The Social Customer Manifesto

Haystack Updates - May 17, 2006

Some news, hot off the presses on the Haystack front. Two big new capabilities to note this week: Multiple Haystack Support and RSS Feed Integration. Here's the skinny.

Multiple Haystack Support

We've implemented capabilities that allow a single individual (or, more correctly, a single digital identity as represented by an email address) to belong to multiple Haystacks. This is a big one. We realized early on that we are all members of multiple groups, and various aspects of "who we are" are relevant only in context. More importantly, when an organization is setting up a Haystack, that organization may only want certain traits to appear.

For example, profiles that are in a Haystack that's set up for a local bookstore might include favorite authors, whereas a Haystack for a medical office would likely want to have a tag category set up for specialty of practice for each doctor in the practice. Since a single individual might belong to both of these Haystacks (let's say the doctor volunteers at the bookstore on weekends), the profile the doctor needs to put in the Haystack for her medical office is going to be quite different than the one she puts in the one for the bookstore. This new capability easily allows this, and allows different Haystacks to easily capture different "facets" of a personality.

Here's an example of an individual who belongs two Haystacks, one for the BrainJams unconferences, and one for the recently-concluded MeshForum.

RSS Feed Integration

One capabilty that Stowe Boyd has noted is missing in other enterprise social networking systems is the ability to integrate "live web" aspects into a profile; a profile is typically a "static" construct. (I agree, this is critically important. Since "who we are" will be increasingly defined by the digital artifacts we produce, integrating feeds into your digital identity is a critical capability to have.) Stowe notes that he sees a need for:

"...importing RSS feeds of outside information into the profile (I'd like to link my blog, for example)"

Stowe, ask and ye shall recieve. (Check danah's profile in the Speaker's Haystack for an example.) Haystack profiles have the ability to pull in an RSS 2.0 feed, and the feed parser is even all AJAX-ified and stuff, so that a customer or prospective business contact can view your tags and the rest of your profile while the system goes out and grabs the most recent headlines from your feed.

Next?

Recent related items:

Podcast: Customer Relationships, Communications and Enterprise Social Networking
Haystack Updates - April 26, 2006

Podcast: Customer Relationships, Communications and Enterprise Social Networking

Had a great conversation on Wednesday with Shel Holtz, on the For Immediate Release podcast. We chatted about the link between communications and customer relationships, and the importance of communication within an organization. We also talked at some length about where things are going with Haystack, Cerado's enterprise social networking tool.

Would love your feedback! Click here to listen.

Links, Links, Links

"Link" is a word we all throw around a lot. A lot. Let's go to the source on this for a minute (source: answers.com):

noun

• A unit in a connected series of units: links of sausage; one link in a molecular chain.
• A unit in a transportation or communications system.
• A connecting element; a tie or bond: grandparents, our link with the past.
• An association; a relationship: The Alumnae Association is my link to the school's present administration.
• A causal, parallel, or reciprocal relationship; a correlation: Researchers have detected a link between smoking and heart disease.

verb, transitive

• To connect with or as if with a link: linked the rings to form a chain.
• (Computer Science.) To make a hypertext link in: linked her webpage to her employer's homepage.

verb, intransitive

• To become connected with or as if with a link: The molecules linked to form a polymer.
• (Computer Science.) To follow a hypertext link: With a click of the mouse, I linked to the company's website.

Now, those are just some of the definitions that are in current usage. And they are all about connection.

(social networking exercise, Chicago, IL, 2005)

When two things are connected, a link joins them. Take some linked items, and join them together, and all of a sudden you have a network. Dave Gray writes:

"Networks form the basis for everything, from the tiniest atom to the entire universe. Understanding networks and how they function may be one of the most important competencies of the knowledge economy."

I agree with Dave. Which is why from Sunday-Tuesday, like Dave, I'll also be at MeshForum. It looks like there'll be a few other folks there, as well:

• Shannon Clark, founder of MeshForum
• Manuel Lima, founder of VisualComplexity.com
• Robert Scoble and Shel Israel
• Heather Gold
• Anil Dash
• Michael Herman

And many others, too. Here are a few links where you can learn more about MeshForum, register, or even check out the Haystack-based network we're setting up for the event.

Quotable

Best line I've read all day.

"Good social networks provide ways for people to create just the sort of information to create useful affinities or ways to find the people you're interested in networking with. This is something I call the social surface area (graphic) but I think the potential for this in the enterprise are clearly still there, once initial concerns are overcome. Thus, the social media companies that find good ways to increase a user's social surface area without disrupting the business itself will tend to be most successful." -- Dion Hinchcliffe (ZDNet), from his post Social Networking Makes A Play For The Enterprise

Spot. On.

Haystack Updates - April 26, 2006

A bunch of news on the Haystack front. In addition to moving to a new infrastructure provider, have put in a load of new capabilities. The most notable two are:

Profile Permalinks

We realized that, if businesses are going to be using the system to enable customers to find the "right" person to help them from within an organization, organizational representatives need to be as visible as possible. So, in addition to finding individuals via the Haystack tag navigation, profiles are now permalinked and, therefore, discoverable via the big search engines. This also means that you can put a link to your Haystack profile in your email signature, or even link to it from a webpage. Or even from within a blog post.

Example: Permalinks to Dennis Howlett, Denise Ryan and Andrew Taylor.

And check this...the Google visibility rocks.

Private Haystacks

We've had a number of customers come to us and say "I love what you're doing...can we use this just ourselves, and not make the profiles visible?" The answer is now yes. So, Shel Holtz writes the following about "enterprise social networking" behind the firewall.

Shel: "To me, [enterprise social networking] means within the organization. I am convinced that there is tremendous potential in an all-internal social networking platform for large organizations that lets employees get knowledge and information, and make connections, among themselves."

There you go, Mr. Holtz. Any Haystack administrator can now choose to make his or her Haystack "private," and only allow visibility to those who are in the network. The Haystack itself doesn't even show up in the directory. Done. Next?

"Contact Is King"

1950s-1990s: Content is king.

2000s-???: Contact is king.

(cite: Howard Greenstein, quoting Shelly Palmer)

Facebook Gets $25MM In Funding

The hits just keep on coming. Facebook has landed an additional $25MM in funding, and Bambi Francisco is reporting that the pre-money valuation of Facebook was $525MM.

(via nick)

UPDATE: Matt Marshall has more on the Facebook deal here. The key strategy bits:

"Facebook has only "scratched the surface" on its efforts to expand in new markets, including international and post-graduate communities. Facebook launched a product for high schools last year, and recently launched a version of its site for mobile devices. It also introduced photo-sharing several months ago. Facebook's Deitch said comScore data shows Facebook is the largest photo-sharing site on the Web

The company will eventually turn to developing three revenue streams, [Greylock's] Sze said. Those include local advertisers, such as pizza companies or bookstores that want to post an ad for a local college audience; banner advertisers seeking to reach Facebook's demographic type nationally; and sponsored groups, such as large companies sponsoring an online forum to interact with students."

MySpace For The Office

Nice piece from BusinessWeek's Steve Rosenbush today: MySpace For The Office.

I have a feeling we're definitely going to see the enterprise social networking market heat up in the next six to twelve months; Visible Path's $17million in financing mentioned in the article is going to be just the beginning.

Congrats to Antony Brydon and the rest of the team.

Bonus link: A MySpace For Business

No, Steve. Build Bridges, Not Moats.

Build bridges, people, bridges.

Not moats.

Bill Brantley Groks Haystack

Bill Brantley writes:

"I was first lured to Cerado's site by their "Web 2.0 or Star Wars Quiz" which challenges you to determine if a term is a Web 2.0 concept or a Star Wars character. Anyway, I clicked on their Haystack link which appears to be a MySpace for business folks. Now, it took me a couple of reads to understand the concept but what I think you do is you register your organization and have members of your organization create profiles. Then you can find other similarly-minded folks in other organizations and voila - instant business networking. Each profile links to the person's blog (if they have one) and the profiles are tagged which enhances the chances of finding a good match."

Bill...Yes! (Only thing I'd add to that off-the-cuff is that there are a bunch of other use cases as well.)

Read more here.