Most internal systems present some difficult hurdles in these cases. If your organization is running SharePoint, it’s difficult to authenticate people who aren’t in the company directory. You can ask your IT department to add external people to the directory for the sake of the project but the request, if it’s granted, might take weeks to be delivered.

So it’s logical to look around for public, cloud offerings to support your extended and distributed workgroup.

• You could use file sharing sites like Box or Dropbox or Yousendit. But ultimately, these are static repositories: good at storage, but not great at building and supporting a dynamic team
• Basecamp is a popular alternative. It too has file sharing, and adds rudimentary social commenting. It also includes simple calendaring, which can be helpful for a project. Of course, the service may be simple but it’s not free, which can get in the way of getting a project started quickly.
• You could use online document editors and repositories like Google Docs, Zoho or Acrobat.com. These have the advantage of sharing the current version of the project files, and enabling co-authored content. In a way, they’re like the file sharing sites, except that you can also edit the files. But, like file sharing sites, they are pretty static and don’t offer a person-centric model for engagement.

Convofy: Extended Social Networks the Answer

But to create a really dynamic and productive environment for our extended teams, you should take a look at Convofy. It has the same file sharing ability as many of these other sites, but we don’t limit the overall size of your storage. Convofy also enables rich commenting and collaboration, so if you are working with others on documents, images, videos or web pages, Convofy is a great way to work together.

Here’s how it works: Convofy is meant for use within an organization – that is, workers who share the same email domain. However, when you create groups in Convofy, you can invite people from outside your organization. Those participants can only view and collaborate on content shared in the groups to which they are invited. They do not have the ability to create other groups, but otherwise have most of the Convofy functionality available to them, including email notifications.

• The image at right depicts several groups created by members of a primary Convofy network.
• Members of the originating network are in blue. Clearly, you need at least one member of the primary network in each group, which is how the group would be created.
• You may also notice that external collaborators may belong to more than one group. The green and orange characters, for example, are each in two groups.

The user experience for the external collaborators is virtually identical to the internal participants. When they log in to Convofy, they will have a primary news feed, which will show content added to the group(s) to which they have been invited.

One other important item: external participants may themselves be part of their own Convofy network. In the image above, the orange character belongs to his own network.

Note: when the orange character switches networks from his primary network, he will be logged off from one as he is logged into the other. This way there is no chance that content will accidentally be migrated from one network to another.

Not Only Easy, but Free

One final but important note: Unlike many of the aforementioned solutions, Convofy is free to use, and the functionality of the standard edition is generally sufficient for many extended networks. If not, we have a Premium version to help provide you more control and administrative features.

So try Convofy: there’s no better way to enable organizations to work more effectively with partners, consultants, contractors, agencies and other extended team members.

Photo courtesy - The Next Web

A network is nothing without people who share, communicate, and collaborate within it. A key factor for the success of a social network, personal or enterprise, is it’s ability to enable conversations on the content people share within it. The recent claims of 60% daily engagement on Google+ has already been well discussed and with this latest change Facebook too, is targeting even higher engagement.

While designing Convofy’s collaboration experience and interface, we also deliberated over the benefits of sticking with the norm, the familiar, that is comments below content versus comments right next to the content. In the end we looked for innovations that challenged the norm in order to drive better engagement for a couple of very good reasons.

Comments and chat make up the biggest part of activity on Convofy.

Engagement is a huge motivation as we design each Convofy feature. Our own early usability tests found that the likelihood of a lone comment sprouting into a full-blown conversation was higher when it was within the moment of engagement – when users were viewing images, files, and links and when they were able to see exactly what they wanted to talk about. Convofy’s real-time engine not only powers the main News Feed but also comments inside each posts so you are pulled into live discussions without having to wait for those pesky page refreshes.

We have been blown away by the phenomenal engagement within Convofy networks. 65.3% of all activity across Convofy networks is made up of comments and chat and 34.4% is shared content.

The other reason is more obvious but equally important. Convofy’s context rich comments work better when they are content-adjacent. This way comments can easily point back to the shared content. This design also scales fairly seamlessly across the many content types Convofy supports.

Context-rich comments across images, links and docs.

Do you find it easier to read comments on Facebook photos now? Do you post comments more frequently? We would love to hear how Convofy improved conversations within your organization.

One of the things Dion points out in the post are the many ways social business adoption can get bogged down. For example, getting bogged down in a debate on whether SharePoint is a viable social business environment can take months, even years.

(Our opinion, by the way, which we’ll write up soon, is that SharePoint is an excellent repository, or system of record, and that a tool like Convofy can complement SharePoint by dramatically improving engagement while still enabling content to be stored in the less-engaging enterprise document repository.)

Dion also adds a typically interesting high-level diagram that describes the areas of value that social business provides to enterprises:

Convofy users have enjoyed the advantages in all four areas. One of our differentiators is in the upper right quadrant, where we go beyond other social business tools to offer real collaboration, where colleagues can work together in the social environment, without having to go elsewhere to actually engage over content.

Our other differentiation, which is sufficiently unique that it isn’t directly referenced in the diagram, is in immediacy. Unlike Yammer, Chatter or email, Convofy has a built-in real-time communication capability that enables IM, group chat, presence and real-time edits and updates. This engagement model contributes to the entire experience, but in the graphic above, it probably relates in the lower left quadrant, where it enables improved communication and connection among colleagues.

Realizing social business: Enterprise 2.0 success stories | ZDNet.

It happens frequently: someone in your organization sends out a broad email message with some good news, or useful reference document or link.

Then you (an untold others) get a series of messages in response, many of which amount to nothing more than, “Got it, thanks.” As a participant in the thread, it’s natural to groan as you watch your Inbox fill up with well-intentioned but ultimately vacuous messages.

These respondents are probably just seeking greater engagement within the organization, a way to feel more connected, to humanize the work environment, and provide some simple feedback and affirmation.

The problem is that email is a clumsy medium to host this kind of immediate and affirmative interaction. Email is just not an engagement environment.

Employee Engagement Delivers Business Value

Many organizations are increasingly focusing on employee engagement, which is simply a measure of an employee’s enthusiasm, energy and commitment to the organization and to the quality of his or her work. It’s an emotional state that measures employees’ attachment to their organization, a willingness to perform, and a sense of ownership for the process and outcomes for their work.

It should seem obvious that positive employee engagement results in key performance metrics: better quality, improved productivity, and higher employee retention. Commitment to the organization’s mission and its outcomes should lead to improved business results, it’s safe to assume.

Employee engagement is about morale. If employees feel positively about their environment, if they feel like their work is valued and valuable, and they are committed to positive outcomes, then the morale in the workplace will be significantly improved.

And when morale is strong in an organization, personal interactions are more positive and constructive. Not only does this lead to better and more fruitful relationships among employees, it will also lead to greatly improved customer interactions. And these positive external occasions will contribute to a positive brand for the organization, which will in turn bolster the sense of mission and worth internally. A virtuous cycle indeed.

Current State: Lack of Engagement

And yet, a recent Gallup survey determined that less than a third of American workers are committed and enthusiastic about their work:

“Seventy-one percent of American workers are “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” in their work, meaning they are emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and are less likely to be productive.”

According to a major study by IBM, most HR executives struggle to effectively connect their workforce:

“78 percent of the HR leaders we interviewed do not think their organizations are effective at fostering collaboration and social networking. Yet only 21 percent have recently increased the amount they invest in the tools required to promote collaboration and networking.

As if to confirm that email does not drive this sense of engagement, a recent IABC Employee Engagement Report included the fact that companies still predominantly use email as the “communication method most used to engage employees and foster productivity” (81%), while social media was used by only 16% of participating organizations.

While, as many of us learned in High School or college science, “correlation does not mean causation,” there is a striking correlation between lack of engagement and the rampant use of email as the method used to promote engagement!

There is Another Way

Another study revealed that 98% of HR respondents say they believe that social networking is an important tool for recruiting, retaining and managing employees. If you take the numbers at face value, the gap between the 98% believers and the 21% taking action seems like an opportunity for breakthroughs in employee engagement using social media. The Convofy team certainly views it this way.

While technology alone cannot address the problem of engagement, companies are increasingly seeing social media as an expedient means to get employees engaged. In an article called Top 15 Ways to Engage Your Workforce, Workforce.com has laid out 15 suggested areas to engage employees. Internal social networks can have a direct effect on these areas, and indirectly affect the others (shown in bold in the list below).

1. Onboarding experience 
2. Offer clear lines of sight or alignment
3. Feedback/communication
4. Feeling of community
5. Opportunities for job advancement
6. Commitment to developing the employee
7. Treating professionals like professionals
8. Compensation, including non-monetary rewards
9. Genuine investment in people
10. Shared purpose
11. Relationship with peers 
12. Leadership
13. Career development
14. Empowerment
15. Company image

In other words, in this context social networks can impact more than half of the areas that drive employee engagement.

Convofy Drives Real Engagement

Active Convofy networks report that this social environment really drives engagement. Sure, we have a “Like” button, which makes it easy to provide simple and immediate affirmation for content that is helpful.

But more than simple “Likes”, one of the characteristics of active, engaged networks that we have observed is the frequent use of comments. A comment is like a reply to an email, except that it is immediate and simple (a text entry box right below the original post), and can be as long or as brief as needed.

In other words, Likes and comments are the easiest form of response, and they definitely promote engagement and connectedness because, unlike email, they are contextualized and immediate.

The Depth and Immediacy of Engagement

We’ve also discovered that Convofy networks provide longer lasting engagement than other internal social networks. That’s because tools like Yammer and Chatter provide very little depth to the network engagement. Sure, you can upload files, but there is little or no means to engage with your colleagues on that content. So they end up being little more than a notification channel for activity elsewhere on the network.

Yammer and Chatter also don’t support real-time communication, in the form of IM, group chat, presence and real-time editing. It’s harder to drive engagement on a social platform when you don’t feel the immediacy and connectedness you get with Convofy’s real-time platform.

Yammer and Chatter give you neither the immediacy nor the substance that drives long-term engagement like Convofy does.

Go For It

It certainly seems that Social Networks are a great way to drive employee engagement, improve organizational culture, identity and productivity. They certainly are a great improvement over email. But don’t settle for the light-weight social platforms, that ultimately can’t deliver the substantive and immediate engagement you get with Convofy.

And please let us know here (by comment) how your engagement initiative works out!

It’s so hard to change the way we work that Andrew MacAfee, in an older post called The 9X Email Problem, has said that new solutions must be perceived as being at least 9 times better to induce people to change.

Most of us who have worked in a professional social network environment for communication and coordination can assert that the improvement is worth the effort to change, but the challenge is in encouraging your colleagues to invest enough time and focus in the new environment to buy into its benefits.

This post is about some of the approaches you can use to change communication and collaboration behavior in your organization to improve productivity, engagement and responsiveness.

Migrate content

There’s nothing less inspiring than showing up on a new site and finding nothing there. Sort of like going to a party when you’re the first to arrive (and maybe unsure whether anyone else will show up). So the first imperative in getting an active network is to populate it with interesting and relevant stuff.

Look for content that your team would all be interested in, posting it on the network, and then notifying your colleagues via email. A good starting point for this might be meeting agendas or minutes. These are typically not very interactive documents, but when added to Convofy they become more dynamic and useful.

Another example is status reports. A detailed report shared on Convofy can solicit useful and shared feedback. It is also available for keeps, and doesn’t fade away in the morass of old and forgotten emails. It’s searchable, discoverable and part of the shared company memory.

Create Groups

Of course, it’s ideal to have a well structured set of groups within which to add relevant content. Creating groups is easy – unlike, for example, creating email distribution lists – and you can invite anyone who needs to participate. Once the group is created, all content added to the online group is accessible to everyone in that group. If a person is added subsequently, they too will have access to all content, including the stuff that preceded their arrival. This makes for faster on-boarding, and improved long-term group memory. If someone leaves the group, they will no longer have access to the content there.

You can actually share the same piece of content with more than one group. This is like sending a single email two different email distribution lists – except that, again, the resulting content becomes part of the organization’s shared memory far more effectively than in email.

Organize “Affinity” Groups

Groups can be functional or project oriented, which is the obvious starting point, but many organizations have had great success in transcending organizational silos by creating specific kinds of “Affinity Groups”. These are groups that share some common attribute, even though participants may reside in different parts of the organization. Some examples of affinity groups are:

• Sector Affinity Groups: Sharing knowledge about a particular market or customer sector that matters to the business. This is particularly useful for field personnel to share news, tactics and strategies for the sectors they are trying to service.
• Practice Area Affinity Groups: practice areas can allow professionals across the enterprise to share their knowledge, experience and expertise with others across the network on topics specific to the functional business areas they are trying to service. For example, a web agency may have practice area affinity groups in the areas of web design, SEO, cloud computing, or social media.
• Competency Affinity Groups: Building and sharing skills across the organization can be enhanced and improved by enabling professionals to share their tools, approaches and even their career paths within an affinity group. A great deal of informal mentoring can happen this way.
• General Interest Affinity Groups: professional or personal, these groups are about specific topics of interest, ranging from geolocation technology to bicycle commuting.

Email integration

As mentioned above, one of the biggest challenges to moving to a social platform is that people will generally fall back on email, which is the communication environment they know best. It’s actually best not to fight this impulse, but leverage it. The two obvious ways to complement email is 1) getting email notifications of social network updates, and 2) adding content via email – something you can do in Convofy but very other environments.

Notification is a natural capability within Convofy, and we give you a lot of control over which events and content in your network you will be notified about. You can receive updates as they happen, and/or receive daily or weekly digests. This way, you can live in your comfortable old world of email, and mosey over to Convofy when interesting things crop up. Of course, we think you may spend increasingly more time in Convofy as you become more engaged and get more value out of the environment, but this notification capability makes the on ramp a little more gentle.

The other powerful email integration capability – worthy of a blog post in its own right – is the ability to mail-in content directly to a Convofy network. Yes indeed: when you receive a particularly interesting email, you can send it along to Convofy for further sharing and commentary. This is particularly useful because it helps you avoid the endless threads into which email sometimes devolves.

Emailing content into Convofy is also very useful when someone sends you an email with an attachment. Rather than go through the usual menial process – detach the item, read it offline, then comment, then re-attach it to send back – simply forward the message to Convofy, where you can read the attachment online, and your comments will be visible and accessible to the group with whom you share the message.

Every Convofy group has its own email address. One approach we’ve heard is to add the group email address to your email distribution list, or address book, so content naturally flows to a place where its more accessible and more easily consumed.

Complete Your Profile

A key early step in making a more effective collaborative environment is to complete a personal profile and/or add a biography. For established  social networks, this is probably the first step that newcomers will take.

After all, any social collaboration tool is about knowledge management, which is making your collective knowledge more accessible to the organization. So filling out your profile makes your personal experience, interests and expertise accessible to your colleagues.

This not only helps humanizes your work landscape (and wouldn’t we all want a more hospitable environment in the place where we spend much of our waking hours?), but a completed profile also enables you to find others with similar interests – during or after work.

In Convofy, we suggest not only completing your profile (under the Settings menu), but also sharing a copy of your resume / CV to your followers. The CV and all your available skills and experience will thereby be discoverable via search.

Continue Encouraging Usage and Celebrating Success

Once the site is up and running and your teammates have been introduced to it, it’s likely that the community will need ongoing encouragement. Whenever possible, you can politely ask a colleague whether the excellent document they have just shared with you via email has also been uploaded to the shared environment.

Or, when you find yourself in the midst of a long and intractable email or thread, move the discussion to an online forum and notify the group of its new home.

When people add great content to the site, or when you observe a meaty discussion happening online, call it out! This can be done by email, as contradictory as that sounds, in meetings or on the site itself. When and if appropriate, share the success outside your group and show off!

This will likely be an ongoing process for several weeks, even months, as your teammates get acclimated to sharing online. However, with persistence you and your team will get great results from your efforts.

Have Some Fun

Finally, don’t forget to make it light and fun online as well. One organization induced a group to start interacting more online by holding a contest to share pictures of their pets. The commentary on the pictures was as priceless as the pictures themselves, and within a week an entire group was fully engaged in the social network.

1. First there is our unparalleled on-the-page collaboration. Instead of switching back and forth between your communications environment (say, email or IM) and the content you are trying to discuss, in Convofy you can highlight, markup and annotate directly on over two dozen types of media – including Office documents, PDFs, images or even videos (yes, you can markup and annotate videos in Convofy). How else do you share comments on a picture or a video anyway?

Convofy will provide you a high-fidelity preview of the file, and then allow you to highlight text passages, markup images or video, and comment on those elements and share those comments with others. Don’t just talk about the item in question – circle it or highlight it, and tie your comments directly to it!

As you can read elsewhere on our blog, we think you can quantify the cost savings and productivity improvement of working in a single, cohesive environment rather than switching back and forth between apps.

2. We’re already beyond what other social platforms do, but it gets even better. In Convofy, you can exercise that same direct, on-the-page collaboration on web pages and apps. I’m sure this didn’t register, since you’ve never engaged in this kind of mind-bending and useful exercise before. So listen carefully…

When you share a link to a web page in Convofy, we don’t just ship you off on your own to another browser window the way other apps do. We bring your desired web page into your collaboration environment.

This is unique: we load the web page right within Convofy. And then you can actually do the same highlighting, markup and commenting directly on the web content. Think of this as holding private conversations on public content. Discussing web pages, on the web pages: you can’t get this feature anywhere else. It works on web apps too. This alone should get us voted web app of the year.

3. Convofy Groups the evolution of groupware. Groups may seem like an ordinary and unremarkable capability, but in Convofy your groups can be shared not only with your direct colleagues, but also with all of your collaborators inside and outside of your organization.

This makes Convofy a natural evolution in the state of groupware art, which migrated from Yahoo Groups, to Lotus Quickplace, to Google Groups, to maybe Basecamp, and now to Convofy. When you’re working with an array of folks scattered geographically and organizationally, invite them into a Convofy group and stay connected – collaboratively (see points 1 and 2).

Groups are a great way to collaborate with customers, partners, contributors. And, by the way, unlike Yammer the activity in all your external groups is visible to you in a common activity feed.

4. Email integration. Though much has been made recently of the death of email (okay, even we mused about it), we all know that email isn’t going away anytime soon. Email is just too universal a conduit and notification channel. But let’s face it, email is not a place to do real work.

The good news is that it’s easy to get messages and attachments from your email into Convofy’s collaborative environment because Convofy allows you to send messages directly into groups, to yourself, or to your followers. Every group has its own unique email address, which means that you can move email threads and messages with important attachments to an environment infinitely better suited to collaboration. If someone sends you a photo or an Excel file attached to an email, just forward it to your Convofy group, and hold a more constructive conversation about the content in a shared environment.

The flip-side is also true: you can email any Convofy content to yourself or to others. Convofy also provides flexible notifications via email, so you can stay on top of developments in the real work environment when you are forced to be focused on email.

5. Finally – and this is important – Convofy offers the ability to connect directly with your colleagues (inside and outside the organization) with our built-in instant messaging. You might think – as all the other social platform vendors must have – that you don’t need yet another IM environment. While we totally respect that perspective, how do you collaborate in real time with these other environments? You have a chat window open, while viewing some key piece of content that your colleague is (presumably) also viewing. There is no connection between the communication environment and the real collaborative work. Comments are in one window, while the content is in another window. Convofy brings the two together, and even allows you to highlight, markup and annotate the content in real time, and point to it within the chat session!

We can’t blame them really: other social platforms don’t deliver IM because they don’t have an integrated collaborative work environment. Convofy provides IM because it’s part of how people work together – and that’s what we’re all about!

Okay, there are five important and unique character traits. No other platform allows you to do real collaborative work directly in the connected social environment.

Now go out, check them out, be fruitful, collaborative and prosper!

“One of the significant discoveries of cognitive psychologists in recent decades is that switching from one task to another is effortful, especially under time pressure.”

Further:

“[F]requent switching of tasks and speeded-up mental work are not intrinsically pleasurable, and that people avoid them when possible.”

More validation that Convofy’s in-context collaboration save time, effort and reduces unpleasant work processes! Check out our blog post, where we quantify the savings of in-context collaboration: Convofy Returns $1,000,000 More Than Yammer.

Social collaboration here is defined as the integration of collaboration and social technologies. It should be noted here that Convofy is the leading example of this emergent integration, since no other social platform offers a comparable level of collaboration. The anticipated value that Forrester sees in bringing social collaboration is the “gradual erosion and opening up of the traditional silos of business information” that is locked within enterprise apps.

Social Focus

There are may advantages in the prospective integration of Social and Enterprise platforms. The most important is the ability to provide a single focal point for updates, notifications, and recommendations within and beyond the domain of enterprise information. Rather than toggle between multiple apps, with a variety of interfaces and occasionally jarring context changes, enterprise users will be able to monitor their areas of interest in a more dynamic and relevant social environment.

And because the new focusing environment is social, unlike email, employees can get help interpreting updates and other notifications, and can arrive at resulting and decisive actions faster.

And if your environment for integrating enterprise information is collaborative, as it would be with Convofy, then your organization can effectively crowd-source its knowledge base to employees.

As the Forrester report points out, individuals benefit from social collaboration because it allows them to better keep on top of their job responsibilities, and it provides access to information that is relevant to their current task. For employees whose job responsibilities and typical tasks involve working with enterprise data, the integration of an organization’s ERP system with a social collaboration platform should be a boon in productivity and quality.

But there are challenges

As the report points out, these are early days. Some enterprise software vendors are making early forays into social technologies, and the report details some of these attempts. But for the most part, unless you use Convofy (more on this below), social collaboration hasn’t really arrived to enterprise information.

Forrester points to two trends that promise to hasten the integration. One approach is that “ERP vendors will embed a thin layer of ERP-specific social collaboration within their apps.” Frankly, this doesn’t sound promising because it implies that users will still be embedded in the exclusive domain of the enterprise app, without integration into other relevant sources of updates and notifications.

The other trend is that, “ERP vendors or third parties will bolt on non-app-specific social collaboration for customers to apply to ERP.” This sounds like a more fruitful path, because it gets outside the ERP-specific domain and enables integration across domains in a way that is centered on the employee, who must bring together diverse content to his or her tasks.

Convofy makes ERPs Social, now!

Organizations don’t have to wait for social collaboration solutions to emerge from ERP vendors, because Convofy can already fill that role.

Convofy is the first and only true social collaboration platform, integrating the social activity feed with both on-the-page collaboration and real-time messaging. ERP-provided social platforms are limited. For example, Chatter only works within Salesforce.com environments, or custom integrated platforms. When your organization uses Convofy, employees can collaborate and monitor activity across the full range of enterprise functions, and not be restricted to only those environments offered by ERP vendors.

Convofy is the only social platform that enables collaboration on web-based systems, right out of the proverbial box. Neither Chatter nor Yammer enables this kind of immediate return on social investment. This means that your enterprise systems are already enabled for social collaboration when you use Convofy. For more on how this works, see our post Collaboration for Socially-Challenged Enterprise Apps.

Let us know if we can show you and your organization the advantages of Convofy. Just drop us a note at sales@iscrybe.com. We’d love to hook you up! Or navigate over to Convofy.com ad sign up your organization – you’ll be up and running, for free, within a couple minutes.

With the emergence of environments where an effective internal social network carries virtually all communication, the idea of phasing out email is actually plausible. At Scrybe, where we obviously use Convofy, we observe that internal emails have been reduced by 90% or more. The result has been salutary: there is greater clarity in communications, it is easier to find information, and less time is spent “managing” information.

The big difference is subtle but important. Email is a “push” model: that is, you push content to specific people or mailing lists. This means two things:

1. By default, people are excluded from access, and you have to explicitly grant them access by including them in the To or Cc line.
2. The information shared by email is subsequently stored in personal repositories – Inboxes or other mail folders – which is inaccessible to others.

Internal social networks offer the opposite orientation, which is closer to a “subscribe” model. Messages, documents, links, etc. can be posted without a specific audience in mind. In many cases, social networks change the mindset of the sharer from “who needs to know this” to “whoever needs this can find it.” This represents a significant change not only in attitude but in accessibility of information, much of which should be treated as an organizational asset, not the personal, private and sequestered nuggets that get buried in email.

Of course, email isn’t really going away. Ever. Or at least, not until there is some other universal messaging and information exchange service that can span across diverse organizations.

In the meantime, especially for internal use, it’s plausible that email will be increasingly constrained to things like private messaging and notifications (though texting will supersede in both cases, except perhaps for longer messages). And won’t that be a good day, when the information that we need for our organization isn’t buried in Inboxes, but accessible to the appropriate people whenever they need it?

Which junk mail delivery service will fade to extinction first, email or the Postal Service?

Update:
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