SM Global Report: Firestoker's Jevon MacDonald

Building Communities Behind the Firewall

       

[ NOTE--This is the 101st report in my ongoing series on social media's impact on business and culture. Formerly, the SAP Global Survey, it is now the Social Media Global Report. This and future posts will be tagged SM Global Report.]

I've heard several times recently that there is more social media activity going on behind the enterprise firewall than in front of it. It is an unprovable assertion however, since there is no way to actually count or monitor what organizations are actually doing in the privacy of their own secure spaces.

What is clear is that there is a lot of activity going on. At Best Buy, for example, 22,000 in-store sales people have joined BlueShirt nation and Geek Squad, the  company's computer service group also collaborates online. At Sun MicroSystems, 9000 engineers are sharing what they know in a behind firewall social network where engineers score points by helping each other.

Jevon MacDonald, co-founder & CEO of Toronto-based Firestoker.com has been building private social networks for organizations of diverse size and type since the coarse and buggy days of 2002. I turned to Jevon to get a sense of what is going on behind firewalls.




1.  The Firestoker story has an interesting beginning as a program for students who are hearing impaired. Tell me how it started and how it evolved into an enterprise collaboration platform.

Around 2001, my partner, Rob Paterson and I were management consultants. About the same time we were getting pretty excited about what was happening at Blogger.com and with social tools like Greymatter. Guys like Ross Mayfield were saying that all this stuff might make sense for business. We started playing with blogging behind the firewall, to see how it might help our clients.

Our opportunity came up in 2002 while we were redesigning departments for York University in Ottawa, Canada's third largest university. Rob spent some time with students representing disability-related groups. He came away determined that we could help deaf and hard of hearing students connect with each other online.

We built a private community for hearing impaired students behind the university firewall. It had everything you see in community sites today. Everyone had a blog and a rich profile, and there were even widgets in the sidebars and features like an events calendar. What was amazing was that the site actually got used. I like to think it made a difference.

The experience had a real and lasting impact on us, because we saw that the use cases were clear. This wasn't about processes or heavy duty metrics, the value was in letting people connect to each other in a meaningful way. All we had to do was trust them to do smart things with the connections.

I think that bit, the part about humans connecting, is lost in most enterprise software. Even most of the Enterprise 2.0 tools out there, fancy platforms and big software that just doesn't mean anything to people. Sure we need those enterprise-level bits, that's the engineering. But, what we REALLY need is beautiful, livable, architecture.

2. Give me some sense of who your customers are, how many, how big and where located?

They vary dramatically. We served a five-person company that was just trying to keep track of day-to-day stuff while people are on the road. We have also completed deployments in Fortune 500 companies, and quite a bit in between . Almost all are in North America.

3. Why stay behind the firewall?  How is the technology different behind the firewall than it is in front? Aren't you leaving money on the table by staying behind the firewall?

When you are building social tools behind the firewall there is just one focus. People need to get their work done. The differences between internal communities and external are big enough that different approaches are required. The two do meet eventually, when the organization is ready to listen to the customer, but that often occurs only time.

A lot of social software companies who started behind the firewall, now  focus on building external communities. We have avoided that--leaving money on the table in the process--for a few reasons. The main one is that I think there are amazing tools out there that address the external problem, and they hardly cost anything. Ning is a great example. I don't know why anyone would spend $50,000 and up for something they can get for $200 a month, and it is usually better.

Trying to straddle both sides of the firewall is an easy short term strategy. But, I believe, the most successful company in the internal enterprise social media world will not be one that is doing both.  Doing both properly would require two sales operations, two design ideologies, two different partner networks, fractured marketing and ultimately: confused users.

4. What percentage of your customers use social media exclusively behind the firewall? Why?  Are they using it to talk with customers, employees, entire ecosystems or what?

Most of our customers use social media almost exclusively behind the firewall. A lot of them are looking at ways to step into the broader marketing/PR side of things, but there is usually so much work to be done behind the firewall that many of them get preoccupied with what they can accomplish there.

I also believe that a company needs to be able to listen to itself first before it can engage with its customers. A company that goes out and says to its customers "let's have a conversation," but can't have a conversation between employees, executives and partners is doing a disservice to everyone. So much about external social media tends to be about communicating a message, but social media is by definition two-way, and when you ignore the customer's voice on the return path, it can get dangerous. Nothing pisses me off more than when I reach out, and receive no worthwhile response.

If you can do this inside the firewall, you are going to have a chance to not just listen to your customers, but to let them transform your organization. It's a powerful idea that we often forget.

5. You told me a story a while back about how Jay's Burgers, a Canadian fast food chain of about 250 locations that uses Firestoker to ensure food quality & safety. Can you recount it for your studio audience?

It is my favorite use case for not only Firestoker, but for enterprise social media in general.

Our customer isn't actually called Jay's Burgers. We still haven't gotten a permission to use their name, so we've substituted Jay's. A lot of our customers feel their use of social media behind the firewall is a competitive advantage, and many are really shy about talking about it.

Jay's Burgers considers their competitive advantage to be in the buns, which are made fresh daily at each restaurant in the chain. Just before a busy holiday week end, a manager posted on the social network we had built for them that he was having problems with the bread dough, and that he had done all the usual troubleshooting to address the problem. He had assumed his staff was somehow to blame.

Very quickly, other store managers, chefs and franchise owners joined into the conversation. Other sites were having similar problems. Through the social network, the senior staff self organized into problem solving teams.

It turned out the staff was not to blame. There was a flour-yeast mixing problem. Because of the private community, 250 individual restaurants did not have to figure it out on their own, 250 times. Just a few worked it out and and then shared the solution with everyone else, all  within a few hours. If these people weren't able to communicate with each other, the problem would have plagued the system all weekend.

6.  I've been told that in 2008 there is more activity behind the enterprise firewall than in front of it. Is that what you are seeing as well? Why do you think this trend is forming?

I can't be sure that it is the case, but it makes sense to me, especially if you count the clandestine use of social media by people who are just trying to get their jobs done. We aren't talking about big IT-installed software, but about the assistant who might be using a Google Doc in the same way many of us use Wikis, or the office might be using Instant Messaging and BlackBerry IM constantly.

Instant messaging is one of the least celebrated successes of social media inside the enterprise. The one-to-one nature of IM means that a lot of people don't think of it as social media, but it remains, by far, one of the most viral and social tools out there. IM really mimics how we share a lot of information in the real world. Where a lot of tools, blogs included, are a sort of soapbox, IM is more like a gossip channel we are comfortable with. Each of us chatting idly, but sharing massive amounts of information.

7. Your customer base is pretty diverse. How do the issues change or stay the same as the enterprise size changes?

There are a lot of issues that seem to creep in as deployments get to a certain size. Findability is one thing we think we have done a good job in addressing. The idea that there are things you will browse for, things you will search for and then there are things that your network will push to you.

All have to be factored in, and there are actually different ways to display all that information to the user based on how large and active the deployment is. Subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) changes in how the application displays things can be critical in making the leap from a deployment for 10 people to one with 1000+.

The biggest and most important issues never change. Those are the basic human issues that we see everywhere. The vast majority of problem solving comes down to having a few smart people watching who can say "hey, cool it", or whatever else needs to be said. The important thing is that it is happening in public, so those things rarely happen twice.

8. What tips do you have for companies planning to use social software behind the firewall?

I'll be honest, the most important piece of advice is the same advice I was given when I got married. That was: "Be nice".

If you are the person who wants to push this forward, you are in for a tough road. Nobody gets to ride in on their horse and chop off the kings head, you are leading a revolution of sorts and you have to win the hearts of the peasants and farmers first.

It sounds silly: but go sit in the coffee room and meet some people you haven't spoken to yet. Do something nice for people near you and go out of your way to keep doing the right thing.

The change that comes with bringing social media inside the firewall is incredible, and it is (I think) totally underestimated. If you can show people that these tools will give them a chance to speak their mind, to share their ideas and to make a positive change, then they WILL get behind it. But if you aren't a person that they have ever felt those same feelings with in person, then they won't believe you can do it online. You have to earn that respect first. It is going to be a lot easier to disarm opponents than it is to take them on by force.

You aren't the smart one- They are.

9. What measurement/monitoring tools to you recommend for behind-firewall use? What should be measured?

Our measurements are really basic stuff. Almost CRM-like in nature. We provide a suite of tools that will monitor usage and if certain people, departments or other groups are not engaging in a meaningful way, then a set of notifications can go out. If those don't work, then the right person or people can be notified so that they can follow up in person. A lot of people just need some reassurance, or they ran in to a particular problem and just need some guidance. It has taken us a long time to get those queues right, and we still have a lot of work to do.

Other metrics, like meme-tracking, are baked in to the user experience, so they aren't so much analytics, but more of a flag that gets put up when interesting things are