The opening keynotes for day 2 of Share 2012 are done. In the first session after the keynotes, Ramin from eBay is talking about their with enterprise social networking. I had the privilege of hearing Ramin speakt at Share 2011 in Sydney in November. See my notes there for what he said in November.

Key points from today:
– focus – why social? The roadmap, strategy, and key ideas.
– why social? The business strategy:
– … (1) get knowledge to people immediately
– … (2) connect people across boundaries
– … (3) expertise search, collaborate, and find facts
– to discover the ideas that would resonate, Ramin went to the various parts of the organization and got their input on key themes. They ranked the importance of these across the opportunities and the departments.
– develop a roadmap – including selecting the vendors, making recommendations, running a proof-of-concept, training (started brown-bag sessions on SharePoint and social very early), align organizational goals and culture, and more.
– … be intentional about the wave 1 – for eBay, it was social communities (learning and development, global leaders, etc)
– … … for wave 2 – the social consumerization. Eg., Chatter, MySocial, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. At eBay, linked the intranet with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn – so you can publish something from the intranet through to the social consumer tools. Do need to wrap an acceptable usage policy on this.
– … … for wave 3 (August to November 2012) – social and email integration, and contextualization of social networks.
– who do you start with? See the Gartner chart on pioneers, settlers, and stay-behinds (actions, motivation, turnoffs, and the level of IT support needed)
– social tools strategy – any device, any place, any time. Don’t dictate the tools being used. The Hub – the Intranet – brings everything together.
– a “hub and spoke” approach is the most commonly used approach for spreading ideas and reality around social business.
– develop an organizational partnership:
– … eg., organizational effectiveness – use of real-to-life scenarios.
– demonstration (SharePoint 2010 with NewsGator):
– … Ramin showed the eBay intranet.
– … did a search for “scrum.” Using Fast Search, it returns content and people.
– … or can use a tag cloud and find people. With NewsGator, it will give a visual indication of the people who are interested in that tag.
– … the system can generate email notifications. It may give too much though. When releasing the system, have email turned off by default. Can also reply to a conversation by email.
– … has a variety of communities.
– can you measure success? Ramin says yes – count the number of page views.
– Ramin sees user adoption happening over four stages – winning attention, communicate concepts, apply concepts, make it real. This was Ramin’s re-badging and contextualization of User Adoption Strategies in his work. Cool.
– some upcoming adoption projects:
– … integrating LinkedIn with the profile part of The Hub.
– … inclusion of social in Outlook, eg., perhaps with Harmon.ie (no decision made on which plug-in to use yet).
– … the video hub – for uploading videos.