Jive Talks

Day 4: What social traditions do you participate in during the holiday season?

Day 3: How social are you at your company during the holidays?

Day 2: How has your social business platform helped your company "tighten the belt"?

Day 1: Why did you choose your social business platform?

Day 10: Where do you draw the line for social in your business?

Social Media Q&A with Jive's Deirdre Walsh & Megan Cynaumon of Quest Software

2011-12-29T19:54:22Z

Jive Social Media Monitoring Helps Quest Software Increase their Social Reach by 90%

Today, Jive introduced a new member of our social media monitoring app family, called Fathom. It's available for free from the Jive Apps Market, making it easer than ever for all Jive 5 users to listen to the social web. Read more about Fathom at Can you Fathom the future of the social web? To explore the increasingly critical role that social media monitoring plays for our customers, I sat down with Megan Cynaumon, Social Media Coordinator at Quest Software. Over the past year, Quest has had great success using Fathom's full-featured cousin, Fathom Pro, to get closer to their customer base and gain new insights into their market and competitors.

Hi Megan. So tell me a little about Quest and your work there.

We’re an IT systems management company, providing tools for managing databases and other systems. As the Social Media Coordinator here, I’m Quest’s point person on the social web. I monitor social media--including Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, and more--for content that's important to the company. This includes comments and complaints from customers, support and sales questions, and information about our competitors and industry. I capture relevant observations and route them to key people in our various business units, such as product marketing and support managers. I analyze trends and sometimes engage in direct dialogue with social media users.

Why did you start using Jive social media monitoring?

We needed more visibility into the social web, and we weren't getting that using native social network tools. We also couldn’t report metrics about social web chatter in any meaningful way. We were missing important feedback about our company, our competitors and our market, and we weren't able to effectively track the impact of our campaigns.

So you have been using Fathom Pro for some time now, could you describe how you have been using it?

Fathom Pro is a big part of my job. It’s my primary social media listening tool. It alerts me to conversations of interest from a wide range of social media sources and allows me to easily share the information with my colleagues. It also helps me analyze social data and identify trends. Specifically, I’ve set up a large number of monitors (more than 500) using various combinations of search terms to track information important to our business units. For example, we monitor hashtags for topics related to our company, our competitors, and industry. And we create our own unique hashtags for Quest events, contests, and campaigns—this is a great way to track the response to and impact of each initiative. I share valuable observations with coworkers by posting them to groups in our Jive-powered internal community. I create monthly reports for each of our business units, summarizing statistics such as mentions of our company versus competitor mentions.

What do you see as the primary benefits?

We're better informed, on a minute-to-minute basis, on what people are saying and thinking about issues vital to our company. And because of that we can engage the public in more effective ways. I often reach out to people directly to clear up misinformation, resolve complaints, and connect them with someone in our company who can help them. That kind of dialogue has helped us build brand loyalty, and to spot potential problems and turn them around quickly. It's also helped me drive users to our public-facing Jive community, by directing them to resources and people who can assist them with their questions and issues.

Can you give an example of a customer issue you were able to resolve?

We had a key influencer—a widely read blogger—who posted that she’d had a bad experience with our phone sales. Fathom Pro alerted me to her post, and we were able to contact her and address the issue within hours. As a result, she quickly followed up with a post saying, “Quest took care of it.” That’s just one example of how Jive has enabled us to deal with issues as they arise, to become a really agile company that clearly listens to and responds to customers’ needs.

How about internally, has there been an effect on users? Any effect to the culture?

It's been great. I want to stress that it's not just me doing social media monitoring. We have a number of people in seven of our business units who also use Fathom Pro. The fact that it's very convenient to use and supports any number of users without extra fees (unlike some of the other products out there) makes it really easy to spread the capability around the organization. And that's really important, because the goal is to become a listening company. Fathom Pro has helped make that a reality at Quest. We've also come up with some creative ways to increase employee involvement with social media. We held a contest to see who could use one of our Twitter hashtags over a short period. We used Fathom Pro to monitor the results and pick the winner. The winner was an employee who managed to tweet 100 times over four hours!

What features of Fathom Pro do you, personally, find especially useful?

I like the breadth of data sources, from Facebook and Twitter to blogs, forums, news services, and even RSS feeds. The search capabilities are great, enabling us to set up a wide variety of highly targeted monitors. We have a broad portfolio of products, initiatives and acquisitions, so we need a lot of monitors to track different kinds of information. Fathom Pro’s sharing and analytic capabilities are also very helpful, letting me quickly pass key information to colleagues in our Jive community, and to generate periodic reports.

Lastly, for anybody starting out in a similar positions as yours, what advice would you have to offer them?

When I began, I was hesitant to respond directly to commenters on the social web. Now I know it’s imperative to respond, and to do so quickly. I try not to let anything slip by me and to respond as quickly as possible. It lets people know we’re here, we’re paying attention, and we care. It’s helped humanize us. In effect, our social media outreach has become the public face of our company. By enabling us to listen better, Fathom Pro is a big part of that.

Can you Fathom the future of the social web?

2011-12-20T19:04:57Z

I'm happy to share today that everybody using Jive across our customer base--like those working with John Summers at NetApp, or Tim Wike at Thomson Reuters, or any of the other millions of Jive users--will now have an even easier time gleaning vital information from across the social web. Our goal has always been to make social media monitoring and engagement as ubiquitous as email and Google searches. Our newest offering, Fathom, fulfills that vision.

What is Fathom? Glad you asked. Fathom is a new app in Jive's App Market (available to all Jive customers on Jive 5). It is completely free to install and allows you to monitor sources like Twitter, Facebook Fan pages, communities, and 100M+ other sites across the web. You just create the search by choosing keywords of interest, and Fathom scans the social web, collecting relevant results. This is not a 'trial' app or demo of Jive's broader social media engagement capabilities. It's a new product that brings social media listening to everyone--whether you're in support, sales, R&D, HR, or Marketing--at no cost.

Fathom provides access to the entire social web, including the full Twitter firehose. In addition, it's tightly integrated with Jive's Social Business platform. Results are reported to you right in Jive, making them easy to keep track of and share with colleagues. If you see a tweet or post of interest to your peers or coworkers, you can just click to turn the item into a discussion, document or blog post for others to see. Fathom also helps you analyze the data it collects, identify trends, and share periodic reports.

For those social media experts in your company who want to do even more, Jive now also offers the more advanced Fathom Pro through the Jive Apps Market for $49 per person per month. Fathom Pro's features include the ability to engage directly with social media: you can log into your Facebook or Twitter accounts to post, reply, tweet or retweet, without leaving Fathom Pro. Fathom Pro also also provides more advanced analytics--such as the ability to track sentiment trends and measure user influence. And Fathom Pro lets you create an unlimited number of automated searches at no additional charge--another aspect of Jive's approach social web engagement that sets us apart from most others in the industry.

So my recommendation for any Jive 5 customer who wants to be a hero and introduce the power of social media monitoring to everyone at your company is, start getting the word out about Fathom now!

Here are some additional details around the differences between Fathom and Fathom Pro (this list is not exhaustive of all the functionality, just an overview):

Feature	Fathom	Fathom Pro
Number of saved searches	3	Unlimited
History of the social web	14 Days	30 Days
Analytics history	14 Days	6 Months
Analytics - mention trends
Analytics - compare mention trends for multiple searches	Up to 3	Unlimited
Analytics - media distribution
Alerts - receive alerts in your Jive activity stream
Alerts - receive alerts in your email
Collaborate on results within your Jive community (create discussions, documents, blog posts quoting results)
Collaborate on analytics graphs within your Jive community (create discussions, documents, blog posts quoting results)
Share searches between team members
View and track sentiment of results
Analytics - sentiment trends
Engage with the social web (post, reply, retweet, favorite, like)
Connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts for use in posting
See author's Klout scores to understand their social influence
Export data to csv

Any questions, thoughts, or reactions? We're listening

Adam Mertz, Jive Product Marketing

Day 11: What's Your 2012 Social Business Resolution?

2011-12-20T17:08:50Z

The approach of New Year's Day has me not only looking back over the major Jive milestones of 2011, but more importantly, thinking about the future. The holidays are the time of year to reflect and promise to adopt a variety of goals.

Do these sound familiar?

Quit...drinking, smoking, over-eating
Start...working out, spending more time with the family, learning how to play the piano
Get...organized, out of debt, a new haircut
Give...time, money

I've found that the best New Year's resolutions are specific, measurable, and offer a reward that you don't have to wait 365 days to evaluate.

So, Jive Community, I want to hear from you: What are your 2012 Social Business Resolutions?

Previous Days of Conversation:

Day 9: What do you do to reward participation in your online community?

Day 8: What movie quote best represents the state of your social business?

Day 7: What is next on your social business To-Do list?

Day 4: What social traditions do you participate in during the holiday season?

Day 3: How social are you at your company during the holidays?

Day 2: How has your social business platform helped your company "tighten the belt"?

Day 1: Why did you choose your social business platform?

Day 9: What do you do to reward participation in your online community?

Day 10: Where do you draw the line for social in your business?

2011-12-17T05:21:35Z

One of the biggest advantages of social business is the ability for people to socially orchestrate solutions and execute with agility; saving time and money. Not unlike its predecessors, social cannot escape the reality that it may not always be the best answer. Whether in a primary or complimentary capacity, balancing the role social plays in the enterprise is an exercise in managing risk, reward, and cost, just like any other business decision.

Due to its virtually endless applicability in the enterprise, it is often more important to deflect use-cases that will knowingly not succeed (as defined by your organizational values) on social, more so than solicit use-cases where you think social is applicable. It has been my experience that for every use-case you identify that can benefit from social enhancement, your constituents will find another 4. As such, educating people on lessons learned and known limitations will help reduce wasted efforts down the road, but also benefit your social adoption. Which brings me to the question at hand,

Where do you draw the line for social in your business?

Based on your organizational value(s) are there any areas that you consider off limits for social enhancement in your enterprise? If so, what is the reasoning or context for this decision?

Previous Days of Conversation:

Day 8: What movie quote best represents the state of your social business?

Day 7: What is next on your social business To-Do list?

Day 4: What social traditions do you participate in during the holiday season?

Day 3: How social are you at your company during the holidays?

Day 2: How has your social business platform helped your company "tighten the belt"?

Day 1: Why did you choose your social business platform?

Day 8: What movie quote best represents the state of your social business?

Day 9: What do you do to reward participation in your online community?

2011-12-16T07:26:12Z

Rewarding community participation is imperative to the longevity of any online community. Most online communities follow the 90:9:1 principle, which according to Wikipedia:

The "90–9–1" … states that 1% of people create content, 9% edit or modify that content, and 90% view the content without contributing.

So to break this down into "lamens terms", for every batch of 7,843,113 users, you have:

7,058,801.7 users who view (.7 indicates right eye is half-shut)
705,880.17 users who modify / edit content (.17 indicates mouse only interaction)
78,431.13 users who actually create content (.13 indicates liberal lorem ipsum usage)

Now that that's cleared up, standard interpretations and actions are pretty straight forward and universal: increase content creators. If you fall below the 1% mark for creators....then theoretically your community may be being starved for content. Conversely, having too many creators is rarely a problem as long as they are complementary. Rewards for community participation play a key role in achieving this goal at scale, and should be leveraged by community managers who wish to keep pace with their spiking growth trends. In fact, I've been working with laurie martin on some new ways to reward our customers in the Jive Community … so stay tuned!

But back to the question at hand,

What do you do to reward participation in your online community?

P.S. I may have found the wrong definition for "lamens terms". =)

Previous Days of Conversation:

Day 7: What is next on your social business To-Do list?

Day 4: What social traditions do you participate in during the holiday season?

Day 3: How social are you at your company during the holidays?

Day 2: How has your social business platform helped your company "tighten the belt"?

Day 1: Why did you choose your social business platform?

Day 7: What is next on your social business To-Do list?

Day 8: What movie quote best represents the state of your social business?

2011-12-15T19:24:42Z

Believe it or not, movies are a great communication tool for relating societal trends and sentiment. But not all movies are created equal. For example, there are movies like Citizen Kane, Shawshank Redemption, and The Godfather that frequently are revered as the best movies of all-time; while rounding out the bottom we have cinematic "gems" like Mac and Me, Battlefield Earth, and Santa with Muscles (don't ask how I know this one).

If you look at the winners listed above, you'll see strong elements of plot, character, and underlying motifs at play that resonate with most people. If you look at the other movies … well … you probably just wasted $1.99 on iTunes. But, good or bad, movies are a great vehicle for expressing yourself socially, as they tend to generate quotable phrases that can provide deep contextual meaning with very few words.

For example:

Have fun storming the castle!
I gave her my heart and she gave me a pen.
You can't handle the truth!
Nobody puts Baby in a corner.
These go to 11.
(Can you name these movies without Google?)

So this brings me back to the question at hand,

What movie quote(s) best represents the state of your social business?

P.S. I'll be back … for another day of conversation tomorrow.

Previous Days of Conversation:

Day 4: What social traditions do you participate in during the holiday season?

Day 3: How social are you at your company during the holidays?

Day 2: How has your social business platform helped your company "tighten the belt"?

Day 1: Why did you choose your social business platform?

Day 7: What is next on your social business To-Do list?

2011-12-15T19:23:47Z

Lists are great. We all make them in one shape or another. Grocery lists, shopping lists, and even the never-ending To-Do list. Lists give us a sense of accomplishment; crossing off items and allowing us to look back and see what we've done. But its what's left on the list that tends to be the most important.

Today, Jive Software crossed a huge item off it's list, going public. (see Paving the new way to the NASDAQ ... with Social Business).

This feat would not have been possible without our customers, and again, from the bottom of our hearts … we thank you for your vision and support for the new way to business.

So what's left on our list? We turn the focus towards our customers, and ask the simple question:

What's next on your social business To-Do list?

Previous Days of Conversation:

Day 4: What social traditions do you participate in during the holiday season?

Day 3: How social are you at your company during the holidays?

Day 2: How has your social business platform helped your company "tighten the belt"?

Day 1: Why did you choose your social business platform?