Third Idea Consulting

Many of you know that I come from a print media background—mostly magazines, with a few books shuffled in. While I’ve moved on in my career to a place where most of my work seems to be electronic in nature—blogging, ebooks, social networking—I still have a soft spot for words on dead trees. So whenever somebody says that books, magazines, or newspapers are dying forms of media, I have to speak up.

Of course, nobody’s actually said that to me recently, so I need to stretch a bit. Just the other week, this brilliant video posted all over the Interwebs. While it turns out that it was prepared by a unit of Penguin Publishing, the message is no less valid. Make sure you watch and listen to the whole thing before you make up your mind.

Yes, it’s on YouTube. Yes, social networking has been a big deal long enough to go from fad to trend to established communication form. But there still has to be something to talk about. One can only get so deep into philosophy, current events, science, and art with Facebook or Buzz status updates. There will always be a place for physical media. These are major sources for big ideas.

New media can be the start of great print too. Social networking is a thousand different sociology experiments writ large, all happening at once. Good information on human behavior is there for the observing. Journalists get leads from Web sources all the time. And who’s to say that a hot exchange of tweets won’t inspire the next great novel—or that a blog won’t help us find out about it?

Sure, circulation and ad revenue are down, but that’s just good news for the trees. Executives must learn that the socialverse isn’t going away, and adjust print’s business practices to reflect this fact. I don’t have the answer yet, nor do they, but we’re working on it.

As usual, my patented, trademarked, hermetically sealed and hypoallergenic live coverage of this morning’s event (Dreamforce 09) will be appearing in the Twitter stream to your right. Follow @Lager if you don’t already, and I will be adding my analysis afterward in this space.

If you’re wondering why I don’t just liveblog it here, the answer is simple: I like words, and the temptation to editorialize is much easier to manage at 140 characters a pop.

UPDATE 11:40 am PST: Tweetdeck just crapped out on me, with the “recipient not following you” error message. I’m over my limit.

11:44 am PST: Generally speaking, Salesforce Chatter looks a whole lot like Facebook. There’s also Twitter embedded. It’s a secure social business interface. I want a lot of demo time with this.

11:48 am PST: Marc is wrapping up now. Force.com has been modified so you can build collaboration apps. Chatter collaboration cloud is an attempt to change the way we work and make it more like … well, how we kill time at work when we should be working. Your coworkers are now your community, with the closer contact that implies. The biz apps, dashboards, and workflows are still there, but social networking is now built in instead of layered on.

11:53 am PST: For those of you who are worried about security, Chatter is as secure as Salesforce.com in general. You can pull in info and interactions from outside the enterprise, but I assume that once it’s there it is shielded from malfeasance.

11:55 am PST: Sales Cloud 2 is built on Chatter. Service Cloud 2 has been rebuilt for Chatter (that two rebuilds of Service Cloud). It’s all mobile capable.

12:01 pm PST: True to social form, content can be followed or broadcast automatically-you don’t have to go into a group and post to it. Your content, your apps, and your people are all talking to you. And, to judge by this demo, they’re all talking about how bad Sharepoint is.

12:04 pm PST: Demo is over, now announcing pricing. Available early 2010 in all editions of Salesforce.com and Force.com-standard in all editions. If you want to bring outsiders into Chatter, there’s a $50/user/month product. Very nice, and a welcome departure. We’ve got Jason Goldman, from the board of directors of Twitter. @goldman if you want to know.

The hot topic in social computing is social CRM—at least it is for me—but there are other aspects that bear consideration. I spoke with LiveOps yesterday (by way of Eckart Walther, SVP) about one of them. Paid crowdsourcing is a newer kind of business process outsourcing (BPO) that leverages qualified personnel as a sort of “in crowd” for projects. The occasion for the briefing was LiveOps’ announcement of new application programming interfaces (API) for LiveWork, the company’s BPO platform (for which Walther is general manager).

LiveOps and companies like it have developed applications to manage uncertainties (like whether the offsite employee is competent and present) and make it easier to get the best effect out of remote labor. The greatest success has been in virtual contact centers, but imagine if there was a means by which businesses could access a pool of experts, specialists in a given industry or product line or core competency. Remotely, as needed. Think of the efficiencies for a business, not to mention motivated individuals who don’t happen to live where the main office happens to be.

The new API set allows developers to leverage LiveWork in settings beyond the contact center. Two early examples are Smartsheet (which crowdsources lead generation, content review, and content generation) and CrowdFlower, a more general workforce-on-demand provider.

If a LiveWork API and some ingenuity can be stretched far enough, this could be mildly disruptive in the BPO industry. Major outsource providers (staffing agencies and large management and/or IT consultancies) will still have a lock on long term engagements, especially where frequent reassessments and tweaks are needed; but for cases where the duration is short or the required workforce is very large, this solution beats the heck out of hiring temps and part-timers.

If you’d like to see why LiveOps thinks this has play in the business world, it recently produced a white paper which you can find here. [CORRECTION: The white paper was in fact produced by SmartSheet, though with the assistance and participation of LiveOps. Thanks to Andrew Schmitt of OutCast Communications for the clarification.]

[Correction #2: I've changed the link to the document. It should take you to the most recent version of the SmartSheet white paper at their site.]