There are many different descriptions of this transformation, from the 4 c’s, such as content, collaboration, community, collective to the 4 e’s , Kodak’s expose, engage, educate, evangelize. However you choose to describe the shift, taking the first steps includes listening to the conversation about your organization, it’s products or services and it’s image.

Evidenced by Ken Burbary’s current wiki list of 201 different options, the selection of tools is extensive. Understanding which features will deliver the most impact for your business provides you with a framework to evaluate your choices.

Platform (Account) Management

Participating in social media can mean managing multiple platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, Foursquare, Google Buzz and MySpace, at the same time. If you are still unclear about which platforms are relevant for your organization, you may want to read the Top 52 Social Media Platforms post on the 60 Second Marketer blog.

Tools such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic can assist you with  cohesively updating, and to some degree monitoring, your accounts on these platforms. Though both allow you to monitor and respond to mentions of your keyword(s) within the same interface, they lack the ability for more than one person to respond to tweets at the same time. Tweetdeck also must be physically installed on a client machine which may not be appropriate for your environment. They do however, make good, free, starting points for a small to mid sized business, and take you beyond the basic Twitter Search or Google Alerts.

Monitoring

More sophisticated tools allow you to both monitor and analyze mentions of your keywords on either one or many of the platforms. Keywords can include your brand name, your product name or class, or your competitors brand, product or service. Twazzup provides details of Twitter activity and has the added feature of providing additional details about sources when you mouse over them. Information available from monitoring tools includes:

• Volume Metrics, quantify activity related to your key word(s)
• Opinion or Sentiment, attempts to qualify whether the reaction to  your brand, product or service is positive, neutral or negative
• Influence or Reach, measures the the impact those discussing your  key words have, for example, how many people follow them
• Engagement Trends, allow you to identify the content that provides you with the most impact.

Social Mention provides you with the opportunity to track key words in real time across 100+ social media platforms including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google. Their easy to read dashboard is an uncomplicated starting place for listening to the conversation about your key words. You can also choose to have an RSS feed generated, to be e-mailed on topics that are particularly important for your organization.

Mobile Apps

If monitoring and updating on the go is relevant for you, make sure that the tool(s) you choose have corresponding mobile applications. Hootsuite has applications available for both iPhone and Android, each of which has customizable interfaces, the ability to update multiple accounts at once, save searches and track statistics.

Collaboration

If more than one team member will be updating and monitoring your platforms, you can opt for a tool with integrated workflow. Hootsuite allows multiple contributors to share access, without sharing passwords, and allows you to assign tasks to different team members. CoTweet is free (Standard edition) for small teams who monitor only a few twitter accounts. Like Hootsuite, it offers multiple team members the ability to engage in conversations on the same accounts at the same time.

Cost

The price of these tools varies from free for all functionality, to free for monitoring of one key word to paid subscriptions. Generally a case of you get what you pay for, the higher monitoring functionality may be more relevant for larger organizations or when social media has become a more integrated part of your day to day operations. Examples of paid subscription tools include:

• Co Tweet Enterprise, allows for more advanced roles and workgroups, monitoring of facebook, integration with salesforce and more complete monitoring and analytics.
• Scoutlabs, from $250 per month, allows for unlimited searches, advanced analytics, the ability to export data and team collaboration features.
• Radian6, $600 per month, one of the most robust tools, their extensive list of features supports clients such as Microsoft, Adobe and Dell.
• Trackur, ranges from $18 per month for 5 saved searches to $377 per month for unlimited saved searches. They also offer Trackur free if your needs can be met with 1 saved search. The pullNotpush marketing site offers additional tips on how to use Trackur effectively.

The majority of the tools with paid subscriptions offer a free trial period, giving you a chance to test drive prior to committing to their ongoing licensing fee. Consider using other free tools first, to identify whether they will fit the bill for your stage of transformation, and to provide you with a baseline to evaluate what commitment is reasonable for the options gained by the more feature rich tools.

Though the article addressed issues for packages that have already been selected and implemented, I was reminded of how many similarities there were with  software implementations, whether a new accounting package, small business suite, an e-Commerce solution, a CRM product or medical / veterinary practice management software. In particular, why so many of them fail to live up to their potential.

Large, build or buy, software projects or organization transformation initiatives, can have large teams dedicated to their success and there is still an estimated 50% failure rate for projects to deliver results as measured against original expectations. Experts have found that increasing the success rate means breaking down the project into manageable pieces.

The same concept can be applied to technology selection and implementation for small to mid-sized businesses and I have highlighted below the steps that can be followed to increase your chance of a success. If you feel these steps are beyond your organization to complete, engage a consultant before you begin your project to help avoid the frustration that can result from a difficult implementation.

1. Define Your Objectives

Why are you considering this solution and what are the problems or missed opportunities you wish to address? Answering this question and communicating the answer to key users of the new technology will validate your expectations for the solution. At a minimum, their early involvement will help you identify which of the users will be early adopters (your new champion) and those that may have a more difficult time accepting the new technology.

Key Deliverable: Software Replacement Objectives

2. Document Your Requirements

Before you evaluate different options, identify which processes and reports are critical to your operations and document how you use your current software / tools. This will serve as a basis for you to compare new technology options and ensure that your critical requirements can be met by your new solution. These critical processes should include an outline of new features you need to solve the existing shortcomings.

Key Deliverable: Process Documentation and Requirements

3. Evaluate Your Options

The requirements and processes you have previously defined can serve as the basis for you and your key users to evaluate the technology, whether software packages, web based services or even cloud computing options available to you. Technology reviews are plentiful on the Internet and in particular, user forums can be reviewed to identify recurring issues with packages or hosted platforms. If you are planning on using a package solution, you may also want to engage a technical consultant at this stage to determine whether your existing environment can properly support its use. For a web service or cloud solution, you may wish to further investigate data privacy and security issues that could impact your use of the option.

Key Deliverable: Solution Selection

4. Train Your Key Users

When you have selected the technology that you feel is the best fit, either the vendor or other training experts can be engaged to teach your key users the best ways to use the new solution. The users should have been introduced to it in the previous steps, and if you have also included them in the selection decision, it will go a long way to their acceptance and enthusiasm for the new product. While they are training they can update the process documentation to reflect either screen shots or software tips, to help define how to use the solution in your business context. If engaging the vendor or trainer is outside of your budget, have your champion work through the existing manual, wikis, help forums, blogs or corresponding ‘Dummies‘ or ‘Missing Manuals‘ type books, to support their efforts to generate the documentation. They in turn, can help other users adapt to the new technology and processes. Users learn at different rates and having a reference document could make the difference for less adaptive users in accepting the changes.

Key Deliverable: Training Manual and Updated Process Documentation

5. Monitor and Update Your Processes

Once you go live, try weekly update meetings with key users to check on how they are using the solution and whether their processes, or the setup, needs to be adjusted to meet their needs. These updates can be tapered down to monthly as your users become more comfortable with the solution and as you begin to see the benefits realized from the new technology.

Key Deliverable: Ongoing Feedback Mechanism and Process Audit

At the end of these steps, key users have assisted you with implementing the right solution for your problems or opportunities. Additionally, your updated documentation should reflect your organization’s specific processes, helping you utilize the solution you have selected more effectively.

‘As a managerial approach, BPM considers processes to be strategic assets of an organization that must be understood, managed, and improved to deliver value added products and services to clients. This foundation is very similar to other Total Quality Management or Continuous Improvement Process methodologies or approaches. BPM goes a step further by stating that this approach can be supported, or enabled, through technology to ensure the viability of the managerial approach in times of stress and change. In fact, BPM is an approach to integrate a “change capability” to an organization – both human and technological.’

More simply put, BPM workflow defines the electronic routing of tasks based on established rule sets. Once defined, these rule sets and tasks can be readily updated, allowing businesses to nimbly adapt to changes in their operating environment. This may be of particular relevance for routine, back office processes such as invoicing and claims processing, but also for processes that are  required to meet regulatory requirements, as Managers can monitor and report on process compliance.

In addition, some of the specific benefits that may be achieved, include the ability to:

• Automate time consuming manual business processes;
• Improve operational efficiency;
• Make business processes consistent and streamlined;
• Optimize complex business processes;
• Reduce processing costs; and
• Benefit from remote access to business processes.

In my previous post on documenting your processes, I mentioned several affordable options for Business Process Management. As most of the options were shown based on their offering of free process modeling tools, I’ve updated the list of BPM software to include additional Open Source options.

There were two main packages that I found in the open source BPM market, Intalio|BPM Community Edition and ProcessMaker.

Intalio was originally in the enterprise market for it’s full BPM suite, and opened up it’s community edition in 2006. The community edition is offered for free, and includes their Intalio|Designer and Intalio|Server components, training and support are offered for a price. While this suite is a robust solution for an organization, I would be concerned about recommending it to my small to mid-sized clients. The potential learning curve and the cost to train employees (which runs from 1,350 to 2,500 based on their training offered in Portland – the closest choice to my native Vancouver) may not be palatable to them.

The business model for ProcessMaker is similar though I found their free user community and wiki site more extensive than Intalio and their training was webinar based and less expensive at $995 US.

Additional open source BPM platforms include:

• Anaxagora
• JBoss JBPM
• OpenWFE built on the Ruby platform
• RunaWFE. based on the JBoss platform

These choices were more oriented towards software development and would likely not be as applicable for my clients.

Of the Open Source options above, I have chosen to further evaluate ProcessMaker, as I feel it offers the most user friendly and accessible on-line training options. As stated previously, TIBCO Business Studio remains my current favourite for entry level (and beyond) BPM.