Dropping Your Pants on the Second Date

I heard the expression "you sell like you buy" from my first ECM mentor back in the mid/late 1990s. Glad to see it still has relevance with the cool kids more than a decade later.

As I enter week #7 as Chief Marketing officer for Nuxeo (Open Source Enterprise Content Management), I am pleased to report tremendous progress on plan approvals, prioritization of marketing activities, even a budget that got all the right heads nodding on version 2. Yay team.

In the last 72 hours I made 4 important decisions on 2010 marketing spend.

2 were YES decisions
2 were NO decisions

Actually - that's not quite right. All 4 proposals were requested by me. Because I know what I want and need. The NOs were not meant to be "NO", more "can you go back to the drawing board".

The 2 yes decisions were made because the vendors listened to exactly what I had to say, wrote down what I asked for, repeated it back to me on the phone or in email, and when the contract was shipped over, I reviewed it, and yelled down the hallway for a PO number.

The 2 no decisions were for vendors who sent proposals that were ever so slightly off - but ultimately very salvageable. I asked them to go back and revise because in one case, the geographical focus was wrong. Right thing, right time, wrong place. In the other case the timing was wrong. Right thing, right place, wrong time.

But in both cases, when the first "No, but ..." came out of my mouth, the guy on the phone immediately dropped the price. As though a discount was going to change something important. I actually thought in both cases that the original price was entirely fair. What I wanted was a re-focus and alternative time-line, not a blue plate special.

Making the service cheaper doesn't make it more attractive. It makes it cheaper. And now I question whether it's worth anything at all.

Making Enterprise 2.0 Real. My Story of the "No E-Mail Beta Program" **

A whirlwind week in Boston as we launched Open Text Social Media to the premier gathering of Enterprise 2.0 thinkers, vendors and practitioners. The downside? I didn't attend nearly as many of the sessions as I had circled in the guide. The upside? Fantastic one-on-one meetings all week with customers, prospects, partners, press, analysts, bloggers. We chatted in meeting rooms, at the Starbucks, in the pub and of course, those comfy couches in the Open Text Lounge.


Still a lot of angst in the E2.0 world about making it real. How do we measure, how do we justify. SHOULD we measure? SHOULD we justify? How to get management buy-in, how to get community engagement.

Well, this week my colleagues & I tried to make it real. Most of the people who stopped by our lounge for a discussion about our new product saw something a little different. No virtual images. No dummy demo servers. No "what you COULD do.."

We spoke about our own personal day-in-the-life: as active production users of our own dogfood. (I know, I know...some colleagues hate that term. Champagne.. coffee... whatever). And we showed sample people, process and content scenarios based on the reality of how we do things.

Sometimes it is the simple story that delivers the lightbulb moment to people who don't quite see the value yet.

For me, it's my story of "The No E-mail Beta". **

In November we announced our 2.0 plans at Open Text Content World, and started recruiting customers interested in beta program participation. From November '08 to early '09, we talked with customers, learned about their potential use cases, their requirements, and narrowed down the list of participants who were keen and committed. The beta participants have been an incredibly rich source of feedback, ideas, and generous with honest and open comments on likes and dislikes.

In December, we kicked off a weekly status call for all of our internal people: development, services, product management and marketing, customer relationship managers, spanning at least 4 countries and likely 8+ cities.

Over the 7 months, about 40 people have been in and out of the weekly calls, depending on their roles and phase of the project. Once a week, a core set of this team got on the phone. And as people join the call, I open up our beta community workspace, go to the wiki for weekly status calls, click 'edit' and go.


While on the phone, the roll call is done, the old business reviewed, action items knocked off, new items added, we recap the status of all the customer beta communities, wrap up with a open discussion on issues or interesting topics. And when we're done, I click "save", and whammo. Instant meeting notes, organized consistently from week to week, categorized by the date and call number, immediately ready for anyone who missed the call, and optionally pushed out as a notification to those who chose to subscribe to updates.

Simple, fast, efficient.

7 months = 28 weekly calls so far, 2.5 action item updates per week x (40 people x 25% on core team) = ~700 emails not sent

Cool, but not the light bulb moment. That moment came a month ago when we got an intern from the university for a summer work term. How to get him up to speed rapidly and accurately to get him productive on Day 1? Easy. Sent 1 URL to the status call wiki, he read from bottom to top and knew what was going on and who the key people were. I actually cannot even imagine how long that would have taken if we would have relied on e-mail communication.



But it was not just the technology that made this work. It was the people - the people who committed to working this way. The core team who led by example. Who posted action items in the community (never underestimate the power of peer pressure to get things done). By delegating the call chair duties by posting a shout-out to the community when travel or vacation made it impossible for me to dial-in. By wanting to all be able to walk the talk in front of our colleagues, partners and customers.

2.0 technology made this easy, it but didn't 'cause' the success. The community workspace and wiki was a tool that made sense for the task - bridging a diverse, distributed global team focused on a shared objective. I haven't even personally met everyone on the team yet. But I know their smiling faces, what they can contribute, and what I've learned from them. My Social Workplace in action.


** OK, the 'almost' no-email beta program. Full disclosure: we used email with colleagues who had a specific role for a narrow portion of the program. Ie, getting the corporate legal OK on any agreements. And for customer communication before they went live. And my comment to my colleagues who subscribed to automated email notifications, well, that was your own choice.

Some good E2Conf recap blog posts so far - (watch the #e2conf twitter stream as more pop up over next few days):
Sameer Patel @ Pretzellogic

Ron Miller @ Fierce Content Management 1 of 2 (argh. I bad hair day, but was fun chat with Ron in the ultimate conference social workplace, the hotel lounge)

Ron Miller @ Fierce Content Management 2 of 2 "Neatest Technology at Enterprise 2.0" And yep... we're there ;-)

Doug Cornelius @ Compliance Building He called out some great reality checks as 2.0 comes into business and faces compliance and governance issues of the real world

What I Learned... @ Mashup Patterns

Social Amber - It's about the people...

E2Conf Blogger Janetti Chon "It's a Wrap"

Your Content Is A Social Object

Your Content Is a Social Object.

But hardly anyone treats it like one.

I use this slide when educating customers, partners, prospects and colleagues on the Open Text Enterprise 2.0 direction. How does our ECM Suite help individual knowledge workers and virtual teams bloom into a new world of the Social Workplace? or Social Marketplace? That's what keeps me busy these days.

So with all due apologies to the artist, cartoonist, blogger, marketer, wine huckster, genius, occasionally "not safe for work" Hugh MacLeod @ www.gapingvoid.com, here it goes...

The watercooler. The coffeepot. The cafeteria. The sheltered overhang in the parking lot that's known as 'smokers corner'. This is what a Social Workplace looks like. That common location that we flock to for some shared purpose. To drink, to eat, to smoke. Not in solitude but with people we can bump into along the way. And subconsciously we know that there's more to that trip down the hallway than the obvious objective. We know that while we're pouring the sugar, or rinsing the glass or passing around the only working lighter in the rain... we'll talk.

We'll catch up on weekend activities, communally moan over the new cubicle layout, whisper overheard rumours and get the gossip from those guys upstairs. You know the ones - not sure what division they're in or who they report to, but always seem to have the goods on what's going on....

So what brings this diverse group of people together? What inspires conversation among people who normally wouldn't interact in the workplace? ...because they're in different branches, or sit too many levels of hierarchy apart to talk via regular business channels.

It is a Social Object. As is the water, the coffee, the dry wind-free shelter. My last blog post explored the concept of valuing information that is used - of directing effort and energy into what is meaningful to one's audience. That information - content - is what brings people into an application or repository. Content that does not lure eyeballs to it, content that is not findable, content that is too hard to retrieve or understand, content that is locked away from its audience: does it have value? If a tree falls in the forest....

So how do I make my content precious? How do I get people who need it to read it? It's up to us to think about how to get this information in front of the eyes that need it. Make it social, make it accessible, let it be found and consumed.

When companies fret that deployments of ECM systems or online collaboration workspaces are failing, it is often because usage rates are unexpectedly low. No buzz, no compelling reason to contribute, no sense of pressure to participate because none of the cool kids are there. Death by meh.

My challenge: make your content a social object. Make it interesting and compelling enough that people want it, can find it, and will appreciate it.

And to content authors I throw out a call to action: put some skin in the game to promote it to the colleagues you think should need it. Send out links to your slide decks. Publicize your research summaries. Evangelize your business plan, engage the people counting on you to draft the meeting agenda. And not by endless emails. But by taking an interest into what your peers are worried about, what they're tasked with, and finding the places where you can lend a hand with what you know.

If we're so bored or indifferent to our own work that we save it and ignore, why should others act differently?

ROI in the Age of Narcissism

But what's the business case? Nodding intently and listening to the question for the million trillionth time, suddenly it hits me. "Well, maybe your people can stop doing things that nobody cares about and reinvest that time in something useful".

D'oh. Inside Voice! Inside Voice! Inside Voice!

User engagement. Adoption rates. Participation. Content ingestion. To get a business case for an ECM deployment (never mind Enterprise 2.0....) companies need to kneel at the altar of the Pivot Table to get an ROI justification. Achieving said benefit means systems need to be used and stuff needs to be put into them.

People put the content into content management systems. When they don't do that, content management projects don't deliver that magical ROI. Luring typical information workers into a system perceived as onerous, complex, corporately mandated that ultimately seems not relevant to day to day tasks is tough.

But maybe there's an angle we've missed...

"Personal Productivity for ME... but the Community benefits"... this is how I've been describing emerging 2.0 tools as they enter mainstream business.

Social Bookmarks - are MY favorite items... but like-minded colleagues get the info and share their own... Blog - dead easy simple self publishing for ME, but my readers only need to find me in one place... Social Networks - let me tell you about MY expertise and experience and maybe we'll find some common interests and exchange information of mutual benefit.

When I started blogging personally a few years ago, like most bloggers, I became obsessed with my hit rates. Playing around with Sitemeter.. Google Analytics.. other cool tools du jour trying to understand: Who was reading me? How did they find me? Who linked to me? Does anybody bother coming back?

Seriously - name a blogger who isn't consumed with their traffic patterns and referrals. Yeah, thought so.

But... hang on. Where have I seen this before?

Haven't good old document management tools been providing metrics and tracking on content for umm... almost 2 decades? Who edited, who printed, who emailed, who viewed, who copied....kind of old skool, actually.

So here's my question: Why not apply the blogger self-absorption mentality to corporate ECM contributors? Bloggers who are motivated by traffic hits write content of interest to their audience. More hits = more on the topic. I often joke (not...) about Productivity Driven By Ego. In the enterprise space, why don't I pay attention to the content people read and well, quit producing the content they don't. Why do smart expensive educated knowledge workers invest time in things that no one bothers to look at?

Audit trails, activity lists, document history is the measurement of usefulness. One of my favourite analysts at Gartner - Debra Logan - uses the phrase "content valuation". But you can't know what's used and whether it's valued if you don't measure the consumption of specific content artifacts.

Why do I personally invest the time in tagging my Harlequin dive bar concert videos on YouTube? Because I want them to be found and be more popular than the ones my sister posted... Meaningful metadata lets them be found in the sea of millions upon millions of cheesy music clips. Why can't my colleagues find my whitepapers that easily....

Measure, track, compare, assess, weigh... Spend time on things that are useful to people, and stop doing things that aren't. Sounds like ROI to me.