Deck for a Webinar presented to an online audience for the Society for Technical Communications (STC) in August 2010. Outlines use of socially-focused solutions for support and internal communications.

1. STC Webinar: Social Solutions for
User Support and Communications
August 11, 2010

2. Agenda
 Introduction
 Background and context
 Case 1: Support wiki for worldwide CMS
 Case 2: Editorial project communications for marketing and
content managers
 What we learned
 Future plans and takeaways
 Questions

3. Introduction
Ken Efta
Co-founder and Principal Consultant,
Allyis, Inc.
Twitter: @kenefta

4. Background
Some Background: does this
sound familiar?

5. Background
 Our client:
– Large software and services firm
– Central marketing/sales management  global
field offices
– Case 1: Globalized Web Content Management
(WCM)
– Case 2: Marketing Campaign Strategy and
Execution
 Internal, enterprise-only (not
consumer-facing)

6. Background
 Didn’t set out to build a social
solution
 Thought of our solutions as
“provisional applications” to
solve problems

7. Background
 Very little budget for travel,
in-person training
 Field productivity was key
 Leveraged SharePoint 2007
(and SharePoint 2010)

8. Background
 Cultural issues
 Resource constraints in the
field

9. Support Wiki for Web Content Management
Problem:
• Central publishing support team
running custom WCM system AND
supporting the field users
• Migration onto globalized WCM
platform from disparate WMC
platforms
• Complex WCM content inheritance and
localization models
• Varying levels of content and technical
expertise
• Lack of knowledge sharing between
field offices
• Word-based documentation
• Geographically distributed
• Language and cultural barriers
Goals:
• Save $$
• Save time
• Get field sites on-boarded
• Communicate WCM features that
would best help field be
productive
• Better engagement and
communication with field

10. Support Wiki for Web Content Management

11. Solution Description: Support Wiki for Web
Content Management
Results:
 Highlighted key design issues and pain points with WCM
onboarding; mitigated some field perceptions and frustrations
 Gained insight into best practices and workarounds innovated by
the field; leveraged these field-based successes
 Reduced support and onboarding costs: helped users help
themselves
 Justified budget for process and tool improvements
• Moved operations and training materials from Word doc in a
SharePoint Library to a SharePoint 2007 wiki
• Documented all FAQs, learnings, and workarounds on wiki
• Paired in-person training and conference calls to evangelize wiki as
a place to get training, post questions, and share field insights

12. Solution Description: Support Wiki for Web
Content Management

13. Support Wiki for Web Content Management

14. Support Wiki for Web Content Management

15. Editorial Project Communications
Problem:
• PMO received several content and
campaign questions each day from
stakeholders and the field
• Data was there, but “locked” in a
system that required a special tool
• Large time commitment to track down
comprehensive status
• Difficultly in helping the field prioritize
and localize content
• Geographically distributed
Goals:
• Save $$
• Save time
• Create transparency into content
strategy
• Create traceability into
management of site and
campaign assets
• Assist field in prioritizing their
localization investments

16. Editorial Project Communications

17. Solution Description: Editorial Project
Communications
Results:
 Dramatic drop-off in number of questions to PMO
 Increase in field productivity due to better visibility, prioritization
 Additional investment in data entry allowed for quicker production
of campaign kits used by the field
 Help to identify unused and low value content (~2000 pages of
content  ~300)
• Leveraged an import utility to migrate all transactional task and
project data into set of SharePoint lists
• Created custom list views showing editorial best bets, in-flight
campaigns, and project status
• Required some additional data entry from publishing team to
ensure that all publishing assets could be traced back to a given
campaign

18. Editorial Project Communications

19. Editorial Project Communications

20. Editorial Project Communications

21. Editorial Project Communications

22. What We Learned
 Removing barriers to
information
 Helping two-way, network-
based communications
 Automating processes

23. Key Social Concepts
P = People
O = Objectives
S = Strategy
T = Technology
Groundswell Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff

24. Key Social Concepts
Weak Social
vs.
Strong Social
“The Strength of Weak Ties”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Granovetter

25. Key Social Concepts
Nielsen’s Participation
Inequality: 1:9:90
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

26. Future State
 Better reporting to monitor usage and take
action/outreach
 Greatly improved wiki functionality in SharePoint 2010
 Social Features (Commenting, Rating, Tagging,
Status/Activity Feeds)
 Experiments with Microblogging
 Business Connectivity Services

27. Questions