It’s been longer that I expected since my last post. Sorry, life got busy. One of the things I’m busy with is LaidOffCampNY, a free two day conference happening this Friday and Saturday (May 1 & 2). Come see me and network with the New York metro area’s best un-, under-, and non-traditionally employed. Pre-registration is suggested.

To recap what I last posted: What are the areas where social networking methods can beneficially impact enterprise voice and video communications? At a high level, they’re the common motherhood and apple pie issues familiar to most organizations.

* Improved customer experience
* Increase employee productivity
* Improve the product
* Grow organizational heath

I provided examples for the first two points in the last post, now I’ll do the last two.

3.  Improve the product

The obvious example here is the monitoring of Twitter as an early detection mechanism for product or services breakdown.

Another example:  Hold a YouTube contest to identify innovative uses for your products.

Another example, one that is more speculative as to its reliability, is to use social network analysis to identify the hidden and public thought leaders in your product consumer networks and directly engage them to assist in product design.

Yeah, many folks already know of these examples.  Please, let me compensate for the lack of more innovative examples with a link to a lolmonkey picture.

4.  Grow organizational health

Heard about eTelemetry’s MetronEBA yet?  This product monitors an organization’s voice calls to map out your organization’s social graph.  For extra punch, couple it with one of the many email and messaging analysis tools.  Sure, it feels a little big-brotherish, but it will definitely provide new insight into your organization and allow monitoring of efforts to improve organization communications and break down intra-organizational barriers.

Today’s bonus link:  Intro to Dunbar’s Rule (a best-of restrospective from my corporate past) Read it to understand why we need contact lists, and why all such lists should have rating fields.

This post is a big change from the topic of the previous two posts, to one of adapting common enterprise communications services and usage models to incorporate Social Networking and Web 2.0 methods. As my introductory post on this topic I’ll be resurrecting some ideas from old presentations.  I’ll also try to not dig too deep into technical details, so as to avoid audience whiplash.

What are the areas where social networking methods can beneficially impact enterprise voice and video communications?  At a high level, they’re the common motherhood and apple pie issues familiar to most organizations.

• Improved customer experience
• Increase employee productivity
• Improve the product
• Grow organizational heath

If I were to take off from that list in the normal direction, this blog would be as bad as those bland articles that keep the ads from running together in many industry fishwraps (not you Internet Telephony mag!).  So where does the master of the obvious take this blog now?  How about I pick one feature or product representing each of the above four points and describe what’s cool about it.  To keep this blog to a manageable size, I’ll do the first two points in this entry, and the next two in a future entry.

1. Improved customer experience

Have you, as a jedi-level geek, ever called a support line and gotten someone who  started by asking you to reboot your system and see if that helped?

Or…

Have you, as a tech-noob, ever been asked to verify that your subnet mask is appropriate for your LAN segment?  Or has someone called you a tech-noob and you didn’t know what that meant, but you did feel somewhat insulted?

In either case you’ve run into the dreaded support skill level mismatch.  It’s a common issue that I’ve seen repeated on many service quality surveys, yet it has a relatively simple fix.

After many support interactions, the support caller often has the opportunity to rate the support agent.  Why not allow the support agent to rate the caller?  Agents rating callers  should provide feedback on customer temperament, willingness to follow directions and technical skill level.  The next time that caller needs support, that information can be incorporated into Automated Call Distribution (ACD) system logic and an agent with complementary skills and temperament can be selected.

I’ve heard from others that this type of logic is already being incorporated into call center products, but I can’t claim first-hand knowledge of it.

2. Increase employee productivity

For this example, I’ll focus on employees who work remotely.  When you finish installing your mobility solution that provides employees with all the features of the enterprise PBX while they’re on the road, you might want to start thinking about how you can replicate all of the back-channel communications paths you find in an office environment.  How do you replicate a team going into a conference room together, where all can hear and contribute to the discussion equally?  How do you replicate the conversational snippet heard over the cubicle wall that drives you to jump onto another agent’s call and provide the solution you figured out last week?

Appropriate social networking and Web 2.0 tools that can be applied to these situations are Instant Messaging (IM), Twitter, tag clouds, and social groups.  Tag clouds?  Review this and meet me below.

Let’s say that you’re a call center agent working from home. How do you hear something happening over the metaphorical cubicle wall? One method would be to define a common set of tags (keywords) appropriate for the types of issues the call center handles, and then incorporate as tags the companies and contact names from the corporate CRM system. Live conversations can be monitored for matching tags using Voice Recognition for voice calls, and a keyword text search that does the same thing for emails and text chat sessions.

A tag cloud display can be moved to the side of an agent’s screen and is observable without  too much distraction from the agent’s focus of attention.  In a tag cloud, the tag size, position, typeface and/or color can be made dependent on the number of times the tag is found in the monitored content.  The “value” of the tag is its count.  When using tag clouds to monitor call center conversations, the tag value should be calculated based on additional factors.  Potential value factors may be:

• Customer weight – high/med/low revenue, high/med/low influence, etc
• Emotion – using contextual analysis and voice stress, higher emotional levels should raise the tag value
• Agent experience – an inexperienced agent may need more assistance so tags associated with that agent’s conversations should be weighted more.

Different tag attributes, like color, position, size and font can also be mapped to represent any of the individual value factors.  For example, color can be related to emotional level and the tag can be bolded for passing a threshold of the number of times the tag appears in a context involving important customers.

Tag value should change quickly to reflect current conversations, so a decay factor should be added.  I like to use a standard half-life decay factor of 2 ^(t/thl) (2 with the exponent of t/thl where t is the current elapsed time and thl is the half life time).  I’d suggest a thl of 400 to 600 seconds to start.

That’s enough for one sitting.  Feel free to pick your own example of social networking or web 2.0 techniques that can be used in communications and add it to the comments.

This first blog entry is a repeat of a recent comment I made on my friend Carl Ford’s blog.   I want to start a conversation about moving from technical fields that are shrinking (at least locally) into those that are growing.  Specifically, from the world of communications into Clean Technology.

Stealing a quote I once heard: “On the east coast, when it looks like you’ll lose your job, you prepare your resume. On the west coast, you prepare your business plan.”

Why? Why aren’t we seen as entrepreneurial here on the east coast. There’s plenty of evidence that NYC has entrepreneurs galore, but in the cities and suburbs of NJ, we just don’t seem to be able to get that critical mass going.

In NJ there are programs like the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, the NJ Entrepreneurial Network, Einstein’s Alley, and a limited number of Meetup groups (like businessnetwork.meetup.com) working to change things. They are likely having an effect, especially around the Princeton area, but success is nowhere close to being assured at this time. It’s an especially challenging environment for the bootstrap startup relying on savings that have lost much of their value in the last few months.

The question is, what can be done to better develop NJ as an entrepreneurial zone? I have a hypothesis that the one thing NJ lacks are natural gathering places. I’ll write about that hypothesis and how it relates to the development of both entrepreneurial activities and the indie performing arts scene soon. However, with the possible exception of Princeton, where do you go in NJ to find ideas, potential partners and money? You go to New York, of course!

While the trip into the city from NJ is not a “big deal”, it is still a “deal” for most of NJ, being both expensive and time consuming for someone trying to bootstrap a new business. So I’ve decided to try a hybrid approach. I’m using NYC-based activities to build momentum that I will then try to transfer across the Hudson. One of those activities that I think will bear fruit is LaidOffCampNY.

LaidOffCampNY is a free two-day event (May 1st and 2nd) for people in a career transition who are looking to gain perspective, discover new passions, or reinvent their careers. It is run BarCamp style, meaning that there are no set speakers. Speakers will self-nominate at the beginning of the day and attendees are expected to be “participants” rather than “audience”.

One of the ideas I’m trying to line up for discussion at LaidOffCampNY is how technical skills gained in the world of voice and video communications infrastructure can readily transfer to “Clean Technology”. Think about the SmartGrid for a second. Time’s up. The SmartGrid requires monitor and control protocols similar to the SS7 and IMS networks. I’m still learning, but it seems like the big money interests in the SmartGrid don’t think any further than the Smart Meter. Limiting the SmartGrid to that domain makes as little sense as having value-add VoIP services end at public side of the enterprise gateway. We tried that dumb phone idea before, and I want something better now. I want an Asterisk-like power management server that interfaces to a Smart Meter gateway functionality.

Inside the enterprise, small or medium business, and even the home, there’s a need for a peer to peer network where additional power monitoring and management services can be added. Why do I want my exterior wall mounted meter to be the only thing in my house that understands peak hour rates? I want that information to be shared and acted upon individually by every electrical switch and outlet, and all of the major appliances.

X10 and Zigbee protocols and products have made some inroads into home and business power management, but I haven’t yet found information on where they interface into the Smart Meter. If that information is available, please send me a link! If that info is not available, we’ve got a problem.

I’ve mixed two topics that each deserve a focused post of their own, so I’ll stop here. If developing an entrepreneurial environment in NJ, or transitioning communications service and infrastructure skills to Clean Tech are of interest to you, please look me up at LaidOffCampNY on May 1st or 2nd and help me make something happen.