As one of North America’s largest producers of lime, the essentials of Graymont’s business haven’t changed in 100 years. They operate facilities on sites that have been in operation for 200 years. But the company’s philosophy around information and technology is absolutely 21st century.

“We believe that sharing information everywhere possible will help us do a better job and be a lower-cost producer,” says director of IT Ron Ogilvy. And part of that philosophy is that every employee be included in the collaborative environment, especially those who come to work in steel-toed boots and only occasionally sit at a computer.

Graymont planned to implement a company intranet as a binding element in its seven-year strategy to build a common set of information tools for over 1000 employees in several dozen locations across the continent. Ogilvy briefly considered Microsoft SharePoint for this crucial role. “But we came quickly to the conclusion that to do what we wanted in SharePoint, it would be a very large, expensive and long project.”

Last year, he trialed several “intranet in a box” products – plus ThoughtFarmer. ThoughtFarmer won hands down. “Its ease of use and the look and feel were huge attractions. We were amazed how quickly we could set up a complete and very effective tool,” Ogilvy says.

 
Screenshot of Graymont’s ThoughtFarmer-powered intranet home page

Today, three months after launch, myGraymont, the company’s ThoughtFarmer-based intranet, is the portal to most of the applications, tools and information resources employees use, including the Web-based JD Edwards EnterpriseOne ERP system. It’s also the primary interface to the company directory. Employees are responsible for keeping their own listings up to date on their personal myGraymont pages, which they’re encouraged to personalize with pictures and information about themselves.

And ThoughtFarmer is the company’s document management system too, its database already populated with thousands of items – policies, instructions, how-tos. Employees can edit and correct most and post their own. “So you have a continuously evolving, self-healing base of information,” Ogilvy says.

 
Screenshot of ThoughtFarmer page for the Pilot Peak quarry

The payback? Easier access to information and tools will make employees more productive – and less frustrated – and also reduce the management burden for IT. “But the big values,” Ogilvy says, “will come in areas outside IT – when a person in Pennsylvania, say, connects with someone in Alberta and shows him something he’s done that saves the company $10,000 or $20,000; or when an informal discussion group is established amongst maintenance workers or kiln operators across borders and geography. We expect those things will happen regularly.” 

Just using myGraymont to interact more personally with distant colleagues can be an end in itself, he adds. “If it helps create a new relationship, the value of that relationship will be the payback.”

A photo gallery of a lime plant from Graymont’s ThoughtFarmer installation.

Localized interface and multilingual content management

ThoughtFarmer now supports a localizable interface, easy language switching, and multilingual search. Pages automatically display in your home language, if available, or intelligently fall back on your secondary language preference. Watch a 90-second video overview.

Create blogs

Create department blogs or employee blogs. Use them for project reports, status meetings, and for sharing your latest insights and ideas.

Create and share calendars

Create multiple event calendars. Share launch dates, project schedules or important deadlines. Control who views and edits each calendar.

Create forums

Now, in addition to inline comments on any ThoughtFarmer page, you can create dedicated discussion forums.

Support for high-capacity, load-balanced deployments

ThoughtFarmer 3.0 contains numerous performance enhancements that results in drastic speed improvements in all environments. Data replication across distrubuted data centres is now supported.

ThoughtFarmer 3.0 contains over 100 enhancements and improvements, as well as minor bug fixes. A full list of changes will be available in the release notes.

At 12:15pm on Tuesday, I’ll be presenting on the following topic:

Intranet 2.0 in 10 Not-So-Easy Steps

In this fast-paced, entertaining presentation, intranet consultant and ThoughtFarmer co-creator Chris McGrath will share the 10 not-so-easy steps to convert an impossibly complex, seldom used corporate intranet into Intranet 2.0: a simple, social intranet that helps employees collaborate, share ideas and find information.

Come by the demo pavilion to catch the presentation, or stop by our booth. Send us a message on Twitter if you’d like to schedule a meeting with either of us — we have some available time when the expo hall is closed.

It’s shaping up to be a great conference for anyone interested in next-generation collaboration tools for the enterprise. Hope to see you there!

After 3 major revisions to the forums over a 4 year period, usage was still sporadic at best. The technology worked, the culture was right, and the company was big enough (over 500 employees). What was wrong?

When you have a small base of users (say, under 10,000), everything has to be perfect to create effective discussion forums. Here are 6 guidelines:

1. ATTACH A FORUM TO EVERY PAGE.

Instead of just providing a centralized location for forums, allow discussions to emerge on any and every intranet page. It’s impossible to know what will spark a conversation.

2. PROVIDE AN AGGREGATED, PRIORITIZED VIEW OF DISCUSSIONS.

This page should list every active discussion on the intranet, showing:

• Title of page where discussion is happening
• Owner of page
• Number of posts to the discussion
• Date & time of most recent comment (best expressed in relative terms, i.e. 2 hours ago)

Sort by date, placing at the top the discussion with the most recent post.

3. INTEGRATE FORUMS WITH THE COMPANY DIRECTORY.

Forums shouldn’t require registration. The intranet should be able to personally identify each user (usually via Windows integrated authentication).

Link the name of each commenter to his or her employee profile in the intranet directory.

4. STRIP THE INTERFACE TO THE BASICS.

On the actual page containing the discussion, all you need for each comment is:

• name of commenter (linked to his/her intranet profile)
• date & time comment was made (best expressed in relative terms, i.e. 2 hours ago)
• the comment itself

Not needed:

• No multi-level threads
• No comment-level subject (a single subject at the top of the page is sufficient)

Sort comments with the oldest at the top, so the discussion is easily read.

5. SIGNAL PARTICIPANTS WHEN A POST IS MADE.

This is perhaps the most important step to effective discussion forums.

As soon as a post is made, send an email to the page owner and to everyone who has participated in the discussion so far. (If your user base is technically savvy, you can provide an RSS feed instead.) This keeps the discussion moving and keeps all participants involved. Otherwise, days can elapse between comments, and the conversation dies out.

6. ENGAGE YOUR ORGANIZATION’S THOUGHT LEADERS.

If you can get the leaders at your company to use the forums to share opinions or ask thought-provoking questions, others will follow.

It takes all 6 steps to create effective discussions on your company’s intranet. Has your company made a success of forums? Do you have any other ideas on how to make them work? If so, I’d like to hear about it. Post a comment below.

Shel Holtz

Shel also took a close look at ThoughtFarmer itself, and had this to say:

I must confess, I was pretty impressed with ThoughtFarmer, which includes a slew of features ranging from single-signon and polls to inline tagging and image galleries.

Read his entire write-up.

ThoughtFarmer embraces the Wiki model, offering an open and democratic authoring environment with no barriers to content creation. The service then adds structure and social networking to the wiki core.

Read the entire article here.

ThoughtFarmer customer Hicks Morley was interviewed extensively for this article. An excerpt:

After looking at six or eight products last summer, [Hicks Morley] settled on ThoughtFarmer (www.thoughtfarmer.com), server-based software from Vancouver’s OpenRoad Communications Ltd.

Colman is pleased with the decision. “One of the lessons we’ve learned is that it’s really important to select a tool that’s very easy to use. We did look at some products that had tons of features but we thought they would be too overwhelming [for users]. That’s why we picked ThoughtFarmer — it’s intuitive, it has a nice clean look, and it’s easy to pick up.”

Colman also liked the Web 2.0 features that some other products didn’t have, such as RSS (really simple syndication) as a mechanism for notifying participants of changes, and tagging, a simple way to group pages by subject or theme making it easier to browse a document base. ThoughtFarmer also lets individual Hicks Morley users set up their own personal wikis to store links and documents they use all the time. It also lets them search for documents across all of the firm’s wikis.

After running a six-week ThoughtFarmer pilot project with one small practice group, the firm gave Colman the go-ahead to roll the product out across the firm. She is now helping transfer already-built wikis from DominoWiki to ThoughtFarmer, and to build new ones.

Download the entire article in Acrobat format (1.1MB).

ReadWriteWeb featured an article on our hilarious Tubetastic marketing campaign. From the article:

Unlike many companies pitching, the ThoughtFarmer team didn’t just tell us what their software could do nor did they ask for our time via an on-the-phone walkthrough. Instead, they appealed to ego and curiosity to intrigue us enough to take a look.

Read the full article.

Over the past couple of months, we’ve been working to devise an effective marketing campaign for ThoughtFarmer. Our goal was to reach out to online influencers in the technology space–bloggers, analysts and journalists (those job titles are getting very blurry these days). We wanted to introduce ThoughtFarmer to these folks, and encourage them to take our wiki-powered intranet solution for a test drive.

After some brainstorming and false starts, we devised Tubetastic, a fake company with a fake logo, a fake org chart and, you guessed it, a fake intranet. If you want to have a look at the site, just ask and we’ll send you access details.

What Were We Thinking?

We undertook an intensive approach to connecting with these influencers. Our thinking is based on a few beliefs:

• Everyone is really busy. You need to be creative to interrupt the fire hose of inputs.
• When you work hard to craft an original approach, people respond to it. If you invest a lot of effort, it demonstrates respect for your audience. It says “we value your attention, so we went to a lot of trouble to get some of it”.
• Marketing works best when your marketing strategy is as close as possible to the thing you’re marketing. It seemed obvious to use a ThoughtFarmer intranet as the centrepiece of this campaign.
• What do we care most about? Ourselves. Marketing works best when we can see ourselves in the context of the campaign. When influencers visit Tubetastic, they see themselves and their peers.
• Find the funny. The slogan for Tubetastic is “We make tubes. A whole series of them.” Savvy readers will recognize this as a nod to United States Senator Ted Stevens’ infamous metaphor for the internet. This opening gambit, in theory, entices our audience to log in and find out what the heck is going on. It seems to have worked. Rob Lewis was “instantly curious”.

Here’s how we put the campaign together:

Prepare the Intranet

To start, we invented a fake tube manufacturing company called Tubetastic Inc.

We created fake employee profiles for each influencer. Each profile is a sort of entry interview, with the answers coming from excerpts from their blogs and articles. We left one question unanswered, in the hopes that some folks might offer up their opinion.

Here, for example, is the profile for Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb fame:

Though ThoughtFarmer offers a dead sexy interactive org chart, we needed a printable one. We were a bit cheeky, and stuck really popular bloggers in rather junior positions. Robert Scoble is a Tubular Receptionist, while Mike Arrington is the company mascot.

We also wrote a couple of hopefully-amusing short articles to fill out the site a bit. They’re in the style of cheery, boring stories that you might read on your average corporate intranet. One is titled “Our Tubes Are the Shiniest for the Third Year Running.” Here’s how it starts:

As many of you know, our Quality Assurance team participates every year in Tube-o-Rama, the tradeshow and industry challenge in which tube industry employees compete for glory and prizes. For the third year in a row, our tubular QA experts have come home with the trophy for best tube polishing.

“It really was our finest hour,” said Junior Tube Polisher Stowe Boyd. “Our time to shine. And shine we did. We shined those tubes like they were our grandma’s silverware.”

Another story involves the Operations team relocating to Chile. It’s not The Onion, but hopefully they make the occasional reader smile.

It’s the early days of this campaign, but we were pleased when analyst James Governor added his own amusing short piece. It concerns legal action by prog-rock legend Mike Oldfield, who wrote the album “Tubular Bells”.

Prepare the Packages

People are inundated with email. Technologists are also overrun by new channels. Just today Robert posted this to his Twitter feed:

NOTE TO PR PEOPLE AND ENTREPRENEURS: I am far less likely to talk about you or do what you want if you DM me than if you just beg in public.

Instead, we like to send our audience something interesting via snail mail. The natural fit was a faux new employee package. It contained:

• A welcome letter, which prominently featured login details for the Tubetastic intranet.
• An employee badge, with their name, job title and photo.
• The aforementioned org chart, with their name circled.

We couldn’t find actual addresses for everybody, but we did reasonably well. For the remainder, we put digital versions of these assets on the web and contacted them through an online channel (email, IM, Twitter and so forth).

Then we sent out the packages. We’ll follow up in a week or so, to confirm that people received their goodies.

The Risks

This sort of strategy isn’t without risk. Here’s what we saw as potential problems:

• Nobody notices. This is every marketer’s fear. We’ve done our best to avoid the black hole of apathy.
• They get creeped out. It’s possible that some folks might be a little weirded out by seeing an employee profile featuring themselves. However, most of these folks live very public lives, so we’re optimistic that it’ll matter less to them than the average person.
• Snail mail doesn’t work. Either the mail doesn’t get to the actual recipient, or they choose to ignore it. We’re not overly worried about this one. I asked Sarah Perez what she thought of the old-fashioned approach, and she replied, “I thought it was cute! Usually snail mail is junk or bills so it’s nice to get something unexpected.”
• They publish their login details, and the intranet site gets hammered or covered in graffiti. Too many people looking at ThoughtFarmer is a nice problem to have. We just have to pay very close attention to the site over the next few weeks. We’re mitigating this by providing an easy way to request access.

As Seth Godin says, “safe is risky, and risky is safe”. In our experience, the best campaigns are the ones where we feel queasy about their launch.

Who We Contacted

For the sake of completeness, here’s the list of bloggers, journalists and analysts who we contacted.

• Stake out our booth
• Show off the latest version of ThoughtFarmer
• Meet some players in our marketspace (the nice ones)
• Scowl at some players in our marketspace (the mean ones)
• Court the media & analysts
• Hand out 7000 business cards
• Find some good restaurants

Drop by our booth! We’re booth #15 in the Long Tail Pavilion. And for some commentary on the Expo, follow us on Twitter.