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.
