I have been told by a few community members that their posts don’t get as many responses as they used to and their posts tend to sit in the community for a while before anyone notices.
I took these comments and built a poll to help me better understand how our community members socialize their content. Activity in our community is at an all time high, so I decided to paint a picture on the habits some of our community members may have when it came down to getting their posts noticed. The poll results are below:

The details below will pertain to all types of content posted in the community: (discussions, blog posts, documents, polls).

• Post in the community and put together an outlook email and send to certain folks. 37% of our voters follow these steps in order to socialize their content. This is a great way to get your content noticed & quickly socialized with everyone (community member or not). This raw approach is a bit more time consuming, but necessary in order to get the attention of those you believe to able to provide value to the conversation. I propose to include login information in such email communication & I don’t send in your email your entire post .. encourage the user to come to the community and activate their account so that they can be part of future conversations.
• Post in the community and leave it alone. 26% of our voters take care of their content this way. This approach may work well for small communities with highly engaged members such as private communities, groups with highly specialized content or communities in which the members often opt to receive email notifications with every post. By far this is not the rule for most communities and it is increasingly important to make other colleagues aware of your post in order to get the most out of it. With nearly 2,100 community members it is becoming harder for content to get noticed quickly, you may already find yourself overloaded with information so make use of the “send as email” feature found in the Actions widget in order to achieve your goals.
• Use the “send as email” feature to notify other community members of my post. 21% of our voters use this feature. This is the best way to socialize content in the community without the need to leave the platform. The email can easily be customized to your liking and provides a link to the post. It is strongly recommended to customize your message so that it bares more priority to your connections (Tip: ask your connections to send your post to their connections). Here are three advantages of socializing content this way: (1) You can select from your connections (those you follow) and filter to your labels, further helping you send a strongly targeted communication, (2) You can select from your organizational chart and socialize your content to your manager and peers & (3) Your connection can reply via email to your customized message from the community, this will allow them to be part of the converstion and their reply will be posted to the original post.

GINO ROSSI
@GinoRossi | in/GinoRossi

Last week I posted a poll in my community asking community members to vote on the main reason they follow other community members in our Employee Commons.

As you maybe aware of, members have the ability to follow each other in our community.  When you follow someone, they become your connection & a full listing of all those you follow can be found in your profile at the “Connections” tab.

As I went thru the results of the poll I realized that many … actually most members were following each other with the wrong understanding of what the results would be.  Allow me to explain.

• FOLLOW TO RECEIVE EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS.  This is a big one, members will follow each other thinking that they will receive emails whenever a member they follow makes a post into the community.  Well, following a member is step 1 of this process, step 2 would be to explicitly check off the checkbox to receive email notifications from that member.  This is found in the profile of the member in your “Connections” tab within your profile.   NOTE: (you maybe receiving emails on posts made by certain community members, but you didn’t explicitly subscribe to receive their emails … lf this is your case, look at the community in which the post was made, it’s is very likely that you are subscribed to receive emails from that community (space or group).

• FOLLOW TO SEE THEIR POSTS IN YOUR CUSTOM VIEW.  This is a nice way to get the information you want from those you want it from.  To achieve this you must add the “Community Activity” widget from the widget designer & then you’ll be able to toggle between the different group of users available to you.  If you would like to customize your personal view, read this blog post which will show you how to get the Activity Widget into your personal view:

• FOLLOW TO ADD CONNECTIONS INTO LABELS.  This option received no votes, but it’s a feature that I always use.  A label allows you to categorize the members you follow, you can call the label whatever you’d like & add that label to as many members as you want.  A label can be as simple as “Social Media” or “Oracle”, then assign that label to any members you follow.  Once this is done, you can then filter your connections by their labels & your list will display only those members with that specific label & with their last update/post into the community.

If you have any questions on this blog post, don’t hesitate to reach out to me.  I’ve also summarized this blog post in the following image.

GINO ROSSI
@GinoRossi | in/GinoRossi

The day began with a nice kick off show, Jive’s CEO & other folks shared portions of their vision on the future of social business software for the enterprise, etc. Here are the some of the high lights in my opinion: Social search, Social Graph, Apps & Offisync.

Social Search: very powerful way to bring in external data repositories & other social networks into a single search entry (Jive). The understanding of what a user looks for in their day to day activities is essential for Jive’s suggestion engine. This engine builds a set of suggestions for specific users, it turns the table on users searching for information to information searching for the user. Creepy I know.

Social Graph: looking closely at the way you interact with your connections, how you share information with them and what type of informamtion is share helps build a very strong understanding of our habits. The social graph can help show in what levels we interact with others in the enterprise, this can be a very powerful tool for HR/Talent management as their best candidates could be living within the organization.

Apps: extremelly excited about where this is going, I do still see the apps market as being inmature, but I do see the potential for all Jive customers. Some very impressive apps were on display here such as: Bunch Ball, Rypple & others.

Offisync is very cool for sure, it allows all your social personas to live within all your Microsoft Office products. Extremelly useful for outlook when looking to reply to messages with the understanding of what that person is doing in the social web at that moment in time. I see this as a powerful ally to Jive with it’s ability to do a two way communication/posting of content without needing to leave the outlook or other MS Office product. We have 100 FREE licenses that we can implement at QUEST, we will need to upgrade to Jive 5.0 first .. more on that later.

Lastly I’ll touch on theming. The #ThemeMaker looks very nice and promising. It’ll allow community managers (groups & spaces) to control the look of their own communities by giving them the free range to alter the colors of backgrounds, widgets, etc. It’ll also allow them to change colors to fonts & more .. very neat where this is going.

That’s all for now, this blog post was not run by spell checker .. so I don’t want to hear it

PS .. here is a little fun about how SharePoint & Jive recognize why they should work together & here is a link to the “soon to be world famous” white paper on why SharePoint plus Jive makes a lot of sense: http://www.threewill.com/sp-jive-wp

Gino Rossi | @GinoRossi

JiveWorld (#JW11) is being held in Las Vegas at the Cosmopolitan Hotel (@Cosmopolitan_LV). Great looking hotel & great atmosphere .. lots of engaged & positive thinking folks. Jive Software is for sure pioneering the SBS landscape.

I attended the Admin courses on Tuesday, the topics covered were good but elementary in nature. Not really what I was looking for, but it did provide me with the names of folks that are navigating thru simular situations with their own communities. Hot topics this week for current Jive customers are: Analytics, Adoption & Apps Market.

Analytics: Jive acquired some time ago a company called Proximal Labs, their master data chefs promise to bring easier to use & more meaningful reports related to everything taking place within the community. Via my tweets I have been told by Jive (@gutelius) that big news will be released this week here at Jive World .. stay tunned on this as I am keeping my eyes & ears opened on this topic.

Adoption: Several organizations presented their success stories on how they have conquered this area. One company that stands out is “T-Mobile”. I listened to a presentation by T-Mobile’s VP of Marketing (@Mariamobile), she shared how valuable their community is for responding fast & effectively to customers inquiries on their products & services offerings. Their employees have found the community to be crucial in their ability to deliver the best service possible to their customers thanks to all the collaborative features found in Jive. Internally they have been able to identify problem areas before products have been launched, they have also been able to modify & improve their responses to situations thanks to the transparency provided by the platform. Folks are able to find their answers faster & the community is thriving as a result. Other companies have found similar success such as: University of Phoenix, Toshiba, Sony, Yum & more.

Apps Market: Lots of focus is being placed in this new area. The apps market is exclusively for Jive v5.0 and promises to bring many productivity based applications into Jive provided by the many software vendors that have signed up to build & resell their applications thru Jive’s Apps Market. I will be looking out for more information in this area, there seems to be a lot of excitement on what the future hold for this part of Jive. I like the way they have gone about adding it into the current architecture of Jive, I am however a little concerned on how apps are incorporated within social areas .. more on this soon.

Several great speakers took the stage on the official opening day, but none were as impressive as Gabe Zichermann (@gzicherm) who is an expert on Gamification & Game Mechanics, his examples & thoughts were top notch. He has two books published on the topic & I will be buying them. His understanding on why gamification works is outstanding .. he dropped some serious knowledge & provided us with the first F-bomb at Jive World (that I’m aware of) .. I’m a fan for life.

Off to another session “Spread Social Like Wildfire”. More to come soon. Cheers.

Gino Rossi
Social Business Scientist – @GinoRossi