A webcare team monitors online conversations on Twitter, blogs and other social media and has a strategy on how to deal with various types of negative responses via social media. When necesary, they can join the conversation, offer support, provide facts or anything else to steer things in the right direction. But it is not just about customer care, the webcare team can also do PR (discovering and preventing issues) and marketing (educating customers or providing feedback to product development).

Why do companies actually care about what is being said in social media? More and more companies realize that, in line with the Cluetrain Manifesto, “markets are conversations”: customers trust opinions of friends a lot more than they trust company websites, and they use information about products and services found on social media to make informed choices.

Who should be in your webcare team?
From the type of work a webcare team has to do, it should be clear that this is not a job for the IT department. Instead, people from marketing and corporate communication should be involved, and maybe even experts on your products and services. Pick your team from people who understand the norms of social media and are able to respond from a personal perspective. As such, your manager PR and corporate communication is probably not a good candidate for the job.

The tools of the trade
Webcare teams get more and more tools to discover what is currently being said about their brand, products and services. Important tools of the trade are Google Alerts, Twitter search, Technorati and Google blog search. These tools are all aimed at discovering relevant online conversations, without having to spend the whole day looking.

What is a smart social media strategy?
Unfortunately, there is no universal recipe for a smart social media strategy yet. Nevertheless, an important starting point is to accept each opinion as such, and not call opinions into question. As with any employee that takes part in an online conversation, the norm is to identify yourself as an employee of the company and behave accordingly. Also it seems important not to be drawn into online discussions: seek direct communication with the person behind the complaint. For more inspiration on social media strategies, I suggest you take a look at the IBM Social Computing guidelines.

I would like to hear your experiences with webcare teams!

The slides of our talk (in Dutch) are available via slideshare:

	Quickr	Google Docs	Ning	Zoho wiki	Office Live	Box .net	Huddle	Con fluence	Base camp
Logging in
Https	?
New workspace
According to template					(1)
Access rights
My workspaces
Documents			(2)
Action points
Traceability	(3)
Notification change
Notification action points
Schedule
Online status
Chat	(4)
Knowledge base
Free	(5)					(6)	(7)	(8)	(9)
User friendly
Web application
Dutch
Ads free			(10)
Standard	DFNAS	DF	NS	DN	DFNAS	DF	DFAS	D	DA

About the demands: based on the way the customer would like to work together with people from other organizations, we have formulated the following demands on the virtual workspace. The words must, should and could in the description indicate the importance of the requirement:

• Logging in. The workspace must be secure and people need to log in before being able to access information.
• Https. Communication over the internet should be secure.
• New workspace: It must be possible to create new sub-workspaces that contain information on a specific topic/case, with specific access rights.
• According to template: It should be possible to create new workspaces according to a template to create a standard structure or to fill them with standard documents.
• Access rights. It must be possible to indicate per sub-workspace which people or groups have access (edit, view, no access)
• My workspaces. It should be possible to have an overview of the workspaces (topics/cases) you are working on.
• Documents. It should be possible to upload documents (Word or PDF) as part of a workspace. In the next phase of our experiment this must be possible.
• Action points. It must be possible to keep track of action points as part of a workspace.
• Traceability. It must be possible to see who made what changes to the workspace.
• Notification change. Users must be able to receive notifications of changes to the workspace.
• Notification action points. Users must be able to receive notifications of changes to the action points.
• Schedule. It should be possible to keep track of scheduled meetings in the workspace.
• Online status. It could be nice to see the online status of other workspace members in the workspace.
• Chat. It should be possible to exchange chat messages with other users in the workspace.
• Knowledge base. It should be possible to create a knowledge base at the highest level of the workspace, with questions and answers that all registered users can access.
• Free. The workspace should be free to use.
• User friendly. The interface of the workspace must be intuitive, clear and appealing (subjective scale).
• Web application. Users must be able to access the workspace via the internet using their web browser.
• Dutch. The workspace should have a Dutch interface.
• Ads. The workspace should not show ads.
• Standard: While it is often possible to store information in a workspace (for instance, notes about a document can be placed on a wiki), this shows which types of information (relevant in the pilot) the workspace recognizes.
  • Documents
  • Folders
  • Notes
  • Action points / tasks
  • Scheduled meetings / events

Notes:

1. Only via pre-defined templates
2. Only via external applications: Ning Apps
3. Only in the Quickr wiki
4. Requires integration with Lotus Sametime
5. The costs are €71 per person per year
6. The costs are $15 per person per month
7. Costs start at $200 per month, see http://www.huddle.net/huddle-price-plans/
8. See the options at http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/pricing.jsp
9. See the pricing options at http://basecamphq.com/signup
10. Paid option

Periodiek organiseert het NAF (Nederlands Architectuur Forum) vanuit de werkgroepen special interest sessies over specifieke thema’s, de Naf insights, in samenwerking met Automatisering Gids en Informatie. Eén van deze sessies is getiteld: Web 2.0 in de Enterprise
Enkele sprekers op het event: 

• Jeffrey Walker, President en CEO Atlassian
• Robert Slagter, Novay
• Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur, co-founder Fleck & initiator The Next Web Conference
• Steven Webster, Director Adobe Systems Incorporated

Security in the workplace - can pinguins be wrong?

Information security incidents have become part of our lives during the last couple of years. Popular media regularly report on incidents which range from lost pen drives filled with privacy sensitive data to financial fraud by employees costing financial organizations billions. The increase in reported incidents not only shows that security incidents are on the rise but it also indicates a change (yes we can!) in how organizations respond to incidents. Reputation and trust are increasingly important concepts in today’s business world, and organizations need to find ways to deal with security problems.

The openness that organizations are showing lately, both to customers, to employees, to other organizations, and to the general public is interesting. From a security perspective openness is a double edged sword: On the one hand, openness means granting access to parties which may not be trusted yet. This clearly complicates security administration. On the other hand, openness also stands for transparency and open standards which simplify matters. And simple things are easier to secure.

Security researchers who study organizational security associate the new found openness in organizations with de-perimeterization. De-perimeterization means that the perimeters of organizations are disappearing. This is problematic because most security strategies pay a lot of attention to perimeter defense: Concentrate your efforts on the perimeter and the rest of the organization is secure.

Is perimeter defense a bad strategy? Thousands of huddling Emperor penguins can’t be wrong, can they? And if you’ve ever played the board game Risk you know that the best strategy to defend a continent is to move all your armies to the border countries.

In part 2 we will have a closer look at de-perimeterization and see how it interacts with future workspaces.

Bij Rabo Unplugged staat de klant centraal. De Rabo medewerker kiest bewust waar, wnneer, met wie en met welke middelen je het snelst tot de beste resultaten voor de klant kunt komen. Regels worden minder belangrijk, medewerkers worden steeds zelfstandiger. Rabo Unplugged doet met plaats- en tijdonafhankelijk werken een groot beroep op de eigen verantwoordelijkheid en resultaatgericht werken.

De klant
Rabobank Nederland is een financiële dienstverlener op coöperatieve grondslag met een zeer breed aanbod van financiële diensten en producten. De wijze waarop Rabobank Nederland in de wereld wil staan, wordt bepaald door de kernwaarden die aan de missie en ambitie zijn ontleend: respect, integriteit, professionaliteit en duurzaamheid.

De wens
Unplugged werken betekent veel verandering. In het fysieke, mentale en virtuele wereld. Fysiek gezien worden flexwerken en telewerken de nieuwe norm. De Unplugged visie van meer ondernemerschap en eigen verantwoordelijkheid vereist een grote mentale omslag. En ten derde wordt virtueel werken belangrijker: nieuwe manieren van communiceren en via digitale weg kennis en informatie ontsluiten en delen.

De wens van de Rabobank is om virtuele werkomgevingen te creëren die de nieuwe werkstijl optimaal ondersteunt. Verken de nieuwe mix tussen fysieke en virtuele activiteiten: wat doe ik waar, wanneer en hoe op de meest effectieve en efficiënte manier. De Rabobank ziet dit als een leerproces: nieuwe mogelijkheden worden continu geëvalueerd en aangepast aan de wensen van de medewerkers en de organisatie. Rabobank zet de verandering dan ook stapsgewijs in, waarbij pioniers ervaringen opdoen die waardevol zijn voor de hele organisatie. Zien wat wel en niet werkt. Wat verbetert kan worden, waar behoefte aan is.

Toekomst
In 2010 betrekt Rabobank Nederland een nieuw bestuurscentrum aan de Croeselaan in Utrecht. Deze verhuizing markeert de definitieve overgang naar een nieuwe flexibele en sterk gedigitaliseerde werkstijl voor de hele organisatie volgens de principes van Rabo Unplugged.

De rol van TI
Binnen het Future Workspaces innovatieprogramma (www.futureworkspaces.nl) begeleidt het Telematica Instituut het Unplugged projectteam bij het verkennen, valideren en introduceren van nieuwe virtuele manieren van werken en het anders organiseren en vormgeven van activiteiten. Hiervoor is het Unplugged Living Lab ingericht. In het Living Lab wordt, samen met de gebruikers, de dagelijkse praktijk met state-of-the-art oploosingen verbeterd en vernieuwd. Hierbij blijven de gebruikers werken binnen hun eigen “context” en omgeving. Op deze wijze kan continu het gebruik en veranderd gedrag worden geëvalueerd en gemeten.

Telematica Instituut: brug tussen universitaire wereled en de praktische toepasbaarheid

‘Mede dankzij het Telematica Instituut kunnen wij nu kijken in hoeverre samenwerking in virtuele werelden voor de Rabobank toegevoegde waarde heeft. Telematica Instituut slaat de brug tussen de universitaire wereld en de praktische toepasbaarheid in ons bedrijf. Tevens brengen ze ook verschillende organisaties bij elkaar zodat we van elkaar kunnen leren en blijvend kunnen innoveren.’

Maarten Korz – Innovatiemanager Rabobank