Intranet & Customer Community Blog

4 Tips for Building a Better Internal Community in the Workspace

Internal communities are essential to modern businesses. A user-friendly platform that provides valuable content and focuses on employee engagement can make your internal community a vibrant and dynamic part of your organization. Here are our top 3 tips to creating a culture of innovation and productivity within your organization's internal community.

Why You Need a Social Intranet

Let's have a frank discussion about your current Intranet. It's terrible! You know it. Your employees know it. Your management team knows it. If you are like most companies, there are probably only four features that are used on your Intranet...

JiveWorld 2012

As summer ends and fall approaches, we are looking forward to the social collaboration event of the season, Jive World 2012 in October. As a Silver sponsor, the Social Edge Consulting team and I are eager to hear the latest developments from Jive, as well as the benefit from the unlimited opportunities to network with clients and leaders in the field. We have a number of success stories to share at Jive World, where I was selected to be a "ringside expert" for a panel discussion on October 11.

Surfacing Ideas: Bringing the Needs of 'the Street' Up to the Boardroom

So, you’ve made the decision to bring social collaboration to your enterprise. It’s a great choice that will net many gains for your team in global team engagement, communication, and managing content. As a leader you have objectives and targets in mind with your rollout. You will find lots of experts on social collaboration, both internal and external, in your endeavor.

Measuring the Value of Social Technology

It's been a short seven years since Andrew McAfee, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, wrote an article titled Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration in the MIT Sloan Management Review (Spring 2006) that asked the question, do we finally have the collaborative technologies that reflect the way work gets done?

Our Philosophy: Social Business Strategist Mike Fraietta on The Social Edge Approach

Get Real! Social Edge at Jive World '13

In just 10 days, the SE team will be heading to Las Vegas to participate in Jive Software's annual social business conference: Jive World. There are many of us attending, so we'll be a tough crew to miss!

Applying six questions from Peter Drucker to social business initiatives

Peter Drucker. I'll hazard a guess that (knowingly or unknowingly) we've all come across examples or quotes from the works of Peter Drucker. The recent 5th Global Peter Drucker Forum which focused on "managing complexity," brought him front and center again for me recently. During the event @dpontefract noted how the Return on Assets on public companies has collapsed since 1961 by 75%, with no signs of it turning around.

Social Business Lives Under the Radar But That Will Change

I always tell people that I have the best job in the world. When I explain to them what it is ??? helping businesses go social inside and outside their company??? they usually have no idea what I'm talking about. But social business, as it's called, is an unstoppable trend that will help change the way we live, and work, on this planet.

Gamification as a Social Business Strategy - What Do You Think?

Is gamification good for Social Business? Is it bad? This is the debate that I faced with my new colleagues at Social Edge Consulting in my first week at the company. We get together weekly and discuss and debate the finer points of implementing social business strategies and solutions.

No More Naysayers: A Rebuttal to Why I Don't Jive

...title caught your attention? Introducing social collaboration to a business isn't always an easy undertaking. We are asking people within all levels of an organization, including executives and senior leaders, to change the way they work. As with any change management process we are bound to hear negative feedback from tentative users. As community managers engage employees in the change process it is important to address any hesitation and uncertainty.

Company Wisdom

How many people do you know at your company? 100, 500, 750, 1000? If you were fortunate enough to be employed by a large company for a long period of time maybe you do know 500 people. Maybe you moved around and held various positions in a number of locations and you know 750. Let’s say that you are a natural “networker” as well and you know 1,000 people. Wow! That would be pretty amazing. When a challenge confronts you or when you need to bounce around some ideas around you have this incredible internal network to leverage. Lucky for you.

Selling Social Collaboration to the Front Line

Some of the more challenging conversations you will have regarding your new social collaboration platform are with your front line business teams. These are the job functions that are at the heart of your organization. They have no time to waste and many will be skeptical of “hot trends” that might be long on promises and short on delivering. It is worth the time to spend with them as they have the most to gain from social tools.

Illumination is Near: Balancing Transparency and Privacy in the Social Space

I was fortunate to attend Jive World 2012 in October, and sat in on a number of sessions regarding community management, and internal and external communities. One of the presentations, “Breaking Down Walls: Work in Private with Anyone, Anywhere,” resonated with me. The idea that privacy is possible no matter how public your space, is good news to many businesses.

Turning Lurkers Into Contributors - The 5Cs of Social Business Communities

You may have heard about the 1% Rule of the Internet. Also known as the "90–9–1" rule, it states that 1% of people create content, 9% edit or modify that content, and 90% view the content without contributing. This rule is pretty spot-on throughout most of the Internet but using collaborative and social technologies, like Jive, gives us the opportunity to turn lurkers into contributors, creators, connectors and collaborators. On one community, we were able to raise the contribution rate from 12% to 22% in a three-month period.

Social Business Moving to the Cloud - Myth or Trend?

We're seeing growing adoption of cloud-based platforms for communities and social intranets, but can we call it a trend? Are we seeing companies switching from on-premise and hosted installations to Software as a Service (SaaS).

How Social Interactions Can Lead to Better Business Outcomes

Some business leaders have expressed the concern that social interactions in an employee community will result in a loss of productivity. In this blog post, Andrew Kratz shares a story on how an interaction he had in such a social group ended up benefitting his organization and led to improved company outcomes.

Discover the Magic of Top-down and Bottom-up Communications with a Social Intranet

Andrew Kratz talks about top-down and bottom-up communication and the magic they create inside a community-based intranet.

Customer Panel Recap: Building Better Use Cases

On June 19th Social Edge hosted our first Customer Panel: Building Better Use Cases, featuring panelists Dina Vekaria and Dori Gray, Community Managers at Pearson and Medidata. They shared their use case best practices and presented live demos of their internal communities, Pearson Neo and Medidata Express. Check out the recap to learn more!