The State Department using Collaboration and Social for Operational Effectiveness

Richard Boly, Director of the Office of eDiplomacy at the U.S. Department of State, and I spent time chatting about the way the State Department is leveraging social strategies and tools to better manage and train State Department employees.  Richard began his career in Silicon Valley where he gained a core belief in the power of openness and collaboration, and has brought that belief, that passion, to his multi-decade role as a Foreign Service Officer at the State Department.

The eDiplomacy Office, for those that do not know, was setup by Colin Powell in the wake of the 9-11 and East African bombing attacks.  The belief that the State Department needed to move from a “Need to know” mentality to a “Need to share” mentality drove the creation of the office and remains the its primary goal.

The ability to maintain institutional knowledge has always been a challenge for State.  Staff is rotated from assignment to assignment on a regular basis (every two years), often resulting in expertise and institutional knowledge ending up in the wrong place, or at least in locations where it was hidden from those who could benefit from it.    In order to become more operationally effective the State Department had to find ways of breaking through the command and control, top-down, mentality that had led to the information silos, it had to quickly become a more open, more internally transparent, organization.  An internal Wiki was born.

While a Wiki may not seem cutting-edge, the cultural shift that a Wiki enabled, the cultural shift that it required, was major.  Instead of centrally controlled information, the Wiki provided a method for anyone within State to share information, safely behind their firewalls, with anyone else at State.  Information was no longer locked into organizational reporting structures, it was available to anyone.  The wiki has recently passed the 10,000 article milestone and has become a core part of how information is shared.

This cultural shift has led to the creation of knowledge centers, such as Deskipedia, which is focused on streamlining the training of new Desk Officers.  Due to the regular rotation schedules it was not uncommon for a new Desk Officer to begin at a post with almost no hand-off, no formal training, occurring.   Deskipedia houses FAQs, Knowledge articles, Best practices, that literally save new Desk Officers hundreds of hours of training and reduce the likelihood of political gaffes occurring in the field.

Success comes at a price, however, and the eDiplomacy team is working on methods to crowdsource support, shifting some of this burden away from their team to the end-users that are living on these various communities and portals.  The private sector is dealign with the same challenges, companies HP, Comcast, and BestBuy are seeing the power of crowdsourced  communities.

The State Department has done an excellent job with their Secretary Sounding Board project, an Ideation Platform like that being used by GSA for their Better Buy Project.  The platform has seen more than 1000 ideas entered with thousands of comments by others in the organization.  The ideas have enabled those water cooler conversation of the past, those that rarely were heard of by others, and almost never discussed beyond the water cooler, to come to fruition.  For example, as part of ongoing efforts to green government, people suggested the addition of loaner bicycles to go to meetings across town instead of having to ride cabs or use their own cars.  These bikes, which are now a reality, will make a difference in effectiveness, and are but one small example of the power of employee collaboration.

It’s great seeing social tools being used to save all of us money while making key Federal organizations more efficient, and safer, in the process.  Keep up the great work.

John

Important updates from Scout Labs today

I chatted with Liza over at Scout Labs last week to hear more about the exciting changes they were working on. The changes went live today so I wanted to take a moment to highlight a couple of the more important updates.  Jennifer Zeszut, CEO of Scout Labs, wrote a solid post about the changes, you can view it in detail here.

A Ticketing System

When I first reviewed Scout Labs one of my biggest concerns was the lack of a ticketing system.  They have delivered on their promise of a ticketing system in Q1.  Great job Scout Labs!  While the ticketing system support is light weight (no workflow or customzation), you can assign any monitored conversation to a user in the system and they are able to view and respond as needed.  In addition, e-mails are sent to the user to alert them, an important feature for the infrequent user.

Forum Support

One of my favorite additions is forum support.  While forums may feel old-school, they are an extremely popular destination point where conversations are taking place, conversations you should be aware of.   In fact, depending on the topics you are monitoring you might even find the bulk of the conversation is taking place on forums.  Check it out.

I’ll keep you up to date as I learn more. 

John

Another tool in your marketing and customer service toolbelt, Slideshare channels

If you are not yet leveraging Slideshare for your marketing or customer support efforts you should take a look now. With the release of channel support I would urge all to try to get a branded business channels created immediately.  I have requested mine, crossing my fingers that t comes through.

This sounds like the beginning of some exciting moves taking place at Slideshare.  In a brief e-mail exchange with Rashmi Sinha, CEO of Slideshare, she indicated a shift towards a business media community, a shift she is writing about in an upcoming post on her blog.  Stay tuned, could be an interesting time for all of us on the Slideshare platform.

John

Adding transparency to the public meeting process

I have thought more about the value technology can bring to government 2.0, specifically the public meeting process that, in most towns, sees only a few people ever take part. 

I was chatting with someone on the GovLoop site recently, Justin Mosebach, about the meeting process, here are his thoughts.

“People have busy lives. Whether it be a job, family, or school, people don’t have (or want to take) the time to attend a County, Township, or School Board meeting.  Most people don’t want to sit through multiple agenda items that are unimportant to them until they get to a topic that interests (or applies to) them. What if there was a way to allow local governments to video their meetings and put them online? Currently, the most common application of transparency for local meetings is the minutes. But minutes usually don’t provide a full (and unbiased) account of what really happened. Body language and tone of voice aren’t communicated. However, if there were video of the meetings online, this would be possible. Online video would also enable anyone to just watch the items of the meeting that matters to them, whenever they want, with the time that they have. Archived meeting videos would allow citizens (including reporters) to easily research what a council member specifically said about an issue last July.”

I agree that video can be used, and is used in some towns, to offer more transparency to the process.  Housing videos on a YouTube channel, presentations on SlideShare or Brainshark, are all easy ways to add richness and transparency to the process.  What else should local governments consider?

• Live twitter feeds.  Yes, if you have people available to capture and report on the topics of the meeting, do so.  People that are not in the room may still jump on board.  Leverage Twitter lists to find interested parties and keep it simple to track and respond to the discussion.
• Post meeting agendas as a SlideShare or My Brainshark presentations ahead of the meeting.  Ensure that web-savvy citizens are able to fully take part.
• Leverage games like Foursquare, GoWalla, to publicize and reward citizens who are participating.  Those badges are an amazingly addictive virtual reward system.
  • For those aware of my thoughts on Foursquare, here is another example of where virtual world check-ins matter.  I want the Youtube channel housing these videos to be a destination.  Rewards should go to those that take part in the process, in person or on-line.
• Feeling particularly tech ready?  Bring the meeting into SecondLife.  You might want to verify that people would participate first, but this is another great technology to consider.

Is there a return on your investment by driving more open participation?  Definitely.  Start measuring and reporting on the following and I believe you will see results

• Voter turnout numbers.
• Meeting numbers, broken down by virtual participants and physically present participants.  I know you want to measure mental participation too, perhaps later.

Thoughts?

John

Tell me the truth! Crimson Hexagon does not hold back

Social Conversation Monitoring platforms generally use keyword matching algorithms to decide sentiment, a few also leverage natural language processing (NLP) techniques. Crimson Hexagon has gone a different route, leveraging algorithms created by Gary King to essentially convert text snippets into binary information that is faster,and some would argue more accurate, to search. Most companies claim 75-80% accuracy with NLP, Crimson claims 97% accuracy with its algorithm.

Who is Crimson Hexagon?

They are headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, not far from me actually.  Gary King created the core algorithms used by Crimson Hexagon, algorithms based upon his work at Harvard University. As is the case with dozens of companies of in this space, they have been around for only a couple of years, quietly focusing on building great technology, investing little in marketing efforts.  However, even without a focus on marketing they are getting buzz, check out this video from CNN’s John King.

What excites me about Crimson Hexagon, and about the direction this market is going, is a focus on taking the large volume of data and turning it into actionable information.  Even a relatively small brand could have thousands of mentions across Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, etc, pouring through that to find the important data points is daunting. Crimson focuses on making that a little less challenging by identifying relevant information, I’ll tell you more about their approach as we go along.

How much will this cost me?

It’s not cheap, but neither is rent in Cambridge and someone has to pay the bills, right?  The core platform costs $25K per year, plus charges for each monitor.  Your average company that leverages 25 monitors will be paying about $150K per year (no charge for named users).  Crimson does give away its Buzz product for free, however, and its basic keyword search capabilities seem solid.

How does it actually work?

At a high-level, the approach is roughly:

• Define objective.  The only reason to use these tools is to support corporate or agency goals, to make sure that the strategies and tactics you are employing are resulting in the changes you need, or to inform decision-making before making changes in direction.  You do know your goals, right?
• Define filter.  Define, using simple keywords or robust boolean logic,  a set of filters that make sure you are looking at the most meaningful information.  For example, want to find out information to help you decide if Tiger Woods is a practical brand spokesman?  Filter out the noise (e.g. commentary about his PGA video) games to focus in on the relevant conversations.
• Define the questions to ask.  Simple enough, right?
• Calibrate algorithm.  This is where Crimson earns its money.  To train the system, for each question, you literally walk through social mentions and decide which class it falls into (or skip it).  For example, if you question is “Has Tiger Wood’s brand been tarnished” you find tweets, blog posts, etc., that are examples of these types of messages.  The more messages you define as examples of each category/question the better the algorithm will do.
• Ongoing monitoring.  Get results, make decisions, grow your business.
  • Note that Crimson Hexagon attempts to only show you relevant mentions by default.  It is much easier to review 1000 relevant mentions vs. scanning through tens of thousands of mentions.

A few more details

• The algorithms are language-independent.  You train the system in a specific language and it performs its magic against the data set regardless of the source language.
• Information is not translated on the fly, however.  If you have trained a monitor in Hebrew it will not find mentions in English.
• A point of confusion.  When you review results you are shown the results of two algorithms.  The summary information is using the “secret sauce”, the detailed data simple keyword searches.  This can lead to some confusion as you may actually see posts/tweets that were not identified by the magic formula when reviewing the detailed data set.  Crimson Hexagon includes indicators next to each items (red, yellow, green) to show the likelihood that a piece of data was included in the main formula’s algorithm.  However, I still felt this could be confusing for some users.

I do recommend checking these folks out.  The tools are impressive and, while pricey, could be a good addition for those companies/agencies looking to go deeper in their analysis.

John

When it comes to support channels, phone and email still rule (for now)

As you may remember, I kicked off my survey of customer support preferences and usage patterns a couple of days ago.  While I will continue running the survey through the end of March, and the sample size is still less than 100, I wanted to share some very early data.  If you have not yet taken the survey, please do.  If you have not yet shared it with friends and family, please do.  Let’s gather as much information as possible (I share).

The majority of the respondents have dealt with support issues in the last month, they have not based their answers on old experiences.

Also, the bulk of the respondents are from North America, not surprising given this is where I am located.

The majority of those responding still use phone and e-mail to get the job done.  Now is that because they choose this path or because that is the path provided?  Time will tell and I’ll share my opinions when the poll does eventually close.  However, let me leave you with this.  Over 67% of the respondants were satisfied with their experience.  Is that really good enough?

John

Is social the new dirty word?

I woke up in a cold sweat the other morning, memories of the early 2000s floating in my head.  Remember the insanity when everyone wanted to throw the “e-” prefix in front of everything?  Good thing we all learned from that lesson.

Social strategies and tools are adding, and will continue to add, real value across the public and private sector.  However, we must avoid turning the social prefix into the next dirty word.  I am already seeing executives shaking their heads at the term, let’s rope it in and keep talking about business and citizen value.  In the end, that’s all anyone cares about anyway.

John

Sales people, you’re fired!

There are many who look at social strategies as transforming a business to the point that it will no longer require traditional sales people.  I disagree with these somewhat utopian views of the world but did want to take a moment to note a couple of very important points.

One recent post notes:

“Social businesses don’t have a role for a traditional salesforce anymore as the end-to-end process-driven model takes over.  Today’s salesforces will be replaced by cadres of independent sales people that have only one purpose: relationship brokers.”

• There will be a few businesses that transition deeply into this model.  Real estate brokers, stock brokers, and the like, already follow this model, the good ones anyway.  The strongest will survive, their relationship building behaviors will be replicated (as they already are).
• Do not expect a wide-scale transformation across all industries and markets.  The idea, while interesting, will not scale.  Great sales people do much more than simply build relationships and they are not as commonplace as we would want.

The writer also notes:

“It becomes a win-win situation, one of the aims of a customer-centric model, where the customers get value from the products or services and the social business gets an even exchange of value in the form of money.  In addition, these are the transactions that over time lead to emotional loyalty, the aim of a social business.”

This is critical in today’s business world, not just in tomorrow’s “social business”.  Customers that do not receive value for their money will not be customers for long.  It is an excellent point, however.  You may make money selling inferior product services, for a time.  If you want your business to survive for many years you need to get back to the basics:

• Deliver a product or service that meets a true need.
• Hire a great team.
• Clearly communicate the company’s goals to employees, potential customers, and anyone else who will listen.
• Develop strategies to achieve the goals you set forth.
• Execute flawlessly.
• Measure, adjust strategies and tactics based upon the results being achieved.
• Hope for some luck.  Having been through a few startups I can tell you that luck helps.  Call it timing if you prefer, but great ideas, great execution, can sometimes fail if the idea is too early or you bring on the wrong board, the wrong management team, the wrong staff.

Sounds pretty simple, right.  I guess we’ll need those sales people after all.

John

2010 Social CRM and Government 2.0 Predictions

The good folks at Lithium asked me to weigh in on the future of Social CRM, Social Strategies, Government 2.0, throughout 2010.   I tried to avoid the hype cycle with my predictions and wanted to share them with you.  I guest posted on their blog but also wanted to share my thinking directly with you here, let me know what you think.

2010, and probably the first half of 2011, will see rapid growth internal to the industry, the analyst that follow, the experts and their opinions, and the major companies/vendors involved. During this same period of time, however, the average consumer/citizen will go on without seeing much that impacts their daily lives. In large part this is due to the fact that companies are still working to understand how to strategically leverage social strategies and the associated tactics and tools. More importantly, many companies are trying to determine how to even begin listening to the conversations taking place. We are early in a process that will, over the course of the next few years, dramatically change how business and government is done.

While there has been much in the way of hype around terms like Social Business Design and Social CRM, I expect we will see the industry pay less attention to these terms, these frameworks, and focus more deeply on how social tactics and tools play into their general business strategies. Social strategies will surely be used, but expect them to remain targeted to certain functional areas (e.g. marketing, customer service). Even though this is the case, companies will prefer to buy from all-in-one social solution providers as it will make it much easier to scale their use of social tactics across the business over the course of the next 2 – 3 years.

So, who are those leaders in terms of providing a suite of solutions? Jive Software, INgage Networks, and Lithium Technologies are the leaders to watch and, for those companies, and government agencies, looking to build out a complete solution, companies you must speak with. This is not to say that there will not be hundreds of niche players, thriving in many cases, offering very specific solutions that are often better than what you will get from these three.

2010 is also going to be a year of consolidation. There are simply too many companies, some running with too much debt, some with too few customers, which are reaching the end of their lifetime. I would expect to see at least a half dozen Social Media Monitoring and Social CRM companies disappear in 2010. There are already a small number that are in trouble, or nearing trouble, and others will have challenges as they seek to differentiate themselves from the competition. The news, however, is not all bad. We are also entering an era where you will see many partnerships and acquisitions taking place. Jive Software made a good move when they bought Filtrbox, adding Social Monitoring/Listening capabilities, the other major players will need to do something as well.

Companies like HP and McDonalds, who are great examples of companies using social strategies effectively, will be creating real world examples of ROI, helping the rest of the industry by providing models to follow. ROI (return on investment) and CONI (cost of not investing) will not have agreed upon formulas but executives will be looking for numbers, even if they are simply ballpark numbers, to justify the investment in these strategies. As a CTO I dislike spending any money without understanding the payback, my CFO friends are going to be asking as well, answers had better be ready.

As I look at the public sector and the open government movement, expect to see continued growth. Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US will continue to lead the charge but countries like Brazil, Germany, and Japan will become larger players as well. In large part the focus will remain on providing open data sources at Federal and local levels. However, while politicians will mostly provide lip service, agencies like the GSA will deliver value through key projects like the Better Buy Project, providing rallying points from which other agencies can move forward.

Will we see flying cars, businesses that engage for reasons other than bottom line profit, and politicians that really want more than your vote? No, not as the norm. However, we are continuing down the path to a better way of doing business, of running government, and for that we should all be very excited.

John

Consumers, what are your support preferences?

Did I mention that I will be speaking about Social Support Communities at Parafest ‘10?  I am spending time chatting with some of the larger Enterprise companies in the world to bring you more information on that front and I know you will find the session valuable.  However, I want to go beyond the Enterprise perspective and better understand what real consumers expect, want to help?

Of course  you do.   I have put together a very simple survey that I would love your feedback on.  It should take you less than a couple of minutes to answer the survey, just remember to answer the survey from the perspective as you, the consumer.  I will leave this survey open until the end of March (or until I need to give Parature my final presentation).

Please take the survey by navigating here.

Thanks everyone, hope to see you in Las Vegas.

John