Jive learning in the US
Last week I sat in on Jive Software’s customer advisory board meeting in San Francisco which includes representatives from Dell, Nike and Intel. Jive makes collaboration software for both internal and external styles of communication that is usually self hosted.
The meeting was interesting at a number of levels. First, it is clear that Jive is being driven by customer need. Several suggestions about new functionality were shuffled around the release schedule to better accommodate customer preferences. That’s unusual as more often than not, development organizations work to schedules that suit them.
More interesting though were the discussions around what works and what does not for business. I’ve been hesitant about using any expression that includes ’social’ in its phrasing and the notion of ‘friends’ doesn’t sit easily with me when put into a business context. It seems that big business feels the same way. Martha Ford of Intel said to me that:
“Social networking as an expression doesn’t mean much to the reseller channel we want to reach but they can relate to story telling and participation in forums and the like.”
Ms Ford prefers the expression ‘participative marketing’ something with which her community of resellers can relate.
On the ‘friends’ question, delegates agreed the indiscriminate use of this term is not a good idea but struggle to come up with an expression that works. My sense is that this is most likely to be industry specific. In the profession’s case, we’d probably be happy with ‘clients’ ‘business partners’ and ‘colleagues.’ Even so, I believe we should be given the choice to create expressions that make sense in ‘our world.’
In the meantime, I also made a short (6 minute) video in which Jive’s chief marketing officer Sam Lawrence discusses the difference between internal and external collaboration.
Jive is slated to offer a major release around 1st April which I hope to review.
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Den- Couldn’t you find a better spot to do the interview than outside the bathroom? Distraction aside, I have been a Jive customer for about 6 months and, withstanding some bugs and minor issues, I love the Clearspace product. Easy to administer, great for internal knowledge sharing, and a great platform for engaging our clients.
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Heh – was it the bathroom? I didn’t notice. -:)
We were in the back of a noisy Starbucks and short of time. In fairness, it was an off the cuff thing and Sam didn’t know I’d recorded it until we were done.
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@Jason The bathroom cracks me up, too. Dennis is amazing at capturing you when you don’t know it. I literally had no idea he was recording me.
Dennis, here we had the Clift Hotel in all it’s splendor and we end up outside a bathroom strung out on coffee.
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Dennis – It’s candid camera 2008 – sponsored by… Starbucks! Well, there are worse places for sure. Nice work though – good length, drew out the story nicely, great stuff!
Sam – the unrehearsed interview/conversation seems to work well for you! Great points, particularly the aspect about transparency into the community. Whether you start inside or outside, at some point, there should be some head-smacking going on… “Why is it we don’t have this over on the other side?” Those internal silos are a tough one though, for sure.
Agree that internal community owners don’t exist. Actually, that I don’t agree on that… companies that have such positions are probably companies that bought into and actually DID THE WORK to make Knowledge Management a reality, and are still reaping those benefits today.
Overall, though, yes, internal systems almost always fall behind with ownership and investment as compared to things that are directly tied to generating revenue, which as you say, makes the ROI on the outward-facing view that much easier to spot.
In our forthcoming Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0, we sliced the respondents by some behavioral and cultural questions to see if success with E2 had anything to do with what we’ve seen in the last 10 or so year from a KM inclined nature, and whadda ya know, it’s (in some ways, obviously not all), KM 2.0 time!
Cheers, Gents.
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