Zuckerberg’s Law of Sharing

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is no stranger to exponential growth. Since Facebook’s launch in February 2004, the world’s largest social networking site has gained over 750 million users—and counting. While Zuckerberg expects the growth of Facebook’s user base to continue its meteoric rise and reach the one billion users mark in the near future, he’s also watching another trend develop at an even faster rate.

That trend is sharing.

During a product annoucement earlier this month, Zuckerberg highlighted a trend that has since become known as the “Law of Sharing.” He explained that the average Facebook user shares about twice the amount of content today that he shared the previous year—and one year from now, he will probably be sharing twice as much as he is today and so on.

If Zuckerberg’s Law of Sharing holds, it will likely have important repercussions not only for Facebook, but for the Internet at large. First and foremost, we will be looking at an unprecedented amount of information. How users connect to and dissect this information will ultimately determine whether the growth in information becomes a blessing or a curse.

The danger—one which Zuckerberg fails to address—is that as the number of “shares” exponentially increases, the marginal value of each additional “share” could exponentially decline. For the business user, this lurking danger is especially troublesome. We’ve already seen our email inboxes become infested with irrelevant information. If the Law of Sharing comes to reality, not only for consumers but business people, will enterprise intranets become today's dreaded inbox?

It could happen. The key requirement then, in the hyper-sharing world now and in the future, will be to ensure that information pushed to employees stays relevant. Most social software packages equip companies with the tools to do this. With NewsGator Social Sites, “Top News” is automatically elevated to the front of the Activity Stream. Company managers can also control the level and type of external information that is brought into the internal network. For their own part, employees can custom tune their Activity Stream filter, weeding out over-sharers and other sources of distracting or unecessary information.

Smart companies will combine all of these practices, exercise a certain degree of administrative control if need be, but also nurture a culture in which employees promote only the most meaningful information to colleagues. Unisys's experience is a prime example. Company executives determined it was important to develop Content Posting Guidelines to govern all internal and external practices within their internal collaboration network. At the same time, they granted employees a strong level of autonomy within the network and have plans to begin surveying the workforce to determine additional use cases, time savings and other benefits that will result as adoption continues to grow. To learn more about how Unisys is utilizing social collaboration, check out the full case study from Microsoft.

Time alone will prove or disprove the validity of Zuckerberg’s Law of Sharing. In the meantime, companies can arm themselves with the tools necessary to make sharing an accepted part of the company culture.

The Globalization of NewsGator Social Sites

Though many of our customers are based in the United States, organizations around the world are increasingly using the software localization tools offered by NewsGator Social Sites 2010 to improve their business performance. Playing a major role in this growth is André Bonvanie, general manager of our international business. André is based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Q. Where are we seeing companies implement NewsGator Social Sites 2010?
Andre: In a few places you might expect, and in a few that might surprise you. Because of our robust software localization services NewsGator customers have implemented Social Sites 2010 in a dozen countries: Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.

Q. Who has recently joined the NewsGator Social Sites family?
Andre. Off the top of my head, there’s adidas in Germany, BNB Paribas in France, Borusan in Turkey, Bouyges Telecom in France, the Kuwait Oil Company in Kuwait, MTN Telecom in South Africa, Nokia Siemens Networks in Finland and Germany, and an equal number of companies who are keeping their activities secret!

Q. There are three telecom companies on that list… is that a pattern?
Andre. No and yes. No in that their overarching use case is not so different from any large organization that must keep its customers happy. Enterprise social computing improves all of their operations, including sales, marketing, R&D, logistics and more. Yes in the sense that you will not find a customer with a more sophisticated mobile user base than a telecom company. Because we offer so many powerful ways to leverage SharePoint and NewsGator Social Sites via a mobile device – iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android – Social Sites has strong appeal for a company with a focus on mobile computing.

Q. There is more than one German company on your list as well. That is surprising given their strict privacy laws. Can you explain?
A. Yes, aside from being a country that understands product quality like few others, Germany has strict data privacy laws that require company data to be managed on premises. Since we have a very powerful on-premise solution, we are a great fit for these companies. Plus, we offer many of the benefits of a hosted solution, including ease of ownership.

Q. What else is new outside the United States?
A. Our software localization services are expanding to five new languages in the next couple of months. Stay tuned! 

It’s a Wrap! What We Learned at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference

NewsGator had an awesome time at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in L.A. last week.  There are almost too many highlights for us to list:

1. Jon Roskill (Microsoft Corporate VP for Worldwide Partners) talked about NewsGator US Partner of the Year award during his Day 3 Keynote speech featuring me and our great customer Kraft Foods. Jon proceeded to wrap up his keynote by saying “Let’s all be NewsGator’s!” to the 16,000 partners in attendance! Check it out below:
   
   
   
   
2. I sent a picture of me on Kobe’s huge Staples Center screen to my kids, who texted back “Yeah, but are you gonna go to the Espy’s?”
3. We deepened our integration and go-to-partnerships with other key players in the $580 billion Microsoft Enterprise Social ecosystem. This is a huge competitive advantage - integration with partners like AvePoint, Cardinal Solutions, Infusion, and Nintex create soup-to-nuts stack augmentation offerings that will drive social as an enterprise class solution. Aggressive go-to-market partnerships with companies like Ascentium, Aspect, Avanade, Pariveda, PointBridge, RDA Corp, Slalom Consulting, and Unique World bring our lowest TCO solutions to market faster than ever.
4. We participated in innumerable meetings with the Microsoft field teams, industry vertical teams, product groups, BDM/marketing teams, Microsoft Consulting Services, and the management team (including Steve Ballmer) for 100% strategic alignment between NewsGator and Microsoft for their 2012 fiscal year and beyond - including O365 and the Cloud.
5. As part of the Partner of the Year (POY) ceremony to kick off Day 3, Laura Farrelly, VP of our Microsoft Alliance, carried in the US flag representing NewsGator and our US POY award. As Laura reports, “I always have wanted to be Olympian but with my lackluster VO2 max this is as close as it gets. The coolest part was meeting some of the winners from other countries. For example, the person who represented the Country Partner of the Year Winner for Algeria traveled 14 hours on four different planes in order to participate in WPC and accept his award for his company and country – there was so much dedication and excitement!”
6. So many parties, so little time to actually sleep. One of the great venues was for the Azure party – on top of the Standard Hotel in mid-town L.A.  We all felt like we were rocking out in Shanghai in the 1930s… or some William Gibson novel in the not-too-distant future. 

What did the conference tell us about Microsoft overall?

1. The event was extremely well-organized. Huge props to Jon Roskill, who took over as Corporate VP for Worldwide Partners a year ago. Tweetsville is filled with encomiums to his team’s work organizing and running the event.
2. Microsoft is fun! The social events were at great venues, and terrific music was to be found throughout. The last night’s fireworks were amazing! Two things I particularly remember are:
        a.    During the Smash Mouth concert, the lead guitarists’ pick landed on my smart phone while I was tweeting.
        b.    A gentleman next to me at the concert had his laptop open on his head throughout the show as he Skype’d the concert back to his kids in Israel. 
3. Buy their stock. Ironically, Microsoft didn’t have a lot of splashy new technology to announce this year (last year they rocked the house with Kinect). Nonetheless, the incessant impression throughout the event was of relentless competitive progress by the company. The past is a prolegomena; it sometimes takes them a few iterations but they do not stop coming at you, and they ultimately get it right enough to leverage their market position to win with the new, too.  Kinect and Xbox are accepted successes now but weren’t too long ago; Google as a threat in the enterprise has waned considerably; Bing and Windows Phone won’t stop gaining; Microsoft has become the most-trusted provider to IT (remember when they were enterprise pretenders years ago?); the cloud is the single biggest investment Microsoft has ever made; and Microsoft continues to invest more in R&D than anyone else in the industry. The capital markets don’t like to like the story, but this year signaled more significant competitive progress on all fronts for Microsoft than I’ve seen in years.

NewsGator is immensely proud to be Microsoft's Partner of the Year for the U.S. We're focused on extending the social ecosphere so that we're Partner of the Year for the Entire Galaxy in 2012!

We must be doing something right

Last year, NewsGator was honored by Lead411 as one of Colorado’s hottest technology companies. As a great testament to our success over the past year, NewsGator has made the list again for 2011, and we couldn’t be more proud.

For companies like ours, who are building innovative enterprise technology businesses outside of one of the usual US technology cities, winning this award is quite an honor. NewsGator is truly on a roll and it’s terrific that Lead411 has continued to keep an eye on us and our progress. For 10 years, Lead411 has been tracking fast-moving companies for their customers, and felt it was important to recognize these growing brands publicly. To be considered for this award, a company must be in the software, wireless, hardware, internet, or media industry, it must be a privately held organization, and it must be located within Colorado. From there, each company must meet one or more of the following requirements: 100% increase in revenues over the past two years, or $2M+ in funding in the past two years. So needless to say, NewsGator fits the bill.

This past spring has been very busy for NewsGator on the product front with major updates to our flagship platform, Social Sites 2010 and exciting new modules that help customers tailor the Microsoft SharePoint social experience to match their needs. And the customers keep coming. Even in what are generally seen to be tight economic times, Fortune 50 businesses are seeing the value in going social and are choosing NewsGator to make socializing SharePoint simple.

Our goal is to continue pushing the boundaries of Enterprise 2.0, and it is paying off; we are being recognized for our hard work and success, not only in Colorado but throughout the globe.

Live from the Center of the Universe!

Well, it seems that way. We’re here en masse at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles, immersing ourselves in the latest exciting developments out of Redmond. We’re lucky to be in the coolest galaxy of this universe, the SharePoint ecosystem, reconnecting with the strategic partners who help us serve our customers, including @ascentium, @aspectuc, @avanadenews, @avepoint_inc, @cardinalnow, @infusiontweets, @parivedaslns, @pointbridge, @rdacorp, and @slalom.

It’s only Day Two and we’re already brimming with ideas for improving our customers’ experience.

NewsGator CEO and President JB Holston, Vice President of Marketing Melissa Risteff, and I (Laura Farrelly) are speaking, and the whole team is straight out (in a wonderful way) with back-to-back meetings.

WPC is special for us this year because we’ll be on stage Wednesday officially receiving the 2011 Microsoft Country Partner of the Year Award for the United States. This is incredible validation of our customers’ business results, our company’s hard work, and the future of productivity for the workforce.

So we’ll be connecting with the folks at Microsoft who helped make this possible, including our colleagues in business development and marketing. We’ll be picking the brains of our friends in the Office 365, Windows Azure and Cloud areas on what’s coming down the road. And we’re also looking forward to seeing JB make his cinema debut in a video during the final day’s keynote.

Oh, by the way, NewsGator Social Sites 2010 is the social networking engine for Microsoft’s elite Managed Partners, all of whom are attending WPC. The “Managed Partner-to-Partner Portal” is a creation of Microsoft, NewsGator, and OpSource.

If you’re at the WPC, say hi in person or email me. And again, cheers from the center of the universe!

An Interview with Nick Harris - NewsGator’s Resident Apple Expert

NewsGator Social inSites (NG): Have you seen a big increase in demand from your user base for Apple device support?

Nick: Yes. Apple devices are as popular as ever, and we're seeing more and more enterprise IT departments "officially" allowing iPhones and iPads within their organizations to access internal resources.

NG: Do you believe Social Sites users are more apt to use their iPhone or iPad to access Social Sites remotely?

Nick: Our main goal is to make the mobile experience the easiest way to use Social Sites remotely so I hope we are succeeding! I find myself catching up on company activity in situations where a laptop would be inconvenient – such as waiting in line for an elevator or something. It helps make time like that more productive.
 
NG: Security is a big issue with mobile device use – how do you ensure Social Sites info accessed via a mobile device is not compromised?

Nick: We follow all of Apple's security guidelines as well as enabling extra security features that Apple provides. Apple wants these devices in as many hands as possible so they know very well the concerns people have with security. They spend the time, money, and research to make sure they get it right and we keep up with their technological advances in each release of iOS.
 
NG: SharePoint 2010 is limited in its mobile device support so the fact users can access SharePoint on the iPhone and iPad via NewsGator Social Sites seems to be a significant option. What are your thoughts on this?

Nick: Absolutely! Accessing your shared documents from SharePoint 2010 is a fantastic and unique feature of Social Sites for iPhone and iPad. This capability allows you to quickly and easily access your files wherever you are and share them with others. We're just getting started with this integration, so there is so much more we can do! Look for better integration in future releases.
 
NG: Are there any user limitations when using Social Sites on the iPhone or iPad?

Nick: We're focusing our mobile strategy on solving the problems people face most when they are mobile - for example, keeping track of a conversation, sharing a photo or a link, or just having easy access to a colleague's phone number. In that regard the mobile experience doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Social Sites, but we have made sure to focus on solving the problems people face when they are away from their desk.
 
NG: Do you believe mobile is just the new way of work or are people still using desktops?

Nick: Desktops are still the number one way to be productive. Mobile devices right now are only filling the gaps in between the time you're not at your desk. It will be exciting to see how the trend develops over the next few years as more iPad-like devices make their way into enterprise environments.
 
NG: What’s your favorite iPhone or iPad app?

Nick: Social Sites for iPhone or iPad of course! ;-) But aside from work, I'm a fan of Pano. I've taken some great panoramic photos with my iPhone 4.