As a brand new sales rep for TIBCO, I was responsible for selling more than a dozen products. This was daunting, to say the least. I had to quickly learn what these products do, who knows what about the products, corresponding customer stories, and everything about competitors.

Out of my initial list of target accounts to sign on as new customers, one of them was a hi-tech manufacturer who happened to be in the market for a B2B partner management solution. This prospect had a short selection timeline of 30 days, so I needed to figure out exactly what our technology offered and how it could be positioned to them.

Like most new sales reps, we’re given a few training sessions and then we’re on our own to fill in the rest. Normally, I would spend that time interviewing other account executives on how to ramp up quickly, or sort through some sort of knowledge management system or portal (where documents usually go to die). Instead, I found myself relying on tibbr, TIBCO’s enterprise social network, to immediately find the answers I needed.

When the prospect asked for a customer referral, I found an invaluable reference from another sales rep on tibbr. (continued…)

We all love a good argument. There is nothing more fun than proving all the dissenters, skeptics, wet blankets and naysayers, wrong.

But, as exciting as it is to introduce an internal social network to your organization, not all people will be as receptive to change. (Just think about how many complaints go out every time there’s a new iPhone or Android update.) To win your colleagues over, it helps to get informed. Here are some of the most common myths, or misconceptions, about enterprise social networking, and how to dispel them.

It’s a Waste of Time

If you’re comparing enterprise social networks to sites like Facebook, sure, it could be seen as a waste of time. Facebook is where you post funny Youtube videos, make jokes about your friend’s profile picture, and all things far from work-related. On the contrary, enterprise social networking incorporates some of the easy-to-use, collaborative features of Facebook except the conversations are very work-focused. First off, employees know their boss, and even their boss’s boss can see their posts. So naturally they’re going to post insightful updates, appropriate for the work environment. Second, enterprise social networks increase productivity in many ways—even more than some knowledge management and email systems can. (continued…)

With the seismic shift to cloud services taking place across markets and amongst businesses of all sizes today, we are seeing a fundamental change in how customers buy new apps and services. A straightforward, get started motion is now an expectation – services need to be easily switched “On” out of the box. Increasingly, businesses are interested in that same easy button for service delivery across all the services they purchase and use.

Enter the cloud services aggregator, a single trusted partner that provides a single login, standardized provisioning, one bill, and one support contact across a business’s apps and services, from cloud applications to hosted software packages. Playing the dual role of retailer and delivery engine for services, a cloud services aggregator often provides compelling packages enabled by combining a broad catalogue with deep customer knowledge.

Today tibbr announced a platform partnership with KPN, a pioneering cloud service aggregator and leading telecommunications provider, with years of experience providing IT services to business customers. The tibbr offering through KPN, which has been optimized for the KPN Grip platform, delivers a ready-to-go and straightforward user experience with clear customer ROI. With this expansion of its platform ecosystem, tibbr brings the enterprise social network to new geographic markets and lowers the barrier for businesses to take advantage of tibbr’s ability to connect people, files, and business applications in a contextual and personal way. (continued…)

Enterprise social networking is rapidly becoming a must-have in the 21^st century. Businesses like Yellow Pages Group are replacing traditional technology like SharePoint and using social technology to revamp the critical connection between sales and marketing. Discover how Yellow Pages Group is integrating enterprise social networking into their business processes to drive higher sales and increased revenue.

Join Angela Ashenden, Principal Analyst at MWD Advisors and Andre Boisvert, Chief Architect at Yellow Pages Group for our live interview-style webinar on how to Transform Sales and Marketing to Boost Revenue with Enterprise Social.

Why you should attend:

• Discover how Yellow Pages Group employees use enterprise social networking to boost collaboration across departments and drive revenue
• Hear their business objectives and the plan that was put in place
• Learn how private social networks naturally gather feedback, so the efforts of Marketing don’t go unnoticed

Register Now!

Andre Boisvert
Andre is the Chief Architect at Yellow Pages Group. YPG is a Montreal-based holding of leading digital advertising and marketing solutions companies. With offices coast to coast, Yellow Pages Group employes over 2,800 people.

Angela Ashenden
Angela is MWD’s Principal Analyst for Collaboration. With Experience in many areas around collaboration and information management, she has advised clients on technology and management issues relating to collaboration, enterprise content management, portals, workflow, enterprise search and e-learning. (continued…)

The gang at tibbr loved comics as kids. Some of us never really out-grew them. Since we’re lucky to know a good illustrator (that would be Manoj Vijayan), we thought we’d take a stab at a series based on our observations on social business (and business in general). Welcome to SocialPaths Episode 1. It may never be worth as much as a 1938 Superman issue, but we hope it lightens your day! (continued…)

Quick! We need someone to help us build a mobile app. Start looking for developers on LinkedIn.

Hold up.

How much will it cost to headhunt? How much time will it take? Anyone less than a “10” will drag down the business.

Plus, have we thought about the additional costs of hiring full time? Health benefits alone cost 1.5 times the salary. And what if the product fails, then what?

So many questions…

Sometimes it’s just better to crowdsource talent from within.

Take for example, the other day I was writing copy for a landing page, for an event coming up in Munich. I don’t speak German, so part of the challenge was finding someone to translate the document. Rather than hire a translator or outsource a firm, I posted a question to our enterprise social network asking if anyone could translate the document. Sure enough someone could.

There are countless examples where employees crowdsource talent from their internal social network: one employee finds the right person to troubleshoot a technical problem; another employee finds someone who has experience optimizing websites for Google search results (saving the company thousands of dollars otherwise spent on an SEO firm). I could keep going. (continued…)

In the wake of the September 11th attacks, law enforcement agencies were forced to rethink their intelligence-sharing strategies. InterPortPolice, a global law enforcement association, began searching for a technology that would break down information silos and provide a secure platform for exchanging relevant updates. It selected tibbr® as its private social network because of its sophisticated security and ability to deliver information to officers when they need it—even from the scene of an incident.

“We needed a trusted partner with an easy-to-use platform to help us break out of the insecure email bottleneck and offer streamlined text, voice, video and picture collaboration to participants across multiple jurisdictions and countries,” said Secretary General Jay Grant, chief executive of InterPortPolice.

“Early in our search, we came across various tools that fell short of meeting the demands of our mobile and collaborative workforce. tibbr was an obvious fit for us because it goes beyond basic social communication – it is secure, mobile and integrates updates from various law enforcement systems. In our world, that could mean preventing a serious incident or crime.”

According to InterPortPolice, the majority of law enforcement officers at the airports and seaports are away from their desks 90 percent of the time.  (continued…)

Everything is faster. The way we consume information, the way we digitally access information—even the way we talk is faster than a decade ago. We have access to an abundance of information and yet the old knowledge management problem is still the same: how to get the right information to the right people at the right time.

While some businesses are adding a social networking component to their existing systems, others see it as a risk. They worry that giving employees the ability to share and consume freely will distract them from focusing on what’s important. This is where they’re wrong. Here’s why:

• Conversation is still the best form of knowledge transfer. We are inextricably bound to social: storytelling, conversation, and discourse. It is our most natural way of learning. The old way of managing knowledge—databases, data mining, document repositories, directories etc.—is simply not enough. But, let’s dive deeper…

• Social Increases Learning – It’s not just a matter of getting the right information to people—people need to engage with it to learn. It is the social context of the scenario that gages interest, motivates informed responses and ultimately drives the best answer.

• Social Helps Us Make Decisions Faster - Think about all those times you needed to ask a colleague a question or gather everyone for a meeting before you could decide the next step.

(continued…)

Social media is rapidly evolving beyond just marketing and integrating into business processes across all departments. Check out the top 5 stories on enterprise social networking for the last month.

Making A Case For Social Collaboration Tools

Christian Buckley – wired.com Most CIOs raise a flag when it comes to social — and with good reason. They just don’t see the business value in the current slate of social tools — most of which were developed with the consumer in mind, not a secure, compliant, enterprise user-base. Developing an open-ended social dialog, without permissions, structure and control just doesn’t meet the stated goals and strategies of many enterprises that have spent massive dollars building out comprehensive, yet secure and compliant, collaboration platforms for their organizations. (continued…)

Evolution of the Networked Enterprise: McKinsey Global Survey Results

McKinseyQuarterly.com Over a surprisingly brief period, the use of social tools and technologies has grown from limited experimentation at the edge of corporate practice to what’s now the mainstream. A remarkable 83 percent of respondents say their companies are using at least one social technology, and 65 percent say employees at their companies access at least one tool on a mobile device. Ninety percent of executives whose companies use social technologies report measurable benefits from these tools, and what’s more, a small yet growing number of companies—the most skilled and intensive technology users—are racking up outsize benefits.  (continued…)