Identifying 10 online professionals that are making a difference in the industry was as fun an exercise this time around as when we first did it in 2009. Twitter remains a truly diverse medium with people using it to communicate on a wide variety of topics; mostly useful, but at times less relevant in a business context.

I have myself previously complained about noise on Twitter and proposed a simple quantity-rule to get around it.

Just like last year, the list includes some familiar faces as well some names new to Twitter and perhaps new to you as well. For each of them I have picked a selected tweet to give you a taste of their style. Enjoy!

1. @BGleba: Beth Gleba is currently Employee Internet Portal Project Leader at IKEA based in the Greater Philadelphia Area. She’s been with IKEA since 2001 and has developed their award-winning Intranet by focusing on key employee roles and required information needs.
   

   I like it! “We let (internal com) our blog comments be anonymous, this allowed comments to soar!” #10CCM Nicole Foster.

2. @bjfogg: BJ Fogg is the famous Stanford innovator. He appears on Fortune’s list of 10 gurus you should know and has spent the past years in the field of persuasion, including work on Facebook and mobile (and both). As our 2007 and 2009 Aarhus Conference keynote speaker, he’s made significant contributions to our programmes. He’s once tweeted that he regrets 20% of his tweets.
   

   “Email cheapens our lives” I explained at a Stanford event in 2007. One reason: Email can undermine our closest relationships

3. @BrianBentzen: Brian Bentzen is online communications manager at Servicestyrelsen (The National Board of Social Services) in Odense, Denmark. Moreover, he has previously acted as Lecturer of Communication Studies and worked at a local digital agency.
   

   Content Farming – SEOs Get It, Journalists Don’t http://bit.ly/aY9dLT #contentstrategy #SEO

4. @ernstdecsey: Ernst Decsey has been working for UNHCR in Geneva Switzerland for the past 12 years. As part of the intranet team, he uses Twitter mostly to share recommended articles.
   

   Medecins Sans Frontieres: Social Media Lessons from the Haiti Crisis http://bit.ly/aUn8qY

5. @healthythinker: Jane Sarasohn-Kahn founded THINK-Health, a strategic health consultancy, in 1992 after 10 years as health care consultant in firms in the US and Europe. Jane focuses on the nexus of health and technology.
   

   Phonecare works – remote telecare for people with cancer, pain and depression; FCC #broadband implications #mhealth | http://bit.ly/d7uEbZ

6. @izahoor: Zahoor Hussain is a busy and recognized UK consultant. He co-founded a business which was later acquired by digital agency LBi. Zahoor is very good at engaging in conversations on Twitter and also regularly shares pointers to interesting reading.
   

   Defining & Defending The Meaning Of “Community” an Open Source imperative http://bit.ly/9kTH7W #cms

7. @kreidy: Kathleen Reidy is a respected Boston-based analyst at The 451 Group covering content management and collaboration technologies. I haven’t yet been successful in getting Kathleen to speak at one of our events, but hopefully it will work out in a not too distant future.
   

   technical founders / CEO / CTOs – if you hire a high-profile marketing exec, let him/her do the briefings – really

8. @lwelchman: Lisa Welchman is the founder of WelchmanPierpoint, a Baltimore-based consultancy. She has pioneered the field of Web Operations Management by distinguishing Web strategy, governance, execution and measurement as it pertains to large Web sites.
   

   opps. was it a Freudian slip to say For Web Managers and the Managers that “mange” them…..? hmm

9. @markgr: When Mark Greenfield is not at conferences, he is busy as the Director, Office of Web Services at University of Buffalo. Mark is also an Associate Consultant with Noel-Levitz, a US higher education consulting firm. He was first introduced to our community at the recent conference in Philadelphia and has accepted an invitation to speak on the higher education track at the  Aarhus 10 conference.
   

   Why do so many high profile blogs make it impossible to print? For that matter, the same applies to many websites #petpeeve

10. @stephlemieux: Stephanie Lemieux used to work as taxonomy practice lead at Earley & Associates, but just announced that she has started as Director of Search & Content Mgt at the Yellow Pages in Montreal, Canada.
    

    in a presentation on using a wiki to display enterprise metadata to users – divorce management from presentation layer #EDW10 #metadata

This list enables you to easily follow all 10 on Twitter.

Who do you follow on Twitter? Whose tweets do you hate to miss? If you think we have left out any unmissable online professionals, please feel free to drop a comment!

The German Autobahn is jammed with foreign cars; the Spanish coastline is full of Northern Europeans; it is holiday time! Wherever you decide to switch off and recharge, here some suggestions for interesting summer reading.

We have collected a few reading titles  and tips from members of our community and received some good input on our growing LinkedIn group.

Articles

• How to Build a Footer That Dosen’t Stink – a simple and effective guide
• Medecins Sans Frontieres: Social media lessons from the Haiti crisis – how an NGO used social media in a time of crisis
• Web Site Migration Handbook – migration are complex beasts. Learn how to tame them in this complete guide written by David Hobbs

Books

• Speak Human, Eric Karjaluoto – our Philadelphia 10 and Aarhus 10 conference keynote ask how you speak with your customers
• Delivering Happiness, Tony Hsieh – pay your employees to quit, let corporate culture be your first priority, try to change the world and oh yes, earn money
• Why Intranets Fail (And How to Fix Them), Luke Tredinnick – how do you meet the needs from both end users and your internal stake holders?
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky – you need to change the way you think about social media. This books tells you why.
• The Lords of Strategy, Walter Kiechell III – strategy as a term has only been around since the 60’s. Learn more about the pioneers behind the term that we use all the time today
• Remote Research, Nate Bolt & Tony Tulathimutte – how to design and conduct remote research studies, top to bottom, with little more than a phone and a laptop.
• Open Leadership – How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead, Charlene L – how you can be open while maintaining control
• Our Iceberg is Melting, John Kotter – a story about penguin colony in Antartica will change your view on organisations

If you like me are way behind with the “ought-to-read” list, you may want to check up on our 2009 recommendations as well.

What have we missed? Feel free to drop a suggestion below.

“The symptoms of an ailing intranet are not hard to recognize: poor adoption, irritated users, failed tasks, and ingenious (but unproductive) workarounds in order to avoid the intranet altogether.”

- Forrester Research

Using this analyst quote to push their message, US-based CMS vendor Ektron has started promoting eIntranet, a new intranet application focused on making it easier to deploy a “best practice intranet”. eIntranet comes with a set of so-called widgets with key functionality or integration to popular applications aimed at reducing implementation cost and time.

Needless to say, you’ll still need implementation assistance before you can launch with eIntranet. Besides considering the purely technical aspects of getting it up and running, you will need to go through proper planning, including user experience and interaction design, persona development and a way to address intranet governance in order to achieve satisfactory adoption, happy users, completed tasks and “no workarounds”. Widgets alone are not going to solve these tasks.

According to Ektron, eIntranet has more social capabilities than established intranet competitors (see recent coverage: Focused intranet vendors; moving in on the market?), but with a list price of USD 250,000 for an organisation with 4,000 users, eIntranet is also not exactly a cheap way to reboot your intranet. To compare, Australian specialized intranet vendor Intranet Dashboard is priced at USD 4,000 per month for 4,000 users.

European intranet expert Jane McConnell has defined 3 stages of intranet maturity. Stage 1 intranets is where the intranet will become the “way of working” within 3 – 4 years. These intranets are characterized by lack of strategy, a low level of resources spent and a very low degree of management attention. If this is you, then eIntranet can definitely help you kick-start the intranet process and brings several benefits to the table.

More advanced intranets with major leaps in the last 12 months in key areas such as the integration of business applications into the intranet (stage 2) or when the intranet is the “way of working” today (stage 3) has less to gain from eIntranet, I would say. Stage 2 and stage 3 intranets also has a riskier implementation path to eIntranet with complex migration and potentially few business gains compared to what is already on the existing intranet.

Ektron is far from an early adopter when it comes to traditional website focused and experienced CMS vendors offering intranet solutions:

• EPiServer offers a product called Relate+ which “signals the end of the passive intranet era”.
• Kentico is scheduled to release a Intranet Starter Site during this quarter, which will contain basic templates and functionality for an intranet.
• Sitecore calls their solution and Intranet Portal and promises “a full-featured, easy-to-use intranet in just one week”.

Worth mentioning as another and widely adopted option is obviously also Microsoft SharePoint.

Forrester has correctly identified the symptoms of an ailing intranet. Whether eIntranet is the right tool to address it should become apparent over the coming months, as more reference customers learn the new tool.

It really does not matter what you are trying to achieve; whether implementing content management, search, portal or something “social”, the project is certain to face internal organizational challenges along the way and will require a level of organizational maturity in order to avoid complete failure. How do you figure out whether your organization is indeed ready for that big web technology initiative you are dreaming of?

Unfortunately the chosen route often turns out to be a “dead end”. Don’t expect any digital agency or other type of vendor to tell you that you are not ready to buy their solutions. Many buyers start the conversation with their vendors much too early in the process, naïvely hoping for some honest feedback. What normally happens is that the vendor challenges the buyer to define their functional requirements, while important aspects such as governance and organizational readiness are left unchecked.

If you suspect that your current agency is milking you for what you are worth, you may just be right. In fact, considering the scenarios at some of our members, I’ve sometimes thought that any other vendor or any other system would be a dramatic improvement on the status quo. Actually making the change is the difficult part.

If you are able to make the decision and change things on your own, then you belong to a tiny minority of online professionals. Most have to liaise with managers, other departments and a group of critical stakeholders often not placed in the same location. Moreover, getting the permission to go ahead with a vendor evaluation process is really only the initial and easy part of the project. The implementation is much more cumbersome and risky.

In my experience, typical indicators of organizational readiness include:

• a sizeable team of experienced online professionals, including at least one knowledgeable manager, ideally with strong project management skills
• a clear strategy for your online activities with success criteria and a clear vision
• a governance model that enables you to make decisions, including how to allocate resources, set priorities, definition of roles and responsibilities
• a few failed projects under the belt with organisational learning on how to prevent it from happening in future projects

Digital projects hardly ever come in on time and on budget. Add to that the factor that if the organisation is not ready for the change, a new technology or a new vendor could actually turn out to be a competitive disadvantage.

Buyers, press and analysts alike tend to focus exclusively on functional requirements and vendor viability when evaluating vendors. What is too often completely overlooked is the valuable vendor community of references, developer network and partner channels.

While the community might be both harder and more time-consuming to evaluate than features  and financial results, almost every successful project I have ever come across, had involvement from the wider vendor community. Here are some examples of what people have done:

• talking to references before procurement to save money and again before going live to share lessons learned and avoid repeating expensive mistakes
• finding and engaging an experienced partner for implementation assistance and training
• meeting with seasoned developers to get up-to-speed on the all important details

The very big vendors, e.g. IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, have all made a serious commitment to nurture their community, mostly through partners, online forums for developers and annual mega conferences. As a customer this brings several benefits, including easy access to training and several ways to learn more about the products. As an example, Oracle has their online Oracle Technology Network, more than 450 local user groups and their OpenWorld conferences, which annually brings some 40,000+ delegates to San Francisco.

Among the smaller vendors, e.g. Alfresco, CoreMedia, Day Software, FatWire, Percussion and Sitecore, you find significantly smaller communities and it is often much harder with the smaller vendors to assess the usefulness of the community. Some might have a strong online community or a vibrant group of users that meet regularly on a regional level, while with others there might not be any of this.

You can always ask your sales representative for a list of references that you can talk to. Beyond talking to peers, chances are that with a smaller vendor you will find it difficult to find experienced partners or developers.

Regardless of the size of vendor you are evaluating, make sure to set time aside to consider the community.

Earlier this week I attended Bowen Craggs & Co’s third Web Effectiveness Conference in Paris. 2 intense days focusing on current achievements, challenges, headaches and predictions of the hard working individuals managing some of the largest and most complex Web estates in the world. Two of the dominant topics were:

• The changing role of the corporate website
• The impact of social media in the enterprise and how the attitude is maturing

Stephane Aknin, head of group e-communications at AXA, opened with a quote by Simon Mainwaring, which seemed to sum up a lot of what was discussed over the 2 days:

The online presence of a brand will increasingly become the sum of its social exchanges across the web and not the website that many currently call home.

The changing role of the corporate website and the impact of social media on the web more widely are in many ways linked. It is naturally not a simplistic case of social media taking over the roles and functions of the website; rather, corporations are gradually realizing that the way they have to act, comply and behave online is changing fundamentally because of social media. –At least the web professionals inside the organisations are! Jerome Colombe, head of Web governance at Alcatel-Lucent concluded that The 2.0 (r)evolution has “cracked the Web architecture lines we knew”. The godfather of Web analytics, Jim Sterne, who talked about how to actually measure the impact of social media, bluntly claimed that the impression of your company no longer derives from the corporate website.

After years of social media hype with rushed-through policy making and childish excitement in equal measures, it was great to listen to a discussion that finally appears to be maturing. Sensible questions were being asked and people were openly sharing their hard-learnt lessons. Some of the key points I scribbled down throughout the many presentations that brought up social media related issues were:

• Listen listen listen! It takes time to follow the many conversations that go on, but it is vitally important to dedicate that time.
• Respond to criticism if appropriate – and don’t mull it over for days: do it quickly.
• Have social media guidelines, even if you don’t intend to actively participate on social media platforms; your employees need them.
• Do not attempt to remove critical; even defamatory comments and do not try to shut down “negativity groups / spaces” – you will immediately be branded a “controller” and it will always backfire, as more than one organisation told us. When you find yourself in a social media storm, “facts simply don’t matter”.
• Befriend someone influential in your legal department and get them to take a real interest in social media; one organisation told how they have made one of their senior lawyers responsible for social media; all initiatives and considered scenarios are run past this lawyer. Every organisation should have a social media lawyer who can take a pro- rather than a re-active approach.
• Don’t befriend customers, clients or stakeholders anywhere in the social media space; Maintain a professional distance whenever you represent your organisation.
• Social media monitoring: think of it more as an alert mechanism than an achievement indicator!

I have deliberately not credited all the speakers for their good advice as many of them were talking out of very recent painful and still highly sensitive experiences, but thank you to all contributors nevertheless – and thanks to Bowen Craggs for facilitating and moderating all this valuable no-nonsense knowledge sharing!

For more on the impact of social media on the enterprise and the deafening hype around it, check out Peter Kim’s talk on the subject given at the recent J. Boye conference in Philadelphia.

What is happening in your organisation? Control or conversation?

SharePoint is a complex product with a complex pricing model. In an attempt to try to clear things up, I talked to Microsoft’s Subsidiary Product Marketing Manager for SharePoint, Åren Ekelund about how much SharePoint 2010 will cost in a web content management scenario.

Products such as Windows, Office and SharePoint are typically bundled, the different products have different license models and prices depend on your organisation’s license agreement with Microsoft. Customers can always contact a Licensing Specialist to figure out how much they actually pay for their Microsoft solutions. For web managers however, it can still be a challenge to figure out how big a part WCM is of the total bill. This is also the case for the recently released SharePoint 2010.

As with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), many believe they have the licenses already as a part of their existing license agreement. If your organisation has a so-called Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft, Client Access Licenses (CALs) to SharePoint are indeed included. This means that internal users have access to SharePoint.

However, when it comes to web content management, you will have to buy additional licenses for the external facing servers. These vary widely in price depending on many factors, but here a few realistic indications:

• Standard Internet Server: The price for a SharePoint 2010 Standard Internet server lies around EUR 5.500 – 9.500.
• Enterprise Internet Server: The prise for a SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Internet server lies around EUR 20.000 – 32.000. The major extra features in the enterprise version include Access services, FAST search enhancements (note these also require a FAST server license), business intelligence, InfoPath Services & web analytics. You can see a detailed comparison of the editions here.

These prices are one-time expenses which you need to pay up-front for each server. If you choose to get an optional – but recommended by Microsoft – Software Assurance (SA), you will have to pay around 25% annually of the initial license price. Most significantly an SA will allow you to upgrade to new versions as they come out.

Note that many organisations will need several servers if they have significant web requirements (e.g. 2 front-end servers and a search server). UK SharePoint expert Ari Bakker has made some useful pricing examples for SharePoint 2010, which illustrate how much it will cost in both internal end external scenarios. As an example, Bakker writes that a large website on SharePoint with FAST search would cost EUR 82.000 (for 2 Enterprise servers and a FAST search server).

The best advice from Microsoft is to talk to your existing license partner in order to figure out how much your SharePoint projects will cost. Microsoft themselves will also be happy to answer any questions on pricing. As Åren said:

“SharePoint 2010 pricing can be hard to explain, but actual price quotes are easy to get via Microsoft or a licensing partner. We are always happy to help”

My advice is to contact Microsoft early on in any large project, before you decide on one system or license model over another. Many have burnt their fingers on SharePoint having thought that they didn’t need additional licenses. As a comparison, licenses for other .NET based systems such as Ektron, EPiServer and Sitecore start around EUR 30.000 – 40.000 for enterprise projects (see our CMS shortlist from 2009). So even if you have an Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft including SharePoint CALs, SharePoint might not be the cheapest option, if your WCM requirements are significant.

Thanks to Søren Laurits Nielsen, Kristoffer Munch, Niels Højdahl (@hoejdahl), Shawn Shell (@shawnshell) & Åren Ekelund for constructive input.

Like most source communities, Drupal has been struggling with their marketing, at least in terms of reaching beyond developers. During a recent exercise to come up with a new slogan, Dries Buytert, the creator of Drupal suggested:

come for the software, stay for the community

This seemed to resonate well with the energetic and developer-friendly Drupal community. To me though, it raised a few questions:

1. Is this really how you should select Drupal, or for that matter any other content management system?
2. Is the Drupal community really that good?

During the past years I’ve been arguing that you should not only look at the software when you select a new CMS. You should look features and also consider aspects such as documentation, roadmap, partners, support and yes, community. Real Story Group, the vendor-neutral analyst firm formerly known as CMS Watch, calls this “intangibles” and has increasingly emphasised this in their product evaluations over the years.

Moreover, I recently argued that developers and not software features, were the real key to success. This lead to a session at our Philadelphia conference earlier this month, where we asked whether the community is really more important than the CMS. In my view, the community is very important and something you should consider before you select any product.

So, does the new Drupal slogan indicate that the software is the best part of the project? Perhaps. But do look beyond the software before you select any CMS. As an example, Drupal has fewer experienced implementation partners than most comparable content management systems.

I would say that Drupal has a very dedicated and large community, mostly populated by developers. The community is especially strong within the media industry. The Drupal developers don’t just meet online; they meet regularly face-to-face, including at the bi-annual DrupalCon conferences, where an impressive 3,000+ registered for the San Francisco edition held this past April.

The interesting thing with Drupal, is that the term community has a few different meanings. Drupal is really engineered with community-driven content in mind, e.g. as known from many news sites, where readers can comment on articles and web managers can build their own little villages.

With community playing a significant role in all-things-Drupal, I’ll suggest a perhaps more fitting slogan:

come for the community, stay for the community

In other words, don’t select Drupal just because you have requirements for community-driven content and Drupal is a good fit: Select Drupal only if you have also talked to the community and have a plan for how to engage with it.

Most governments don’t have to worry about winning and retaining customers. Perhaps that is why they have such a very long way to go in terms of speaking human. Today, many government websites reflect this and are very difficult to understand and use for the average citizen. This leads to complaints, negative press and excessive numbers of phone calls, which could have been avoided or handled much cheaper and more efficiently over the web.

At our Philadelphia conference earlier this month Eric Karjaluoto made a very compelling case for organisations to ’speak human’ in order to better connect with customers. He illustrated his keynote with best and worst practice examples from large and small enterprises that made it clear why you can no longer “lie, cheat, steal” your way to making it big. This advice applies equally well to government administration, which would be able to make real progress if they became better at connecting with citizens.

A few stories to illustrate the potential and how the web could help:

• In Denmark with a population of 5 million, the Danish Tax and Customs Administration receives about 4,5 million phone calls every year with questions about taxes. In a a story in a Danish newspaper, a government representative says that the Danish tax rules are particularly complex. That might be true, but a good content strategy making the website much easier to use should be able to reduce the number of  calls greatly.
• In the US, The New York Times recently reported that doctors, once used to answering patients’ questions about their hearts or other matters physical, have lately spent up to half of their time answering a range of different questions — about the new health care law. Needless to say, substantial policy changes will always lead to questions. Better websites with plain language texts should help answer most of these.

Part of ’speaking human’ is about using plain language. In the UK, The Plain English campaign has been campaigning since 1979, “against gobbledygook, jargon and misleading public information.” Here’s an educational example from their website:

Before:

High-quality learning environments are a necessary precondition for facilitation and enhancement of the ongoing learning process.

After:

Children need good schools if they are to learn properly.

Plain language will indeed get you far in terms of speaking human. You’ve probably seen plenty of examples like the above in both paper and online communication if you have had to deal with government. Plain language in a sense is the easy part, the difficult one is the “connect” part. This is where you actually listen and builds a relationship – regardless of whether online or offline. I can name several enterprises that do this well at the moment and Eric Karjaluoto also named a few.

Please, dear reader, can you mention just one government agency that ’speaks human’ today?

Social media has evolved from distracting fun to hype to significant mainstream adoption over the last 18 months or so. Will the intranet remain unaffected by this? Or are there any emerging signs from intranets in social businesses that could provide some clues to what the future is likely to bring?

Consumer organisations such as BMW, BT, Coca Cola, Red Bull, Virgin and WWF have invited their customers to participate in conversations and taken their usage of social media tools, such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and wikis very far. They have, in effect, become what analysts now call “successful social businesses”.

Social media has undeniably become a dominant phenomenon everywhere; yet most intranet experts continue to discount it as simply a collection of interesting features and emerging technologies with little relevance. Social media is indeed much more. Notably, some progressive social businesses are going out of their way to facilitate culture change through increased employee participation using mature, “enterprise-friendly” technologies. Notable examples of this includes the world’s largest pump manufacturer Grundfos, pharma giant Novo Nordisk and financial network operators SWIFT, who you can meet on 2 June in Copenhagen for our social business event.

This is causing disruptive intranet changes, which are happening in government administration, large enterprise as well as NGO’s. It would appear that social media is destined to have a huge impact on the work of intranet professionals. Here are just a few signs from existing “social businesses” indicating how your intranet will be affected:

• Collaboration has been an integrated part of the intranet for many organisations for years. With collaboration spaces increasingly being opened to external partners, collaboration might be becoming too important to be left with an intranet manager alone. Collaboration continues to be pushed, mainly through the demands of an increasingly dispersed workforce. Moreover, it is one of the few actual strengths of Microsoft SharePoint.
• Content: once considered a centrally controlled and approved information asset. The amount of online content is exploding in social businesses. When the majority of employees embark on creating and commenting on content it easily causes chaos and places new requirements on governance and monitoring.
• Intranet as a term has disappeared altogether in some organisations. Many successful social businesses effectively don’t even have a corporate intranet. In a social business this development goes far beyond a simple name change: It makes little sense to have a dedicated intranet team, when what you have is an increasingly scattered collection of social media that nobody refers to as the “intranet”. Some social businesses still have their “legacy” intranet around, but this is not something that new employees are told to worry about.
• IT departments remain responsible for the intranet in many organisations, but rarely so in social businesses. Social businesses tend to have tiny IT departments that are busy enough keeping the IT infrastructure (e.g. remaining servers, desktop apps) running. While once infamous for their obsession with security and lack of communication skills, in social businesses  the IT departments are softening their firm grip to allow experiments such as cloud computing (e.g. Google Apps) for business critical (traditional intranet) tasks.
• Management have, with few notable exceptions, been very hard to persuade about the importance of intranets. They take a different position in a social business. Their expectations are constantly increasing and they see internal communications and employee applications as a part of a much bigger picture. The intranet silo has gone and been replaced by a networked set of tools.
• Mobile has been hyped up for many years, but now it is happening at an extremely fast rate. When employees can put the office in their pockets, e.g. e-mail and Office, they also expect their killer applications to work when they are on the move. Facebook is very popular, in particular on mobiles, in social businesses.
• Technology, in terms of intranets has so far been plagued by inflexible content management systems or enterprise portals. With a byzantine user experience and long implementation times (think Interwoven, Microsoft SharePoint, Oracle Portal or SAP), social businesses have taken alternative approaches. Blogs and wikis may have lost some of their sexiness, but are being deployed massively, also beyond technology-happy IT users. Social businesses tend to find the right tool for the job and are not afraid to put more than one tool in place.

Can we all agree that big change is ahead for intranets? If so, please share your thoughts on how intranet professionals can tackle this challenge.