How to aggregate several Twitter Users in a FriendFeed group

How to aggregate several Twitter Users into a FriendFeed group:

How to embed a FriendFeed Widget in a Blog

This is a SlideShare presentation on how you can embed a FriendFeed widget in your blog:

Here you can see the result!

Started with a new blog

I have started with a new blog: http://www.jeroendemiranda.com

I will continue writing on Web 2.0 and management topics. In the coming economic downturn innovation will become even more important for the health of companies, I will be focussing more on innovation. Social Media is becoming a very important enabler of innovation; therefore the new title of my blog is:

Innovation and Social Media

The new blog makes use of the Thesis template. This gives me more flexibility in presenting and managing my blog posts.

I hope that subscribers will subscribe to this new blog; you can do this by clicking on this link to the RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/InnovationAndSocialMedia

Twitter in the Enterprise: Yammer and other microsharing / microblogging products

The last few weeks I had a closer look at Twitter-like solutions that work within the enterprise. This is a summary post of the discussions that I have found on the internet. It is mainly focussed on the new enterprise microblogging product ‘Yammer.com’

Yammer at TechCrunch

Short summary description of Yammer: ‘Yammer Wins TechCrunch 50 with Twitter-like Enterprise Service’

TechCrunch50 Awards Ceremony – Yammer (video)

Short video explaining the functionality of Yammer: Yammer presentation by David Sacks, CEO of Yammer at Techcrunch50

Summary description from the Yammer site:

‘Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: “What are you working on?”

As employees answer that question, a feed is created in one central location enabling co-workers to discuss ideas, post news, ask questions, and share links and other information. Yammer also serves as a company directory in which every employee has a profile and as a knowledge base where past conversations can be easily accessed and referenced.

Anyone in a company can start their Yammer network and begin inviting colleagues. The privacy of each network is ensured by limiting access to those with a valid company email address. The basic Yammer service is free. Companies can pay to claim and administer their network’

Other remarks in this presentation:

– a tag cloud give insight into what people are talking about within the organization

– comparison with email: conversation is shifted from email to Yammer, enabling other employees to find relevant information

– Apple iPhone, Adobe AIR clients are available

– Business model : everything is free; you pay to be administrator to remove users, enhanced security (like IP address ranges, password policies).

Pistachio consulting

‘Pistachio consulting’ has an excellent blog on Microsharing/ Microblogging.

On Yammer, they present  is an overview of all articles related to Yammer, which is an enterprise microsharing solution. Yammer is a ready-to-use solution (Software as a Service)

Downside of this solution is that you have less control, and that the data is not within your organizations’ firewall, but at the service provider. Upside is that you do not have to take care of all servicing yourself (updating the software, backup etc, problem resolution, customer service, etc).

Comparison matrix of Yammer and 14 rival microsharing solutions: ‘Twitter’s “water cooler” collaboration, support and problem-solving qualities have led to much discussion about a similar application for internal “Enterprise 2.0″ collaboration and communication.  Yammer’s success touched off a spate of announcements about similar applications, and Jeremiah Owyang and I have been tracking the growing list. ‘ (Scribd.com site; free account needed to download the comparison sheet).

Chris Brogan

Chris Brogan has a different opinion on Yammer:

‘Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant’: ‘So, to sum that all up: Twitter inside the firewall, private for your business is Twhirl+laconi.ca. Twitter outside the firewall with your business colleagues and friends is Twhirl+Twitter’ – Discussion on FriendFeed about this post

Twirl+laconi.ca: Indeed, this might be a good solution when you want to host the service inside our own organization, within the firewall.

Other (some more critical) voices

Mathew Ingram (Communities editor at The Globe and Mail in Toronto): Yammer: This thing is a prize winner?

NY Times article: Will Microblogging at Work Make You More Productive?

BBC is using Yammer: Yammer goes down, companies all over go silent

Mark Evans: If Yammer has potential as an enterprise tool, the big question is why hasn’t Twitter already moved into the corporate market. For a company scrambling for a business model, you figure that selling a corporate version of Twitter would be a no-brainer.

Good commentary blog post by Steve Boyd: ‘The idea that work activities — like request for meetings, status changes in tasks, peoples comings and goings, and new information about projects — should flow to you rather than sitting in web pages, documents, or emails is compelling.’

‘Yammer is a more-or-less point for point duplication of Twitter functionality, which makes it so odd that Twitter has refused to build this product. That is spectacularly dumb. Here’s what it looks like.’ – Steve Boyd’s own Yammer site:

Steve Mann (SAP) on Yammer (Steve Mann is a 20-year veteran of the high tech industry. Currently he is a Global Vice President of Marketing for SAP, focused on driving SAP’s Social Media Strategies to market. ): ‘In the hopes of becoming part of an Enterprise 2.0 backbone for organizations of all sizes, grouping functionality is absolutely essential. Without it, there’s no way to cleanly and precisely provide direct team support capabilities.’

From the NY Times: ‘Now, Brevity Is the Soul of Office Interaction’:

“Every time we put something across Yammer, we’re exposing it to people but not forcing it down their throats,” said Tom Link, chief technology officer of Universal Mind, a Web development company in Westfield, Mass., with 70 employees. “Depending on what they’re doing, people might be paying attention to messages as they’re posted. But if I’m not in the office, I can go back and get the whole company stream for a day and read it in about 10 minutes. I could never do that with e-mail.”

“Companies with many employees who work from home or in far-flung offices may get the most out of internal microblogging, which can help fill the inherent social gaps among remote workers. Even simple updates like, “Going to the dentist” or “Mopping coffee off the keyboard” can make co-workers feel more connected to one another.”

Security concerns

‘Security. Any time a business has employees putting data outside the corporate firewall, there will be privacy and data security concerns. If the Yahooligans could get Gov. Sarah Palin’s private e-mails and post them to the Internet, it could happen to one of your employees.

Yammer’s security statement

Technical

http://www.programmableweb.com/api/yammer: links to API description, blog

Other platforms: Present.ly

Enterprise Twitter heats up with Present.ly

Other platforms: ESME

ESME means Enterprise Social Media Experiment. ‘ESME is a secure and highly scalable microsharing platform that allows people to meet and discover one another in a business process context.’

ESME is an open source development; developers from companies such as SAP and Siemens are contributing to it.

The interesting part is that this platform is very much focused on delivering a solution that can integrate well into the overall enterprise software landscape. This is no surprise when we see that most of the contributors have strong background in SAP.

More on this platform later, in a separate post.

Customer Service and the Web 2.0 platform GetSatisfaction.com

I am looking for ways to improve customer services of some existing web platforms. Using ‘GetSatisfaction.com’ might be a good way to do this! Below I present an overview of this exiting platform, and indicate some key benefits.

To be clear: I have not had any real experience yet with using GetSatisfaction.com in this way.

Does a New Website Hold the Secret to Great Customer Service?

Summary of this interview with CEO of GetSatisfaction.com Thor Mueller – with my comments on some of his quotes added:

• ‘Launched in September, 2007, the site provides forums where customers discuss problems with products and services of 2,500 companies from Apple to Zappos — whether the company participates or not. (…) We’ve got companies large and small that are actively participating, ranging from Comcast and Google and Paypal to more up-and-comers like Twitter and Timbuk2.’

GetSatisfaction is a viable platform – well known startups such as Twitter use it; it is also used by large companies such as Dell and Microsoft.

Some companies have their own employees acting on it; whereas e.g. the Facebook entry on GetSatisfaction is completely run by volunteers. Dell using GetSatisfaction for customers services on 18 different products (as of november 2008)

• ‘The problem with traditional forums — which in many cases worked quite well over the years — is that they’re often difficult to search or the answer is buried way, way down.’

This is what I see when setting up communities, e.g. by using www.ning.com – ning.com is a great platform, but has limited capabilities for customer services. GetSatisfaction.com could be used by a group of experienced users from the specific Ning community to help out new users of the Ning community.

• ‘Our proposition is different; it’s a neutral space. We call it a Switzerland between companies and customers, and it’s designed for positive outcomes.’

The proposition of GetSatisfaction enhances the attractiveness of your community, by offering this neutral space.

• ‘… In a very basic way, we’re seeing that customer service is the ultimate way of creating word-of-mouth marketing and creating lifetime value with customers.’

‘Word-of-mouth’ marketung is the primary driver for growth of online communities; enhancing it with a customer service platform can enable such growth.

How it works

• http://getsatisfaction.com/how_it_works
• Most active companies on GetSatisfaction

Key benefits

On Get Satisfaction for Your Company:

• ‘Create and retain passionate users’
• ‘Get users involved in improving your products and services’: this is the most important benefit when using it for a ning.com type of community
• ‘Reduce customer churn and repetitive support tasks’

Technology

• GetSatisfaction support OpenId ; this makes the barrier of entry lower (easy authentication mechanism)
• ‘Our feedback widget allows you to collect customer input on any page of your site.’ – this means you can have a tight integration of GetSatisfaction on each of the pages of you site.

Comparison with other customer services platform

• Google Revamping Forums, Changes Look Good – GetSatisfaction still looking superior compared to Google forum functionality
• Cross platform example of ‘Word-of-mouth’ : ‘Yammer is currently being praised by employees of the following companies and start-ups: Xerox, GetSatisfaction, Slideshare, and SmugMug.’

Comparison with older ways of online support (FAQ’s etc)

‘Customers helping customers: The first step is to use Web 1.0 tools like a FAQ or knowledge bases to enable customer self-help – this is a fairly standard operating procedure for the vast majority of contact centers. However, beyond this there is an opportunity to allow customers to help each other through forums, wiki product manuals (e.g. see Moto Q wiki), customer-led support (Second Life does it), or online problem solving venues (e.g. see GetSatisfaction.com).’

Possible downsides…

… to using GetSatisfaction.com as complementing a ning.com community; however I do not yet know how serious these downsides are:

• users have to create yet another account (although the OpenId support makes this a less serious downside)
• spam messages on your GetSatisfaction forum
• (for Dutch users): the site is in English, not in Dutch

Government use

From Brian Solis on TechCrunch (‘Is Obama Ready To Be A Two-Way President?‘)- he mentions the idea of using GetSatisfaction:

‘Other opportunities to engage with citizens online include:

– Launch a social network at Change.gov and/or whitehouse.gov

– Create a citizen feedback and collaboration page at GetSatisfaction‘

What do you think?

It would be great if you would contribute your thoughts, either by posting a comment on this post below, of @replying on my twitter account! Thanks!