Introducing Social Lair

In my last blog post, I described some of the lessons I have learned in creating and deploying social innovation communities. I have created a new platform that builds upon the lessons learned for our new company Social Lair (http://sociallair.com). In this blog post I want to outline the solution strategy adopted by Social Lair that really "puts social to work".

Getting work done is at the core of all our offerings. A good enterprise social platform will get the work done faster, better, and cheaper by  reaping the benefits of collective wisdom of crowds. We believe that every business process, from innovation and idea management to HR, Product Management, can benefit from becoming more open and democratic. In fact, the enterprise social software will become mission-critical only when we achieve this goal.

At the conceptual level, our solution can be viewed in terms of three main layers (depicted in the figure below):

• Blended Social Analytics - Analytics is the core foundation of our solution stack and consists of Information Network Analysis (reputations, connector rating, conversational levels), Natural Language Processing (purpose-based routing, expert identification), Quantitative Aggregation Models (prediction markets, rank aggregation), and Gamification (currency management). Analytics piece is instrumental in optimizing cost of social transactions and adding relevance to search and ranking.
• Purposeful Conversations – We model community interactions as a series of structured conversations focused on a business purpose (market forecasting, choice resolution, ideation, etc). Each conversation type has an unstructured component, a quantitative component, and an aggregation and analytics engine for providing actionable intelligence to the conversation sponsor.
• Community Archetypes – Based on our past experience, we have realized that different business contexts require different styles of community design. For example, Idea campaign communities would just not work effectively for daily collaboration.  At the same time, we did not want to create a system that is TOO flexible and requires greater knowledge and effort for set up and configuration. Our approach is to capture well-established collaboration patterns in the form of community archetype. Each archetype is defined in terms of the included conversation types, navigational scheme, terminology, and access control.

Our strategy in realizing this vision is to create minimalistic experience that reflects our approach and iterate on it based on the feedback received by our end users. We are already having some interesting conversations with end users in this space who are getting quite excited about the potential of our technology. I will off course keep you updated in the new venture as we continue our journey in this space.

Lessons learned in developing social innovation communities

About five years ago, I started building a social innovation platform that has now been successfully deployed by several Fortune 500 companies. These communities have yielded great results: new products, improved process efficiency, greater customer satisfaction; just to name a few. Those successes were also accompanied by realization that these communities are extremely hard to sustain. Ironically, the two most important factors were top leadership support and a passionate individual/team whose sole job was to run innovation (Sorry Gamification!). Moreover, this individual or the team needed to constantly care and feed the community to keep it going.
I have also been watching a slew of “enterprise social” software companies entering the market. We tried to use some of these products ourselves and came to the same realization I had five years ago: socializing without purpose isn’t going to stick; it ends up producing more noise driving away serious users.
As I digested this information and observations, I came up with a few things that have to be done differently to address the adoption malaise in the enterprise social arena:
Focus on “Collaboration” not “Socialization” – Business leaders, quite justifiably, frown upon employees using Facebook or Twitter at work. Simply bringing these technologies inside your organization will not be productive. Although there is a need to facilitate undirected, water cooler conversations, you have to put “business” before “social” to create “business social” solutions.
Create a “Funnel of Funnels” – The “Idea Funnel” model of user engagement is easy to understand and works for one or two campaign but ultimately requires enormous effort from the single sponsor to keep it going. The engagement platform needs to make it easy for a broader cross section of participants to create their own funnels. Campaign style communities democratize idea generation part, but fail to do the same to funnel creation.
Judicious Use of Gamification – Applying game design techniques to improve user engagement levels is tricky. Unlike game designers, enterprise community managers are interested, not in raw user activity, but in meaningful participation that produces results consistent with sponsor objectives. I have seen virtual currency awards leading to spamming behavior by users simply trying to earn that $10 gift card. Conversely, I have seen instances of self-motivated community members contribute great ideas without needing leaderboards or badges.
More Efficient Social Transactions – The ROI associated with enterprise social deployments comes from two sources: cost savings and revenues associated with business transactions, and efficiencies in establishing “social transactions”. The former is well understood and can be easily quantified, so I won’t go into that here. A social transaction is an interaction between two or more stakeholders associated with a business objective. An effective enterprise social platform would minimize the time and costs associated with social transactions, especially in case of weak or non-existent ties within transacting parties.