate investor relations specialists and even expensive electronic subscription services use the formatting and programming standards developed to deliver social media feeds to make links to their content available to their subscribers. With this ability to collect information from individuals, institutions and the media in one common format, tailored collections of information can be assembled and adjusted in a moment. This can greatly enhance the productivity of people who cannot afford to trudge through dozens of emails or search results from sources that will not help them focus on their goals.
• Effective social media tools make it easier to collaborate internally and externally to build and update valuable knowledge more effectively.
  One of the continual problems in any large organization is building up a composite picture of valuable facts and insights that leverages as much internal and external knowledge as possible. Many different human and technology checkpoints or gatekeepers may exist in an organization to keep people from assembling that knowledge effectively. Social media tools make it as easy to build a common source of information collaboratively as easily as most people edit an email or a memo on their PC. This encourages both contributions and use that leads to more contributions and use. Once a social media resource is adopted as a definite source of information in an enterprise it is rarely ignored and oftentimes the most fresh and up-to-date view into processes and objectives.

While these benefits of effective social media tools may be clear enough, support for social media in many large enterprises is only beginning to emerge. Change in information technologies in many large organizations can move very slowy, with information "gatekeepers" in many different roles. Corporate compliance regulations are also a concern that may slow down some social media projects, as requirements to have all information generated by an organization availble for examination in archived company records. But the largest change may be the culture of large organizations: with generations of workers used to using more tighly held information as a means to personal success it takes good examples of how to implement social media to begin to change institutional culture. Bit with a large portion of the work force now used to social media tools from their personal lives many powerful and influential institutions are beginning to deploy social media publishing tools successfully.

The Central Intelligence Agency: Building a Mission-Critical Knowledge Resource via Social Media

Few organizations on earth are offered the wealth of information tools for mission-critical job functions found at the the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. With its own venture capital arm and countless technology projects underway, the CIA can deploy virtually any technology on the planet to attain its goals as it strives for absolute control and security over its knowledge assets. Yet in the wake of attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. in 2001 a brave group of technologists at the CIA began work on Intellipedia, a wiki collecting information from U.S. intelligence agents around the world.

Intellipedia's is based on the same type of freely available software that operates Wikipedia on the open Web, so its basic functions have been built at minimal expense. Intellipedia is a wiki that makes three different versions of its information available with U.S. intelligence agencies: one for those with top secret access, one with secret access, and one for information that is sensitive but not classified. Intellipedia collects text, videos and images that fill reports and profiles, with people collectively updating pages. As updates occur the software used for Intellipedia enables people to see easily who edited what and when, providing a simple and effective audit trail for changes. Intellipedia is still growing after two years of deployment, helping the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies to combine their knowledge on key topics rapidly and eliminate barriers to the flow of information.

The availability of Intellipedia is encouraging contributions not only from younger personnel but also from older agents whose knowledge can be retained and shared most easily - one of the most prolific contributors is 69 years old. While more sophisticated databases may help to structure information for more detailed analysis, Intellipedia is succeeding both at encouraging people to be publishers to everyone in a community at a specified level of access and in doing so overcoming barriers to widespread understanding of crucial issues. The CIA has also deployed secure instant messaging systems to enhance communications - one of the few ways to be able to cut through the information clutter in the organization and ot reach key people rapidly.

Content Nation Enterprise Rule #2: When knowledge needs to be shared widely and openly to enhance common understanding and open discussions, social media can break down barriers rapidly.

Using Social Media to Drive Productivity and to Change Fundamental Business Processes

"This market has moved...two to three we'll have telepresences in all of our offices around the world, not just videoconferencing but true virtual presences," noted Cisco CEO John Chambers in an address at a recent conference. As a global supplier of computer network technologies for enterprises Cisco needed to do more than control costs - they needed to improve productivity and increase innovation to respond to rapidly changing markets. Instead of just experimenting with social media, Chambers became a key driver for ensuring that both for its internal capabilities and its products and services Cisco would be focused on social media tools. “Web services, online social networks, unified communications, telepresence, podcasts, mashups, blogs, and peer to peer all combined – we're already doing this across company with tremendous speed," Chambers noted. "Consumers are driving business. There are a lot of ideas with social networks, and we are changing the business from a formal hierarchy to informal social network council implementations.”

Chambers has deployed a wide variety of social media technologies technologies to enable Cisco employees to communicate more effectively on their internal communications networks. A "Ciscopedia" wiki enables Cisco staff to keep a common reference of terms and methods used throughout their global organization. Cisco's "I-Zone" wiki is a platformed to collect and build new ideas for products within the organization. I-Zone has generated 400 business ideas with 10,000 people actively contributing to the ideas, ideas with billions of dollars worth of potential new revenues. Text and video blogs help thought leaders and managers in the company keep people up to date on late-breaking developments and ideas while social bookmarking tools are being explored to enable Cisco employees to highlight new sources of information and to generate "buzz" around ideas, events and trends that are important to them. All of this is wrapped around Cicso's use of its own Telepresence videoconferencing platform.

Software that gathers information from these initiatives across the company and that generates  performance metrics is a key for them understanding both the information being generated by Cisco and its business value. Cisco's expectation is that they will be able to measure a 10 percent improvement in productivity each year and to build new business units far more rapidly thanks in large part fo social media technologies that enable people to be liberated by technology to break down barriers to innovation and collaboration.

Content Nation Enterprise Rule #3: When the future of your company depends on using the collaborative brain-power of your staff social media can unlock new revenues and cost savings rapidly.

Wells Fargo: Spreading Thought Leadership in a Major Bank via Blogs

Banking and finance is a highly competitive industry which requires constant innovation as well as stringent controls. Like many industries it's one in which people have a hard time communicating new ideas and insights across an organization. Wells Fargo is a major financial institution that has embraced social media to build communications across the organization as well as to engage its clients. The first bank known to have established a client-facing corporate blog, weblogs thrive inside Wells Fargo now. At Wells Fargo hundreds of employees maintain blogs covering a wide variety of topics that propagated information and ideas across the organization as well as to clients in some instances. In a recent interview Steve Ellis, EVP of Wells Fargo's wholesale solutions group, noted that "A blog is informal - a great way to get away from the corporate thing and let people inside our heads." Wells Fargo's employee blogs are one of the most popular information sources in Wells Fargo, but this does not mean that every employee is going to be a great or consistent blogger for their colleagues.

Although there are hundreds blogging at Wells Fargo, there are thousands of employees who had the opportunity to blog who have not. What a blog can do, though, is to enable an organization focused very intently on tightly controlled informaiton resources to break out above the systems designed to ensure limited access to specific information and to begin to create a culture more focused on innovation and collaboration. Most importantly, these blogs do not clutter up email inboxes - they can be visited as one would visit any Web site to pick up the latest news and insights from people who see things from a fresh perspective.

Content Nation Enteprise Rule #4: Give your staff the ability to provide thought leadership through social media and they will respond with it in ways that can drive your organization forward.

BlueShirtNation: Best Buy Builds Employee Loyalty Through Social Media

With thousands of consumer electronics stores in North America and global retail alliances in China and elsewhere BestBuy is a retail giant that lives and dies by what happens on their sales floors. Keeping their blue-shirted sales associates across this scattered network of stores motivated and in touch with the central management team was a major problem - a problem that social media was well positioned to help solve. Best Buy established an employee-only Web site on the Internet called BlueShirtNation.com, equipped with a variety of social media tools.

The use of the public Web to give their staff access to the site was a crucial decision: since most sales associates are engaged actively in sales and customer support activities when in the store a private Web site on the public Web enabled staff to access the site at home - and to give and receive insight and information that would otherwise be difficult to convey during store hours.On BlueShirtNation.com employees can connect with employees in other Best Buy stores, offer ideas and suggestions on better sales and client care practices and get funding to try out some of their ideas.

With over 20,000 employees using BlueShirtNation.com it has become a part of the company's culture and has helped to deliver measurable improvements for Best Buy: while employee turnover in most of their stores averages is typically 60 percent the employees using the BlueShirtNation.com Web site have a turnover rate in the neighborhood of 8 to 12 percent so far, according to the manager in charge of the social media project. In a business like retail electronics, which requires a knowledgeable sales staff to support buyers making decisions on complex technologies, such improvements in employee retention can help to power strong sales productivity.

Content Nation Enterprise Rule #5: Giving fragmented groups of staff a sense of unity, intimacy and influence through social media can influence your bottom line.

Social Media Powers Data, Decisions and Deals

The improved insights and collaboration enabled by social media publishing tools are good for many general business goals but eventually people have to execute upon their enterprise mission with the best information possible. In many ways social media is thought of as a tool for text and pictures and not for data. But as seen earlier in the example of Jigsaw's collection of business card information from professionals that can be used to feed enterprise sales automation systems, there is a wealth of opportunity to harvest useful data via social media and to use social media as a source of information for sophisticated analysis of individuals, companies and markets. In enterprises the importance of Content Nation is not just in what people publish in social media but how it powers data, decisions and deals.

Manta: Getting the Right Data on Businesses from People who Care about Businesses

While Jigsaw targets largely managers in major enterprises and early-stage technology companies, ECNext 's Manta business information portal focuses on the millions of small to medium-sized businesses across the U.S. In many instances traditional business information services collect information on this huge swath on companies through phone banks of people who call businesses to ask them to update information on their company in their databases. With rare updates solicited from major information services and many smaller businesses lacking Web sites or having only minimal information on them, it's not easy to harvest up-to-date information on many businesses from searching Web sources.

Manta's approach is to enable their members to edit information on millions of companies in their database, Members may edit basic information such as address, phone number and Web site, but also important data such as the number of employees at a company and their revenues. Thousands of business records get updated every day in Manta. With small business owners wanting to make sure that their business information is correct, minimal screening of updates is required by Manta's internal staff - most people want to, and do, provide accurate information. This enables Manta to deliver accurate updates to information on small and medium business faster than traditional business information database providers.

Manta members are also helping to determine what categories should be associated with specific kinds of products and services - for example, if a company produces pavement sealant, should that be in industrial products or home repairs? By taking their hand at these kinds of choices, Manta members "vote" for specific categories into which to place business with very specific products and services - information that is generally not available from other sources. Conceptually this is not so different from a social bookmarking site like Digg but it's a concept that's been applied to a very specific type of data collection effort. Business information sourcing of this kind, both on the Web and by the staffs of major companies, is enabling businesses to get more up-to-date data through the collective insight of people who know the most about the topics that require data collection - instead of having to wait for traditional publishing methods to catch up.

Content Nation Enterprise Rule #6: The personal perspectives offered by social media can be used to gather hard facts as well as insight and opinion.

OneSource Information Services: An Information Company Turns to Social Media for Intelligence to Drive Strategic Decisions

Many companies provide information services to their staffs for intelligence on existing and potential competitors in the marketplace that helps to shape decisions on their product design and market positioning. While much of this information can be collected from company Web sites and news reports, social media plays an increasingly important role in providing competitive intelligence to enterprises - including companies that provide traditional sources of information on businesses. OneSource Information Services, a major provider of business data, research and news, provides an internal Web site for its staff using software from RivalMap. With RivalMap OneSource staff members are able to track news from both traditional sources and favorite weblogs on the Web that talk about very specific market niches. RivalMap also enables OneSource staff to create wiki overviews of companies and products along with structured tools for competitive analysis, competitive feature matrices and segment needs analysis that can be compiled automatically into customized email summaries.

All these features are great, but it was the availability of ever-freshening content from weblogs that made it a resource that people at OneSource would put to work. Michael Levy, a Product Marketing Manager at OneSource, notes: "I've long struggled with how to setup and maintain discussion portals around our competitors...a few weeks ago when RivalMap integrated [blogs] this enhancement led not only to improved competitive intelligence flowing through RivalMap, but a roughly 50% increase in usage as OneSource staff started linking from the expanded alerts...The lesson here is that you can build all of the communications tools that you want for an internal [Web] portal, but you need to have a steady set of compelling and current [content] links...to remind users about these internal assets."

Content Nation Enterprise Rule #7: The many voices of social media attract people who are encouraged to contribute their own content to resources that drive decision-making.

Rearden Commerce Uses Social Media from InsideVew to Make More Deals

Making strategic sales for technology products in a highly competitive market sector is a challenge for any company - even when your product is great. But when you're trying to sell against other fast-moving technology companies to major enterprises getting the right information at the right time is more than a matter of convenience - it can be a matter of a young company making enough sales to survive. Rearden Commerce produces software for mobile devices that make life easier and more productive for executives on the go. Selling to major companies through its own sales force and through backers such as American Express and Chase, Rearden needed to have information on when and where people were ready to hear their sales pitches to keep their sales force focused on the best opportunities.

Rearden Commerce turned to sales productivity specialists InsideView to get content that would get them pointed in the right direction at the right time. The InsideView service is able to combine information from a wide variety of subscription information services and to combine it with information from weblogs and social networking services such as LinkedIn and Facebook. InsideView filters this information through software that analyzes it for patterns which will indicate that a sales prospect is ready to hear a sales pitch.

Using information harvested from social networks and internal sources InsideView then helps salespeople to understand who the right contacts would be for a sales call and what relationships they have that might lead to obtaining an effective introduction to those people.  Using these capabilities Rearden Commerce was able to reduce its re-call research time from 30 minutes to 10 minutes and increased the average number of sales calls from 30 a day to more than 60 for each sales representative. This year Rearden Commerce is expected to double its sales - thanks in part to social media that makes it easier to understand how to get to the right people at the right time.

Content Nation Enterprise Rule #8: Social media makes it easier to know who is ready to say "yes" to a deal and how to get to them.

Reaching Across Boundaries: Social Media Builds Benefits Outside of Companies

While enterprises are reaping rewards from using and developing social media inside their own organizations, one of the greatest benefits of social media is that it can act as a powerful bridge between an organization and the people and the organizations and individuals that it serves. Increasingly enterprises are finding through social media that there is a great deal of value to be found in "the commons," the arena of publishing that enables people in various roles from many different kinds of enterprises to come together and to share knowledge, ideas and solutions. In some instances these cross-role and cross-organization meeting places made available through social media enable not just problem-solving and collaboration but as well a new sense of common purpose. Social media can bring organizations and individuals together in ways that create relationships and end-products which may have a greater value to all participating in their common efforts than the sum of the parts.

Oracle Forums Take Market Conversations Beyond Marketing

As one of the world's leading technology companies Oracle competes fiercely to build a loyal base of clients who will rely upon them for enterprise software. One of the keys to Oracle's success is their system of online forums, in which anyone can find or provide answers to technology questions and interact with Oracle's global staff of software developers, product managers  and support specialists. Millions of people visit Oracle's forums pages each month, which are equipped with social media tools that enable people to track the most popular topics, forum members and topic description tags applied by members.They come not for the razzle-dazzle of the Web site - it's well designed, but downright plain-looking - but to communicate openly and clearly with one another.

Company-sponsored online forums like Oracle's have been around for years, but what's interesting is how being able to have discussions with both peers who are using Oracle products as well as Oracle staff members is becoming a key draw for Oracle's marketing purposes. Judith Sim, senior VP-CMO of Oracle, noted at a recent Business Marketing Association conference that Oracle's marketing budget has been going down every year for 10 years "Oracle believes in doing more with less," Judith Sims said.  She became concerned, though, when in recent months people visiting the home page of Oracle's Web site had declined 4 percent - a trend that is becoming far more common for corporate Web sites. What she discovered, though, was that in recent months the number of users visiting Oracle’s forums had increased 22%, with 94% more postings from members inside and outside of Oracle. In other words, instead of coming to the branded, marketing-oriented home page to solve problems people were moving directly to the forums as the starting point of engaging Oracle. Overall traffic to Oracle's Web sites has nearly doubled in the past year, according to Compete.com - driven in large part by these online forum conversations between people coming together to learn and to solve problems.

In the process of engaging with people via their forums Oracle is learning truly how to have conversations that engage their markets - and learning that simple, person-to-person communications that lay aside the smoke and mirrors of typical marketing presentations can provide not only client loyalty but real engagenent with their markets that puts everyone on the same side trying to solve problems together. The power of Oracle grows through this conversation, but serving the conversation itself through social media in ways that people find to be honest and constructive becomes the real source of influence and leadership for whomever uses this form of personal expression to drive revenues.

Content Nation Enterprise Rule #9: Solving problems and building influence and leadership through social media is becoming the center of an enterprise's brand value.

Connotea: Building Scientific Understanding through Social Bookmarking

The Nature Publishing Group has experimented with a number of social media tools that will enable scientific and medical researchers and people applying the lessons of research in product development and medicine to exchange knowledge with people outside of their own institutions. With conferences at which research papers are presented an expensive and time-consuming option to share knowledge with peers social media seemed to be a logical choice to enable people to share information and insight more frequently.

One of the most successful of Nature's experiments in social media is Connotea, a social bookmarking service based loosely on services such as Digg and del.icio.us. Connotea enables its members to collect links to articles on topics on the Web that interest its members, to organize them by topic tags and to share comments on them with other members. Many of the articles bookmarked by Connotea members are "hard science" produced in peer-reviewed scientific journals, for which Connotea makes it easy for scientists to extract bibliography information that they may use in developing their own scientific papers. Bookmarks and comments can be shared with everyone or organized by specific topic interest groups.

The response to Connotea has been very strong in the scientific community, which values open access to research but also guards closely their ability to publish research that will give them a boost in their career goals. Connotea offers these professionals the ability to share, organize and discus topics that keep them in touch with their professional peers and to use their insights to propel their own thinking - without having to spend a lot of time at a conference or to search the thousands of publications in which scientific information is published. Search engines can help scientists to find what information is of general interest and relevance, but Connotea allows them to rise above the general and to get to the specific articles that are drawing the interest of people with similar interests in very specific fields.

Social Media Enterprise Rule #10: When most of the people who know something about your specialty aren't in your own organization, social media can help professionals to build knowledge and relationships.

ALM: Enabling Lawyers to Build Blogs and Data That Lead to Business

Lawyers get business from people who know their work. But getting people to know your work when you've had success with very specific types of litigation is not always easy - and advertising techniques are not an option oftentimes for helping people to get to know your work objectively. ALM is a publishing company that has come up with two innovative approaches that enable lawyers to leverage their own publishing in a setting that builds their reputation. ALM's Law.com Blog Network is a collection of more than two dozen of the leading weblogs by lawyers with a variety of legal specialities. ALM provides ads that run on each of these independent blogs and highlights the best of these in its Legal Blog Watch "blog of blogs." One of ALM's most popular content features, legal bloggers get to expose their expertise in a community of experts - something that a corporate Web site or marketing program would be hard-pressed to provide.

The other ALM resource built on social media principles is VerdictSearch, a database in which lawyers may deposit for free information about recent legal cases that they've been involved in. Laywers provide details on cases that would otherwise be inacessible, including details such as expert witnesses that were used to support their case, awards provided in verdicts, opposing lawyers and many other details about their day-to-day professional work. The ALM editorial staff reviews these submissions before posting them in the database and in the process of reviewing the submissions they identify newsworthy cases that can be highlighted as news in ALM publications. ALM sells subscriptions to the VerdictSearch database created by these submissions from lawyers, which they can search in great detail to find just the type of information and expertise that they need. ALM gets great content to sell and lawyers collaborate to build a valuable resource that helps them when they need to do research and that their potential clients use to find the right lawyer for a particular kind of litigation.

Social Media Enterprise Rule #11: Even in highly competitive marketplaces professionals can collaborate outside of their organization to build highly valuable content that can help them to reach their goals.

Managing a Career: Building Lasting Relationships through Social Media

While major organizations work hard to break through their hierarchical restraints to compete in global markets, the effort to respond more rapidly to changing conditions means that many people are no longer as tied to specific organizations as they used to be. The U.S Department of Labor estimated recently that by the age of 38 the average American worker will have had between ten to fourteen jobs. Their statistics also show that 1 in 4 workers is working for a different company than they were a year ago - and that half are working for a different company than they did five years ago. Cradle-to-grave job security, always a myth but long a promise of many economies, is clearly not a reality for most people in today's shifting enterprise workplace.

With many organizations offering mostly transitory benefits to the typical worker, it's no surprise that one of the most popular social media applications among working adults is social networking. Keeping in touch with people who we've met along the path of our lives turns out to be a major focus of many social media applications for adults in the workplace. Social networking amongst professionals is not limited to services that help people look for jobs or find work assignments - many are turning to services such a Facebook that connect people with both colleagues and personal friends. The merging of personal lifestyles with work lifestyles into an "always on" society is bringing people to social media to find relationships that will help them to survive and thrive. Social media is  becoming the constant in today's electronic lifestyles that work oftentimes promises to be - but oftentimes fails to be.

The impact of social media on how people manage their careers can be seen in part from a comparison of social media sites to traditional job-seeking sites. In the chart on the right, tradiional resume posting services such as Monster.com and careerbuilder.com are showing stagnant or falling traffic to their Web sites, while social media sites such as Facebook, Craigslist and LinkedIn are growing strongly. Social media enables people to develop and call upon trusted relationships within a community instead of just inserting information into a database. Instead of being just a commodity, a person gains more value in the context of their relationships. Enterprises in turn are beginning to understand the power of social media as a tool for recruiiting new talent, leveraging the existing relationships that people have in their organizations through social media to identify people already known to their staff.

LinkedIn: Leveraging Trusted Professional Relationships for Business, Jobs and Knowledge

LinkedIn is the leading social networking service for business, enabling more than 20 million professionals to establish a network of relationships that they can use to locate business, work and information. LinkedIn enables a member to link their personal profiles to others on LinkedIn, which in turn helps them to understand who their colleagues know well enough to arrange a possible introduction. LinkedIn members can send private email messages to one another without exposing their email addresses - enabling people to communicate easily while maintaining a level of privacy. 

The personal profiles that people fill out on LinkedIn are quite detailed, which enables them to filter through contacts with possible skills, personal connections or affiniities that might be useful for a specific purpose.  Endorsements of a member's work from colleagues help to provide potential hirers a sense of the strength of their skills. The LinkedIn Answers feature enables people to pose questions to colleagues and to get back answers from people who are right in the thick of many key topics. Instead of having to commission expensive research projects to locate, qualify and interview professionals, questions can be posed quickly to hundreds of members and answers provided quickly, oftentimes within minutes or hours of having asked them. A person's profile on LinkedIn can also link members to people on other Web sites. Hiring departments in some major organizations include LinkedIn data in their Web portals to make it easier for LinkedIn members to idnetify staff in a hiring organization who they know already - and who might be able to help accelerate the hiring process through their personal knowledge of a candidate.

In other words LinkedIn provides many of the benefits of professional relationships that one has to struggle to build both inside and outside an organization - usually at great personal or financial investment. Old colleagues appear and link a member to new opportunities. People update their profile data on LinkedIn to ensure that is fresh for people's viewing - making LinkedIn's database of contacts one of the more authoritative sources of professional work histories.

As LinkedIn grows its membership it is becoming a default place to identify one's self to peers in a trusted environment - so much so that some major organizations use LinkedIn messages as a preferred way to contact people outside of their organization, instead of having a message lost in a person's email inbox. Insted of worrying about losing contacts when moving from one job to another people are able to keep their professional networks intact - and to stay alert to new opportunities. With a service like LinkedIn Content Nation can face the future with at least the assurance that their personal network of colleagues will be well-organized and ready to help them meet new challenges at a moment's notice.

Content Nation Enterprise Rule #12: In a world of increasingly temporary relationships with enterprises social media builds bonds that keep people connected to the influential relationships that can help people to survive and thrive.

Facebook: From School to Work to Play

While LinkedIn is a place to hang one's professional hat, Facebook is a social networking venue that lets people stay in touch with colleagues in a more personal way. Originally a Web site that enabled high school and college students to connect, Facebook has expanded its appeal as early adopters brought their enthusiasm for its social networking tools into the workplace. Today both young professionals and professionals in more senior positions - including CEOs of major corporations - maintain a personal and enterprise presence on Facebook to stay in touch with friends, clients and colleagues and to find out who's doing what with whom. The "what with whom" can revolve around people becoming Facebook "friends," joining affinity groups, inviting peope to events, sharing photos of recent get-togethers, becoming a "fan" of a company, cause or product or sharing links to videos and text on the Web that interests them.

While the profiles on Facebook are more limited than those on LinkedIn and its mix of interests as much about fun as it may be about business Facebook is an increasingly important example of how "always on" lifestyles require a different kind of personal communication at times to make the most of professional relationships. With the tenuousness of so many relationships with enterprises on the increase and the bonds built through social media growing ever stronger social media services like Facebook are ways to get to know people who are in one's professional life in ways that used to take conferences or personal get-togethers such as golf outings to develop. Now we can peer in our our colleagues' most recent family photos, hear about their favorite activities and share moments of fun or serendipity in an instant - and, perhaps, build a deeper personal relationship that will lead to imporant influence on a personal or professional basis later on. In Facebook, our personal worlds become our media.

Social Media Enterprise Rule #13: In a world where many enterprises use people as disposable "human capital" social media helps people to build their own multi-dimensional human capital that can last a lifetime.

Breaking the Isolation: MyLayover Helps truckers to connect in a mobile lifestyle

While people in office jobs are now discovering the benefits of social media as a tool to help their personal and professional lives, in some ways the truckers of the world have been there and done that for decades. Equipped with citizen's band radios and their own particular language for broadcasting to one another on the road, a trucking sub-culture has developed to support people who live out of their rigs a good part of their lives. It's not surprising, then, that the increasing availability of high-bandwidth mobile communications networks is enabling social media to connect truckers on the road with a new generation of tools to keep in touch with their tightly-knit community.

MyLayover.com is one of several online social media services now available to truckers who want to create and share content with one another. Launched by Layover.com, one of the leading Web sites for information on the trucking industry, MyLayover.com offers social networking tools, blogs, forums, videos, music, photo galleries, job postings and polls enable people in the trucking community to build relationships with one another on the go - and a "small town" feeling that helps people working in a very specialized profession that blends work and family in its own intimate way. While getting smaller social media communities to scale effectively can be a challenge, the rapid initial growth of MyLayover's audience is an indication that blending work and personal lives in a profession that encourages their overlap can help them to come together even more closely - even when they're rolling down the road.

Social Media Enterprise Rule #14: When your work life becomes your personal life social media can help people to build influential bonds that bring both worlds together.

Content Nation and the Cloud: The Changing Shape of Enterprises

So social media is having a major impact on enterprises large, small, governmental, corporate, independent - virtually every profession on earth has been touched by social media or in all likelihood will be touched by it some time shortly. While many social media tools are succeeding using software installed within major enterprises, many of the enterprise success stories for social media that we've touched upon are tools that work both inside and outside of the enterprise or outside of them altogether. In many instances social media is succeeding without a company having to involve their own technology staffs to get the services up and running - they can be made available to an enterprise's staff over the Web quickly and used at desktops and on mobile devices as if they were a part of the company's own internal infrastructure.

This trend towards using social media tools as services rather than as purchased software reflects a broader trend in enterprise technology. While many enterprises have large technology staffs to provide for the development and support of information systems, many of these staffs have the time or the budget to deal with anything other than technologies that impact the core operations of an enterprise. As a result more and more content services needed by enterprises are being provided by external services providers on a subscription or ad-supported basis via a connection to the Internet or a similar communications network. Since communications networks are depicted oftentimes in technical diagrams as clouds that pass information from one place to another this delivery of information services from external communications into internal communications networks is referred to sometimes as "cloud computing."

A recent study by Gartner information industry analysts indicated that by 2011 the leaders in adopting enterprise information technologies would be delivering up to 40 percent of their information services via cloud computing without spending on internal infrastructure to deliver them. Instead, these services will come in to their enterprises as a from exteral service providers - including social media service providers on the Web. So although companies will continue to use information technologies to give them a market advantage fewer and fewer of those services will come from their own technology staffs.

But if so much of the crucial infrastructure needed by enterprises will not even be in an enterprise because of cloud computing and if so many of the services provided by social media succeed best when they are enmeshed with people and information outside of an enterprise, then a troubling and pressing question comes to mind: are the kinds of organizations that we have today really producing the kinds of unique intellectual assets that will them to succeed in the future? Is the prevalence of social media and other content that flows in and out of major enterprises with increasing ease because of cloud computing indicative of a more fundamental shift in leadership and influence in the workplace being accelerated by social media?

A Nothing But Net Enterprise: What Happens When Social Media Defines Everything?

Hints as to what social media's sole will be in these changes can be seen in a more radical example of how social media is transforming people's work lives. Serena Software, for example, is an up-and-coming software development firm which decided to keep its young workforce motivated by using private groups on the Facebook social networking service as their main internal infrastructure for sharing information with co-workers. Since all of their customers are also willing to use Facebook it's easy for Serena Software's staff to stay in touch with customers and to be able to communicate with people inside and outside their organization at all times where they are and what they're doing - with no training of staff on software that's special to their organization and no investment in the hardware that is required to support it. Significantly this will help them also to reduce and in some instances eliminate the need for emails, since messaging is build into the Facebook platform already, and in essence put all of their intellectual assets on a public service.

It's another way of saying that the property in which enterprises need to invest is increasingly out of their complete control. The software upon which they rely for such externalized operations is not their own and they don't even own a license to it: they simply own the right to use someone else's software on the Web as a service. The information upon which they rely will be fully accessible, but although the information and ideas that are stored in such services may be the property of an enterprise by law they will not own the relationships that people have via the social media platforms that helped to create and store this information. In a sense today's large, hierarchical enterprises are running out of things that they can own which will actually make money, provide leadership or influence people.

Economies of scale are no longer necessarily benefiting directly from the scale of hierarcical organizations. Instead the ability to scale productive, collaborative relationships through communication tools such as social media may be enabling another kind of asset to dominate the success of organizations - the asset of a trusted network of personal relationships that will exist for individuals with our without the presence of specific institutions to sponsor those relationships. The asset of relationships pushes us further into an economy focused on delivering services, with intellectual or physical assets providing a less prominent for delivering value through trusted service relationships.

Creating New Channels For Demand: Farmavita.net Shows How to Market Pharmaceuticals Expertise

A further hint that social media is an important alternative for building economic success can be seen in the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry is beginning to resemble the Hollywood movie industry in that it relies more and more on the intense marketing of a small number of expensive "blockbuster" drugs and treatments for its revenues. Many pharmaceutical companies are actually spending more on advertising and marketing for new products than they are on the research and development required to produce them - trying to ensure maximum market demand for a product during its protection under patent law protections before it becomes a generic drug that can be produced by anyone. But with fewer and fewer potential market winners in the product development pipeline pharmaceutical companies are challenged to deliver the profits that their shareholders demand - especially from sales in developing nations in which expensive drugs are rarely an option for impoverished people.

A possible model for improving the markets for pharmaceuticals is being tested by the Croatian social network Farmavita.net, which  offers an opportunity to turn the pharmaceutical business model inside-out. Instead of focusing on major marketing campaigns to mass markets, Farmavita provides an online community in which initially anonymous companies can make potential clients aware of their expertise in preparing both patented and generic drugs ready for the marketplace. Buyers from developing nations can make sellers aware of the skills and materials that they require to manufature drugs in their local markets at prices that people will be able to afford in those markets.

Instead of trying to focus on selling specific drugs with a very short duration of high profitability Farmavita.net invites the producers of such drugs to consider that the most valuable thing that they may have to license is not a specific product bur rather their insight into how to create and market drugs successfully. In the "Big Sombrero" market model pharmceutical companies could take fewer risks and reach potentially greater rewards by facilitating conversations globally with many smaller global markets via social media and learning about how to meet the needs of a greater number of existing markets for existing products more effectively - though with more competition from other enterprises with similar skill sets. The "new work" that social media facilitates may be pointing us towards the importance of leadership and influence through social media rather than ownership as the key drivers to our local and global economies. 

And if social media can have such a potentially world-changing impact on leadership and influence in today's enterprises, you can be sure that social media will have an equally great impact upon an arena of human endeavor in which leadership and influence are its very lifeblood: politics.