Gamification - putting out the welcome mat

I love IBM Connections. It's a great way to connect and share information and it allows me to broadcast my opinions and ideas within our company. Out of the box though IBM Connections can be a bit sterile. Yes, there are some templates and yes you can customize it of course but it's still all a bit aloof. It can take some time to really feel connected with it, which means getting the adoption going can be a struggle.

Cue gamification: We recently became a partner for Kudos Badges, a gamification module that helps drive adoption of IBM Connection and implemented it within our own environment to try out. Suddenly everyone was talking about the badges and checking out their scores. The overall usage picked up immediately.
Ok yes, I work with mostly males and regardless of what you say.... THEY ARE MORE COMPETITIVE than females (although I'm usually worse then most of my male co-workers but that's really the exception). So there was a definite surge in activity visible and it caused most of my co-workers to really start exploring and using IBM Connections.

But apart from the competitive element it adds something else: A visually appealing effect.
It personalizes the for some relatively overwhelming digital social tools environment and adds a bit of humanization and color to it. Making it less sterile and less intimidating. It's like putting the 'Welcome' mat out and a pot of flowers in the windowsill to invite people in.

Now yes, I am competitive but that is secondary to visual for me. When I look at something I notice style, color, layout and navigation first and functions second. The better the visual appeal and logic the better I understand and recognize the functionality and the more I am inclined to explore it further.
And I am not alone! Why do you think Apple products are so appealing to so many...? Their way of putting design on an equal level to the functionality clearly works. Gamification for IBM Connections, if done right taps into that as well.

So in a quirky way Kudos Badges is livening up IBM Connections in more then one way. On the one hand with a competitive element, offering leaderboards and scores and on the other with a bit of visual appeal and logic, offering clues and tips on usage, colorful achievement badges and challenges and goals to strive for.

Does this mean it is something that will entice everyone or that this is an end to it self? No, but it's a great onboarding tool, something that can help you get that initial adoption going and get people interested. Helping them overcome their initial hesitation of using IBM Connections.
So use it to put out the Welcome mat and give your users a warm welcome. Let's get them over the threshold! 

 

BLUG Session Slides: Get Social but not THAT social

Presention delivered at BLUG in Antwerp 23-3-2012:

"Company regulation versus personal individuality, how do you get your employees to be responsible partners in a Social Business and how do you weigh freedom versus restriction? The whole Social Business idea is based on the idea of each individual having an intrinsic value to the organization that isn't necessarily linked to its role within the organization alone. This begs the question of how to tap this resource without losing control and how to implement and regulate the changes that are going to be needed. How much of this can you regulate (top-down) and how much do you allow to evolve (bottom-up)? 
This session will highlight the difficulties and choices a company will face while making the transition into a Social Business and offer ideas and guidelines on how to do so".

BLUG 2012: Get social but not THAT social

View more presentations from Femke Goedhart

Silverside Kudos Badges partner

As of today Silverside is proud to announce that it has signed a partner agreement with ISW Australia for distribution of Kudos Badges software in The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg.

Kudos Badges, a solution that provides gamification for IBM Connections to stimulate use and adoption for social collaboration, is a product we feel can add significant value to any IBM Connections installation.

 To provide for our Dutch customers Silverside has been collaborating with ISW in creating a Dutch version of Kudos Badges allowing for better integration in Dutch and multi-lingual environments.

Best in Breed

We might have already known it but now the rest of the world seems to catch up too. IBM Connections was awarded the V3 "Best Business Social Media Product" 2011. 

for now just a category in a long list of awards but I'm sure this category is gaining importance fast and can't wait to see how the new and improved IBM Connections (of which little sneak peeks were released over the last few weeks) is going to do. I'm sure it's a definite leader on a market that seems to gain momentum really fast!

For the full list of awards & winners go here

Bye bye email?!?

The Social Business revolution is here. We are living in a new world and one of the 'old' relics being under attack is email. Email a relic?? Yes in the eyes of some, it is outdated and in need of retirement. Nowadays it's all about new forms of communication. more direct, more interactive, less static...and all kinds of initiatives like 'Global No Email Day' and IBM's 'OutsideTheInbox' are started to get people to realize this.
I can totally relate to this idea. Mainly because it seems that lately it isn't us that is consuming mail but the mail that is consuming us. More importantly: consuming our time.

Ok, so I agree, but then I started thinking. How many mails do I actually get in a day.....? 
I've got 5 email addresses. One for work, one for friends, one for non-work-non-friend related stuff I deem important and 2 for spam. I use those last two when I need to register on some obscure site and I never check those two unless I'm looking for something specific. So those don't really count towards my email consumption. The other three gave me a total of 12 messages today, 7 of which were notifications from other systems.
Now that isn't extreme! That is actually pretty low if you consider I work in IT and was working at home today. I know people that get hundreds of messages, especially while working at home. So why don't I? Does this mean I don't work, don't communicate.....?? No, I actually communicated with several of my colleagues and customers today as well as had interactions with several people around the globe. So lets analyze this....

I started the day with an email notification from Quickr about a document I'd put up for review. It was reviewed by a customer in the USA and she'd updated the document in the Quickr environment and used the notification option to let me know. As I noticed the customers project leader was online on Greenhouse Sametime I used this to have a short discussion about the review.

I then proceeded with opening our new IBM Connections test environment that we set up specifically for demonstrations to customers. To get some filling all employees were asked to fill out their own fictional profile as well as provide some fake content. While doing this I noticed some problems with the test installation. Instead of using mail I put a message on the Administrators notice board, telling him about the problem.

He responded back on the board which was promptly shown in my Status Update widget in my Lotus Notes client.

Now I could just as easily have used our internal Tweet application as well but as it was Connection related it seemed logical to respond within the environment itself. Using mail didn't cross my mind once.

Roughly at the same time I was invited into a Skype call by another customer. During this call I had to verify something with a co-worker and with a Partner of us. So I used LotusLive Sametime to connect to my co-worker and set up a second Skype chat to ask my partner contact. He wasn't up yet (Canadian) so I just left him a message in his chat to pick up when he returned.

While all this was going on I was also setting up a test environment for a migration project. It was not exactly going as planned and I used Twitter and Facebook to vent some of the frustrations with getting the thing to work. Apart from the fact this helped me to vent some of my frustration it also delivered a handy tip from a guy that responded to my tweet and sent me a helpful link.
Through the social media app I use I also noticed a new invitation request on LinkedIn that turned out to be a business relation that wanted to connect. As I'd been wanting to talk to this person for a while I used the opportunity to send him a direct message in LinkedIn and set up a phone call.

For the rest of the day I made several phone calls to customers & relations, used text messaging to make an appointment with a good friend, had a lengthy call with a co-worker on the server I was trying to set up and congratulated my niece with her birthday on Facebook.

So looking back on my day and talking about the 'Less mail' initiatives, I can honestly say I'm actually doing pretty well already. I'm not email-free yet (nor do I want to be, there's always something that is better done through mail) but in general I can definitely say I'm not being consumed by my inbox.

There is however another side to this. Remember that Skype chat I started with the Canadian guy that wasn't online yet? He did get back to me but by that time it was evening here. And that is the whole crux in this story....

Because one of the downsides of using more interactive forms of communications like Social Media, Skype and Sametime is that it is stretching my day. Timezone differences mean I have to adept to other peoples day regimes if I want to speak, chat, Sametime or Skype with them and that means I tend to spend a lot more time at night behind my laptop, sometimes stretching well into the night.

So are these forms of social communications the future? Yes, definitely! It allows you to not just  communicate  but to really build a relation with the other person, something that email just didn't do. But I don't think it will put email out of business yet. If not for the fact that lots of people still are hooked on mail then for the sanity of those that need to sleep....

Get in touch!

You would think that getting in touch with people has become a whole lot easier since we've all become so 'social'. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Connections, IM, chats, etc. You could even say that in some cases it's hard NOT to. But still I find that really getting 'in touch'  sometimes is a challenge. Take a recent situation I encountered.

I wanted to ask a distant social business contact something that required some delicacy and a personal touch. I didn't know the person 'in person' (there's an ocean between us) but I 'knew' her on Twitter, Facebook, through Connections, Sametime and even through a persistent Skype chat group. More then enough venues I guess to contact her. But this was harder than I thought.

First I considered the Connections link I had to her. The question was related to that anyway so this seemed logical. The problem though was that she hadn't listed her contact details and I wasn't about to put my question on her public message stream.
Next was twitter but that is mostly public and even when I had used a DM I couldn't really get my question into a 140 character text anyway. So that one was out of the question too.
Facebook wasn't ideal either. On reviewing her Facebook stream I figured she used it strictly for non- business related stuff and as it was a business related question I didn't want to use that route (DM or Chat) for a business related question. Even social business has its etiquette.....

So I looked on. She didn't have a blog (I knew about or could find) and on LinkedIn I found several people matching here name, most without pictures, so no luck there either.
My last chance seemed to be the Sametime and Skype chat. Not ideal but it would at least allow me to ask her for her mail address.  The problem was though that she wasn't online much and by the time she was, I wasn't (that darn ocean again!).

This was frustrating! Here I am, connected to this person on at least 3 social networks and 2 IM systems and still I had trouble getting in touch with her! Having this persons email address would have saved me a lot of trouble. In stead I had all these social links but no decent way of getting in touch.

So in the end I solved it the old fashioned way. I called her company switchboard and asked for her.

Ironic isn't it? That even with all these digital channels and links to her I finally had to resort to the old fashioned phone call to really get in touch...

Social filesharing in MS Sharepoint vs IBM Connections

 A must for anyone thinking about implementing collaboration and/or document management!