Dear Jive Software, welcome to the party!

Your new 3.0 release looks hot. In particular, we can see you’ve finally joined the party that realizes you have to deliver specific product functionality to specific business functions in order to extract all the value from Social Media in business. Most Social Software for Business makes claims of value for specific business functions, but nowhere can you find actual software modules targeted at those functions.

As you put it in your catchy home page line, “Social Software isn’t designed for work. Jive SBS is.” Helpstream has been designed for work from day one, and it’s great to finally see another Social player join us with some modules designed for specific functions like marketing and sales or support.

There’s just one thing though. We notice that while you finally made it to the party, you’re picking a lot of fights with various ideas and entities that are already at the party. We’re just a small company, but we thought words like “Social” and “Community” were about working together, not picking fights. Because we care about the “Social” part, here is our advice to you about how to quit fighting these things and be more, well, Social:

Quit Fighting with Business Process and Enable It

In one of your CMO’s blog posts, you paint a cute picture of Business Process as “Borg” and Social Business as cute little super heroes. From the comments, I can see folks weren’t altogether convinced that Business Process is inherently evil. Most pointed out the virtues of combining Business Process with Social software. One clever commenter noted that the superhero toys were for a suggested age group of 2 and up, while the business process toys were for older children.

Evidently, that feedback was not taken to heart, because yet another post quickly followed with the message, “Enterprise Applications and Idea Bankruptcy”. The graphic this time was an interesting succession of lights showing Enterprise Applications with a dead light bulb for Business Process and some poor user with “No Idea” stamped on his forehead and labeled “Application Layer”.

Our CEO, Tony Nemelka, responded aptly with a comment on your blog post:

Optimizing “People, Process, and Technology” will continue to be the mantra for building and running successful businesses long after we’re all dead. Focusing primarily on “People and Technology” is just as short-sighted as focusing primarily on “Process and Technology”. It’s kind of like putting out a fire with a flood.

To really unlock the value of the Social Business, you augment Business Process with Social Interaction. It’s really not that hard to do and it makes both the Process and the Social pieces much more effective.

We know you are dimly aware of this, because in another post, you suggest that a big problem with Enterprise RSS is that there is, “No connection to my workstream.” What else is a workstream but a manifestation of some business process?

At Helpstream, our Customer Service software seamlessly joins these two worlds. The whole is greater than the sum of our parts, and we can demonstrate ROI both in terms of improving the efficacy of the Customer Service Business Process, but just as importantly, we can also show how a little process improves the efficacy of the Social interaction too.

You’re picking a fight with IT

In another blog post you depict IT as the scary centralized control people who will “make you work in this social software.” Meanwhile, a happy business user looks on and suggests she’s, “going to poke him on Facebook.”

Why pick a fight with IT? They’re just trying to help like the rest of the business. And while it’s fun to talk about “poking people on Facebook,” I am reminded by that about a great quote Dan Nye told me while he was CEO at LinkedIn when I asked him about Facebook:

We’re not here to send people virtual hamburgers, virtual tequila shots, or to poke anyone. We’re trying to deliver serious business value.

Times are tough, and they’ve been tough for IT for some time now. IT departments know they have to deliver serious business value. At Helpstream, we believe in working with the whole organization and not picking a fight with anyone who is trying to be part of the solution.

You’re Fighting with Systems of Record

I watched the demo videos, particularly for the Customer Service piece, and I saw people in Jive interacting with people in Jive. All Jive all the time.

Without Business Process, I guess it’s hard to see the value of integrating with some of the other Systems of Record, but let me tell you, it matters a lot. Sure, it’s great fun to think of throwing all that other software right out of the Enterprise. Aside from the pain of replacing all these working systems, there’s just one tiny little issue—a lot of it is actually adding some value, and your software doesn’t pick up all of that value when it’s gone.

Like Business Process, why pick a fight, tear everything down, and make everyone start over from your point of view? That’s anti-Social. Why not adopt their point of view and show how it can be extended? Now that’s Social!

At Helpstream, we’ve integrated our Social Business vision with existing systems of record like Case Management, or the corporate Knowledge Management System. We developed a special connector component to make it fast and easy. We perform these integrations both at the data level, and at the application UI mashup level for Oracle and Salesforce today, with others soon to follow. You can seamlessly access Helpstream’s Community functions without ever leaving the customer’s existing Case Management system. They think that’s pretty cool, and so do we.

You’re picking a fight with all the Big Vendors customers have relied on

Boy, that’s a lot of fights already, but here’s a bunch more. You’ve gone to war with many of the vendors that deliver the Systems of Record you need to be integrating with. You’ve said they add no value, that their software is no good, and you’ve generally called them out. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and who knows who else?

Not surprisingly, the Community at Large is skeptical about these fights, and has said so in their blogs.

At Helpstream, we agree that being Social is about being part of a broader community. It’s not about insisting everyone come join your community. For that reason, we’ve actively sought partnerships with a number of these players and been happy to be a part of their vibrant communities. We find that working together is just a whole lot more effective.

Isn’t Community About Collaboration More than Fighting?

In the end of the day, we think Community and the Social Business ought to involve more collaboration and less picking of fights. There is never enough value created to go around, especially in tough times. We think the best way to unlock as much value as possible is to embrace, rather than to pick fights. For that reason, Helpstream seamlessly incorporates the ideas of Business Process, integration in a variety of ways with the software you’re already getting value from, working with the whole organization, working with other vendors, and just generally making the team and tools inclusionary rather than exclusionary. Because of that, our customers have been able to deliver some pretty amazing ROI’s with a little help from our software.

Being Social is about Collaborating, not Picking Fights. Don’t you agree?