We were able to assemble a powerful cast of experts to give the rest of us advice on becoming a Social Business. But we did it with one catch.  We asked these 9 experts to do it in under 60 seconds.

Thank you Robert Lavigne for essentially doing all of the video, post production and graphics for these 9 videos.  He’s a phenomenal person. 

The Video is interactive. Meaning you can click on the profiles in the video in order to see their individual response.  Alternatively, you can follow the video links of each of our experts below.

Sandy Carter, IBM

“Culture eats strategy for lunch.”

Sandy Carter is Vice President, Social Business and Collaboration Solutions Sales and Evangelism, where she is responsible for setting the direction for IBM’s Social Business initiative, working with companies who are becoming Social Businesses, and being the evangelist for the concept and best practices around Social Business.

Watch and Listen to Sandy’s Advice

David Sacks, CEO of Yammer

“Keep it simple.”

He has been involved in the internet space for ten years as an entrepreneur, executive and investor, starting with PayPal in 1999. David was PayPal’s Chief Operating Officer and product leader, taking the company from startup to IPO and eventual sale to eBay for $1.5 billion. Subsequently, he founded Geni.com, which is creating a family tree of the whole world, enabling millions of family members to connect, share, and preserve their lives. He also produced and financed the movie "Thank You For Smoking".

Watch and Listen to David’s Advice

Sheila Jordan, Cisco Systems

“Start with your 3-5 year vision.”

Sheila Jordan is Vice President of the Communication and Collaboration IT organization which encompasses Cisco.com, Enterprise Content Management, Communication and Collaboration solutions, CEC (Cisco’ s internal website), internal deployment of Cisco’ s TelePresence technology, and IT support for HR , Finance, Marketing and Emerging Technology deployment.

Watch and Listen to Sheila’s Advice

Sara Roberts, Roberts Golden Consulting

“How do you know you are ready for Social?”

Co-author of the best-selling, "Light Their Fire: Using Internal Marketing to Ignite Employee Performance and Wow Your Customers," (Kaplan Publishing, 2005) and sought-after keynote speaker and workshop presenter at international conferences on inside/out branding, enterprise collaboration, customer experience transformation, the emerging workplace and organizational change management.

Watch and Listen to Sara’s Advice 

Bryan House, Acquia

“Ask how are people interacting already, then match with tech.”

Bryan joined Acquia in 2008 to run product marketing. He came to Acquia from EMC, where he managed product and outbound marketing for Documentum’s knowledge worker business. Prior to EMC, Bryan worked in product marketing and product management in the social business and collaboration technology space, after brewing beer professionally for seven years. Bryan lives in the Boston area and is an ardent Red Sox fan.

Watch and Listen to Bryan’s Advice

Lauri Buczek, Intel

“First, Identify the business objectives…”

Laurie Buczek is a Social Media Strategist within Intel Corporation’s Digital Marketing organization. Prior to joining Digital Marketing, Laurie spent over two years as the Social Computing Program Manager where she was responsible for the major enterprise wide strategy & implementation of social computing for employees to connect & collaborate internally. Laurie began her social media journey three years ago while blazing a new trail for online marketing efforts by helping to launch & manage the first external social media community for Intel. Laurie’s work has been published and showcased across the industry. She is also a member of the 2.0 Adoption Council and Social Media Business Council.

Watch and Listen to Lauri’s Advice

Laura Bassett, Avaya

“Understand your key success factors.”

Laura Bassett is the Director of Marketing for Avaya’s Emerging Products and Technology group. The group delivers innovative business solutions from Avaya Research Labs and Advanced Software Development. In this role Laura oversees the groups go-to-market including business planning and strategy, market awareness, marketing, and sales enablement and engagement for next generation solutions. Additionally, Laura is a supporting author of Avaya’s Social Media in the Contact Center for Dummies.

Watch and Listen to Laura’s Advice

Felicia Brych, Cisco Systems

“Follow the Social Maturity Curve.”

Felicia Brych has been with Cisco since 1999 and has held a variety of positions in the Information Technology and Corporate Communications departments. As part of IT, she managed the architecture, development and operation of several global IT services including remote access, voice/web/video conferencing, desktop video, instant messaging and several voice services. In Corporate Communications, she worked closely with numerous Engineering organizations to define requirements, promote adoption, and facilitate integration of various collaboration products.

Watch and Listen to Felicia’s Advice

Ben Watson, Adobe

“Create intimacy…”

Ben Watson is a principal in the newly formed customer marketing team for the Digital Enterprise Solutions Business Unit at Adobe. Ben’s responsible for working across the Adobe organization to optimize the enterprise customer journey and provide customer input to help define Adobe’s industry leading customer experience solutions and CEM platform. Ben is a recognized thought leader and is directly engaged in many customer experience initiatives with Adobe’s leading customers.

Watch and Listen to Ben’s Advice

A new and important trend is emerging amongst the best of the documentation and eLearning sites.  Both Adobe and HP are delivering in product contextual ads based on user search queries.  While Google has been doing this for some time, they don’t control corporate ads on corporate search sites. 

It’s important because technical documentation has always been seen as a necessary cost of doing business.  With contextual product ads, companies like Adobe and HP can recoup some of their documentation expense by delivering relevant ads when a user performs a search. 

   Adobe Community Help Search Results

HP Contextual Search Results

In the future, you’ll see more cross selling ads and promotional ads in search.  The tools exist today to deliver a similar experience for your company.  Most require customization and a general sense of what people are searching on. 

Relevant, focused ads make sense especially when the user is looking to do due diligence on a product.  If I am satisfied with your documentation on an issue I am having, then it’s OK to show me how to buy the solution.  That works for most people.  

Image via CrunchBase

Just tried using the ‘collaboration’ feature in Adobe Reader I have a free version and not the commercial. It took me a while to find it because it was hidden under the File Menu.   If you want to read on please do, but I can summarize this review with just a short sentence.  It was a disaster.  The product is not user friendly nor intuitive and Buzzword doesn’t work with PDF files!

Here’s my experience and please feel free to share your own:

1. After selecting collaborate from the file menu, the program asked me for my Username and Password.  Since I had an account it found me, but said I needed to update my information.
2. The program then went to a screen that didn’t load properly and I had to do the process again.  Finally it sent me to an Adobe website URL where I updated my information.
3. Supposedly the file had been uploaded at this point.  Yet after I updated my information the document had disappeared.
4. I then used the Acrobat collaboration site to upload it from my hard drive. It was a very slow process. 
5. Once uploaded, I didn’t know what to do with the document.  It certainly wasn’t collaboration.  I could zoom in and out, scroll, but no redlining, comments or anything collaborative. 
6. I then thought to click the New Buzzword button which simply opened a blank document screen.  I thought OK, here is the collaborative aspect of the program.   
7. However, Buzzword would not upload my PDF file (this is Adobe isn’t it?). Alas, they only accept Word Documents.  How crazy is that?

Review Summary

I liked the flash interface, but the collaboration functionality is non-existent.  It’s basically a PDF repository where you can share the document with your friends.  They should have one-click upload collaboration with an “out of box” experience that gets you working on the document with your work associates.  They should wait until after you complete work on the document for updated info.  Asking me to update it prior to uploading it disrupted my process and caused me to want to quit. 

I’d pass on this “collaborative” tool until they work out the kinks and user experience.  Adobe’s claim of it being collaborative is a big stretch.