According to a new study , enterprises continue to deploy social networking tools at an increasing pace. At the same time, though, this Cisco-sponsored study also found that a surprisingly small number of businesses have implemented formal processes and policies related to their use of social media. IT departments have also been left out of the loop when it comes to the adoption of social media tools. Only 10% of the respondents currently involve their IT departments as primary decision makers when it comes to choosing technologies for externally facing social networking initiatives. Sponsor This study was sponsored by Cisco and carried out by the IESE Business School in Spain, the E. Philip Saunders College of Business at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the U.S. and the Henley Business School in the United Kingdom. The researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 100 companies in Europe, Asia and Africa. These businesses were selected because they were early adopters of social media tools. Most of the interviewed companies are using social networks (75%) and micro-blogging tools (50%) as their primary tools to reach their audiences. The study found that social networking tools like blogs, Yammer, Facebook and Twitter are now being used by almost every department in these businesses. The Honeymoon is Over As Neil Hair, assistant professor of marketing at Rochester Institute of Technology and one of the lead researchers of this study told us yesterday, it is also important to note that "the honeymoon period" for social media in the enterprise is coming to an end. Early projects were often led by one or two early adopters who were enthusiastic about the possibilities of using social media tools in their companies. Now, more and more companies are seeing social media as an integral part in how they communicate with customers and vendors. Missing Pieces: Governance and IT Only 1 in 7 companies have formalized a process for adopting and deploying these tools, however. Only 1 in 5 of the interviewed companies have created internal policies that govern the use of these tools by their employees. As the researchers noted, quite a few companies struggle with finding the right balance between "the social and personal nature of these tools while maintaining some amount of corporate oversight." Very few companies (1 in 10) report that their IT departments are directly involved in their social networking initiatives. As these tools become more important, however, the the demand on IT to integrate these tools into the existing infrastructure will surely rise as well. Discuss

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Businesses Need to Formalize Their Social Media Policies

With tourists flocking to the Boston to walk the cobblestone streets of the Freedom Trail and visit various historical landmarks, Boston is often thought of for its ties to the American Revolution. But Boston is also the birthplace of a revolution of a different sort. In 1946, Georges Doriot, a professor at the Harvard Business School, founded the American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC) in Boston - one of the very first venture capital firms. In 1957, the ARDC invested $70,000 in Digital Equipment Corporation, a company founded by two former Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers working on transistor-based computing. The ARDC was later able to turn around and sell their investment for $450 million, quite possibly the best return on an investment ever at that point. Sponsor RWW's Never Mind the Valley series: Boulder Los Angeles Coming Soon: Portland, OR and Austin, TX Half a century later, Boston is a thriving and vibrant community not only for venture capital and startups, but also for large technology companies and research corporations. With nearly a hundred regional colleges and universities - like MIT and Harvard - and over a quarter of a million students, Boston has quickly become a breeding ground for innovation in the tech sector. "The thing that's amazing is we don't have to worry about attracting people into the Boston community," said Jeffrey Bussgang of Flybridge Capital Partners in a speech at the Harvard Business School last October (see video embedded below). "The challenge is to retain people." And retain them they will, thanks to a plethora of resources available to young entrepreneurs and startups in Boston. Monthly meet-ups like Mobile Monday and Tech Tuesday as well as other events like the biannual Mass Tech Leadership Council Unconference are just a few of the great ways startups can get their feet off the ground. Other organizations like TechStars and Stay in MA help Boston startups set up shop in Beantown with scholarships, funding, and mentorship. And why wouldn't startups want to stay in Boston? Massachusetts boasts the highest per capita VC investment rate in the United States, eclipsing California and New York with $457 per person. Data released today from information and data-services company ChubbyBrain shows that while other Northeaster states are suffering from floundering VC investment, Massachusetts is alive and expanding. While New York and Pennsylvania fell to just $513 million and $254 million respectively in the second half of 2009, Boston's home state soared to $1.2 billion. Figures like these have vaulted Massachusetts past New York into the number two spot behind California for VC investments. Bussgang says that reasons like these and the overall economic stability of the state have encouraged startups and entrepreneurs in Boston, despite being across the country from sunny Silicon Valley. "Yeah the winter sucks, but Massachusetts has delivered a budget on time and balanced the last couple years... unlike what's going on in California," he says. Bussgang also points out that California continually ranks last on Chief Executive Magazine's list of Best and Worst States for Business, though Massachusetts is usually not too far away. The close-knit technology and innovation community of the greater Boston area has fostered spontaneous collaborations resulting in several successful companies across numerous industries. Cloud computing solutions like Carbonite and GlassHouse , robotics companies like Roomba-maker iRobot , online video providers like Brightcove , and e-commerce startups Vistaprint and Shoebuy are all examples of the firepower Boston's potential can produce. Boston has even seen recent expansion from larger corporations, such as Google , Microsoft and Cisco Systems . Having these larger companies in the Boston area provides excellent opportunities for startups, says Bussgang. "Boston has become an outpost for a lot of these satellite R&D centers, and a place where the companies that we fund can find a home," he says. To learn more about the Boston startup scene, check out Don Dodge's extensive list of events, resources and people, as well as Larry Cheng's Massachusetts VC Blog Directory , which you can import right into your RSS reader to stay on top of what VCs in Boston are talking about. Photo by Flickr user the-o . Discuss

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Never Mind the Valley: Here's Boston

Over the weekend we had a chance to highlight

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Always Be Testing: 8 Services For Usability Feedback

In 2007, Wired Magazine published an article entitled the See-Through CEO where Redfin founder Glenn Kelman gained the public's sympathy and a slew of new members by blogging his corporate woes. Lately we've been looking inward at how companies can improve their employee recruitment strategy through social media. Great candidates research you before accepting an offer, and here is what your social media profile reveals to them. Sponsor LEARNING : A few months ago Bessemer Associate Sarah Tavel wrote an article entitled

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How Blogging and Tweeting Leaders Build Better Teams

Let's say you want a list of every Fortune 1,000 CEO in the United States, along with a picture and contact information. You can look through Google. Top page results may help a bit. But to get the granularity you need, top page results can only go so far. What's the best way to go about discovering and collecting information that is so often scattered and fragmented? Crowdsourcing works but you need a process and a way to organize the information. Sponsor Smartsheet provides a way to use wikis and spreadsheets for crowdsourcing information from services like Mechanical Turk and Live Works . Smartsheet recently integrated with Google Apps. Clients can work from Google Apps to crowdsource information through Smartsheet. Let's say you have a list of the startup companies from the top 10 metro areas in the United States. You have the names of the companies in Google Apps. But you are lacking the name of the CEO and any contact information. So, you add some columns and open the Smartsheet application directly from Google Apps. You may now make your request to have the work done for you. Smartsheet opens a service such as Mechanical Turk. You describe the job, what you need and set your price. As the tasks are performed, the new information pops into the spreadsheet. You can then import the spreadsheet back into Google Apps. Smartsheet integrates with a wiki environment. For example, Smartsheet works with Brain Keeper . Structured information from Smartsheet may be imported into the wiki, providing the crowd-sourced data to anyone with access. Crowdsourcing is a classic example of how the enterprise can get information almost immediately that could take hours to collect if done manually by one person. The cost savings alone makes Smartsheet an application worth giving a try. SmartSheet is a subscription service. Pricing starts at $9.95 per month on a per-user-basis. Discuss

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Smartsheet and Google Apps: Crowdsourcing Made Easy

Chris Messina grew up in New Hampshire, the Live Free or Die state. As a high-schooler in the early 90's he held his school's website hostage after being suspended for running an ad on it for a controversial gay rights group. Now Chris is nearing 30, today was his 29th birthday, and he just announced that he's taken a job at one of the biggest, most powerful corporations in the world. The latest chapter in the fascinating story of Chris Messina's life ends with one of the most high-profile young proponents of an Open and Distributed Web joining Google, a company that aims to organize all the information in the world and a behemoth that many free spirits online eye with ambivalence. What will the future bring for Messina and his work? A look at how he got to Google might offer some clues. It isn't all pretty, some people worry about what the move will mean for the web, but the announcement is definitely important for all of us. Sponsor Where Chris Messina Comes From Chris Messina grew up in a well-to-do suburb in New Hampshire. As a teenager he railed vocally against a middle class culture that he says he now realizes he was very much a part of. One of his biggest influences, though, was a grandmother with strong Libertarian tendencies. When Chris entered high school, the web was in its earliest days. He became the school's web master, setting up and running its first web site. A group of students at the school wanted to start a Gay/Straight Alliance support group and were facing some resistance from parents and school officials. Messina took it upon himself to post a free banner ad promoting the organization on the school's official web site. He got suspended from school and pulled the site down in protest. (Even in those early days a school librarian had backed up some of the files, so the situation ended without young Messina being paddled or tied to the rack.) After high school Chris went to college at Carnegie Mellon, where he studied Design. That Design training took him far in the tech world and will be an important part of his new job. After graduating from college, Messina went on to build an incredible resume of accomplishments recognized around the world. He designed the full-page ad in the New York Times announcing the launch of Firefox. Thousands of people donated $10 each to buy that ad, heralding an Open Source, community-based challenge to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. He co-founded BarCamp , the now international network of technology and culture "unconferences" that you may have heard of and should definitely attend next time there's one in your town. He was integral in the building of the international co-working community , a network of organizations that help each other serve independent, web-based workers who seek a physical space and support infrastructure. He is a Board member of the OpenID Foundation, the organization working on standards and adoption of open, federated and portable systems of identity for use around the web. He's a leading voice in the movement to create an Activity Streams standard that will allow user activity data to be shared and understood from one website over to another. When Messina speaks about any of the above, the biggest companies on the web listen. He's widely respected, but some people say he's become an arrogant power player at the front of a small parade of outspoken self-appointed leaders. That he gets all the credit when there are other, quieter, people doing a significant portion of the work. That's one perspective, but it's not the most common one and many of the leaders of the circle Messina runs in have shipped products that power the fundamentals of the web we all use today. Now Chris Messina will be at one of the biggest and most important companies around. Today on his 29th birthday, Messina announced he was taking a job at Google, with the title Open Web Advocate. Has Chris Messina sold out? "There are many legitimate reasons to work for a larger enterprise," social web sociologist danah boyd , who recently joined Microsoft, told us in response to Chris's move. "Some are practical: health insurance, stable income, and all of the other benefits that tend to come with such a package. But some come from the same ethos that entrepreneurs have... the desire to ship a product. Where you don't have to do every inch of legwork. And where you know that your work can touch millions. There's also something to be said for being around a whole lot of really smart people." On Landing at Google Messina has worked at a wide variety of startup companies. Most recently he was at OpenID provider Vidoop, one of a number of high profile hires the company made while it was still based in Oklahoma. In September 2008, Vidoop put its 40 person crew in a crazy caravan to its new headquarters in Portland, Oregon. In May, 2009 the company imploded, closed its doors and told some of its employees it couldn't pay back wages. Messina shared his account of what happened on his blog. The next half year Messina spent doing independent consulting, including a month and a half project with Mozilla. The fruits of that labor will be released to the public soon, he told us today. In September Messina was making the rounds, talking to a variety of companies in Silicon Valley and told a friend at Google that he was considering joining a big company as his next step. His Google contact told him that the company had a strong preference for hiring engineers, rather than people with the skills that Messina has. Doug Bowman, Google's first ever staff designer had made a high-profile departure to join Twitter just a few months prior, saying that Google didn't appreciate design. Messina left feeling like that door was closed and considered launching his own startup company. Over the next few months a few other companies offered Messina positions, he said, but then his old Google contact pinged him again and asked if he was still interested in joining Google. What had changed? His contact told him that Google was placing a new emphasis on getting the social web right, in a way that is good for the web. That month Google publicly launched a campaign that had run informally inside the company for two years, called the Data Liberation Front . It works across departments to enable users to remove their data from Google services, a key part of the vision of an Open Distributed Web that Messina has been working toward. "I went in for the interview," Messina told us today, "and 2 weeks later they made me a great offer letting me do what I was already doing. Yes, the interview process was long but very efficient, and I had to complete 1 logic problem (which I almost nailed, but alas, I'm no Joe Smarr!)" Smarr is the widely respected developer that had been working on these same matters at Comcast Plaxo until announcing that he was joining Google in December. Messina told us that he's excited to learn how to organize for an Open web from inside a very large company. It's a perspective he's never had before, but one that will lend him more credibility in his efforts to move other large companies. What This Means for the Web Messina and Smarr join a growing and impressive roster of Googlers dedicated to building an Open, Distributed web. That's a vision that's the opposite of a centralization and control - the typical model of financial success for a large company. This team of people will have to battle inertia, corporate interests and the natural tendency many people say is inherent in a large organization to bring more and more of a market under its control. Google controls a growing size of our search, our advertising sales, our email, our document collaboration, our mapping, our voice communication and much more online. The company is almost sure to face anti-trust legal pressure someday soon . It's always been a part of Google's DNA to support what's good for the web at large, the more people use the web the more they'll click on AdSense. This much centralization of power is cause for concern, though. It's as if Google is set to have a battle against itself. It's staff against the nature of its economy of scale. The culture of the corporation may be more important than its size, though. David Recordon, an open web advocate that works closely with Messina and recently joined social networking giant Facebook, had this to say: "Personally, I love how Facebook's culture lets me continue working on what I'm passionate about while having a tremendous impact on both the technology industry and the world at large. I hope that as my friend, Chris is able to do the same at Google." The day to day reality of effecting change may be more complex than that, though. Yahoo's Eran Hammer-Lahav, the best-known technologist working to develop and support open login standard OAuth , raises an important concern. "This is clearly a big win for Google," he told us. "Messina and Smarr are huge assets in the social web space." "My concern is specific to Google. With Messina, Smarr, [inventor of OpenID and more Brad] Fitzpatrick and others all working for Google, focusing on the Social Web, there is less and less incentive for Google to reach out. Google has a strong coding culture which puts running code ahead of consensus and collaboration. Now with so many bright minds in house, they are even less likely to reach out. "A week ago, you would have to get at least Google, Plaxo, and Messina (representing the independent voice) to collaborate. This week it's just Google. "While I am certain that Messina and Smarr will keep their independent voices, and am not suggesting they will 'sell out' or alter their principles, they no longer need to surface many of their ideas out to the community. They can just have an quick internal meeting and ship products." What will going to Google mean for the rebellious young man who's become such a big personality agitating for the open web outside of the biggest companies on the web? What does it mean that the biggest companies, especially Google and Facebook, keep hiring outside social web technical leaders? Time will tell, but Messina says he's been told explicitly that people for whom "it's all about them" don't do well at Google. The company must be full of formerly big personalities now working as part of a team. PubSubHubbub co-creator and now Googler Brett Slatkin once as a brash college freshman told Newsweek that "If I made a great product, and Microsoft offered me a lot of money, I would spit in their faces." (That's one of my favorite quotes.) Now Slatkin has toned it down and talks tech without the bombast. Messina says he knows it's going to be a big change and is excited to see what being part of Google is like. So the next chapter of the story of Chris Messina will be a part of the next chapter of the story of Google. Next: What could all this look like in the future? See one vision in our article Toward a Value-Added User Data Economy Discuss

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How Chris Messina Got a Job at Google

Intranets are becoming a higher priority for organizations. Intranet teams are growing in size, and the best of them are embracing new trends such as mobile accessibility and social networking. These are some of the findings from Jakob Nielsen's annual report on the top intranets for 2010. Companies that made the list this year include General Electric, Trend Micro Devices and Walmart. Nielsen is recognized as one of the world's foremost usability experts. His findings appear solid, though it is apparent that Intranet development is just on the verge of becoming a central communication environment for enterprise collaboration. Sponsor This year, Nielsen says, top companies on the list had a median size of about 6,300 employees, which continues a year-to-year trend toward smaller businesses. He attributes it to the increase in availability of small-company-friendly intranet technology. In addition, intranet teams are growing, up to 14 people, 27% higher than the average team size in 2006. This is not a big surprise. The need to develop the best possible internal communications environments now cuts across multiple platforms, ranging from the web to mobile devices. More resources are required to keep these platforms synced and accessible to the employees in the organization. Mobile Intranet Sites The best intranets had a separate mobile site for its employees. Of the companies polled, only 30% actually had a dedicated mobile site. Expect this to change in the year ahead. People are still getting to know how to use smart phones. It's still rare for companies to launch application environments for users, but at least one company did: an iPhone web app. Soon, though, users will expect to have access "anytime, anywhere," to their organization's network. Social Features The social Web is finding its way into intranets. Nielsen cites two trends: social features for employees as individuals workgroup support and other features that encourage work-related connections He cites Walmart for its discussion and profile pages and Trend Micro's TrendSpace, which includes the capability for employees to create their own content. Trend Micro goes as far as offering an elaborate system of reward points that accrue to employees when they contribute to the intranet's community features. It's noteworthy that social features are still just emerging in intranet environments, especially with the advent of enterprise collaboration services. Companies still have the chance to be recognized as innovators in this space, especially if they implement real-time update capabilities and mashup environments . Intranet Design is Maturing Overall, Nielsen comes to the conclusion that intranet design is maturing. In many respects, the Intranet has come of age. In the year ahead, intranets will change even more. Mobile usability and social networking features will continue to evolve, especially as teams begin to experiment with the wide variety of enterprise collaboration services now available. Discuss

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Top Intranets Embrace Mobile Accessibility and Social Networking