Social Media Revolution in the Workplace (IITMAANA Event)

Kaushik Raghunath: Thanks everyone for showing up. My name is Kaushik and I'm an office bearer
of the IITMAANA Bay Area Chapter. Since a lot of you might not know what that means
I'm going to take the trouble of expanding that full acronym.
So it is Indian Institute of Technology Madras Alumni Association North America.
So we organize a bunch of events through the year, some technical and some cultural, and
we just decided to pick one of the hot topics of the year which is obviously social media,
social computing and we have a fantastic lineup of analysts and a very capable moderator with
us now.
Before we get started the founder of the Pan IIT group has a small announcement to make
and soon after that I'll hand over the mic to Paige.
So without further ado let me just get started with a short announcement.
Thanks guys.
Monishi Sanyal: Hi folks. Monishi Sanyal from IIT Madras, but to, to be correct I'm one
of the co-founders of the Pan IIT group. The Pan IIT's the composition of all the seven
campuses of the IIT in India which is Indian Institute of Technology.
I just have a small announcement to make. Our next major event, in fact that's a Pan
IIT event, is gonna be on May 16th and it's the first ever Pan IIT research summit and
we're kind of holding this around the visit of our great and honorable Professor Ashok
Jhunjhunwala who is visiting on that day.
He's got the Padma Shri award and several other awards for his work on, on rural advancement
using technology. So he's gonna be visiting and we're putting together a crack Pan IIT
panel from all the other IIT's also, and you might have seen the picture of Prith Banarji
of HP announcing the Singapore set up. He's also gonna be on our panel; he's confirmed
that. And we have another, a number of others who will be joining.
So there's gonna be a morning session and the advantage is it's on the day after TiEcon
which is on 14th and 15th of May, so to facilitate this for our East Coast people we are doing
it in the morning so they can leave on time. So please mark that in your calendars. It's
May 16th, Sunday.
Thank You.
Kaushik Raghunath: Okay. So thanks for the announcement. I guess we're ready to get started,
so please join me in welcoming all of our panelists and Paige Finkelman right here who's
gonna be the moderator for the evening.
[applause]
Paige Finkelman: Thank you. Hi guys. How's it going?
voice in audience: [inaudible]
Paige Finkelman: Great. As Kaushik mentioned I'm Paige Finkelman and I'll be moderating
tonight's discussion.
First off I'd like to thank everyone in the IITMAANA which is a complex acronym for joining
us and many thanks to Google for hosting us.
As you might have heard the, the topic for tonight's panel discussion is the social media
revolution in the workplace.
So really the goal of tonight's gathering is to engage with assembled panel of experts
to my right to answer questions about the adoption of social computing in the enterprise
as well as the cultural effects of set adoption and the best practices they've learned in
the field.
I want to specify that this discussion will focus on internal tools as opposed to external
tools; just to clarify.
Before our panelists introduce themselves, I wanted to take a quick poll of the audience
to get a sense and a pulse on your use of social too, tools, both inside and outside
of the workplace.
So if you wouldn't mind bear with me and sort of do this cheesy exercise by raising your
hand and my question for you is: Do you use, as a consumer, with your friends a soc, a
social network to connect with them?
That would include things like Facebook, LinkedIn, HighFive, MySpace, Orkut -
Alright.
I'm gonna go with that Oliver Marks clearly doesn't [laughs] even raise his hand.
So I'm gonna say the majority of you -
unidentified voice: [inaudible]
Paige Finkelman: Far majority.
[laughter]
Who doesn't?
unidentified voice: If you don't, leave.
[laughter]
Paige Finkelman: We miss you.
[laughter]
We're waiting for you to join.
So my second question is, by show of hands, how many of you leverage tools like Social
CRM, wiki's, blogs or social software in the workplace?
[people in audience raise hands]
Oh. More than I thought. Okay. Cool.
And that, my last question is, by a show of hands, when you're working is email the principle
form of communication you use to communicate internally with your co-workers?
[people in audience raise hands]
That's a fair number. Okay.
So, just wanted to get a little pulse.
So generally speaking the majority of this audience uses social applications in the workplace,
except for a couple of guys in the back. Majority of you use email at work and there are quite
a few adopters of, of social tools within the workplace, which is good.
So I just wanted to get a sense of what sort of caliber the audience was.
So we're gathered here today to delve a little more into the second, third, second and third
questions, which is the usage of these tools in the enterprise.
You know the, the answers to second and third questions are changing rather rapidly and
have been for quite some time. More and more enterprises are acknowledging the value of
collaborative technologies and these tools liberate us from the constraints of legacy
communications, like email.
Social tools also provide business managers with access to the right information at the
right time through a web of interconnected applications, services, and devices.
Ultimately collaboration encourages the collective intelligence of many to bubble up to the surface,
flattening the organization which translates to a competitive advantage by increasing productivity,
agility, et cetera.
So as technology is shifting away from a data centric perspective to a more people centric
perspective, a pro, a profound shift in the way we work and communicate is occurring.
Work, work groups are no longer limited by geography or time zones.
I don't know if you all recall the author Thomas L. Friedman. He wrote a book quite
some time ago acknowledging that the world has indeed become quite flat, at least from
a collaboration perspective.
So why is this important? Why should we care?
For starters, it marks a significant change in the ways companies source business intelligence;
it gives everyone in the ori, organization an equal opportunity platform to be heard
without needing to yell. Humans are inherently social; look around, we're all here in this
room to engage and interact and ultimately, hopefully learn from each other.
And now that the technology has arrived to mimic the social nature inherent in people,
adoption of social computing is on the rise; bringing with it valuable intelligence that
can solve complex problems.
And not only are these problems being solved, but we're learning every step of the way the
best practices and the cultural impact those technologies are having on work culture.
So I was looking around for a statistic to share with you about what, how big this market
is. And the most accurate one I could find was from ReadWriteWeb, weed, white, web and
it was from April 2008 and it said the Enterprise 2.0, which is loosely the term used to define
collaborative technologies, it's very umbrella term, was to become a 4.6 billion dollar industry
by 2013.
That's, that's, that's a chunk of change. And there's significant vendors here in this
panel that represent pretty significant organizations that are clearly have something to say, so
with that I will, without further ado I'd like our panelists to introduce themselves,
starting with my friend and IIT Alumni, Anshu.
Please state your name, who you work for, and what you do for your employer.
Anshu Sharma: Go IIT, especially [inaudible].
So my name is Anshu Sharma. I work for a company called Salesforce.com. I run product management;
I'm a vice-president of product management for the platform group. And what I do for
the company is help figure out our vision for our products which in this context probably
most relevant product is called Chatter, which is our social collaboration tool, which extends
our platform and C-item capabilities to make it a more, more social tool.
And I think I'll have a lot of words to say about these things.
The 4.6 billion dollar number was interesting. I always wonder where the last 100 million
dollar comes from when you come up with 2013 numbers, but that's a ReadWriteWeb question,
not a Paige question.
Paige Finkelman: It's true.
[laughter]
Do you wanna share your mic?
[laughter]
Raju Vegesna: Hi, I'm Raju Vegesna. I'm the evangelist for Zoho. My responsibility is
to just get the word out of, out and educate many users about Zoho.
We're a company based in Pleasanton, but most of the, well 90, more than 90 percent of the
company is just behind the IIT campus in, in Chaley.
So we, we have been around for 14 years doing private, bootstrap, profitable, and doing
well so far.
Oliver Marks: Hello everybody. I'm Oliver Marks. I'm a [inaudible] at the Sovos Group
which is a, a new company which is basically all about enterprise collaboration consulting.
And I'm the only person on this panel who's not a vendor. I'm actually a platform agnostic.
So what I do is I go into large companies and organize their collaboration strategy
and tactics.
And I actually worked inside Sony Play station running their collaboration environment for
two years which sort of informed me for a lot of other work I'm been doing subsequently.
Ross Mayfield: My name is Ross Mayfield and I'm here to fix your email problem.
[laughter]
I'm with a company that's called Socialtext. We started back in 2002 as a Wiki platform
and it evolved into a far broader platform with everything from social spreadsheets to
microblogging and activity streams.
And in general what we do as a group is help provide the tools and some of the practices
for people to change and transform their businesses.
Matt Tucker: I'm Matt Tucker the CTO and co-founder from Jive Software. And so I guess if it's
a 4.6 billion dollar market, we'll leave maybe 600 million for the rest of you guys.
[laughter]
Matt Tucker: I don't know. Maybe. Ouch.
[laughter]
Greg Dawson: Hi, I'm Greg Dawson. I work for a small startup that just went public a couple
years back named Google. And I work on Google Wave as a product manager.
Matt Tucker: What's your real name.
[laughter]
Matt Tucker: What's your real name?
Greg Dawson: My superhero name is Dr. Wave.
[laughter]
Paige Finkelman: And Greg just for everyone's benefit, can you stand up real quick?
[pause]
Greg's actually got jeans with the Wave logo monogrammed onto the pockets.
[laughter]
Yeah, he's that into it. [laughs]
Greg Dawson: Hey, you know gotta have superhero jeans.
Ross Mayfield: Wrangler, that's old school.
Paige Finkelman: Sure, sure.
Okay, thank you gentlemen.
I wanted to say a quick word about the format. We're gonna engage in the panel conversation
for about an hour and then we'll open it up for Q & A. There's a microphone here in the
middle of the room.
I also wanted to mention, for those of you with devices and are on Twitter, the hash
tag for this event is IIT; it's pretty straightforward.
So I'll be refreshing the search page and getting questions that way. If you're a little
afraid of the mic, please feel free to use social microblogging tools in the social media
revolution in the workplace panel. [laughs]
Okay. So I have a few questions. Actually I wanna; I wanna talk to Ross real quick.
So Ross you've been in the, the Wiki business for quite some time.
Ross Mayfield: Yes, I have.
Paige Finkelman: There's a lot of vendors in this landscape.
It can be a little overwhelming for someone because it's so saturated.
How do I know which Wiki is best for my problem?
Ross Mayfield: So I don't think it's just which Wiki. I think, there's a lot of choice
in the market, which is a really good thing. The best place to try to figure out what the
real difference is, is kind of where did these companies start.
Everybody, whenever you're starting, it's, it's kind of a funny thing. Every single company
starts with a single product and every single product starts even with a single feature.
And the DNA of what you are is very much from where you began; the early customers that
you got; the problems that you tried to solve; the culture your built in your community;
within your company and the community around it.
So for us, we chose kind of the starting point of a Wiki which is the more collaborative
of the applications. It's actually the most widely used behind the firewall, unlike let's
say the public facing the social media, there's other things that have grown, let's say even
beyond, let's say Wikipedia to a degree.
But I think also, I mean everybody has a different start. You started off as a, doing public
facing forums; you started off as kind of the daughter of all demos or as an, well Google
is, is, started as a search company, right?
And, and I, I think this might be -
Paige Finkelman: They're a startup too, by the way.
Ross Mayfield: Well they do all kinds of - right
Greg Dawson: [inaudible]
Ross Mayfield: Really?
[laughter]
The, no but, but really I think if you, if you look at it through the lens of where did
they start and take a look at their products; the capabilities around it; and what their
customers have actually achieved with it, that that's, they're very clear differences
in how they've [ ]. In, in both the depth of what they did and then what they discovered
along the path.
And actually within all these vendors, every single vendor has a product within their platform
that's very different. Like right now one of the things that we offer is the only microblogging
solution that's integrated with a broader platform; that broader social platform, you
could say.
But so I, I think there's enough differences. People just have to do their homework.
Paige Finkelman: So Oliver as the only non-vendor - I love that you're in the middle –
Oliver Marks: Yeah.
Paige Finkelman: and I know Oliver on a personal level that you're, you're pragmatic and you're
quite a realist, so are we going about this the wrong way?
And my question really is should we instead of being social for the sake of being social,
instead start with the problem and try to solve it, evaluating the best tools without
sort of thinking from the C-Suite down, what's our social medial strategy? What's our, what's
our collaborative strategy? Are we, are we going about this the wrong way, is, is my
question.
Oliver Marks: There is no one, one way, I mean, there, so there's the, to set the stage
for this year, it is a very crowded market. We're sort of an embarrassment to Rich, because
all the different technologies out there.
But the, the caveat to that is that most companies now are awash with, with dozens of different
systems. So any sizeable sort of company will have social tanks.
Jive; somebody will be using being Google legally or illegally in the company. Somebody
else will be using Zoho probably and Salesforce is another component.
So to, to address the problem, essentially what you're seeing from a high level is that
the C-Suite guys are looking down and they're seeing all these mushrooms growing up; all
these little what I call collaboration silos building up.
So the worst case scenario is where you have dozens of different user names and passwords
with dozens of different systems.
So while you might have 100 people in say a sales and marketing department working and
interacting wonderfully well, in say Jive, ClearSpace or Jive Social Business. The people
outside that don't necessarily see that.
And they, if, if there are fiefdoms and political currents and undercurrents running through
the company, which are, frankly there almost invariably is, then these people will tend
to actually sort of retreat into their castle and, and, and actually use the technology
the exactly the opposite way for which it was designed.
And I see this all the time. So I think this year, sort of to summarize, there is a tremendous
amount of tremendously good technology out there. There's an awful lot of people jumping
on band wagons and doing me too technologies. Twitter came along and now there's dozens
of Twitter variants of varying degrees of, of, of use, I guess.
But to Paige's point, you really have to put the, think very clearly through what it is
you're doing and why you're doing it; just as you would with anything else in life. Pick
the appropriate tool for the appropriate job.
Paige Finkelman: Um. To fix a, to fix a problem.
Oliver Marks: To fix a specific problem.
Paige Finkelman: Not to be social -
Matt Tucker: Paige, are we allowed to just jump in and, and keep answering the question?
Paige Finkelman: Absolutely not. You'll speak when spoken to. [laughs]
[laughter]
Matt Tucker: This is going to be the most -
Paige Finkelman: No, go ahead, Matt.
Matt Tucker: boring panel ever.
[laughter]
Paige Finkelman: [laughs] What would you like to share?
Matt Tucker: Is this live, I don't know.
unidentified voice: It is.
Matt Tucker: Excellent. So one way that I take that question and, and this is an interesting
report from Gartner that came out, I think about two weeks ago.
And one of the statistics was that 70 percent of all IT-led social initiatives would fail
and -
Paige Finkelman: What was the percentage? Sorry.
Matt Tucker: Seventy percent.
unidentified voice: Something like that.
Paige Finkelman: Seventy percent.
Matt Tucker: Something like that. And, and if it's a business-led social initiative much,
much more successful. And that's absolutely what we see every day.
And it's really, are you approaching this from an infrastructure perspective? Is this
a tool? Or are we actually trying to solve business problems?
And we absolutely always look for the business buyer. We know that those social initiatives
are much more successful.
There are IT departments that get it that are focused on, on solving business problems
and can do it the right way, but in terms of what is the right way to do this: start
with a business buyer; start with how do we actually leverage these tools to solve business
problems; and they're invariably much more successful roll outs.
Paige Finkelman: So, so if your current buyer is a line of business buyer, do you ultimately
want to be on the CIO agenda, and have him earmarking dollars? Do we want collaborative
technologies and Enterprise 2.0 technologies to be their own bucket?
Matt Tucker: We like the CIO budgets, absolutely.
Paige Finkelman: Yeah, sure. [laughs]
Matt Tucker: And, and this is a market that's interesting because it is still very early
and there is no line item in most IT budgets for social software still. Maybe next year.
There's just starting to be a shift and, but it is still taking money from some existing
project in order to do this spend on social.
And ultimately yes that's probably where the budget will live, but the way that most of
these projects play out is business buyers sometimes they will pull together, it's the
CMO; every once in a while it's HR; sometimes it's the sales organization that wants to
change the way that they're working together.
And they will pool and their, their resources they will go to IT, they will say, "Obviously
you guys were on our infrastructure and maybe it comes out of your budget, but here's the
problems we're actually trying to solve."
So from a budget perspective, probably it does ultimately come from the CIO office,
but more successful if it's not actually being driven from there, at least for now.
Paige Finkelman: Gotcha, Greg.
Greg Dawson: So, but I think the issue comes up that Oliver was talking about earlier,
that it's not just that HR or sales will, will get together and wanna do this.
What happens is they all wanna do their own solutions. They all have their own sets of
problems and they wanna solve their own sets of problems.
And the problem specifically with social media software which is a sort of all encompassing
word and I don't know exactly what we're talkin' about there, but, but the problem with social
media software is that like -
Matt Tucker: Social business media.
Greg Dawson: I'm sorry, social business, social business media software. Is that, is that
–
[laughter]
No, but the, the problem is that if it starts to break down, if sales is using one set of
things and HR is using another set of things, but the problem is that's the way enterprises
work. Like they're, they are their own little fiefdoms. So what do we do about it? Like
how do you, how do you start to make it so you can have a comprehensive set up within
your enterprise and people can actually get the information they need even though the
HR group is not gonna talk to the sales group and wants to have a different solution?
Paige Finkelman: Uh-oh. Anshu, do you wanna talk?
Anshu Sharma: Sure. I like to talk.
[laughter]
I was counting the number of minutes I can stay quiet; it was a bet with a friend. It's
past my bedtime.
I think two things I want to say. One is, there is a way of addressing that problem.
But how many people here went to school before there was Facebook?
[laughter - people in audience raise hands}
Right?
[laughter]
And what happened was we all survived, right? We built some friendships, we made some friends,
real life friends, and it was all good. In fact, Facebook, if you remember, evolved.
Initially it wouldn't let you in unless you were at a particular college, right? If I'm
not wrong about that.
And over period of time, people realized that, "You know what I just don't want to talk to
my students in my college, I wanna actually talk to my friend who graduated last year."
And slowly Facebook opened up and it spread from there, right?
Because to solve a particular problem for a particular set of users did not come to
me and say, "Hey, you should have a social network because how can you be in school and
not have a social network or be in business?"
So any of you who's ever used CC, BCC, received an email from an application that you didn't
want to receive, or had to log in to an application in three different places to find out whether
your paycheck has arrived or not arrived, has a fundamental problem, which is it's inconvenient.
And there are two parts that will help us get over the hump if there is a hump. One
is there are, one is, yes it's Wednesday, I will tell you the hump joke later on. [laughs]
[laughter]
Paige Finkelman: No. I don't think we can let this go, I think we have to talk about
it now.
Anshu Sharma: Alright. [laughs]
[laughter]
That, I'll delegate that to you.
Paige Finkelman: So -
Anshu Sharma: So I was gonna say, so the way we've seen people start beginning to use our
charter product, for example, is they might start off in a sales and marketing team or
they might start out in an HR team or one particular group, and they may be following
an opportunity. Hey, this is a potential customer of yours; I'm talking about this customer;
they're not thinking, "I'm doing social software."
Just like kids at school were not thinking they were doing social networking because
there was no such thing. They were doing homework and they had friends they wanted to ask questions
on while filling of the assignments, maybe called cheating I suppose. But they were collaborating,
right? And collaboration is good apparently.
So we think that people will start using these tools in the context of the application; so
that's one part.
And as that circle of people that you need to collaborate, not that you desire to collaborate,
need to collaborate expands because once the sales guy talks to the marketing guy for the
collateral, then the contract guy gets built in, then they have to talk someone in legal.
The circle expands in a natural secure share manner and that's the responsibility of us
vendors to make sure that's both natural as well as secure and sharable.
The second aspect is, once you have that in place you need to make sure that it's not
just people talking to people, because half my emails are not coming from people; they're
coming from systems that say, "Our bug system yesterday analyzed 73,000 bugs and here is
two bugs that failed" or I'm getting an email that your expense report is three days late.
I don't want that in an email because that's not the right way for the email system, these
enterprise applications.
So the problem, the second problem we're trying to solve in my opinion is systems talking
to us as human beings at, not interrupting me, me going there and being able to search
on a field and say, "Give me all the things related to expense reporting" for example.
I think if we can make these two problems solve, which is what Charter is basically
designed to focus on, then I think you have solving the specific problem for a specific
set of users and there's a natural evolution. And I'm sure a lot of other tools are trying
to do the same thing.
And -
Paige Finkelman: So it's an issue of productivity…
Anshu Sharma: And if you're gonna do that then -
Paige Finkelman: …is what you're saying.
Anshu Sharma: No, I'm not saying productivity. I'm saying the end user has a specific problem
and we need to help them solve that and as a result of that there will be, you can call
it productivity, agility, there'll be hundreds of things that happen today as a result of
email, that will happen faster and in a less inconvenient manner for the end user.
So that's, and productivity is part of it.
Paige Finkelman: So, so on that note, email, the dirty word, in the collaboration space.
I did have a question for Greg, Dr. Wave.
Greg Dawson: Yes.
Paige Finkelman: So there's probably a lot of Google people in the room, outnumbered
and outgunned, but I'm gonna ask it.
Wave has been labeled as a hosted conversation that provides business context to communication
and collaboration. I just, I just did your elevator pitch.
Greg Dawson: Alright.
Paige Finkelman: So Wave does not claim to replace email, but rather downsize your inbox.
Are you simplifying my workflow or complicating it 'cause there's something else I have to
check in with?
Greg Dawson: Well, so I, I think the, so the core problem is that people think, people
use email 'cause they're trying to get something done. And, and, and I think, as we were talking
about earlier, like they, there is massive amounts of email coming to people that they
don't care about, that's not useful and then when people are actually trying to get something
done with it, they're, and they refer to it as collaboration through email; it's cumbersome,
it's – I hate to use the word linear. Where, where you're just sort of trying to go back
and forth and it's not very efficient.
So what we're trying to do with Wave is take another approach. Rather than thinking about
how can we make email better? Just think about like what are people actually trying to get
done?
And what people are typically trying to get done are sort of having conversations about
things and trying to come up with an end product through, over the course of that conversation.
And so that's, that's really what Wave is designed to be is to allow people to, to do
that smoothly.
What we have been finding is that people will, as they're using email, after they've used
Wave, they start to then, I think the best comment we had is, is "Wave made me resent
email." Because once you start using it then you realize, "Yeah, there are all these ways,
ways that email's breaking down."
So I guess we're not tryin' to say that we're replacing email. What we're trying to say
is we're giving people a way to collaborate that they used to try to do in email. If that
makes sense.
Paige Finkelman: So Oliver, you have some comments?
Oliver Marks: Yeah, just a, a bigger point, I actually did a white paper of for Cisco
that I think they're finally gonna publish later this month on the future of work.
And one of the points I make in that is that we, we basically have slown up on a very old-fashioned
postal and document paradigm.
So while Wave is a wonderful tool, the, most of the people on the planet who don't work
for Google and who aren't sort of spending 14 hours a day looking at their browser and
aware of all the latest web tool technologies coming out every day and so on, are still
very much stuck in a, practically a hundred year old way of thinking. Where you, you email
is effectively like letters coming through your letter box, except that there is no,
there's no regulation of it. I mean it's just pouring in and you're like Pavlov's dog reacting
to it and constantly -
Greg Dawson: [inaudible] anymore involved.
Oliver Marks: Yeah.
Greg Dawson: It's basically.
Oliver Marks: Yeah, I mean fundamentally the, the way people work nothing has changed there.
So you, you substitute the, the big gray filing cabinet, for a, for a Sharepoint or whatever
it is. But you've got this fundamental problem. And this is true for all of the vendors on
this panel, and through the entire industry.
That is the way people work still and it's very, very easy to - [bad audio}
unidentified voice: They shut you off. They didn't like what you were saying.
Paige Finkelman: [laughs]
[laughter]
unidentified voice: Sound.
Paige Finkelman: I have a control button to shut you off.
various voices: [inaudible]
Oliver Marks: Yeah, I mean I, I've made my point so.
unidentified voice: [inaudible]
Paige Finkelman: Just yell.
unidentified voice: [inaudible]
Paige Finkelman: Mike, can you help with the mic?
Mike: If you speak close to the mic.
[pause]
Mike: Testing one, two. Don't know what happened.
Paige Finkelman: Mike saves the day.
Mike: Mike with the mic.
Paige Finkelman: Thank you, Mike.
Mike: Yeah.
Oliver Marks: Yeah. So I mean that's the fundamental problem that, well to be fair all these vendors
are doing wonderful things with their technologies, but that is the fundamental problem we're
grappling with.
So the sales guys for all of these companies basically are going in to the room and demonstrating
all these fantastic new ways of interacting, but there is a huge training and understanding
exercise.
And the point Anshu was making in closing for this point is that even though there's
an awful lot of people on Facebook, that it still ultimately a minority for the way, particularly
the way we work internally.
Paige Finkelman: So if, if email, the legacy application, is not going anywhere soon, why
don't we focus on fixing the legacy application?
Anshu Sharma: I'll take that. So that's an easy one.
Paige Finkelman: Instead of reinventing -
Anshu Sharma: Just like email didn't make telephones go away, right, you still use phones.
Paige Finkelman: I don't answer my phone.
Anshu Sharma: I, I know I tried calling you.
[laughter]
But -
Paige Finkelman: I blocked your calls.
[laughter]
Anshu Sharma: I know. You also blocked my email and my Facebook.
Paige Finkelman: I know [inaudible]
Anshu Sharma: Seriously though. I don't think the purpose for any of our tools is actually
to kill email, replace email, or anything like that. At least it's not for me.
And I'm not even here talking just about sales forces approach. I think none of us are, because
this is alumni crowd for me; this is fellow alumni that I'm talking to.
The, I think the purpose of some of the tools that we are building here is to make, as I
said, our lives easier in different ways and if as a consequence of that you get fewer
emails and you like that, good, right? Because nobody likes receiving 17 emails from their
collaboration system either. I have a collaboration system, that's Consumer World, that sends
me an email every time I get a mess, an email message. I don't actually like that.
So I don't think they're focused on killing email, replacing email. What we really wanna
do is in an organic fashion do for the enterprises what Facebook did for college students and
consumers.
And if we can do that, we'll be helping people collaborate with each other and getting their
work done. I don't mind if 500 years from now there's still an email system. I actually
like email; sending one to one email when I really need to talk to just one person.
Raju Vegesna: I think as we look at it there are, there are, it doesn't work?
unidentified voice: [inaudible]
Raju Vegesna: Okay. So there are personal communication tools like email, where -
Anshu Sharma: Close to your mouth.
[laughter]
Raju Vegesna: where one email communication is more inclusive than the, the like say video
conferencing is more inclusive than audio which is more inclusive than say chatting
or which is more inclusive than email.
So each of these, each of these systems have their own purpose, so I will try to categorize
all of these as personal communication tools.
Then we have public, group or organization specific communication tools. These include
say blogs or discussion forums and, and microblogging within the organization, several of these.
But the real value comes in when you use these individual communication tools in context
with your business like when integrated with your CRM system so when your email system
talks to your CRM system, which in turn talks to your financial system, your, your, similarly
other systems your marketing, your content systems, collaboration systems.
I think when all of these are merged together I think it can be really powerful because
they are, as Anshu said, they are contextually integrated and there is, there is greater
value there.
And they, each of these tools they do have their own place in the system.
Matt Tucker: So I do think we, we need to talk about Wave and email in particular, for
just one more second.
And so one, one interesting thing I've noticed in my network people telling me, "Okay I went
and tried Wave and now I've come back a few months later." And maybe I haven't visited
it for three months and it's kind of a ghost town.
Paige Finkelman: I actually -
Matt Tucker: And it's very consistent and I think the reason for that is there isn't
email integration yet. And I'm sure you guys are working on it, but how do we get sucked
back -
Greg Dawson: We should do email integration?
unidentified voice: [inaudible]
Paige Finkelman: That was one of my questions.
Matt Tucker: That would have been a good question.
unidentified voice: Answer it quickly.
Matt Tucker: Too late, too late.
[laughter]
Paige Finkelman: It came better from you.
[laughter]
Matt Tucker: But it is critical to build bridges back to where people already are and how do
I often get sucked back into Facebook -- it's because I get an email telling me that there's
a Facebook update and then I get sucked back in.
And that's how we get work done; that's how, we do have patterns; we do have scripts that
we follow; and, and email is one of them and that is why it is so critical to build bridges
between these systems.
You use email as a tool to suck people back in. And yeah, ultimately we want to get rid
of some of the worst abuses of email because it is abused all the time inside of our companies.
And it is good for some stuff, but we should also use it as a bridge.
And, and there's other ones too. So we use Excel, we use Word; we need to use those as
bridges into social software as well. If we don't reach back into the tools that we already
use every day, then ultimately it just makes it much harder to adopt something new.
Paige Finkelman: That's a good point.
Greg Dawson: I, I gotta comment on that.
Matt Tucker: It's not a ghost town?
Greg Dawson: Um, it, it's not depending on which part of the town you're in. The, the,
the biggest issue, and it's funny that I'm on a panel about social media, is that we
don't actually think of Wave as a social product. We think of Wave as a productivity tool.
It's a place for getting things done and the, the comparison we often kind of use is if
someone gave you a car and you had no idea what it did, you'd be like, "This is a big
hunk of metal and it's kinda strange." But then when you had somewhere to go, you're
like, "Oh. Well this is actually quite useful to get me somewhere."
And Wave is a similar sort of thing where we need to, if you don't have something to
do it in, yeah, it's not terribly useful, but then what people are finding is when they
do have something to do in it, it is very useful. And that's when they get into the
point where they, they get used to doing things in, in that sort of way, and then they try
to go back to email and they realize that there were all these sort of ledges that they
bumped their knees on.
We are working on email integration, obviously. But there, there's actually - long ago in
a land far, far away, that land was called Sydney, Australia - when we were building
Wave, one of the things we did build initially was a way to, to just dump of all your email
into Wave.
But what we ended up finding which we thought was kind of fascinating, is everyone started
interacting - and I'm talking about Google Wave as if you all know everything about it
so, ask me questions if you don't know - but -
Paige Finkelman: Or Tweet them.
Greg Dawson: But essentially the problem that we, we had is that everyone then started treating
their Waves just like emails. People wouldn't edit each other's Waves. People were, were,
were not responding in the places they needed to be responding, they just started using
it like an email client and then said like, "Wow. Wave is a pretty crappy email client."
And it turns out Wave is a pretty crappy email client, 'cause it's not supposed to an email
client. It's supposed to be a Wave client.
So it, it's kind of interesting that you, you, I, I totally agree with you, that you
have to build those bridges back, but at the same time if you, if you just give everyone
the easy way out, so to speak, you don't push yourself; you don't, you don't try something
new because it's just too easy to fall back on what you're used to doing all the time.
So let me say again, we're working on email integration.
Paige Finkelman: And, and someone commented from the audience that Wave is really combating
the, the version issue, right? You can constantly see new versions without having to, and actually
that brings to my next point.
So Microsoft and IBM aren't here tonight. At least I don't think they are.
Anshu Sharma: There's couple of people.
Paige Finkelman: Oh, heh guys. [laughs]
So [laughs] if I'm a large enterprise and I already use Microsoft Office or Lotus Notes,
no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft or IBM.
[pause]
Vendors, have at it.
Anshu Sharma: Are you sure?
Paige Finkelman: [laughs]
[laughter]
Anshu Sharma: I don't know, like who's gonna say, "I got fired for doing this," right?
But these are very respectable companies, they have done amazing jobs; people have built
multi-[ ] carriers [inaudible].
As someone that I may be working for these days said, "Lotus Notes paradigm was probably
built before Mark Zuckerberg was born," right? So, 'conceived' were the words that Mr. Benioff
used. And I think there is something to it, right? These email systems and Lotus systems
are amazingly powerful tools from 25, 30 years ago.
And times have changed. And we wanna bring, we as in the collective we, and that includes
possibly probably the existing vendors that are eventually gonna see the light of Chatter
and Wave and all these things and come along to the, the, the brighter side.
But at the end of the day that's history. These are tools people have been using, it's,
they work in certain cases; clearly people are complaining about it, certain circles.
For us the focus is how do we take the, what Facebook did for consumers, bring it to the
enterprise.
Everybody in this room understands how to use Facebook. There's no confusion. You don't
go like, "Oh, I saw this link thing, what is that?" Like, "Do I have to click on it,
double click, it's it right click?"
And we've been trained not just on social software and Facebook, but actually been trained
to click things.
If you've ever used ERP application that didn't have a Web based interface - some of us are
old enough to have worked at companies or worked at old enough companies - where they
have those kind of tools from big database companies and such, you will realize that
clicking is not supposed to be what, as deeply engrained in our lifestyle as it is today.
You didn't ever click through your expense report 15 years ago because there was no such
thing as clicking through stuff.
So all that training that's gone into how we use the Internet, forget even social software
like Facebook, Twitter, et cetera, is training a generation of new college graduates, existing
workers, because now they have to talk to their Dads on Facebook, to come into this
new paradigm and they're trained. I don't need to train you how to use Chatter because
you're already pre-trained.
So I think a lot of that stuff goes away if we think through the paradigms that customers
are already used to and users are already used to. If we try to create new paradigms
completely, if I told you, I have to, in order to come to Google's campus you must rent a
horse guard, it'd be confusing.
Paige Finkelman: Or ride a bike.
unidentified voice: Bingo.
Paige Finkelman: I rode a Google bike earlier today. [laughs]
Ross Mayfield: Paige, so the thing to build on that, that needs to be respected is the
rate of change is a lot faster than what it was before.
The vast majority of Americans use social media on a daily basis - even with these really
large companies that you speak of, not me - it's kind of interesting because they're
still built on very old models of producing these kinds of tools.
When you end up having, like we have a, we release a new version every two weeks. SharePoint
releases a new version every three years, which means that it gets implemented every
four or every five years.
Facebook overnight early last year changed its entire user interface from kind of an
info boxes and widgets model to a stream, activity streams and feeds and status update
model; overnight. Three hundred million Americans' expectations about what this stuff was when
they came to work changed.
And the point is that, so we have to be set up as vendors at least to keep pace with the
rate of innovation that's gonna be on the Web and it's always gonna be faster definitively
than enterprise software.
In the meantime, I think we've spoken enough about like email and classical office tools
and things like that, but if you think about traditional enterprise apps, they're all top
down, highly structured, rigid business rules. The whole goal is automate business process
to drive down cost.
But the point is regular employees don't spend all day executing regular uniform business
process. They're handling exceptions to business process; they're handling when the design
of those tools don't actually fit the reality of the environment that they're working in.
And the opportunity in effect, whether it's some of the interesting blends of how you,
we can make other enterprise apps more social. Or you can socialize around a business record
for example.
What you're really solving for is kind of the other half of enterprise software that
hasn't existed yet. Because the best thing we've got is, this really wonderful tool with
email that's actually is so flexible and so social that we've been able to bend it around
and attach things to it and use it for pretty much everything.
So we have to celebrate like the creation of new modalities or at least the testing
of the creation of those new modalities, but also recognize, like as you said, it's really
damn early in this stuff.
And while a lot of the vendors in this space have been around for seven years or more or
less and stuff like that, there's still a vast, larger opportunity and we're not talkin'
about the market size number; that's a, an actual tough nut to crack. So that's it.
Paige Finkelman: Oliver, go ahead.
Oliver Marks: Yeah, just one, one, one quick point is you were saying, Ross, the American
market, but in fact the world is increasingly global as I'm sure everybody in this room
is acutely aware.
So a couple of years ago I was in a very stodgy meeting in London where somebody, a whole
bunch of customers, CIO type customers, one of them said that if, if you told him a year
previously that he'd be dealing with partners in Costa Rica, he'd think you were absolutely
nuts.
But that's increasingly what's going on and you can't argue that email is actually quite
effective on that level. It just has to be used responsibly and the one other component
is if you do actually get access to a new collaboration system you're gonna get your
initial user name, password by email. So in some ways it's very foundational.
Now I'm somebody that spends a lot of time in companies actually talking about why they
should adopt collaborative technology, so I'm not being negative about it, I'm just
being realistic. So -
Matt Tucker: So we, we do believe that there is a failed strategy to products which is
let's take an existing product and add some social features, maybe it's a content management
system. I won't name specific products here. Maybe it's a CRM product and you add a few
really simple social features and you say, "This is a social business strategy." And
it's just not true.
And it's not going far enough and what this market is becoming, it's big enough, it's
interesting enough, there are new paradigms of interacting and all the traditional vendors
desperately want in on the hotness. They realize that it is interesting, that what we have
done in our consumer lives, it has changed, it has changed our lives; it's changed the
way we interact. And it is fundamentally changing the way that we work together, but just adding
a few social features to an existing product, it doesn't ultimately work.
What this market will become is a new set of products; a new, a new paradigm and it's
very hard to take a CRM product or a content management system, add a few social features,
and truly get all the way to where you need to go.
Ross Mayfield: So you're saying they shouldn't buy you and then combine the two things?
[laughter]
I'm just – (laughing)
Matt Tucker: Well I, so I know this, this isn't an easy market 'cause I know a lot of
the smaller vendors will, will be looking for exits this year and maybe that's the only
option available to them -
Anshu Sharma: I think that's a low blow.
Paige Finkelman: Let's let Anshu talk.
Anshu Sharma: I think you make a very good point that you can't just take a [inaudible]
system slap some social features on -
[laughter]
and magically have it become social because there's a fundamental problem.
Your system has to be Web based and if you're a Web based company such as the one that's
hosting this show, you have certain advantages which is you have the capability to reach
customers and users within an organization across organization boundaries and customers
across even customer boundaries based on rules, security, sharing models and such.
Having a set of users that passionately loves your technology, be it customer relationship
management, be it the platform for building new applications - we have hundreds of applications
such as risk management and others and financial applications by our partners - having customer
service and support applications.
These applications need to be brought in to the Facebook era. And while I like the way
you portrayed that, I think -
Matt Tucker: [inaudible] by the way.
Anshu Sharma: if you can transition the users, if you can, yeah I know it's in jest, I am
taking it as a joke –
[laughter]
And, so I think for a, for a company that's being IPO'd for a while just like my other
friend on the other side, I sort of always joke with [inaudible] search is a feature
it's not a company. So maybe CRM is just a feature, but maybe not.
I think the key point here is it's not, we can all take pot shots at database companies
and CRM companies and search companies and all that - I think that's kind of silly - the
key point is are we delivering a solution that people will find useful in day to day
business, and are there enough business applications that will come alive if you provide these
social capabilities and help these people move into the Facebook era.
And I think that's what we're looking to do and I think we, we have a shot at it.
Raju Vegesna: Also I think to run a business we need some basic set of tools, like say
CRM financial system, ERP system. These are all the basic systems that are needed to run
a business.
Use the social media tools at that level, I don't think so. But when you, you slam the
social media or integrate them on top of the existing tools, you can be really productive
and that is what we think the social media tools add to the existing systems. And we
think it is absolutely necessary that we marry these two, these systems.
Ross Mayfield: I think we can all agree with all of our stupid jokes is there's a chance
to rethink some really good core assumptions that we've had.
Paige Finkelman: Yeah. Definitely.
Alright, so Matt Tucker.
[pause]
Hi.
Matt Tucker: You're finally asking me a question?
Paige Finkelman: Yeah. So it should be known that I work for a company called TechWeb and
we're a Jive customer. I'm also a Salesforce customer.
unidentified voice: [inaudible]
[laughter]
Greg Dawson: Have you ever used Google?
Paige Finkelman: [laughs]
[laughter]
[applause]
I use [laughs] I use -
Greg Dawson: Oh, come on don't even say -
[laughter]
Paige Finkelman: I use Zoho.
Anyway, so Matt Tucker, people can be resistant to change, eh? What are some general guidelines
for successful implementation introduction because cor, clearly corporate mandates aren't
gonna work if you just slam social business software on people and say put it, put it
in there, use this now.
How do you get to that organic critical mass point where people start to see the tools
as a help as opposed to a hindrance and how do you, as someone who's selling them this
product, how do you help cultivate that?
Matt Tucker: It's a very good question. I think we'll, we'll probably all have some
tips and tricks to contribute to this.
There is a failed assumption that if you turn on social software, it will just automatically
take off like wildfire.
There are a few organizations that have a culture and that are open enough to the way
of, this new way of working where that does kind of happen and you put in, you put in
Jive or you put in Socialtext or something else and it will just kind of take off.
But more often than not, that doesn't always happen.
One of the, there's a lot of strategies that you can employ. You do actually need to, to
think about it; you need to have a strategy for rolling it out.
Very often we'll see people have even dedicated staff that are responsible for let's, let's
go and reach out to a new part of the organization and teach them this is a new way of working.
It's like Wave, they have to get it a little bit before they, they start using it.
And just spread it one pocket at a time and then there will be eventually critical mass
and it'll take over and it'll spread and there, there's a new paradigm, but it's not always
automatic.
One of the sort of very specific tactics that we always suggest is pick something that they
get done just using social software. So maybe it's a, if it's a sales person they're going
to, every time they, they go out and do a customer call they'll blog about what happened
there. And then people will comment on it; there'll be some interactions; and they'll
discover alright, there, there is some value to this. If I put my trip report up in social
there, there's a new set of interactions that will happen.
And so just get very specific about there is something that I get done everyday using
this tool and that starts to shift the mindset and that can be a pretty key way to get adoption
going.
Anshu Sharma: Funny -
Matt Tucker: Not just always automatic.
Anshu Sharma: Funny that you used sales person example and CRM kind of example.
[laughter]
Just let me point out that.
[laughter]
Paige Finkelman: Guys, do you, do you have any more tips and tricks you'd like to share
in, in this, this issue of cultural adoption?
We talk a lot about the new work force coming into play and, and obviously they have consumer
experience with the tools and then they come in and sorry IBM but there's Lotus Notes as
their email client and they're like, "What's going on?"
Greg Dawson: So one of the things that I've actually found from talking to a lot of people
is that you, you asked a question earlier of like why would you buy something other
than Microsoft Office or other -
Paige Finkelman: Or Cisco now, sorry, I forgot to mention Cisco.
Greg Dawson: The reason people are even thinking about doing these things is they think they
can operate better. And so the, the, the issue is you need to understand where are you currently
broken? What are these biggest pain points?
Because typically what you can do is you can find something that is just horrific currently
in the company - and I tell you every company out there has something that is horrific - and
usually one of those horrific pain points can be helped by social software of some sort.
And so what you really need to do is find where that biggest pain point is and then
just try to, try to address it. And it usually doesn't take long when you try to do that
for people to start to understand the value of it.
And then, and then I, I think Matt was absolutely right is that you need to, you need to start
it spreading like it's not the kind of thing where you can just mandate that everyone has
to start doing this and it will happen. It won't; ever. That's just crazy.
Oliver Marks: I'll back to my earlier point which is that the sales and marketing people
may, may take off like wildfire but because sales and marketing own this one unique collaboration
environment, some other part of the organization would dig a trench and start a third world
war because they don't wanna use that collaboration system. That's the first thing.
The second thing is that all the vendors are selling something new and it's a bit like
that TV show America's Next Top Model; everybody conveniently forgets about America's last
top model.
It's just like the previous generation software they bought which is still sitting around
possibly being used.
There's a number of issues there. But I think that was, that was a perfect point. It's not
hard in large companies to find problems that need fixing really urgently and I'm often
the piñata in meetings between different factions in the company. They all agree there's
a big, there's a big problem, but how they're actually gonna fix it is, is kind of the,
the really tough nut to crack.
Anshu Sharma: So I think there's two things from my perspective.
One is end user training; coming back to my same expense report example. If you joined
a company that used a three letter acronym company's software about -- even now actually
if you're running 4.7 version, you will find out that it's not intuitive to you how do
you get in from your, how do you log in, you have a client how, how do I basically find
my expense report; none of that is intuitive. You don't always have a link based, Web based
metaphor; unless you are running something which is very latest version.
What the Internet has done - New York Times essentially trains and Amazon trains users
to use Salesforce.com because when you know clicking on a link does something and you
are in a CRM system clicking on an opportunity, you intuitively know it's gonna do something.
So I think the beauty of the Web metaphor which is what Google has been actually leveraging
lately is unlike your spreadsheet system of earlier era. Intuitively you know how to use
a Web browser. And so that's one part.
Same thing is now happening - so that happened about 10 years ago - the same thing happened
in last few years with Facebook, to be honest. They trained millions and millions of people
how to use this new social collaboration software.
And we don't need to go teach people that. They intuitively understand why it's useful
in their personal life, what are the kind of things they do. Hey, if I wanna share a
piece of content -- I am doing a performance review in my HR department and we have guidelines
for our managers that they need to read, I, and it's publicly or selectively shareable
as long as I have security in sharing systems in place, which is where enterprise class
systems come into play - it's intuitive to you.
You take your document, whether it's created in Google Docs or whether it's created in
an office based system of your, and you upload it and you don't have to send an email saying,
"In order to understand the following systems you must go to this system. The login process
is as follows; it's a seven page template."
People understand 'click'; it will be readable. Whether it's a PDF file or whether it's a
Web page.
So that whole training cycle that used to take months and months for people that have
ever implemented an ERP system 10 to 15 years ago, or even a modern ERP system from certain
companies; this is a huge paradigm shift.
So I don't think we need to do a lot of work there; people understand how to use those
systems.
Ross Mayfield: Just so you know, within this market adoption has been kind of a classical
problem. One way and I think we've already spoken to part of it, but the, there's two
ways or places that you can adopt social software in the enterprise. It's either in the flow
of your daily work or kind of above the flow of your daily work.
There's a period in time in our history where we were doing a lot of kind of above the flow
of daily work, let's build a Wikipedia inside of the comp, inside of the company.
And then we really discovered that when we embed it in existing processes, in existing
work flows, which does require a little bit of training, you're developing new information
architecture. You're changing habits, but it's easy because you have a real problem
that you're solving; a real business goal; people understand that's why I'm changing
my behavior.
But still the problem is that ends up siloing itself to a degree. So what Michael Idinopulos
who used run McKenzie's Knowledge Management Practice and runs our Professional Service
Practice does now, is what we call a T-shaped adoption.
We roll out a shallow set of functionality to a very broad base of users. Ideally it's
already enterprise wide, within the first couple days.
And literally what that is, is we give them profiles that are about themselves, which
you can populate from their directory system. We host a Webinar, invite everybody in; that
Webinar talks about what they're doing and in the middle of it they use microblogging
as kind of a live chat channel.
So they walk away with this kind of shared experience and they're using just a little
simple thing. It's just what are you work, answering what are you working on in 140 characters
or slightly more.
And the net results of that is: what do you get? The basics of sharing dynamics across
organizational silos; the ability for people to update status or context in a way that's
richer than your IM system, which is really just kind of the state of a communication
channel. Am I busy? Am I available?
And more importantly you get the ability to have a place to go when search fails. Which
is I can, if I have a question and I don't know who to ask, I can go and ask it openly
and I get answers - try this on Twitter - and the important thing is I haven't forced an
interruption on anybody.
And that's a very, and so you do that broadly and then you follow with the base of the T
very deeply in these in the flow implementations, working your way kind of department by department.
And partially because the people who are broadly using it are like, "I kinda get from seeing
the way this one department's using it deeply and the way we're using it broadly, how this
could maybe be applicable to my business problem."
Because as a vendor we're not really gonna know the business problem. It, they're gonna
be the ones who will know it and we'll work with them to understand how to adapt a tool
to make it fit.
Paige Finkelman: So -
Raju Vegesna: That example of what are you working on, by – 'As Is' as we are seeing
with Twitter, I think it could be useful, but when it, when we integrate that with say
a project management system, that question becomes more valuable.
So what are you working on, so your project members really know what exactly you're working
on and you can start a conversation right there. You're not gonna poke him and ask additional
details unless you're interested in that.
But that's a good way to start an interaction. So that's what the contextual integration
of these social tools into the business tools can be really useful.
unidentified voice: Great. Yeah.
Paige Finkelman: So - no Greg.
Greg Dawson: Well,
Paige Finkelman: Go ahead.
Greg Dawson: So I, I, I think we've had a nice little love-in about social software
here. But I think there's, there's really this, this question that a lot of people don't
find social software in, outside of the business place useful and interesting.
A lot of people find, for instance, people on Twitter talking about what they're eating
for dinner overwhelming. And so they don't necessarily feel like they wanna bring that
into the workplace because their impression of social software is it's wasting time, not
that it's giving you useful information and potentially saving time in other places of
your life.
So the question then becomes: how do you sort of go into these places where they're like,
"Yeah, trying to bring social into my business is kind of like saying you gonna waste all
my employees' time." What do you do about that?
Matt.
Anshu Sharma: Well you actually do a very simple thing: you ask - I used to do this
many, many years ago when we were just starting to talk about cloud computing and I had a
very simple question I would ask an audience like this: how many people here use ATM's
to withdraw money? And it would be everybody. How many people here have ever like deposited
a check? Could be about one-third to two-thirds. And how many people here have ever deposited
cash more than hundred dollars? It would be about like 20 people.
And I would say, "You're my core audience, in, this is the year 2003-2004 for being able
to run your code applications in the cloud. You are the next circle and you, my friend,
will come to me in five years.
I think there's a similar pattern there which is some people are just not ready today. So
if you've been following, I don't know, Britney Spears all your life on Twitter, you're gonna
have an impression that all social computing is about using Twitter.
I'm sure when telephone systems were introduced, when email was introduced, people had the
same questions. Why would I want an evil kind of a system at work? That's gonna be complete
waste of time.
And I think between Wave, Chatter, Socialtext, Jive, Zoho, all of us we're trying to change
that mindset.
Paige Finkelman: So, so besides the vendors, Oliver, what do you think?
Oliver Marks: Okay, yeah. I mean just one quick point.
Facebook is ubiquitous but I mean I would question how deeply people actually use it.
A lot of people use Facebook to play FarmVille or whatever it's called,
[laughter]
and but very few people have much understanding of groups as we were discussing before, before
this session.
So people are unwittingly leaving their lives open to anybody that wants to sort of wander
by their page and has access to it. Same thing with Twitter, Twitter is supposedly growing
exponentially but you look at the number of accounts out there that are actually being
used and it's a relatively small number.
So I mean it is my sort of bread and butter that I preach every day, but you've got to
be very clear the word context you used, that is perfect. I mean anytime you're deploying
any of these technologies, just like any other tool or technology, you have to be very clear
what your intent is and where you're actually going with it, rather than just assuming,
as Matt was saying, that you're gonna install this thing and there's a sort of a magic unicorn
button that you press and all these wonderful things will happen and people's minds will
change, I mean it just you know -
Anshu Sharma: While I respect that kind of perspective, I would like to challenge it,
because it's a panel discussion after all.
[laughter]
The reason I'm challenging -
Paige Finkelman: The Anshu discussion apparently. [laughs]
Anshu Sharma: Yes. The reason I'm challenging it is because I don't find anyone here in
the audience saying this cc thing in email is just terrible, and it's a terrible waste
of, if, if actually you were a CIO and I came to you and said all email had only one recipient
field, or two and you could only send email one person at a time, and you were using it,
you were happy because one person could only send one email at a time, so there was only
so much email going around.
And I came and said, "You know what I'm gonna change this thing, now you can cc people."
And you'd be like, "Oh my god! What does this mean? I could be ccing 15 people at a time,
there would be explosion. This thing is never gonna work. Our company's gonna shut down."
And this fear of new features is partially, actually true and partially, actually false.
But irrespective of the, the key is we have to train and treat with respect our employees
that they know how to use features like following people, by updating status in the context
of the work environment, just as we trust them to use cc, bcc.
I can send an email to all of my company and many of you can too. There are mailing lists
which say all at whatever company dot com and we don't do that. There is a reason for
that. We know that's a bad idea. You could get fired.
Paige Finkelman: So, Anshu –
Anshu Sharma: So, I'll, I think we'll learn to use these modern tools and we'll be responsible.
Otherwise we'd be out of jobs.
Paige Finkelman: Anshu, I, I hate to be rude, but I'm gonna cut you off 'cause I have one
last question and then to be respectful of time I wanna open it up to the audience 'cause
I'm sure they've been intrigued by what you have to say.
My final question is about the future of software, the future of applications delivered over
the Internet.
Now if you attach the word "future" to anything everyone cringes, but bear with me. [laughs]
And this is kind of a scary one and, and we're along for the ride to a certain extent in
the collaboration market, in the Enterprise 2.0 market. We're hoping that it's going to
implode, that it will be earmarked on the CIO's budget list, but quite frankly we don't
know.
So my question is future looking will social just become a feature and what, what will
happen then?
Raju Vegesna: Well in the bigger picture, yes, social becomes one of the important features
within your business systems. But again we think it's gonna be, future is gonna be about
Internet systems so that it's easy to connect all these individual systems and then social
is, is another system; another layer on top your business systems. We think that's gonna
be a feature as we look at it.
Matt Tucker: No social is not a feature. But -
Paige Finkelman: It's also the first word in your product. Social Business Software.
Matt Tucker: Yeah.
Paige Finkelman: Right?
Matt Tucker: So it's crazy to think that we, we don't think it's just a feature. Wow.
No the, this is a new way of getting work done. And so yes, maybe, maybe we're in a
hype cycle, absolutely.
But the fact is my personal life is different; it's changed by Facebook and Twitter. I think
most of the people in the room would, would, would say that as well.
There was a lot of hype two years, two years ago about generation Y entering the workforce
and it frankly all sounded a bit like B.S. two years ago. Is this really true? Do they
really have different expectations?
But fast forward two years; they're getting a little more mature in their careers. It
is different. They do have different expectations about how they work together. They have been
influenced by these tools and the momentum is building.
And it's not a fad. It, we're not going back to our old paradigms and our consumer lives.
It's not gonna happen in our work lives either.
It doesn't, it's not gonna be effective to take the CRM system and add social features
or take a, take a content management system and add social features. It will be a new
market and an important market.
And that's why you have giant vendors like IBM and Salesforce and Oracle and Microsoft
doing such big investments in this space, is, it really is a big deal. That's why we
have this panel today.
So it's not just a feature. How it all plays out, of course, hard to say. But it, it's
not just we, we took some existing piece of software, put a little lipstick on, on that
pig and called it a day.
Paige Finkelman: [laughs] Oliver, yeah.
Oliver Marks: Yeah. So I mean the one thing we haven't mentioned all night is mobile,
which is the fastest growing thing - it's growing much more quickly than the Web did.
That's gonna be hugely, that's gonna be another wave of enormous change.
I mean I think it's all, this is a very difficult topic to, to talk about because for some people
it is a feature and it's a, it's a adjunct to their CRM system or whatever it is. For
other people, depending on what it is they're doing it is absolutely the heart and soul
and center of the business strategy of what that company's trying to do going forward.
So very, very variable depending on industry.
One other thing we haven't touched on very quickly is the space is polarized between
legal on one side which tends to really protect IP and protect intellectual information very,
tends to be very secretive.
And then at the other polarity, you have manufacturing companies that like to encourage the world
to think that you can actually see deep inside of their companies and communicate with product
managers and practically know people on a first name basis; making a product inside
a company because the company is so transparent and so on and so forth.
So this is a vast, vast topic. So I haven't really answered the question -
Paige Finkelman: No, I think the, that's pretty right on given – no, Anshu. [laughs]
Anshu Sharma: Do you want Doctor Wave, Doctor Wave to answer the future question?
Paige Finkelman: Well, I just think that being the only non-vendor and impartial, impartial
when it comes to platform, I think that's the most accurate answer we're gonna get tonight.
So I think we might conclude with that answer, if it's okay with you.
[laughter]
>> Thank you, Paige.
[applause]
Paige Finkelman: So with, with that I think we'll invite folks to come up to the mic.
I have one question here on, or a few questions here on Twitter, that I'll, be, also be asking,
but please feel free to step up; state your name, where're you're from and what your question
is.
Rom: Well, hi. I'm Rom. I live in the Valley.
I wanted to get, we, we talked a lot about Twitter. We talked a lot about Facebook, well
and good.
I think the conversation was about the enterprise today.
It is real that everybody's trying to figure out where the opportunity is; that's fair.
I was wondering from your examples, the vendors as well as Mark from a holistic perspective,
are there examples that you know of, specific examples where people have adopted a new paradigm
and what the use cases? If you are willing to share that, it'll be wonderful.
So something, somebody's was using email and then something else came along, but then the
integration was great, or they were using something else, they had to integrate with
email, a use case. One use case was suggested which is a sales person does a report when
they finish. That's a good example.
So I was looking for examples like that.
And second question is: what is the CIO or the CEO's nightmare that they're having; that
they don't know where the next Wave is coming and the company is not adopting it in the
culture?
So an example would be helpful rather than a broad generic thing which [unintelligible.]
Thanks.
Greg Dawson: So I'll give a, a use case. And again I, I said this before, I, I, I have
trouble defining Google Wave as social, because I think it really is just about tryin' to
allow people to get things done more quickly together.
I think the best example we have is there's a small consulting company that we work with
and they, they every month have to do a, a report for all of the, all of their clients.
So, and they'd are, always done it in email. They'd always written documents in Microsoft
Word and each person sort of summarized what was going on, and then they all emailed them
to an intern. And that intern had to collate all this information together. And then once
they pulled all that information together, they had to resend it out to everyone for
approval. And it took ages.
And so they, they tried doing that in, in Wave where people could actually do all of
these things together rather than sort of this, again linear process. And they, they
said that the most surprising thing was that they actually got it done on time which was
the first month they've ever gotten it done on time.
And secondly, they, they saved about eight hours. And I think in the end when you're
a 10 person company that does billable hours, saving eight hours is, is money that you're
making.
And so I think the core thing about using a lot of these types of applications is it's,
how are you going to get things done faster? Get them, get them done better? And get them
done more efficiently, to, to essentially save your company money.
And I think that's what people are really driving at and so it's not about making people
feel better about their company, it's about actually being able to connect people and
allow them do things more efficiently.
Rom: Thanks.
Oliver Marks: Can I, I'll just add very quickly is that you said what's keeping CIO's up at
night and ironically it's, they, CIO's and security personnel within IT departments have
traditionally protected the security of the company very tightly and are running a very
tight firewall.
What's keeping them up at night is the fact that particularly Google Apps - we're in the
Google building so this is fair play - is basically being very widely used.
So the, the Facebook generation we've been talking about a lot think nothing even on
a department, departmental level of whipping out their corporate credit card and in 30
seconds practically they're up and running and in software as a service environment,
which is completely outside the guidance and governance of the company.
But they are getting their job done very efficiently. So people turn, tend to turn a blind eye.
And I know of dozens of situations where employees are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
If get found caught using software as a service illegally they get fired. If they use the
technology they have currently inside the company they'll get fired because they didn't
get their job done in time.
Rom: Actually my question was the other way around. What's keeping CEO's awake at night
that they, a company is not adopting the next paradigm, it's the other way around.
Oliver Marks: Okay. I think people are, I think -
Rom: There are companies like Kraft and others and Proctor and Gamble who are trying to adopt
these things, I just wanted to get a perspective of -
Oliver Marks: Well that's the marketing side of the house which is a very different sort
of atmosphere if you like, the one we're talking about now which is about, more about internal
collaboration.
Rom: Okay.
CEO's I think despite all the hoopla are being quite conservative about this. And to your
point are looking for case histories and evidence of, of this being a substantial advantage
to their company before they actually put money against that.
Rom: Okay. Thank you.
Matt Tucker: I'll give a really quick example. I think there's maybe two categories that
have examples.
One is let's pick something we were doing before and just use a new paradigm to do it
way better; super valuable.
The other one is let's do things that we never could before.
John Deere is one of our customers and they're actually relatively innovative for being a
tractor company. And something that they, they used our software to do that they had
never done before is connect engineering teams in different parts of the world.
And it was never possible for them to have really productive email conversations 'cause
they didn't know each other; you couldn't just email all of them. And one of the things
that they did was shared some information about, and I think it was the height of a
fender on a tractor, and I don't remember all the details, but they figured out that
it actually saved them two million dollars to be able to share that information in the
specific way that never would have been possible before. You couldn't do it with email.
And so because of the new tool they were able to do something brand new and that ended up
having a lot of value to them.
Rom: So you're saying Toyota is a candidate customer for a lot of people.
Matt Tucker: Probably.
[laughter]
unidentified voice: You had another one. Maybe next question.
Paige Finkelman: Well actually I'm gonna ask a question from the Twitter stream.
This was asked: Can social networking replace business networking in the workplace? Will
it ever be as effective as face to face relationship building?
Ross Mayfield: No.
Paige Finkelman: We can all say no. I'd say no. Anshu, you wanna say yes?
Anshu Sharma: I'm waiting.
Ross Mayfield: My cofounder has been saying that the time spent face to face is too valuable
for work. And especially when you have distributed teams, this is actually true.
Half of our company's distributed so we fly people in on a reasonably regular basis to
get everybody together. And yes we get through some work, work, but a lot of it is just forming
the right social relationships so they can be more productive when they have to work
more remotely.
Paige Finkelman: Uh-hum. You know I worked in the conference business. I didn't do a
proper job of explaining myself, but I helped run the Enterprise 2.0 conference which deals
with collaborative technologies and I know these gentlemen from the event that I helped
manage.
And getting together face to face will never replace, I mean that's, I've heard it say
it's a little cheesy but it's the original sort of social networking. Right?
We're mapping the social graph to the Web in order to break down barriers of geography
and time zones -
Oliver Marks: Although Cisco would say with telly presence technology which is coming
on leaps and bounds that you can actually get, you feel more centered of that sort of
reading body language and facial expressions.
Paige Finkelman: Sure, sure non-verbal cues, et cetera, but there's something about engaging
with someone and looking at their face directly, I don't think will ever be replaced. We're
human; we're social objects so -
Anshu Sharma: For me it's very simple. Name one social networking technology. Going by
trains to meet neighbors, airpl, going by planes to meet people, cars, telephones, email,
Internet, none of this ever goes away.
The key question we are trying to answer is in this new Facebook generation are there
more productive ways of getting more done and maybe meet more people, less people? And
how do we get more done?
So I don't think anything of the past is just simply just gonna disappear and it's very
expensive to replace some of these three letter systems by the way, even if you wanted to.
Greg Dawson: So there, there is one example and I, I totally agree that it's, that, that
face to face is never going to be replaced.
But there is one example that we found that was actually kind of interesting in using
Wave where if you have a group of 12 people who are all trying to talk about a topic all
at the same time and they're in a room together, you can't do it very effectively. You need
to sort of keep it sequential.
Whereas there are tools that you can use now where you can have a dozen people all carrying
on a conversation and have it, and it, have it be effective and have it carried on.
Which I thought was really interesting. Like I never imagined that we would get to sort
of that point where there are tools that are, that really are better than face to face.
And I think there's a couple examples where it does work, but not in general.
Paige Finkelman: And I, I would concur in terms of like Type A extrovert personalities
and versus a not so extroverted, introverted person needing to yell to be heard. I can
see value in that, in that answer, Greg. That's true.
Why don't we have the next question?
Hernandez: My name is [inaudible] Hernandez and I actually have a question for Matt and
one for Greg.
[pause]
So for Matt, you mentioned social network, social software helps to solve the company's
problems, but I didn't hear like a concurrent example other than blogging about a sale or
example related to CRM or Sales Software.
What about the supply chains, what about the HCM, what about the issues of deploying the
social networks to other countries when even posting a picture, posting a name, you incur
in discriminations, you have a lot of sensitive data.
Could you come up with an example on how this solution solved the problems in a line to
actually the corporate goals?
Matt Tucker: Okay, I think I understand the question except for the part about posting
names in different countries and that being an issue.
Hernandez: Well as part of the strategy of deployment internationally if you sell your,
if you sell to John Deere you sell to all those [inaudible]internationals. So where
are the rules that are applied in the United States, okay but we going to France, Germany
-
Matt Tucker: Yeah.
Hernandez: even posting a name -
Matt Tucker: That, that is a really interesting question and I, so maybe we can dive down
on that one and there are a million interesting examples just answering the other part of
your question of different places that social software is getting used in product management
and engineering, in sales and often as a way to have the larger conversation inside of
an organization that's never been possible before.
So how do you actually connect larger groups of people? You can't really do it over email.
And you can pick just business problem after business problem that you can apply social
software to.
But drilling down on that question, there is, there are interesting issues around international
deployments. So there are different privacy laws in each country around how do you share
profile data.
In Germany there is an issue of workers' councils. And they have to go through a very rigorous
process in order to decide to adopt a new tool like social and it's hard to get through
that.
And there are different cultural norms about how people actually want to adopt this. And
we've definitely found that people are a little bit more ready for social software in the
U.S. than they are in most parts of Europe.
And so as you are rolling out social - and we, in particular. target large companies
and so we deal with this all the time - and maybe it's that the U.S. division that is
driving the adoption, but what they're really trying to do – Young Brands for example,
they wanna connect their folks in China with the people in the U.S. and yeah, it's hard
and there are different things you need to do in each country; much more than just make
sure it's in the right language.
Oliver Marks: I'll just very quickly interject that I think there's some legislation coming
from the European Union pretty soon about Facebook, about your personal rights on line.
And that's gonna - this is a young industry as we've all been saying - I think that will
have a significant impact, impact on all of this.
Ross Mayfield: A real quick thing is when you roll out to a multi-national, one of the
most interesting values that you have is the ability to start creating much more of a global
glossary; to help harmonize a lot of language of the, the language that people are using.
A weird example also is about how vastly different people use social software because of their
cultures, because of their languages.
If you look on Wikipedia - we all know the way that the English Wikipedia works - but
let's say with the Japanese Wikipedia, what they'll do is everyone will start writing
first on the discussion page and they won't touch the article page. And then eventually,
and they'll be collaboratively drafting and collaboratively drafting and get to a point
where they'll reach consensus and then post the very first version onto the article page;
very different from the way that an American would just slap an assertion onto the article.
Hernandez: Um-hum.
[laughter]
So thank you very much.
The other question is what happened to Google Wave? I attended some of the first meetings
around the headquarters and it was really hard to understand what is the concept of
Google Wave and from a marketing, so what is the business that you are trying to solve?
And even I'm checkin' on Twitter, there's a lot of questions is what is Google Wave?
And what is, how come Google Buzz from day one you get that iteration with the email,
you can download some discussions –
[laughter]
and I don't know, I mean even Kevin Ross in Diggnation last month. He still had a question,
he didn't even know what Google Wave was.
Greg Dawson: Thank you for asking that.
[laughter]
So I, I think one of the things to keep in mind is what we're trying to do with Google
Wave is not something that's going to happen overnight. This is not - in trying to build
a new way to communicate, this isn't something that, that ends up you put it out there in
a month and suddenly everybody understands a different way to communicate. It takes a
long time.
We knew it would take a long time. Unfortunately, there was, there was kind of a, I'll use the
term "buzz" of around Google Wave that we didn't necessarily try to contribute to, but
we didn't stop.
And so what ended up happening is I think a lot of people felt like, "Wow, Google Wave
is a) done"; which it's not. And b) it's, it's it's this new social product you have
to get on immediately.
And so what happened was a lot of people had sort of mis-set expectations and so what's,
what's happened is initially there were a lot of people who, who started using it and
then didn't know what to do with it and so it settled into people using it who, who,
who have found things to do with it; who enjoy using it. And then that base of users is steadily
growing.
And so it's kind of, I have to be honest, as a product manager on Wave, I'm kind of
excited that the hype is over. That, that there was that sort of a lot of hype going
on because a lot of it just wasn't accurate.
So, so in terms of why is, is Google Wave not in Gmail, whereas Google Buzz was initially.
I know I said the term Google like nine times in the last sentence, but whatever.
Paige Finkelman: It's really good Kool Aid here.
[laughter]
Greg Dawson: Yeah, Well -
Paige Finkelman: The buzz about Google Wave.
Greg Dawson: Guh-Guh-Guh-Guh.
So part of that was, was, we are sort of experimenting with different models of how to launch products.
I, I think there's, there's a lot to be learned from trying things in different ways and the
way, the way Buzz tried it was go out to everyone immediately who has a Gmail account and let
them have access to it and let them use it.
And that had some excellent things that happened out of it and there were also some, some questions
that came out of it. And it's really, it's been fascinating reading a lot of the news
articles, that there's kind of equal parts, some people are like, "I hate new things being
thrown in your face, I like to try it when I want to try it", versus people who are like,
"Show me the new stuff because I'm not gonna go look for it."
So I, I don't know if that's a great answer, but the answer is we're, we're trying different
ways of, of doing some of these things to see what will work.
Hernandez: All your answers are great answers.
Paige Finkelman: And quickly I see a few of you leaving, I just wanted to let you know
that there is dessert and coffee in the other room. We're gonna break in about 10 minutes,
but if you need to stretch your legs - the White Room?
unidentified voice: [inaudible]
The what?
unidentified voice: [inaudible]
Paige Finkelman: Oh there's wine too.
[laughter]
unidentified voice: There's been enough whining already.
Paige Finkelman: Oh, I misspoke. [laughs] In the wine room, there's wine in the other
room as well as coffee and dessert. So if you're, need to stretch your legs go for it.
I also wanted to mention that as I already did I work on the Enterprise 2.0 conference.
If you'd like to attend the event, I had our marketing team set up a code; it's my name
'Paige' – P-A-I-G-E.
And if you go to the Enterprise 2.0 Boston Website you can register for a free expo pass
or 15 percent off a conference pass. 'Cause clearly you're interested in collaborative
technologies and that's what we do at, at Enterprise 2.0. It's June 14th through the
17th in Boston.
So just FYI, I Tweeted it out so, FYI.
Yes, sir go ahead.
Monna: Hi. I'm Monna from Manymoon, we're a leading social productivity application.
The discussion is adopt a Wave again.
So there's sites, there's Softpage, there's Buzz and then there's Wave. What is Google's
enterprise strategy with social media?
Paige Finkelman: That's a great question.
[laughter]
Anshu Sharma: Never heard that question before.
Greg Dawson: We get that a lot but [laughs]
Paige Finkelman: Anshu do you wanna answer that one?
[laughter]
Greg Dawson: What-- you don't work in Surge or Google -
Anshu Sharma: What he said last time.
[laughter]
Greg Dawson: So, so I think one of the things that is, that, that's a bit challenging is
each of these products, and this is, this is something that I think needs to be improved,
is that we are building individual products that are sort of solving individual product,
problems in a, in a sort of, one might argue, too highly targeted way.
So to, to give an example, there is email as part of Google Apps. And email, while a
lot of people think Wave is supposed to replace email, it's not. There are times when email
is very useful and in fact partly because everybody, well just about everybody in the
world you'd wanna talk to has email.
That being said, if you're trying to do something and I think the example I gave earlier of
that, of that consultative firm that, that was trying to, to pull together their, their
sort of monthly report; that's hard to do in email. It's hard to do in Sights. Frankly,
it's hard to do in docs.
There are a lot of these kinds of process oriented operations that you do with small
groups of people that you work with all the time, that you really just need to be able
to get things done quickly, iterate with quickly, and Wave does that well.
Now the, one of the things that happens though is that so, so we built Wave as kind of this
experiment to see how well that works; it turns out it works well in that situation.
Then the next stage is pulling, pulling that in integrated with a lot of the other products
that Google has to actually make it work in a cohesive way because one of the things that
I think so many companies fall down on is that they expect users to understand all of
these products and all these distinctions and, and the, the sort of the difference between
- well and I won't use any examples on the panel – but, but the difference between
what a blog is versus what a wiki is.
And while a lot of people understand that there are many, many, many times more people
in the world who have no idea what these things mean. And so you have a friend who says, "Hey,
I just had a baby and I wanna tell all my friends about this baby." They don't necessarily
think, "Oh I should create a blog." Because what the hell does that mean?
What they think is, "I wanna share this information" and so then they go and they search for it
and they find hundreds of different words, wikis, blogs, et cetera, et cetera, any of
which could be used in these situations.
The reason I went on that tangent was because I think one of the things we need to do is
do a much better job of not having to have people understand what these tools are and
the distinction between the tools, but rather allow people to get the things done they need
to get done.
And that's one of the things we are trying to accomplish with Wave is rather than, I'm
going to, I need to, I need to talk to my sales team, so I'm going to go to this one
application. You start a Wave with it and that Wave can then morph and become what you
need it to become and the more it's integrated with the other applications - both at Google
and outside Google - I mean we are open sourcing Wave and we're doing that for a reason.
We think it's a good technology and it's a good platform that people can build on top
of to be able to, to have these things integrate. So you're able to just get started and trying
to do something rather than have to think through like what's the product I need? How,
where am I going with this, et cetera, et cetera.
Monna: So if I hear you right you're saying that Wave is a destination that you wanna
go to and then everything else falls into that.
When I wake up in the morning and I get my cup of coffee and I'm, and I'm looking at
email, instead of looking at email do you want us to look at Wave?
Is, is that, is that what -
unidentified voice: We want you to look at your browser.
[laughter]
Monna: Critical social facts.
Paige Finkelman: There -
Greg Dawson: Could be a conversation what do you look at first thing in the morning?
No, but in some ways yes. Is it going to be Wave and it is gonna be the interface that
Wave currently has? We have no idea.
But I think in the end forcing people to go into their browser and then choose the one
of 35 sites they wanna go to is not success, I think in the Web. And so as it, as all of
us need to get better at that.
Monna: Thanks.
Paige Finkelman: So I think we can all beat up Greg after the panel.
Greg Dawson: You can try, I'm tough.
Paige Finkelman: But, so one more question to close it out.
female audience member: I have a question too.
Well actually I wanted to sort of challenge the panel because I'm not buying it and I'm
not drinkin' the Kool Aid so much. But I'd like to play devil's advocate.
And I do understand that collaborative software is extremely important and I do understand
that there are certain applications. I'll give an example of Google Calendar, where
I wanna work with people all over the world and we're tryin' to plan let's say a trade
show and meet ups so - we can use this but we're going there for a purpose not because
it's like you're saying about Wave. Not because we love social media, we love chatting and
all this kind of stuff.
And so I would say that these examples of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn are all very specific
examples that have had very specific uses.
For instance, I think that Twitter's replaced, has, has done a wonderful job of creating
two-way communication between news organizations rather than just having AP News or something
go out and running headlines and then journalists picking up on this and finding sources.
Now it's become very popular to be a two-way communication between live TV, it's very immediate.
And also politically, reporting on Mumbai or reporting on what's happening in Iraq and
being a force for social change. Those have been very successful.
People who wanna collaborate on stock market, very immediate things. So there's particular
tasks that Twitter is good for, not necessarily a whole business.
And Facebook, I think, is really a, a community where in a, in a diverse world where kids
are now in many places around the world and have been to high school together and gone
away. And for many of us it's more of a community; a way to sorta keep -
Anshu Sharma: But is that your own experience or is that everybody's experience in the room?
Because I would challenge that question completely and say I don't use Twitter to track news
or publish news at all. I use Twitter to talk to my customers, for example, and find out
if they are enjoying the latest release of my product.
There are other people in this room who are using Twitter simply to deal with their family
members and -
woman from audience: I would say that would be a two-way communication that's very short,
I just -
Anshu Sharma: Yeah, exactly so is email. So I think to, to summarize this from my perspective,
I think we've all consensus on this as social software just can't be this amorphous tool.
For Salesforce for example it's very specific. We want people within the enterprise boundaries
and outside of eventually in a controlled manner to be able to engage in conversations
that are purpose driven and engaged with your business, existing business application so
that you can actually do your work.
And a friend of mine created this term called "BRP" which I love. It's called Barely Repeatable
Processes. So there's a lot of ERP systems and other systems that make your repeatable
processes work very well, but there are lots of things that you need to get done for which
we don't have a repeatable process based system because I'm not gonna invest half a million
dollars in building that system.
In that case, I need to choose a communication pattern that's most appropriate -- in certain
cases it's picking up the phone, but we strongly believe that there's a new paradigm; and I
call it a Facebook paradigm which we're leveraging with our Charter product line to introduce
a new way for businesses to get certain kinds of business done.
And all of us have a different slightly take on that, but that's basically what we're trying
to help you enable.
Paige Finkelman: Yeah. I think, I think he's, if I'm understanding you correctly, I mean
obviously there's an intention with every technology that exists
woman from audience: Right.
Paige Finkelman: and that's why it's successful.
Similarly, we're, in the enterprise we're mimicking successful consumer tools to achieve
ultimately a business objective; a business goal and not just be social for the sake of
being social, and, and that sort of fluff.
I think the vendors represented in the panel all have a stake in the game, otherwise they
wouldn't be here.
I know Jive over 2008 I wrote down this quote, or this stat. Matt Tucker. let me know if
this is true. You, in 2009 you were up 85 percent over 2008. Is that right?
Matt Tucker: Sounds right.
Paige Finkelman: That's some special sauce. So, so clearly they're accomplishing some
business objective.
woman from audience: Yeah. So the next - one of the things
Matt Tucker: I think we it probably -
woman from audience: that I would just suggest and I thought you were one of the best speakers,
by the way. One of the things that I would, in terms of talking about testimonials and,
and case studies and use examples, I think that what I was hearing, just hearing from
a lot of people was a lot of, a lot of, "Oh, social media's great. Collaboration's great.
This is a new technology. You're gonna learn to click."
What I really want to hear what exactly that kind of thing. What are the examples of how
you -
Anshu Sharma: We have several examples
woman from audience: Okay.
Anshu Sharma: and I could spend hours and hours with you and as I said -
Paige Finkelman: There's also a, there's something called the 2.0 Adoption Council that Susan
Scrupski runs. If you go on SlideShare just do a quick search you'll find a million and
one adoption examples, case studies, et cetera.
Anshu Sharma: And actually there's a social networking event and some of these people
I can guarantee you are using these kind of tools today to achieve certain business objectives.
And you can come talk to us and we can each tell you -
woman from audience: Well I'm okay. I can imagine what all those things are. I just
was suggesting that it would have been for me a more useful conversation if you would've
spoken more about examples, use studies and testimonials because it just sounds like,
"Oh it's" so –
[many people talking at once]
Paige Finkelman: You don't have to - perhaps we could ask the panel.
Oliver Marks: Let me just respond to that really quickly 'cause all of the vendors have
glittering examples of why you should buy their technologies and if you invite a sales
person from any of the companies on this panel along, they will amaze you with how tractors
were to save two million dollars or whatever -
woman from audience: I'm sure. I'm just saying it would have been nice if this panel -
Paige Finkelman: So, so potentially for the next IIT panel if there's interest in doing
a more sort of salesey, adoption, customer story, we could have half customers, half
vendors, that might make -
[inaudible]
Paige Finkelman: Okay, Oliver.
Oliver Marks: [inaudible] we all speak geek speak here. And the reality is that Micksi—I
don't know if you've heard of it – Micksi is enormous in Japan. That's all anybody uses
in Japan. High 5 is enormous in, in other parts of Asia.
Facebook is, is broadly speaking a Western European and North American phenomenon. And
-
Anshu Sharma: Orkut is big in India and Brazil by the way.
Oliver Marks: Yeah, exactly. So I mean you've got, you've got to all these different - one
of, one - I'll make this quick 'cause I know we, we wanna wrap up. But there, a lot of
people think that making something in their own image is going to actually scale up and
work for the rest of the planet is, is a simple way of putting this including the vendors.
So, so that's a big issue right now.
Paige Finkelman: Yeah. Well thanks, Oliver.
So quick round of applause for the panelists.
[applause]
And for yourselves for being here.
[applause]
And to the gentleman that put together IIT, Google, everyone.
There is an announcement you'd like to make? Go ahead.
Monishi Sanyal: I just wanted to thank the panelists, all the panelists. It was a great
discussion. Thank you, Paige. You can follow our blog at Enterprise 2.0.
On behalf of the IIT Madras Alumni Association we just wanted to thank all of you and hope
that your attendance will be an entirely repeatable process.
[laughter]
[applause]
Yeah, please help - I also want to thank all the volunteers; thank Google, especially Mutu
and Holly and all the alumni who helped us line up these, this wonderful round of this
panel and also a special round of applause to Kartek and Golshek for -
[applause]
[techno music playing]