Guest: Ross Mayfield - SocialText
Host: John Furrier - PodTech

John Furrier - PodTech
We are here at the Web 2.0 conference with Ross Mayfield with SocialText CEO, founder. He did a deal today with Intel, Web 2.0 in a box, the enterprise small businesses, tell us what the product is?

Ross Mayfield - SocialText
Right, so, it's SuiteTwo and what we did was to partner with Intel, who brought together the best breed (ph) offerings for Blog, Wiki, and RSS. So, its SocialText, Newsgator, Six Apart, SimpleFeed, all bundled together on a appliance, its going to be maintained by Spikesource, distributed through Intel and all of its channels, Ingram, NEC, Dell, Red Hat, Novell, possibly Microsoft. It's getting kind of interesting and it's all on the box and I don't know, can you see this interface over here? So, what you have is integrated single sign on we're already logged in here, integrated search, down to the bottom a aggregated tag cloud across all of these applications both, the Blog, the Wiki, Feed Reader, Feed Publisher, integrated some help and admin pages as well. Down to the bottom on the home page you can look at, hey what are all my employees actually blogging, right, what are they talking about here?

John Furrier - PodTech
Web 2.0 Suite (ph) here.

Ross Mayfield - SocialText
What's interesting in terms of, what people are actually working on, what do people subscribe to, paying attention? What is the feedback and response, we are getting from the feeds that were published.

John Furrier - PodTech
It's a Web 2.0 Suite that really is like a dash board or social media, it's like a social media platform for the enterprise.

Ross Mayfield - SocialText
That's right. So, and you can use it not just internally as a way to collaborate and communicate or maybe as a way replace or augment your intranet, but also in a way for the public social media aspects of what you will be doing. So, it's a way of doing a higher rate of engagement style marketing but not just marketing, also a way that you could engage people, with a different kind of support. We are bringing your people kind of from behind the firewall to engage with people's exuberance.

John Furrier - PodTech
So, that's Intel Inside, if you will for Web 2.0 its basically they put this together as a part Echo System, correct?

Ross Mayfield - SocialText
Right, so, what this is is we are kind of bringing the Web inside to an enterprise resembling an Inner Box with smaller mid-sized enterprises, who aren't going to undertake this kind of integration on their own. You would have seen people kind of integrate these tools on their own. Lead users need enterprises, just to solve their own problems and because they saw this opportunity. So we take this again and of having pretty wide distribution, it's a significant channel.

John Furrier - PodTech
Your company SocialText has been involved in Wiki, there's also social media and social media platforms for it a long time since really the beginning of social media, specifically at the enterprise, talk about Enterprise 2.0 in your mind, do you see as facing them with other opportunities.

Ross Mayfield - SocialText
So, the main thing Enterprise Social Software is emergent Social Software, adapted for organizations, right. So, its emergent in that its freeform unstructured, you get participation without filling in forms. You also have social software, which drives participation through social incentives, emergent - and that you get the different kind of collective intelligence and what you were able to see before, kind of like that home page dashboard in a very light there, but the interesting thing is about how these things are actually changing the way the business has worked. You have more transparency, more trust, you get different kinds of insights --

John Furrier - PodTech
People like it.

Ross Mayfield - SocialText
Yeah, well, or actually let me put it this way when I get new things, where I might be able to go to a given blog, that might be about a project and be able to do one click subscription that ads its into newspaper, right within a secured enterprise newspaper appointment. I might be within the SocialText Wiki, right, be able to track what's new, just within the Wiki, what are people on, that kind of thing. But I might be able to go to a given page, right like this is a kind of a funny one and I might be working on this as a blog post, as a group, we might drafting this in private and decide to click a button and end up posting it directly to a blog.

John Furrier - PodTech
So, it's a multi-user blog post, really collaborately.

Ross Mayfield - SocialText
Exactly and that's actually, its based on the patterns that we see in how people actually use these tools, just on their own. Lead users, who are getting access to all these tools, just having the basic integration in some different areas that we haven't really developed yet. We are getting at something that's more usable than we are literally like the whole is greater than some of its parts, whatever that phrase is, you know what I mean.

John Furrier - PodTech
What about deployment for an IT guy, usually it's like a lot of training, talk about deployment and training.

Ross Mayfield - SocialText
Right, so, I think it's going to be a lot like the SocialText appliance that you can get sandaled up right, where in that case, literally, all you need is an Ethernet Cable, an IP address, configure it through email tell it, if you want backups to go in a different location and it runs on its own. An appliance is a way of delivering software as a service behind the firewall right, when it comes to training, that's actually really important. There is a level of what you can do, without a great degree of training and also people are learning how to use these tools at least on the consumer sense, in different communities but a little bit of training up front, really does go a long way for furthering adoption.

John Furrier - PodTech
Well, Intel's doing a great job building out Echo System, almost like bundling a chipset with its software, maybe they'll get some Podcasting with PodTech later, hopefully in Video Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText, company is doing great, congratulations.

Ross Mayfield - SocialText
Yeah, and we are cruising along; we are definitely not struggling.

John Furrier - PodTech
Web 2.0 on the Enterprise with Ross Mayfield, SocialText.

Ross Mayfield - SocialText
Thanks, John.