I don’t know the exact number of organisations that have experimented with social software or social media for internal communications, but from those that we’ve connected with and listened to it’s clear there are a large number of them that didn’t get the results they wanted because they didn’t know where to start or were unsure of how to build adoption. So if you fall into one of these categories, here are a few pointers that you may find useful.

More than just push messaging tool
First off, social tools (wikis, forums, tagging etc), and more importantly social networking behaviours, can be deployed to help information flow more freely, enhance knowledge sharing and internal collaboration, activate deeper employee engagement, and even has proven results in achieving staff retention. They shouldn’t necessarily be viewed as a replacement for those things you are already doing, and they should be seen as something more wide-reaching that simply a communication tool versed with message pushing!

Command and control no longer
The days of command & control are numbered as social tools place greater emphasis on people at all levels by providing everyone with a voice, whether they choose to exercise it or not. Therefore, their is no such thing as ownership - it is owned by everyone, and more so by those with a hunger, passion and willing to participate and contribute. This is heightened by the fact that there are less rules than before - but guidelines are vitally important nonetheless, as leaders seek to engender adoption.

Social networks are a solution, not a problem
There are a lot of organisations and business leaders out there banning the likes of Facebook and other social networking sites from the workplace as they see it as a threat to productivity. I question, is technology the reason that people want to do something other than what they are paid for within the workplace? Perhaps job satisfaction should be studied very carefully, as should the behaviours that are now commonplace among staff in their private lives, for it is this which needs to be harnessed in the workplace.

Host the conversation, it’s taking place anyway!
Business also fears that their workers will talk negatively about a range of work-related issues. To this I say embrace it, listen carefully, and if it becomes such a problem then let the community themselves report it and deal with it in a way they deem relevant. By offering these controls, you will find such negativity rare indeed! What’s more, these conversation are taking place elsewhere, so better to be able to gather them and respond to them in the best way possible.

Don’t be afraid to experiment (and fail)
When considering the use of social tools within the workplace, don’t be afraid to experiment, and we advocate starting small. Invite a number of people whom you believe will be early adopters, and allow them to spread the word. Make them champions within the business, and they will help culture the guidelines and behaviours that can achieve your goals. Social tools are by their very nature flexible and cost-effective, so create a playground, sit back, watch and learn.

A range of business applications and solutions
And finally, developing social tools for internal communications isn’t an initiative that should be led or driven by your IT department. Why? Simply put, they exist to implement now out-moded command and control systems, and are much more focussed on the ‘tech’ rather than the all important behaviours.

Wrapping up, social tools can help you with a plethora of business cases, including the following;

• Internal collaboration
• Knowledge sharing
• Business networking
• Learning
• Internal communications
• Resource management
• Sweating knowledge capital
• Sales support
• Customer service

If you’re asking yourself how you can achieve some of these points, and want to learn more how social tools can benefit your organisation on the inside then drop me a line, I’d be happy to help, advise, guide and get my hands dirty.

Engadget, one of the leading gadget blogs on the internet, recently decided to turn off commenting on articles. Their claim is that in in recent days commenting has got 'out of hand', with a few people creating an environment that they feel is 'ugly, pointless and threatening'.

It's a bold move, and one I suspect they did not take lightly. By their own admission, and inline with the oft cited 1% rule, only a small percentage of their readership comment. However, the feature is considered one of the basic tenants of social media - allowing motivated readers to become part of the debate. Indeed, it's features like commenting, along with the low barriers to entry, ability to syndicate across multiple platforms/channels, etc. that have helped the format grow to the size, variety and popularity it has today.

Benefits aside monitoring comments, filtering out the spam and ensuring abuse is kept at bay can be a difficult process. Blog authors have options, which include:

• Moderation - before a comment is displayed online, it must be 'cleared' by a site administer, ensuring no detrimental posts get through. However, this can take away the immediate gratification users have come to expect and cause commentors to feel they're being censored. Such a process also becomes unfeasible for a site that is as popular (and has such a high number of generated comments) as Engadget.
• Spam filters - Great for some removing the 'v1Agra' type of spam message we have all come to despise, but limited when it comes to deciding if a well composed comment is inappropriate
• Community-managed voting - only displays comments that have been given a positive vote by readers. Very 'hands-off' for site owners, but requires an extra level of interaction from users
• Register to vote - Great for blogs with a small following - e.g. personal holiday blogs, but becomes difficult to track with large and manage with large user base. Equally, as user names and passwords are required each time, barriers to entry for commenting (especially for casual commentors) become very high
• Threading - this allows people to comment on comments. It doesn't stop spam comments, but it does conversations to diverge. Sites like Slashdot take this approach to the extreme, allowing unlimited 'threading'. The side effect is that this can quickly become confusing to the casual observer. Limited threading is a useful

Our advise at Dub is to try and take maximum advantage of the medium and be as open to viewer comments as possible. As you can see, there are a myriad approaches to helping mange comments. Unfortunately, for some publishers all the options in the world can't stop the trolls and spammers of this world.

Read Engadget's full statement here

There's been some considerable buzz around location-based services for some time now, but thats mainly among us consultants. That was until the arrival of Gowalla, Google Latitude and especially the rapidly rising Foursquare. These applications allow you to connect and follow friends as they travel the world (or just your local postcode). They work by using the geo-data captured from your mobile device and then, in the case of Foursquare, get you to 'check-in' to the precise destination. Simple, fun, insightful!

We like Foursquare not only because it keeps us up-to-date with the movements of our friends, but it also allows is to discover new and exciting places to visit in cities around the world, thanks to our well-travelled friends. Perhaps more importantly, the service has massive potential for business owners - especially retailers and operators - in that users can be tracked and rewarded for multiple visits to destinations. This offers great opportunities for customer and brand loyalty schemes and deepens engagement with customers in the 2.0 way.

Best of all, Foursquare harnesses gaming mechanics to increase participation. Simply, the more you visit, the higher your points. Earn points for multiple visits to the same destination or be rewarded with Adventurer status when you check-in to new destinations.

Here's how points are currently awarded:

• +5 points for your first time checking-in at a venue
• +5 points for adding a new venue
• +1 point for per checkin, increasing by +1 with each checkin (e.g. your 1st checkin of the day is +1, 2nd checkin of the day +2 points, etc)

We've even witnessed meet-ups in Sydney and New York for those awarded Mayoral status! So what are you waiting for, drop by Foursquare, befriend me and then drop by Dub....we're waiting for you!

Socialising Best Practice and Lessons Learnt

The Design Council, a UK Government-funded strategic body, promotes the use of design through the UK.  They help business be better at doing what they do by instilling design thinking and by helping designers be more effective and public services more efficient.

Having embarked upon the development of The Designers’ Business Knowledge Base (DBKB) - an essential Best Practice resource from which design professionals, design buyers and design educators can seek inspiration and guidance - the client required a strategic overlay describing how the DBKB could be delivered as an interactive communication and collaboration tool.

The core of our work saw the development of a Digital Framework for the DBKB focusing on how users could submit and extract experience-based stories and case studies. Insights were by way of formal submissions and more conversational stories of the kind designers of all ages and experience could submit using simple, easy-to-use social software tools.

The  framework was constructed on four pillars; The User Model, Content Model, Business Model and Sustainability Model.

• The User Model proposed a variety of benefits and rewards for each of the stakeholder groups, including those of a social, emotional, financial and experiential kind.
• The Content Model explored how the resource would harness user-generated content to provide insightful and inspiring best practice examples.
• The Business Model looked at and made recommendations as to how The Design Council could monetise the service
• And finally, the Sustainability Model took inspiration from what we believed to be some of the more forward-thinking online services around, and how the DBKB could integrate their behaviours in order to be more future-proofed.

The crux of our strategic recommendations was for The Design Council to harness its existing offline design practitioner network connections for traditional push messaging, but also to engage them in more dynamic and ongoing online conversation in order to trawl for ongoing insights and knowledge around design best practice. The development of best practice guidelines in a traditional sense had proven to be expensive, and often the outcome would date very quickly. Digitally captured knowledge could be kept alive, nurtured and extended by the community, and knowledge shared over time to the extent that the community became self-helpers.

Our recommended process and methodology is currently being developed ready for implementation.

We've said for a long time that online research communities provide better research experiences for both clients AND respondents, or members as we prefer to label them. Fun and enjoyment can be quite hard to measure, but seeing the feedback we've just received from a community that we've been running in Brazil, I think it speaks for itself. It's so good we had to share it with you.....

"I would like to thank you for the opportunity to be part of the project, I hope you enjoyed my ideas....I loved it and wanted you to know I did it with affection. I found it really cool, I hope you have received lots of good ideas."

and then there's this one..

"Thank you! I really liked taking part, I found it to be very dynamic and different."

and this one..

"I am available when if you need more research, okay? You can count on me."

I think you get the idea. These people thrived on the  creativity and fun that the tasks we designed offered them, and of course the very personal relationships they struck up with our moderators. I your research needs an injection like this, we'd love to hear from you.

At Dub, we've recently been building a number of online research communities to capture discussions around some very private and sensitive issues. These insight and innovation-purposed communities have been commissioned by players in the pharmaceutical and health and well-being industries, who are growing increasingly switched-on to the opportunities online communities present. These include the ability to gather candid feedback and rich insight from end-users, of the sort they've never before experienced. In a sector where insight  from sufferers and patients of such richness has traditionally been hard to come achieve, online research communities present a major shift.

Of course, when discussing Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), Over-active Bowel Disorder (OBD) and other serious personal conditions with real people, respecting their privacy and offering them relative online anonymity is tantamount to the success of the study.  With this in mind, our approach allows project owners to assign tasks and questions to individuals  by way of private one-on-one discussions, at the same time as supporting open group discussions. The former puts people at great ease, and when combined with the fact that respondents are participating from the comfort of their own home or place of choice, affords response nirvana.

Group discussions such as forums and blog also have a part to play in that they allow the community to connect,  bond and share experiences with each other. Thus they reward respondents for their openness and honesty by allowing the connect with fellow sufferers, thus providing a level of support and comfort in knowing.

The recruitment of patients and sufferers is no easy task, so making them feel comfortable, respected and valued contributors within the community is essential. Our approach achieves this in a number of ways.

First we work tirelessly to design the tasks and activities that benefit from our own of research into the language and behaviours of the target audience. We see our role as party hosts, not entertainers, so it's important that we communicate with them in a language they recognise - theirs not ours.

Secondly we encourage Community Managers to share with them the insights that are being gleaned, so that they themselves are learning from the project and not just giving.

As our online research community work continues, so to does our amazement at the audience-types that are increasingly comfortable in sharing their lives online, be it in private or social environments. Our communities are an efficient and powerful way to connect, create learnings, gather feedback and support sufferers who wish to help others at the same time.

The market research world has a new kid on the block - digital research. But is ‘being digital’ enough?

Digital research is nothing new. Quantitative digital research tools have been around as long as computers have. And very useful they are too.

But now there is a new breed of tools, which offer a more dynamic, richer approach to aggregating the thoughts, ideas and insights of consumers. These qualitative tools are an emerging field, which are being progressively adopted by the industry and their clients.

Qualitative digital research tools can be built as a result of the convergence of two key developments:

• Improved infrastructure - primarily broadband internet connections, capable home computers and media capture devises eg. video-capable mobile phones
• Sophisticated digital user-behaviours

The latter has been made possible as a result of the myriad methods of digital communication, taught to people by popular social networking services like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. These services and the interactive features they offer have equipped participants with the tools and capabilities needed to share complex viewpoints from the comfort of their own home.

Digital research tools offer numerous immediate and obvious technical benefits over more traditional research practices. For example, all data generated is already digital, enabling researchers to cut and slice data dynamically, without the need to transcribe. This is only the start - but that’s a different post!

These benefits alone under-estimate the real potential of qualitative digital research tools. The real benefits are less about the technical advantages and more about the ability to persistently commune with groups of participants for extended periods of time.

With these tools, it is possible to hold extended research ‘workshops’ for anywhere between a few days and a few months. When compared to traditional practices, the quality and quantity of the work generated by each participant can be higher than traditional approaches by an order of magnitude. And typically for little or no additional cost per-participant.

These new dynamics require a new approach to research. The typical method of questions and answers needs to give way to a more open discourse between researcher and participant. This requires researchers to think differently about the way they conduct their primary research. Pre-planning is still vital, but the possibilities of being flexible, reactive and proactive during the research period is much greater.

The levels of open discourse offered by these tools also present new and interesting ways of fulfilling research objectives. In our experience, spending the extra time creating empowering research tasks, which put the participants at the centre of the question, rather than posing questions that ‘tick the box’ produce rich, high quality results that would otherwise be missed. Equally, the opportunity to respond and build on the responses of participants (both immediately, and importantly over time) becomes central to the methodology.

Researchers also need to have an ever increasing understanding of their participant base. This includes having an appreciation of their wants and needs. Looking after participants for extended periods of time is no easy task. Participants need to know what they are expected to do, when they are expected to do it and, how they are expected to do it. In essence, they need to be offered a narrative - explaining where they have come from, where they are now and where they are going. And this needs to happen more than once during their journey!

A well managed community of participants who are ‘looked after’ by someone aware of these factors will produce better results for longer periods of time than a community who are given a few tasks and then left to their own devises.

We offer our clients a sophisticated array of social media tools (blogs, forums, video-interviews, etc.). With these tools they are able to talk to people for extended periods of time, about the topics that are important to their studies. But with this comes the responsibility to help them make the most of the tools and the people using these tools. By offering a supporting service where research tasks are co-designed and managing participants is discussed, we are able to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Congratulations to Experian, Progressive and Vanguard for winning Forrester's inaugural Voice of the Customer Awards in NY yesterday. It's great to see that organisations that gather feedback and turn it into actionable insight to generate ROI are being recognised. It's a major task to gather feedback from the customer masses, and then collating and reporting on it at such a scale.

This new form of marketing is largely supported by some traditional skills combined with great new technologies including:

• Cloud Computing and the rise of the Software-as-a-Service business model
• Increased access to faster broadband
• Maturing social networking behaviours and social media tools
• API's that allow you to integrate mutliple systems such as CRM

All three companies awarded a prize emonstrated hat the voice of the customer was too valuable to ignore, and that by listening to and valuing individuals, the resultant insight and opportunities could propel the business through increased sales, greater advocacy and generally being regarded highly as a business that listens and acts upon what their customers are telling them.

At Dub we provide the tools to allow brands and organisations to do just this, whether it is your customers, your staff or even your suppliers that you want to engage and listen to.

I was saddended not to see any European businesses in this list, surely you are out there. If you are, and you think you should be represented in a more European-centric award scheme, let me know and we'll see what we can do about it.

The UK's favourite retailer, Marks & Spencer, has garnered a lot of media attention recently following its decision to raise the price large bras by £2. The media I refer to is of course not only the tabloids, but social media and those vocal customers versed in using it to rally the crowds. Perhaps the best example of the groundswell is a Facebook group called Busts4Justice which as of today stood with over 17,000 members!

An organisation the nature of M&S - large, customer-facing, national/international - clearly had a business case to support their action, however, their reputation took a dive not only because of the decision they took, but the lack of engagement and consultation that took place ahead of making the decision and presenting the price hike to the public.

Social media allows consumers with a shared passion or common interest - in this instance large breasts - to hyper-connect and create unilateral campaigns that have been known to have an immense negative impact on reputation, brand trust and loyalty. Turn social media on it's head and it presents the perfect medium with which brands can engage in conversation and discussion with consumers, be it in an public or private environment.

As a business that helps and advises brands how to use social media to engage with consumers and staff, we take much from a story like this. The lessons to learn include:

Trigger the conversation, don't wait for it to happen - Before the announcement were made, but at the time of it being discussed internally, locate consumer that are already having conversations around this topic or subject, and invite them into a private conversation. These people will by their very nature be the most vocal and passionate since they are already sharing their views and opinions in the public domain. Knowing where to find them can take time and expertise, but the chances are there will be a public forum somewhere out there where they are already active.

Listen carefully - Once you've triggered a discussion, pay attention carefully and listen to the views and opinions of your customers. Use three ears to do it if necessary! Researchers and moderators have the necessary skills to do this as well as interpreting the information being shared, so consider using them.

Empathise - As the issue or decision is made public, continue to listen and acknowledge points that are being raised. Your Community Manager(s) should provide the voice of your brand at this stage.

Reward - Acknowledgement and involvement with the decision-making process are forms of reward, but there are many others. Loyalty schemes and price promotions are other forms that cab used (within retail businesses), whereby you nurture the customer relationships you have by offering them discounts on other associated products (in the case of M&S where the hike was publicised, for example).

The result of M&S not following some of these recommendations resulted in a very public u-turn, which despite giving customers their requests, left M&S bruised and with a new layer of distrust.