In case you follow my blog because you are a Jive fanboi or fangirl, you’ll be interested in this “official” JiveTalks company blog post I wrote. I’m pretty excited. How about you?

Tell me if you’ve heard this one (I have, from several customers)…

Them: “We implemented a wiki so that our team could share their expertise with a wider audience.”

Me: “That’s great! That’s how many have gotten their feet wet with Enterprise 2.0 over the past couple of years.”

Them: “Well, it works great for co-authoring documentation, and creating a knowledge base, but the comments/discussions feature just doesn’t do it for us when it comes to our Question & Answer needs.”

Me: “Really? Why?”

Them: “We’d like to be able to mark a question as answered, and have the people who provide the answers receive points when their answers are helpful or correct. We want them to get the recognition they deserve, but have the system do all the work for us.”

Me: “Ah I see.”

That’s when I tell them about Clearspace’s Community Everywhere.

With Community Everywhere, you can embed discussion threads directly into existing news articles, blog posts or other content that would benefit from comments or discussions. Instead of forcing users to leave your content to create a comment or view a discussion thread, you use Community Everywhere to enable users to participate in discussions while on the page that contains your content.

You can choose to display one of the following on your wiki pages (or news articles, or non-Clearspace community sites that have less-than-stellar discussion features, or press releases, or home-grown web applications, or portal pages, etc.):

• Display “Discuss This” Link
• Display “Discuss This” Link and Recent Posts
• Display “Discuss This” Link, Recent Posts, and Comment Box

The beautiful part of this is that, if you ultimately want your people to use Clearspace instead of that wiki implementation, this is the painless way to do a behavior migration first. You don’t have to migrate any wiki content right away, if at all. Instead, simply ease people into Clearspace via Community Everywhere in your wiki. Over time, Clearspace wiki pages might become the preferred solution, especially since folks can watch individuals, or specific pieces of content (wiki pages, uploaded files, blogs and blog posts, projects, spaces, etc.), or specific topics, and receive email notifications or an RSS feed whenever those watched people or things are updated.

I usually prefer to just watch the subject matter experts in knowledgebase environments such as this. I’ll get everything they create, comment on, and answer.

And, Clearspace’s discussion component allows the people who ask the question to designate which answers are helpful, and which answer is correct. There are points assigned to each designation, which are awarded to the people who provide the answers. These points accumulate, along with points earned elsewhere in Clearspace, to create a reputation rating for each person. This is displayed on the person’s profile, and anywhere their name shows up throughout Clearspace.

So, go ahead and use Clearspace along with your existing wiki environment, and use Clearspace’s Community Everywhere to solve those Q&A blues.

ETA Sept 30: An example

How cool is this:

Navigate to any Clearspace instance using IE7 or Firefox 2 or higher, then click the search drop-down menu and select it as a new search option.

This is made possible by Clearspace’s implementation of the OpenSearch API.

Your search results will include people’s profiles, and their files, wiki pages, discussion threads, blog posts, projects, and the ever popular “what have you” using your browser’s search box.

I wonder what happens if the Clearspace site is configured with other OpenSearch search engines, like Google or Google Search Appliance or Yahoo! or Wikipedia or whatever other site supports OpenSearch (because you can do that in Clearspace)? It stands to reason that your results will include items from those search engines as well, but I don’t know for sure. I will confirm this. When Clearspace search is also integrated with SharePoint (coming soon), I wonder if I’ll get SharePoint results as well? Gotta confirm that, too.

In any case, try it today on your company’s internal Clearspace site, or the following “powered by Jive Software” public sites:

• The Cisco Learning Network
• Bank of America Small Business Community
• Intel Open Port
• Nike Soccer
• TibCOmmunity
• CNN’s iReport
• Charles Schwab “Money and More” Community
• SAP’s Collaboration Workspace

How we did it

I got to be in Sam’s octopus head yesterday to “sound board” his most recent post, Anatomy of the Enterprise Octopus. It was gloriously goopy. That messy creation stuff always gets me excited, always energizes me, especially when the topic is awesome. And, I was able to share some interesting thoughts with him. Because he is my boss, I won’t have to figure out how to measure the worth of that interaction to report to him later. Whew. I’ll expect my raise soon, Sam.

Anyway.

One thought I’d like to flesh out a bit more is the co-Learning part of COLORS. This is because it is the low-hanging fruit in the overall culture change that must happen for a COLORS environment to thrive. That culture change is already happening in the eLearning space.

First, I always say that, if you want people to use social software, to become more collaborative and transparent in what they do, you need to co-opt existing business processes and work behaviors. You want to “capture the knowledge” of your retiring workforce? Tweak your existing mentoring program to effect that result. You want people to move conversations out of email and into the corporate “piazza” or townhall? Use tools that enable people to create and comment and follow the conversations in that piazza by using… email.

So, many enterprises have picked up on this. I have one customer who is thinking about how to co-opt their call center’s existing eLearning program to encourage more social participation. In a call center, associates are typically encouraged to participate in education modules during downtime. This company also wants them to create a sense of community, to have fun, and be fun. (This blew me away, because I’ve never heard of a company wanting to make their call center environment “fun.” Awesome.)

I have another customer who is working with my pal @jenokimoto to inject social learning into their existing structured eLearning program.

OK. Let’s get really uncomplicated here, and talk about how one person can get started with this. It’s not rocket surgery after all.

How to start a simple Social Learning revolution

Ingredients

• Social software environment that makes it stoopid-simple to create and publish a video, or podcast, or whatever medium your corporate culture likes to consume
• Camera/microphone/keyboard installed on your computer
• Something useful to talk about

Example

Angela creates a quick video that explains the nature of her organization’s relationship with Customer X. She describes the Customer’s technical, non-technical, and cultural environments; she shares a story that highlights a failure, another that describes a success with the customer. Maybe the stories involve trying to sell them something, solving a problem, or simple relationship-building. Who would this kind of information be valuable to? To anyone in the company who needs to work with that Customer in any capacity.

All she’d have to do is brush her hair, click a button in the “piazza” social software environment, and start talking. Then, when she’s done, click a button to save it in the “piazza”. It’s that easy.

You know, certain types of knowledge and experience are better suited to particular mediums. I would probably never type anything like the example above. I’d most likely do it during a phone conversation, actually. But that’s the old way.

Hmm… what if people just started recording themselves during those phone conversations? If the tools are stoopid-simple to use, why not? I’m going to try that – video myself during my next customer interaction, then share that with my sales colleagues so that they get an idea about what I’m saying to customers about Jive Clearspace and user adoption good practices. Gotta go brush my hair now.

I haven’t blogged about how ridiculously extensible Jive Clearspace is. Or, how active the global Clearspace development community is. No need. Just check out the Clearspace Plugin Catalog, along with the discussions and ratings for each plugin to get an idea. Tell your geek friends about it.
You say you want Facebook for the enterprise. How about Facebook in your enterprise profile?

The Facebook plugin integrates users’ Facebook profiles into Clearspace while allowing each user to control how (or if) their Facebook information is shown.

You say you want to comment on Clearspace discussion threads, documents and blog posts via email. You’ve already been able to do that via the Email Watch feature. But now you want to create discussions, documents and blog posts through email, too. Ok. Now, you can.

The Advanced Email plugin gives your users the ability to comment on blog posts, documents and discussion threads and to create discussion threads, documents and blog posts, all via email.

You say you want to manage rich media, too? No problem. You can easily embed rich media from consumer sites with these plugins:

• Vimeo Macro
• YouTube Macro
• SlideShare Macro
• blip.tv Macro
• Google Maps plugin
• Flickr Slideshow macro

Oh, you want to create videos on the fly within Clearspace documents? That’ll be here sometime in July – September:

New Plug-In Enables Jive’s Product Line With High-Quality Video

You want to populate your Clearspace blog with content from some other blog? No problem.

Feed your Blog plugin

You want to display your personal calendar on your homepage, or a group calendar on a community or group homepage? Here you go:

Calendar Widget

You say you want a social software platform. Jive Clearspace might be what you’re looking for.

Don’t miss Social Software Jeopardy on Wed May 28! Over 500 folks have already registered.

Contestants are:

Bill Johnston
Bill is the Chief Community Officer at Forum One Communications. Read more on the Online Community Report blog.

Laura Ramos
Laura is a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, focusing on B2B marketing. Learn more on the Forrester Blog for Interactive Marketing Professionals.

Jeremiah Owyang
Jeremiah is a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, focusing on Social Computing. To learn more, visit his blog Web Strategy by Jeremiah.

Categories are:

• Industry Stats
• Best Practices
• ROI

Your host will be:

Sam Lawrence

Sam is the CMO at Jive Software and a frequent speaker, blogger, and work-a-holic. Sam has 15 years of technology marketing experience ranging from start-ups to Fortune-level hardware, productivity software, communications and media companies. Learn more about him on his blog, Go Big Always.