I'll be showing how Attensa collaborates using Jive Software's Clearspace for cross functional projects. The presentation will be 4:48 (that's specific) on Thursday, September 6 at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I've posted the Attensa presentation on SlideShare

This occasionally crops up in our discussions with companies investigating Enterprise 2.0 technologies. In some corporations BLOG is four letter word conjuring up images of sociopathic rantings, and way too much time being devoted to cat pictures and reviews of LOST.

If you ask me, this paranoia boils down to fear of the unknown or maybe it's about lack or respect and lack of trust in employees to do the right things with the tools they have to work with. When you think about it, if you were inclined, you could do more damage to a company's reputation and morale with email and confidential attachments sent to the wrong people than you can with a secure internal blog post.

I'm not sure what drives this perception about blogs and I'm not the only one who has experienced this fear from corporate management. Six Apart's Anil Dash makes getting beyond fear of blogs a key message in his evangelism. The Burton Group's Mike Gotta has seen it and heard it too.  His take away is that companies need examples of how blogs can be used effectively to solve business and communication challenges.

I'm republishing the highlights from his post "Getting Over Fear of Blogs and including the list of blogging applications that make sense for business environments.

You can read Mike's complete post on Collaborative Thinking.

Mike takes it from here:

Regarding Web 2.0 and social software, I find that people are often captivated by the use of these concepts and tools in the consumer market. While some technologists are skeptical, there are also a growing number of people that are wondering how such practices and technologies could be applied internally and whether such use could bring about some degree of business transformation – especially in terms of leveraging worker know-how and collective insight.

The tone and emotion levels however get quite passionate however, when the topic of blogs comes up. There does seem to be agreement that public-facing blogs can have real business value from the perspective of marketing, PR, customer intimacy and community-outreach. That perspective however does not seem to transfer broadly when the conversation shifts to possible internal adoption of blogs. In fact, it is not uncommon to hear a range of opinions that could be represented by the following statements:

• Risk-related: “We’re afraid of what people will say.”
• Productivity-related: “We don’t want people wasting their time.”

Performance-related: “We don’t see the business value.”

The conversation often swings back to the Internet and how blogs are used as a public soapbox to express personal opinions and how bloggers add fuel to emotionally-charged debates on topics many organizations view as a workplace distraction (e.g., politics, sports, entertainment, religion, breaking news, etc.). A good number of people I’ve talked to feel that blogs introduce risk (e.g., hostile workplace), negatively impacts productivity and hinders overall performance of business processes.

I think part of the problem is due to a lack of examples of how blogs can be applied to solve the types of business challenges organizations face on a daily basis.

Internal Communication

There are many situations where organizations need to broadcast information to its workforce without the need for that information to be pushed to its workers in an intrusive manner (e.g., e-mail).

• A Human Resources department can leverage blog technology to continually keep employees updates on various benefit plans, awareness of enrollment dates, etc.
• CXO-level management can leverage blogs to informally communicate company issues related to markets, economics and its competition.
• Organizations can use blogs to communicate information to employees on the various community-outreach and social programs in need of volunteers.

Program / Project Management

Program management offices (PMO) and project management teams often establish operating environments where information may not always be captured and disseminated in a timely manner. The structure of these organizing bodies may challenge its ability to quickly respond, making it difficult to communicate credible and relevant information.

• A PMO blog could provide a journal of activities, issues and future actions that could be valuable not only to workers within the PMO but to those monitoring and tracking the PMO elsewhere in the organization
• A group blog for developers and quality assurance teams could act as a clearinghouse to voice design concerns, for developers to record and report findings or to capture/disseminate software build and fix notifications discovered during development or testing cycles (e.g., shift notes)
• PMO and project teams create a variety of guidelines, procedures and other types of documentation. While wikis are good vehicles for the collaborative work on the content itself, blogs can provide a platform for individuals to provide deeper personal commentary.

Community-building

Organizations have struggled to find common off-the-shelf tools that allow for the capture, dissemination and augmentation of information while also enabling broad participation and community interaction. Facilitating open communication is a key aspect for organizations interested in sharing know-how and creating effective community-building environments (e.g., knowledge management).

• Research organizations have long valued the importance of personal journals and lab notebooks to catalog observations and record insight. Blogs within such an environment not only are of benefit to those within such communities but enable others to “look over the shoulders” of those engaged in such activities.
• Government organizations can use blog systems to enable first responders to share insight and lessons-learned from on-the-job experiences
• Specialists in many different professions (e.g., utilization management nurses, fraud investigators, security experts, underwriters, engineers) can use blogs to more easily communicate methods and practices relevant to their work activities

Business process

A multitude of business activities include capture of unstructured information as part of processing a particular task. Many applications do not naturally handle the type of free-form commentary and annotation users would like to add to a transaction or append to a case file. There are other situations where applications need to deal with conversational information that are not well-supported by traditional application models (e.g., issue tracking, exception handling, problem resolution).

• A competitive intelligence process is often dependent on capturing field observations, rumors and collating information detected from various news sources. Blog systems can provide the platform the collecting and vetting this type of market monitoring, analysis, and opportunity/threat assessment.
• Certain support processes require workers to capture notes as part of their remote activity (e.g., field repair). Offline authoring tools (e.g., Microsoft Windows Live Writer) could be used to compose analysis on a worker’s laptop and then upload to a group blog when network connectivity is available. In other situations, certain work activities might include capture of notes into operational logs. Blog technology can enable capture of task-related notes inline with performance of that operational process.

OK, I'm back.

We use the same tools and techniques internally.

• Our CEO as a blog to share the big picture with Attensa employees
• Our marketing and development teams use secure blogs to keep each group informed on project status, customer wins and the buzz surrounding Attensa
• Our sales and marketing people share competitive insights on a secure blog.
• We've set up a secure blog with our PR and SEO teams to share strategies, metrics and status reports.

Analytics on the Attensa Feed Server gives insight into how this information flows through the organization and helps assess and identify the most effective channels for communicating specific information

Attensa tools make publishing to these internal blogs incredibly easy. I used one of the republishing tools in Attensa for Outlook to share Mike's post this morning. I scanned the headlines from his blog in the River of News. The title "Getting Over Fear of blogs" caught my eye. I hit the Attensa publish icon which launched Windows Live Writer and pre-populates a new  blog post with the all of the copy, links and images - all nicely formatted. I just select the blog I want to publish to from a list. I can easily edit and add context, categories, tags and then republish the post with a click. These tools make it incredibly easy to share these thoughts with everyone subscribing to the blog. 

My river of news was flowing this morning. This post on Dion Hinchcliffes' Enterprise 2.0 blog is one of the best I've seen on the subject.

Dion ties together the updated definition of Web 2.0 included in a new report Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices with his own view of how Web 2.0 technologies apply to workers using network software within their organization.

He includes a reminder of the ground breaking work Andrew McAfee has done in providing a framework for bringing the best of Web 2.0 tools to work - SLATES.

SLATES = Search | Links | Authorship | Tags | Extensions | Signals

"SLATES describes the combined use of effective enterprise search and discovery, using links to connect information together into a meaningful information ecosystem using the model of the Web, providing low-barrier social tools for public authorship of enterprise content, tags to let users created emergent organizational structure, extensions to spontaneously provide intelligent content suggestions similar to Amazon's recommendation system, and signals to let users know when enterprise information they care about has been published or updated, such as when a corporate RSS feed of interest changes."

There  a great deal more in Dion's must-read post.

Next week Attensa will be previewing a new version of Attensa for Outlook and the Attensa Feed Server at the Forrester Technology Leadership Forum in Scottsdale and at Dion Hinchcliffe's The New New Internet conference in McClean, Virginia. If you are attending these conferences and want to set up a meeting send me an email.

If you are looking for insights into the role of social networking in the Enterprise, you need to subscribe to Dion Hinchcliffe's Enterprise 2.0 blog.

In today's post he looks at the new Gartner Hype Cycle report.

Gartner sees collective intelligence as the most important trend coming from the application of Web 2.0 technologies to solve business problems.

Here's the Gartner definition:

collective intelligence: an approach to producing intellectual content that results from individuals working together with no centralized authority. This is seen as a more cost effective way of producing content, metadata, software and certain services.

Dion explains the why...

"That might be because Web 2.0 offers a sort of inverted way of looking at the way we do things now.  Web 2.0 frequently embodies the emergent and freeform instead of the predefined and structured.  It's often bottom-up instead of command-and-control.  It's self-service instead of being mediated."

Both the Gartner report and Dion's analysis make the point that companies who have a clear vision and plan for putting social networking to work behind the firewall will have a clear competitive advantage.

I'm the head of Customer Service at Attensa. The other day, my boss (you know, that Scott guy) wandered into my office and told me to blog.

OK.

I get pretty busy testing things and logging issues, but every day I hear and read and discover things about Attensa for Outlook that make me love my job. So, I can blog. Here we go...

I used to build catalogs of bookmarks. My bookmark file has travelled from computer to computer as I've upgraded my home office over the years, becoming ever more bloated and less organized. I'm a messy person. I have stacks of papers and kids toys and art projects living on my desk. I will never take the time to open my bookmarks file and clean it up properly... the best I can do is make a half-hearted attempt to purge broken website links once in a while.

Then along came tagging... wow! My life has suddenly changed!

I love tags. As I work through my feeds in Attensa for Outlook, I can tag articles on the fly to use later.... and the cool thing is, I get to make up my own tags (keywords) that work for my brain. When I'm working through my various projects and I need to put my hands on information quick, finding a web page in my catalog is as simple as pulling down the Attensa Tags menu and looking under the most logical keyword. No more hunting under bookmark sub-folders looking for a bookmarked site. With tagging, I don't lose web pages anymore. I use my del.icio.us account with Attensa so I have access to my tagged items from any computer.

Tip:
Attensa's River of News has its own tagging button, on the article toolbar, making it really easy to save that article for later. When you tag the article, a link to the web page itself is created in your tags, not a link to the article in Outlook.

P.S. My boss made me write this.

On Thursday evening  at Supernova, the real world and the virtual world can watch Craig Barnes, Attensa CEO, explain in five minutes why the AttentionStream technology and products we are building matter. It's all part of the Supernova Connected Innovators showcase and gala created in collaboration with TechCrunch.

If you have a Second Life account you can catch streaming video of Craig's pitch in the Supernova Lounge.

You can keep up on the Supernova happenings in the Supernova media center and you can access the Supernova blog, wiki and more at the Supernova Community Connection.

Brian Keairnes at the StartupSpot has compiled a very practical list of business wiki applications covering sales, marketing, research, customer service, product planning and more.

We met Frank Gruber at Syndicate in New York in May and last week our Director of Product Management, Matthew Bookspan, brought Frank up to date on our RSS server plans. He's posted an overview on Somewhat Frank covering RSS applications, how an appliance approach simplifies installation and how having a central access point for receiving and distributing internal and external feeds uses bandwidth efficiently.

Thank you Frank.

Jupiter Research has a report "RSS Comes of Age: Budgeting, Deploying, and Measuring RSS" by Greg Dowling. Currently 29 percent of large companies ($50 million + in annual revenues) publish content via RSS. That number is projected to jump to 63% by the end of 2006. That's just six months away.

The report's recommendation's include, "In order to maximize their investment in RSS, site operators should leverage emerging tools and technologies specifically tailored to RSS."

If you're one of the companies making the move to RSS, talk to us about lowering the barrier for feed management and deployment while helping users control the flow of the inevitable RSS fire hose. It's what Attensa is all about.

We gave Charlie Wood an overview our Attensa Enterprise RSS server yesterday and he has a great write-up on Moonwatcher.

We're planning a July launch of our server which includes RSS proxy services, a web-based reader, optional integration with Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory, and support for secure feeds.

To simplfiy installation and configuration we'll be offering the server as an appliance. The major advantage of shipping a pre-integrated hardware appliance is the dramatically simplified install and config process. It's built on Linux, Apache, Tomcat, PHP, and an open-source database, and includes all of those components out of the box.

Charlie does a great job on his competitive comparison. In an earlier post he discusses the pros and cons of software versus appliance for installation.

If you want more details on the server let us know.

Charlie - I talked to Matthew Bookspan this morning and he's ready for the podcast.

Three articles caught my attention this week and together they create a snapshot of the current state of affairs of Enterprise 2.0.

The first is BusinessWeek's CEO's Guide to Enterprise 2.0 written by Rob Hof. It's a terrific overview with examples of how innovative companies are using blogs, wikis, search and RSS to improve customer communications, overcome information overload and streamline collaboration. The article concludes with an observation by Tim O'Reilly that companies who embrace Enterprise 2.0 technologies will outperfrom those who don't.

Next I read Enid Burns' piece on Executives Slow to See Value in Corporate Blogging on ClickZ. In a survey with 150 senior executive from Fortune 1000 companies only 5 percent said they see corporate blogging as a communications medium; 3 percent see it as a brand-building technique; and less than 1 percent see it as a sales or lead-generation tool. Many respondents doubt the credibility of blogs as a communications tool (62 percent); brand-building (74 percent) and a sales or lead generation channel (70 percent). Robbin Goodman, EVP and partner at Makovsky & Company, the firm that released the study, said in what may be the understatment of the week, "There is a learning curve that needs to take place." Robbin also points out "The benefits of blogging for a business can significantly outweigh possible risks."

I also listened to David Berlind's podcast Reality Check: Wikis? Sorry. Never Heard of Them. He turns the table on a technology tradeshow by interviewing the attendees instead of the exhibitors. His conclusion, technology executives who are beginning to explore these new technologies and tools are extremely clear on why they need to embrace the newer technologies but they're just not sure what those technologies are.

Taken together, the articles are a clear indication that companies including Attensa need to do a better job explaining the benefits of adopting our technologies. They also point out that technology executives who embrace Enterprise 2.0 tools early can have a significant competitive advantage.

It's good when your company name begins with the letter A. That puts Attensa at the top of the list of the Supernova Connected Innovators. Attensa joins 11 other companies with "extraordinary potentional to create new markets and shape the connected future."

The companies were selected by Supernova and Mike Arrington of TechCrunch from nearly 100 submissions. Thanks.

Supernova 2006  is June 21 -23. In San Francisco.

Luis Suarex at ELSUA - A KM Blog links to an article in CIO titled "Who Knows Whom and Who Knows What" which delves into the value of understanding Social Networks in your business. Social Network Analysis can be used to indentify experts, thought leaders and the most effective communication channels for disseminating critical information that can create strategic advantage.

It won't be long before AttentionStream analysis will be used to improve colloborative networking by automatically identifying the most efficient information distribution channels.

You can read more about the role of AttentionStream technology and SNA in our new Download attensa_enterprise_rss_whitepaper_0605.pdf .

Yesterday Craig Barnes, Attensa's CEO and Seth Goldstein, CEO of Root Markets, discussed their views on how applied attention technology works for users. The Attensa approach is to use AttentionStreams to continuously and automatically prioritize information so that the most useful information bubbles to the top, helping to control the flow of the RSS information firehose. The Root Market approach is let user track their clickstreams on the Web and to use and share their history in a marketspace that trades qualified sales leads for offers of value.

The Agile Buzz has the play by play here.

And David Utter at WebProNews raises a valid question on the privacy concerns tied to an Attention based marketplace.

We are in New York at the Syndicate Conference. With its focus on RSS and publishing, Syndicate is one of our favorite shows. It also allows us to catch up with a lot of folk we don't see nearly often enough.

We are previewing Attensa for Outlook 1.5 which showcases our first use of AttentionStream technology. We are excited for its potential, and judging by the reaction at PC Magazine when we demoed it to them yesterday, they are too.

Speaking of upcoming news, we thought we would let you know where we plan on being for the next couple of months in case you will be at any of these conferences and would like to get together. Don't be shy about saying hi and stopping in for a conversation.

You can find our event schedule here.

Syndicate New York: May 16 -17

Attensa President and CEO, Craig Barnes is on a panel with Seth Goldstein of Root Markets discussing - "Selling Attention: Two Differing Views"

05/17/2006, 1:30 PM - 2:25 PM

Attensa will be sponsoring the SixApart Business Blogging Seminars being held:

New York -  May 25, 2006

Los Angeles - June 22, 2006

Red Herring "Pursuit of Disruption" Conference - Monterey- May 23-25

The Spring issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review has a terrific overview of how blogs, wikis and group messaging software are defining Enterprise 2.0 - Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration.

The author, Andrew P McAfee, an associate professor with the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School, coins a new acronym -- SLATES (search, links, authoring, tags, extensions and signals) to describe the tools and communication patterns that are essential to building highly collaborative environments that can drive productivity to new levels.

You can buy a copy of the report here.

Attensa for Outlook includes the features that top the must-list for business class RSS readers necessary to track and monitor the signals

• persistent search tools
• easy to use tagging, auto-feed detection and preview
• ability to handle secure feeds
• one click blog publishing