BroadVision has announced its new Clearvale Social Engagement Analysis Service. This service is designed to help Clearvale enterprise social networking customers better understand and measure how well the level and type of engagement occurring with employees, customers, and partners through the use of social analytics. I spoke with Richard Hughes, Director of Social Strategy at BroadVision to learn more about Clearvale’s social analytics offering. I always enjoy speaking with Richard. Here is one of our last conversations (BroadVision’s Clearvale Offers Integrated Enterprise Social Networking Platform).
Clearvale is an entirely new product built from the ground up with a focus on people. Richard began by going over the five main aspects of the Clearvale social business platform: fully featured enterprise social networking suite, a place for real work, a means to engage the whole organization, coverage for enterprise social ecosystem, and accessibility from any device and any time.
I asked about how application integration is handled, as this is a topic of interest to me. It is also a capability that is essential to meet the middle three objectives above. Richard said that they have built widgets for immediate integration with Salesforce.com, SharePoint, and Outlook. They picked Salesforce because many of their use cases tie into an enterprise CRM system and this is the most prevalent CRM platform. They picked SharePoint because many firms want to keep SharePoint as their enterprise document management system and then have related conversations around these documents in Clearvale. They picked Outlook to allow people to shift conversations away from email and into a much better collaboration tool. These are three wise choices. They also allow for integrations with other apps through their open API so they have covered this requirement quite well.
Before we moved on to our main topic, Richard provided some context. Earlier this year they introduced Clearvale Social Enterprise Transformation (SET) methodology, a 90-day program for assessing readiness, planning, establishing, and refining a social enterprise ecosystem. The SET program is designed to help companies succeed with their social initiatives by combining social best practices, coaching, and a trial of the Clearvale platform.
One of the main benefits of social media is the transparency and subsequent data on employee behavior. However, it is often underutilized. BroadVision found that customers often needed more help in framing questions to take advantage of the analytic capabilities within Clearvale so at the 2012 E2 Innovate Conference in Santa Clara they launched their Clearvale Social Engagement Analysis Service. It is delivered as a stand-alone service or as a component service of the SET program.
This optional consulting service helps customers frame relevant questions and create reports to address the issues they are most concerned with. Here are some of the types of reports available.
- Social Reach - the breadth of interaction between members. Business social networks connect people but if members are not interacting with the content, they are not truly being social. Below is a sample social graph. Each person is represented by a dot. The size of the dot represents the level of activity. The lines show the paths of connection. In this case you can see a few central people and many unconnected ones. The data provides a road map for where interventions will be helpful.
- Participation Inequality - the extent to which levels of activity differ between different groups of members in the network. A successful business social network should encourage participation from as many people as possible so it’s important to know if a few very active users are compensating for a large number of inactive users.
- Inter-department Connectivity - the activity between different departments in the network. Good connectivity inside a team is important, however, high activity levels between other members outside their own department breaks down organizational silos for increased communication and collaboration. A sample screen is shown below
In addition to departments, these reports can be adjusted to show trends by other filters such as geographic locations as shown below.
I really like this capability as the reports go beyond simply counting contributions or comments to showing the relationships between participants within the enterprise. This gives a much clearer picture of the value received and where to focus further adoption efforts. Richard said that although this new service is delivered as a consulting engagement, the main objective to make Clearvale adoptions more successful, not simply to build consulting revenue. This is a good move for any firm offering social business capabilities as social platforms bring into play a new way of doing business. The tools are only the first step. The SET program and this new analytics consulting service will help firms take the remaining steps to succeed.
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