Lost some great comments for many posts.  So very, very sorry.  Will fix soon.

I thought I would go a bit more on why and the meaning behind the question categorizations of play, work, travel, and life. On the why, the ethos of our customers’ employees felt that there would be value if we could sort via question type. For example, if at the end of a long day, someone wanted to be a little entertained, that person could peruse through the “play” related questions. Or if someone is looking for general travel information, that person could narrow down the search to only “travel” related questions.

The meaning behind the question categories is fairly self- explanatory. “Work” related content helps to improve your work life. “Life” related content helps improve your personal life. “Play” are the fun/funny questions and “Travel” is for personal travel based questions.

Examples of some of the questions from our customers are below:

Work

“Did you know that cubeless is built in using Ruby on Rails? Does anyone have any experience with this platform and how could this be useful to our company?”

Life

“Can anyone recommend a good electrician close to where I live? I live in uptown. Thanks!”

Travel

“What seaside city in the Eastern USA would you recommend for an extended family reunion, July 2008 for approximately 50 people ages 2-80 years old. Any referrals to lodging or planning resources would be appreciated.”

and last, but never least, Play

“Which is the best beer you have ever tasted??? I have 4 that I love… Franziskaner blonde (German) is my top choice. Leffe (Belgium), Don De Dieu (Canada) and De Verboden Vrucht (Belgium). My gosh these are good beers!!! What’s your choice?”

Below is a short video on question categorization

Question Categorization

Hot off the Press! New features on the product. Here is a quick overview of what is new…..

Recommendations- Create recommendations for destinations, restaurants or activities with your answers. These recommendations can be pinpointed on the new map view and shared with community members.

Following- Enjoy someone’s blog posts? Found that question interesting? Like the interaction of a group? Now you can follow your favorites in the community, just simply click the “add” link in any member or group profile. This is a great way to gain additional knowledge and information on a topic that interests you.

Question categorization- Assign new questions categories of Life, Work, Play and Travel to better guide the community in providing answers and recommendations. Sort on existing questions to make the search more relevant to you.

Private notes- Send and respond to private notes from members. Choose to post as private or public.

Why the new features, well, it is in response to our customers! Watch for videos to follow describe these new features. So cool!

OK, the next installment for the Insights 2.0 theme (the previous entry was from Jessica Schneider) is from Toby Cunningham, Vice President of Business Strategy in the Travel Studios group. What was interesting to Toby was the difference between an online social network vs. an online community. First, what is similar, which is the sharing of collaborative tools. Both use blogs, forums, microblogging and other communication tools. Indeed, at first glance, both look exactly the same. But while this is the endgame for social networks like Facebook, a true community is a gathering of individuals with shared interests and unmet communication needs. Communities need marketing and content to keep its members interested, and as Toby wrote previously, communities need to “stimulate the user base and create a body of expertise around the topics they’re passionate about.” The extra demand placed on community development offerings, such as Enterprise 2.0 products like cubeless, is challenging. Not unlike the marketing techniques for many products and services in today’s world, user adoption of enterprise 2.0 products is far closer to the customization of one-on-one marketing vs. the standardization of mass appeal.

So meeting the needs of the users (problem solving) is the different between community vs. social networking. Social networks can be large and vague, lacking a compelling central theme. But communities tend to be smaller and centered around topics that people find compelling and meet their needs. These unmet needs could be information, socializing with like minded individuals, or finding others to hone your skills, but the key is finding engaging topics, such as your employer for enterprise 2.0 products. However difficult to establish, the benefits of a health community are massive for all participants, the company and the workforce.

Lately, I have been reading quite a lot of Andrew McAfee’s work,either on his blog (The Impact of Information Technology (IT) on Businesses and their Leaders) or his published work with the MIT Sloan Management Review. I just read an article in the 2006 spring version of the Sloan Management review by him called “Enterprise 2.0, the Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” In the technology arena, this article is a bit old, but really hits the high points on what businesses need regarding social communities. He explains that Enterprise 2.0 is the business movement that is focused on “platforms that companies can buy or build in order to make visible the practices and outputs of their knowledge workers.” ( I have a feeling that I should have started the cubeless blog with this post) A tidbit from the article:“44% of respondents agreed that it was easy to find what they were looking for on their intranet”. From this article, it sounds like he may be somewhat surprised by this number, but I really am not. After all, a company’s intranet was designed by a certain individual or group. What a group prefers in a paticular design isn’t necessarily what others would find most “appealing” or “easiest-to-use”. Additionally, I don’t think that intranets are inadequate, they just don’t answer all the questions. These channels and platforms in use aren’t much good at providing answers to such questions as: What’s the right way to approach this analysis? Does a template exist for it? Who’s working on a similar problem right now?” Looks like the current email channels and intranet platforms could be more useful if there was tracking functionality tied with it. Without the ability to track, it is very hard to find those in your organization who have previous experiences or know others who have had previous experiences with your problem.

Then he goes into his acronym of the six components necessary for successful Enterprise 2.0 technologies, “SLATES”. I though I would go through each one and demonstrate how cubeless delivers on these attributes. S is for Search, basically how well does the product perform regarding keyword searches? Below is how cubeless incorporates keyword search. (Remember, SabreTown is cubeless customized for Sabre Holdings, so yes, we do practice what we preach)

As you can see, you can keyword search for others who have expertise or by content within the system (the Q&A section), below is the tag cloud of the most popular keywords in the system. The larger they are, the more popular. I love the line of “M”s. We know Mexico,
Montevideo, and movies.

With “S” out of the way, next is “L”. “L” refers to Links, as in a product needs to let the user provide links to other web content. I am guessing that in early 2006 (or 2005 if that is when the passage was written), linking may not have been universal, but now, it is a product showstopper. No link, no product, regardless of its other features. cubeless most certainly has this feature.

“A” is for Authoring, the need for the tools that allow user generated content, like blogs and wikis. This is the centerpiece of cubeless. First, its Q and A feature solicits information and gathers content. Secondly, cubeless has a personal and group blog feature. And finally, within the groups feature is an “Almost News” feature for more “news” related content vs. blogs, which are more in-line with opinions. Pics of our blog capabilities are below.

T is for Tags. (I feel like I am a show writer for the “Letter People”) Tags are the one-word explanations of the content’s information. This is important from the standpoint that the content itself does necessarily always match the content’s information. For example, if you are looking for a establishment called “Texas bar and grill” in Seattle, you would not use the tag “Texas”, you would use the tags “bar” and/or “Seattle”. cubeless incorporates the tagging feature as shown below.

The E refers to Extensions, basically finding connections between the tags. This a basic data mining feature called “Market Basket Analysis” and was originally spearheaded by supermarkets to determine what combination of food items go together. For instance, certain items tend to be purchased together, and some items are only purchase when another item is bought. It permeates everything from store layout to what and when to discount certain items. that finds connections between tags.

Why is this important for any Enterprise 2.0 tool, if someone types “France” as one of his/her tags, there is a high probably also he or she will have the tag “wine” as well. Actually, in general, the tags “France” and “wine” usually go together in general. So, a system need to be able to see these connects and relationships. Oh, and yes, cubeless has “market basket analysis” features.

Lastly, the S is for Signals, meaning that when new content appears, the user is notified. This is demonstrated via our Q and A feature with email alerts. Below is a question that I am interested in watching answers to. For each answer, an email appears mentions that someone provided an answer to my watched question. For instance, I am asking the question below and have pointed out the notification preference (I added the arrows, we are not that crazy about email notices)

Now, my question has been answered and cubeless have notified my email account. Ta Da!

Thanks for the tip, Robyn! And for fun, here is the answer….

Btw, the little red guys mean that Robyn and I are on cubeless currently.

Well, there you have it, the requirements of Enterprise 2.0 all in one nice little cube…..er….. cubeless.

In the March 10^th issue of the Wall Street Journal, there is a section devoted to IT and management.  There are a few points that I thought I would bring up.  First, one article titled, “Putting Ideas to Work” by Thomas H. Davenport, Laurence Prusak and Bruce Strong  stresses the importance of an effective knowledge management system and its three subsets, knowledge creation, knowledge dissemination, and knowledge application.   

One key fundamental insight from the article is developing new knowledge isn’t the worst looming issues with companies, but having the ability to “best to disseminate existing know-how to diverse work forces.”  This is where an internal social network can help, pool the knowledge of the collective workforce to provide answers to the community’s questions.

Another article regarding online attacks mentions the importance of inviting and engaging critics.  Again, this can extrapolated to a company’s workforce.  You need a tool to uncover criticism and complaints so management can address such issues, again, cubeless can perform such actions.

OK, sometimes we all get carried away with the Web/Enterprise 2.0 talk….

Sonic 2.0 Commercial

I do wish the video was better, but still.

Today, I was reading a post from Michael Sampson’s blog titled Effective Collaboration. The post was on developing a communication culture for knowledge sharing. I became interested in the following passage:

To build a supportive communication climate you need to send messages that acknowledge effort, creativity, and teamwork, engage people in the decision making process, establish trust, which is maintained through consistency, congruity, reliability, and integrity.

Yet, it is still not enough to be a nice manager and create a nice environment in which to communicate, exchange information, and work. You must also communicate a sense of challenge to your employees by placing importance on high quality and establishing high performance goals.“

After reading, I began to wonder, what are some reasons that some employees in the same firm would not share information? What are the hazards in the road? What else does management really need to do outside of “being a good guy.” Then it dawned on me….

Printing Press

If there ever was a reason for skepticism, it is the printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg. Johannes invented one of the greatest creations of human existence, the printing press, which allowed the written word to be spread quickly and cheaply throughout Western civilization. However, he was fast and loose with his invention, his idea was stolen, and he died w/o deserved reward from his brilliance. Indeed, during his time, most didn’t know who actually invented the printing press; it wasn’t until many years later that it was found that Mr. Gutenberg deserved the credit. .

I believe that this story has of relevance in today’s world and personally, I believe that this is an issue with many companies, especially companies that are technical based. By technical, I am not referring to IT in this case, but companies that are science/engineering based. These are the companies that normally are not viewed as “technology companies”, but employ countless PhD educated chemists, chemical biologists, and/or engineers. Traditionally, they are compensated by the amount of technical know-how they posses and are measured in terms of new patents, new products, new processes, etc. Thus these individuals, and the information they posses, are vital to the health of the company.

But for many companies, extracting insight can be challenge for valuable employees are not willing to disperse knowledge. Why, because it reduces the value of his/her position with the company.  Dispersing employee information not only reduces his or her importance within the company, but also undermines his or her bargaining position since leaving in the company is not a hazardous to the firm. In addition, I think it’s human nature to place weight on sunk cost. If I am a chemist who spent 10 years of my life on a new chemical compound or an engineer who developed a new, safer, more effective compounding process, I can understand why the natural reflex is to be hesitant.

Well, how do firms avoid this scenario? In some instances, I’m not sure you can. If I invent this millennium’s version of the printing press, am I blabbing about it before I have established ownership?  Heck no.  But chances are that people are not going to think “Edison, Gutenberg, Ben Franklin, Malcolm Kass”.  But for other “non earth shattering” idea, I think the key is mentioned by Dr. Krivonos, establish trust.  A company needs to ensure that employees will be justly rewarded for sharing their work, and for an employee to believe that this trust will not be undermined; a company needs to take the necessary steps and set precedents with employees.  In addition, companies need to set performance goals on information sharing to demonstrate that not sharing valuable information to the greater employee base is behavior that isn’t tolerated.  This is hard, but for those enterprises that adopt this culture will have a distinct advantage over its rivals.

Hello again, thought I would discuss a bit more about our groups. Groups are now a main stay in the social community world, but we have tweaked our Groups feature, tailoring the functionality for business/travel purposes.

OK, so I am in my account and here is a listing of the groups that I am a part of. Travel Studios of name of the group I work with and Bring it is an internal idea development organization. You can see that one can develp his or her own group and also explore other groups on cubeless. Lets check out the Travel Studios group.

Tada! OK, now you see our group hub page. Some of the features on the hub page are “Last Group Question Asked” which are cubeless community questions that are directed to the group, so any one could have asked that question, not just the group membership. “Drive Bys” are people who have checked out the site recently and the little red men and who is online currently. “Last Blog Post” is self explainatory. “Group News” is a section for group updates, no Q and A functionality. And surely I don’ t need to delve into the “Group Shout Out”.

Questions directed to the group can be seen on the Q&A tab at the top. Here is an example of what you will find.

Group news is the “news” tab at the top. Again, an example.

Finally, our blog example, a little writeup by Robyn Grasanovits

So in conclusion, you can see our approach to “Groups with features” is simple, intitutive and useful, not the overly complex group feature in many other social community websites. It is easy to use, has numerous features (but no too much to cause confusion) and its another cubeless feature!

I’m starting a series called Insights 2.0 focusing on some key findings that we learned from our roll out of cubeless to Sabre Holdings. Why the 2.0?  First, what isn’t called 2.0 nowadays?  But the 2.0 moniker does have more relevance, for I really want to focus of insights that we didn’t expect/know before.  It’s the indegistion from eating a salad vs. the expected heartburn from the Chili Cheese hotdog an hour ago.  So for the next few weeks, I am going to periodically ask a random workmate of mine what surprised them about cubeless.

First, Jessica Schneider, who works in Travel Studios Business Development. Per Jessica, a big takeaway that we didn’t know/expect before rolling out cubeless was how quickly culture and unsaid standards developed. Sabre Holdings is a moderately large company, and at first, profiles and avatars ran the gamut from the overly professional to what could show up on a a public community site. But after everyone perused thru cubeless, the content developed into a happy medium. Informal, but mature, and only after 1, maybe 2 weeks.  Its like there is a invisible hand that is directing use. Also of note, the more heavy handed content managers are those who have little tie to cubeless or Travel Studios. Ownership developed very fast.