Back in October (wow i can't believe it was that long ago-this is how i get wrinkles!) Peter Reiser, Mike Briggs and Neeraj Mathur at Sun Microsystems took Robert Scoble , Greg Merkle and myself through an overview of what they were building for their customer engineering group around Community Equity.

This week Peter posted additional details on his blog because they have finally filled patent on the work they had been doing- Congrats to the team!

You can also read Peters original public thoughts and passion for Community Equity as a way to measure Social Capital for an enterprise.

The post provides an overview of all Equity values- Information and Personal (Participation, Contribution, Skills, Reputation etc.) that are captured for the participating communities. I find the Information Equity (IQ) piece quite interesting because it is about the object itself and what was done to it:


The Information Equity captures the social activities around an information and dynamically calculated a numeric value which represents the importance, relevance and quality of an information. An information can be a wiki page, blog post, document etc.
* How many times users have viewed an information
* How many times this information had been downloaded by the users (in case of attachment)
* How many times this information were re-used by an individual
* Users feedbacks (ratings, comments)

In a shared collaborate Enterprise environment the notion that the document is 'scored' proactively by set standards in multiple ways and that information is stored within the document is quite important- because when a person leaves essentially their personal equity is no longer valuable (ok it might take a while to degrade but you understand my point). Other items that they are addressing that are quite important in the Enterprise space include:
- document reuse around information equity
- equity aging

He promises to keep us updated on the work they are doing so if you are interested make sure to subscribe to the specific subject /Community Equity.

Update: Robert Scoble interviews Peter Reiser on the road.

Two Fridays ago i got to spend one of the most memorable thinking and learning sessions in a small conference room at the Sun Microsystems office in Menlo Park with a handful of folks including Peter Reiser and Mike Briggs from Sun, Robert Scoble and my colleague Greg Merkle.

Robert, Greg and I had already had some good conversations about a 'new media' white paper (more on that to follow in another post) we are writing together around emerging technologies and behaviors in the enterprise and i had this crazy idea to invite Peter and Mike to join our working session on Friday and they agreed which i was thrilled with because i knew they were up to something cool- and they certainly did not disappoint.

I met Peter and Mike two years ago through some of my other contacts at Sun- and since then we have been keeping in touch through our blogs, twitter, facebook, flickr, eyejot and whatever else we find ourselves in. Peter just renamed his blog Reiser 2.0 because that is what everyone at Sun calls him now a days and Mike and his team share much of what they do publicly over at the OneStop Secret Sauce Blog. They are part of the Sun Customer Engineering group that just had their annual Conference in Vegas and we got to see a preview of what they were going to roll out at the conference last week.

We weren't supposed to make it public before they announced it at the conference so Peter finally got a post up on Community Equity in Action over on his blog that provides a nice overview of how they used the conference to launch their home grown "Facebook for the Enterprise" service that will hopefully become a very successful key part of their CE 2.0 architecture. Peters thoughts and passion for Community Equity as a way to measure Social Capital for an enterprise is both fascinating and promising.

I personally think that what they are building will eventually become a common tool for collaboration in the Enterprise and look forward to hearing more from them as to how it is adopted and the returns they start seeing from their deployments. I have no doubt that soon enough we will also see Facebook like white label platforms for Enterprises.

In the upcoming weeks i will hopefully be sharing more about the 'new media' white paper we are tasked with writing including some of the things we learned at Sun. Our hope is to also reach out to the community for you participation so... watch this space.

CE 2.0 logo photo credit- by Neeraj Mathur who also works on Reiser's team and we met last week and was instrumental to their CE 2.0 launch.

I have posted before about how i think that Sun Microsystems gets it especially the OneStop folks. The OneStop Secret Sauce public blog always provides insight into implementing 2.0 strategies into the enterprise and over the months they have brought in more authors to the blog like Christy Confetti Higgins from the Sun Learning Services (which i think used to be called the Sun Library). I guess i am one of those non-Sun people that follows it and i always recommend it to customers that are looking to implement 2.0 tools like Wikis as part of their enterprise content creation and delivery.

This week Paul Diamond posted about some of the upcoming enhancements that they are looking to provide. Although he does not go into detail (perhaps they will in future posts) it is extremely useful if you are just starting with your Wiki strategy to keep this items in mind as you set your implementation and adoption strategy.

Paul Diamond writes:

Our plan is to:

• merge OneStop and CEpedia into a wiki with access control so that not just anyone can edit everything (after all, you wouldn't want me to be updating anything remotely approaching technical content - trust me on this), but updates are easier and therefore more frequent.
  

Some organizations (i would venture to say many) are going to find that an overall free for all might not be the best approach. It isn't because you are afraid that a content producer is going to create 'bad' content with dirty words- but because authority and trust are key to effective uses of content in the enterprise- one slip and your audience will go elsewhere. so think ahead what type of access control you will need.

• We also want to host this outside of our intranet so that initially our partners can also have access, including update capability where appropriate. Over time we would like to share as much as possible of this information with everyone, but that will take more "cleansing" of what information should be public knowledge and what needs to be restricted

Sun, like many technology companies in the valley have a huge channel/partner network that does a lot of selling and services of their core businesses. Obviously there is a huge need to be able to share information with partners- but it must be the right information. Take for example a common piece of collateral like a product technical scope sheet. It could essentially have three different 'formats' a client facing one that provides high level features, a partner one that provides more details and partner pricing information and a direct sales one that could be the most comprehensive. In most of today's enterprise- marketing is most likely producing three types and posting in three different areas. If you think through some of these content strategies up front you won't have to deal with the 'cleansing' that the OneStop team is going to have to address. (btw a great resource on unified content strategies is Ann Rockley's book Managing Enterprise Content.)

• Additionally, we are introducing various Web 2.0 concepts - tagging, RSS / Atom aggregation, AJAX, voting/comments to drive search results, etc. so that we obtain the benefits of this more participatory technology (aka the Wisdom of Crowds) at the same time as understanding how to leverage this technology better for our customers.

Excellent-looking forward to hearing more about these implementations. OneStop alone (not sure about combined OneStop and CEpedia audience) has over 10,000 users out of Sun's 35,000 employees- that is a healthy audience that probably expects only the most innovative ways to consume, create and deliver content and this team is going to give them what they need and the best part is that they are going to continue to share how they do it with the public.

If you have ever been part of a team that is responsible for information delivery in an enterprise- whether that is through an intranet/portal or even using 2.0 tools like wikis and blogs you probably know that for the majority of your content producers it is like pulling teeth to get people to share and participate.

In addition to asking you (the reader of this blog) to participate in gathering examples of what Enterprise 2.0 means to you (please do participate) and giving you examples of my own usage of 2.0 tools and technologies as an enterprise worker, i have also been looking for posts from corporate bloggers (those i would define as public bloggers who are blogging openly about the company they work for) that i can highlight on the subject.

Last night i hit the jackpot via my personal filtered Touchstone tool that i am using during their BETA period (see below note). In the post titled "Web 2.0 applied in an Enterprise – a huge business opportunity" Peter Reiser lays out beautifully how a company like Sun Microsystems is looking to take advantage of the social dynamics of Web 2.0 and turn it into a business value and business advantage.

Peter hits upon a lot of items that are important when looking to leverage Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise to make them truly Enterprise 2.0 tools- things like ensuring a services based architecture for re-usability, consistent and interactive user design and tagging (with a call out to tying into an enterprise taxonomy) but what i like the most and have been talking to some other clients about is the building of a community based on trust. I am a believer that Web 2.0 in the Enterprise will indeed address a lot of the Knowledge Management issues companies have been trying to address and have spent a lot of cash on.

As humans, we always turn to others that we trust and the blogsphere is certainly leveraging those human trust networks (think Techmeme)- so why wouldn't enterprise trust networks and what Reiser calls "self driven Social Capital System based on community generated Social Values" be just as valuable and provide business advantage?

Know of other corporate bloggers that are writing on this subject? Leave a comment below.

Note: Here is a perfect example of the way a tool like Touchstone has helped me be alerted to something that i might have missed- based on the feeds i have inputted via my OPML file (i have had the complete SUN Blogroll on my GoogleReader for ever but there is just so much on a daily basis i find it very hard to find what is personally important unless i subscribe to Sun individual blogs). With Touchstone and key terms i might be looking for- in this case client names and key words like 'enterprise 2.0' the information was delivered to me via a news ticker of things that are important to me. Without it, i wouldn't know that Peter Reiser was blogging on a subject that is dear to me. Touchstone is in Private Beta- i still have a couple of guest invitation and if you are interested please do drop me a line (danielavbarbosa[at]gmail.com).

I have been reading Martin Hardee's blog Sun.com Design, Usability & Other Stuff for a while now and always like to read the behind the scenes at Sun.com that Hardee posts. He recently posted about Sun.com's website redesign. I was just about to leave him a comment but is seems that his posts are closed for comments so i will leave my comment here.

I really like what Sun is doing and if you have read my blog before you notice that i am a big Sun fan and what they are doing in the marketplace with social media (and that i have a huge crush on JS). But putting that aside, their recent redesign is one to be admired because they are trying to have visitors become more participants then 'shoppers'.

Hardee points us to the new "activity boxes" at the bottom of the page were they have added 4 panels down below that provide "windows into Sun", including a "Participate" box that showcases Jonathan Schwartz's recent blog postings and (if you click on the grey arrow on that box) views into recent blogs from the Sun blogroll community. I also like the addition of the 'Discover' feature because it takes a visitor who might not know what they are looking for to find something of potential interest. In his post he talks a bit about the design choices- leaving the existing page structure etc.. Hopefully there will be more posts with additional tidbits of information on their choices and decisions. I think that the use of specific words (Discovery,Participate, Find & Buy (instead of Shop for products), Stay Connected) is another indication that Sun wants its customers to participate and not just buy. Kudos well done.

Debbie Weil from BlogWrite for CEOs had a post this week about the SEC's (Securities Exchange Commission) Chairman Christopher Cox's comments on Schwartz's original blog post. (although i thought the rule is you comment on the original topic post?). I illustrate the conversation on the right in case this ping-pong- sentence got you confused but also to illustrate how by responding to Schwartz's post- the SEC has decided to engage the public and take advantage of the same power that the original post pointed to.

The topic of the conversation between them was the fact that the Regulation for Fair Disclosure in the US - which attempts to ensure no one audience gets preferential access to material non-public information- does not recognize the internet and therefore a blog as the exclusive vehicle through which the public can be fairly informed.

The blog post to the SEC was Schwartz telling them that a letter was on the way-but why wait when he could just as well post the entire letter on his blog and the comment from Cox- was telling Schwartz a letter was on the way but why wait to receive it because Cox can just post the response in the comments field. At least the post office didn't lose any revenue as they had to deliver the orginal letters.

Debbie Weil thinks : "the real problem here is that if companies transmit their earnings releases via a blog post, that obviates the need for mainstream media to "announce" the news to investors." I don't think it will obviate anything soon and not sure if it is a problem that MSM is not already addressing- and when and if it ever does- it is not because blogs are the new medium to "announce" the news to investors- but the distribution medium itself would change to enable a blog to be the initiating point of distribution (publisher)- mainstream media may not need to wait for an 'official' press release to come out and they may not be the first to comment on the news-but they like the mail delivery service that delivered the original letters will be another source of record depending on the consumer of that information.

That is the power of social media tools- enhancement of the creation, distribution and consumption of information.

This week the first company to be launched in Second Life will be making its debut. Neville Hobson one of the people behind crayon from "“For Immediate Release: " The Hobson & Holtz Report, blogs that crayon is a true mash-up that combines the best in traditional and new thinking about marketing, advertising and PR.

Last week i posted about Sun Microsystem's Second Life conference and the participation by companies keeps growing per this comment on TechCrunch.

Interestingly enough the publishing community is also participating with Reuters opening up bureau in Second Life and CNET already launched this summer. The Daily Graze has a good write up on Reuters with more details as well as this piece at Paidcontent.org. The news will be 'real' news as well as stories from SecondLife- like land disputes, service launches etc. I have no doubt that a crayon story is forthcoming. The Reuters RSS reader that people can use in their spaces is pretty cool but the most interesting is the Discuss an Article feature that the DailyGraze writes about:

Once a company establishes a presence in Second Life, we always ask, "“What will bring people back to your island?" The answer for Reuters is… the news!. On all of the RSS readers, there is a "“touch to chat”" function. If a news piece is interesting to a reader and they want to discuss the articles with others they can click a button on the readers. They are then presented with options to submit their name to chat with other, display a list of others who want to chat, and provide teleport to a discussion room on Reuters'’ Island. When that juicy Ginko or Anshe Chung Studios news hits the Reuters wire head to the Reuters sim and discuss it with others. The building is arranged to have discussion areas for each feed category and they display Reuters' video feeds when available.

Much of the Second Life communication is done via IM Chat features-how many times have you IM'd a news article to a friend or colleague to 'discuss'- I do it all the time. Would i do it in Second Life? Maybe but I just can't seem to find time to live a second life although i tried months ago when Business Week put it on their cover. What is going to be the compelling reason for me to do so? Going to conferences and trainings, listening to speakers - yes i think so- but living a second life- with land and another activities? not sure. Interesting to see where Reuters is looking to invest their money that they will get from the sale of Factiva- but if i was them i wouldn't spend all my money there...

If you are new to Second Life and are asking what is daniela talking about ? here is a quick Introduction to Second Life that talks about some of the economic possibilities.

ok call me a dork- i am and proud-but how cool is the fact that Sun Microsystems held a press conference in Second Life? Looks like among others at Sun, John Gage got it back then and gets it now.

I have to say that if the audience they are looking for are folks like me (perhaps with a little more buying power!), they have the right hook. I have met some great folks at sun in the last year and recently had the pleasure to take a tour of the Executive Briefing Center (with a walk by appearance by Scott McNealy) at the Menlo Park location and i am really impressed with what Sun is focusing on.

On the way work the other day i also watched the Robert Scoble's Podtech interview with Jonathan Schwartz. Here are my un-edited notes (well i corrected spelling) that i typed into my Blackberry on the BART as i watched:

• Free software or access to services grab early adopters
  
• Developers develop applications with open source people want to use those apps- they then buy or influence the buyers
  
• Tipping effect
  
• the majority of people in the world will see the internet first on the phone
  
• i have an official huge crush on JS
  
• Jonathan talks like other bloggers i am and run into-"on my blog i said", "on my blog i say"
• IT as a competitive advantage vs IT as a cost center but as an enabler to their business
  
• flower shop example- sun doesn't service customers who see IT as a cost center
• big providers- look at the internet as a way to increase revenue and need to develop things that are more relevant to those enterprises
• electricity- not just running fast-eco responsibilities -he plays an eco hippie on tv -Ha-
• he wished Robert a bubble-ha-ha!
• folks that drive IT decisions is what he cares about. And how it can grow his business --save money on power- good for you and me

Rich Burridge, Sun Microsystems second most popular blogger (unfair to say because Rich was consistently #1 until Jonathan Schwartz became CEO and the media went blog wild) is a Bookoholic.

In his post about some book statistics from ParaPublishing.com he highlights some pretty scary statistics but on the site there are also some interesting ones about publishing publishing itself. Here are the scary ones:

• 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
• 42% of college graduates never read another book.
• 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.

i am doing my part to encourage book reading:

i like to send customers books that i think they would find interesting or have come up in our conversation. i take the time to personalize them by using these book labels i made a while ago that i sign and stick on the inside of the bookcover. Many times i also bookmark sections....yes with 'old' fashion post-its...with notes about why i think they should read those sections. This is what the labels look like (let me know if you want the template):

lately i have also been thinking about using applications like Google Notebook and del.icio.us to record items of interest and send them to clients. Social booking could be a great way to personalize and share with clients on a one to one basis.

i read a lot of books as many as i can fit in between, work and reading my blogs! Recently i began keeping a bookshelve on ning . I like the concept of a virtual bookshelve so people can see what i am reading but didn't want to put it as a banner type thing on my site so i keep in on my ning. In a recent mid year performance management review i pointed to my ning so that my manager and others may review what i am reading.

i am splitting for the weekend and i won't be back online until monday in my bag for my trip is this book , i am taking time off from business related books.

on a side note- check out the sun blogger rolls posts mostly from today- you will see that sun bloggers are being extremely transparent about the changes and the layoffs that are effecting themselves as well as their colleagues-straight from the top they take directions.

Jonathan Schwartz President and COO of Sun Microsystems has an interesting post on his blog from Feb 4th- titled "The Death of the Cold Call". Based on his recent speech at Sun's annual Analyst Conference,

"It's my view that the growth in front of Sun won't simply be from stabilizing and growing our existing customers. It'll be from acquiring new customers. Large customers as well as small. The important point is we won't be able to meet most of them - there aren't enough sales executives on the planet to call on each of the 4 million Solaris licenses we've distributed to the world. But so long as the internet connects us to them, the distribution of free software allows them to discover us - and for us to invest in building a bi-directional link, ultimately driving revenue from only those who want added services and infrastructure (vs. those who don't). "

In the presentation he goes on to say that their "challenge is awareness"- i was not able to see the complete presentation video (couldn't get my real media player to work but i think this should be a very interesting presentation that i will try on another PC)- so working off the slide deck i am assuming what Jonathan is talking about is "awareness" as to where customers are going-what are their business development plans-and what their markets are calling for- whether their existing top 100 and top 250 or the "Fortune at the bottom of the pyramid" (slide 43) that comes from startups and small institutions. sounds like he is purposing going beyond the traditional 'inside-sales' folks to drive the bottom of the pyramid and going straight to the developers as the primary influencers through the social networks that are driving the industry and obviously affecting sales at Sun and others like them. It is evident in their blogging strategy- http://blog.sun.com/roller/main.do


It also got me thinking about a book i am reading called "The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail" by Clayton Christensen - i could blog for pages on it- but will spare you for now- just assuming that Sun is on the verge of moving on something that will change the way they do business. I just hope that in delivering 'awareness' however defined by each of their market segments-i can help be a small part of that success.