Collaboration platform Socialtext is taking its package of enterprise 2.0 services to the smartphone. The startup has launched Socialtext Mobile, a web-based mobile version of the Socialtext collaboration platform.

Socialtext’s President and co-founder, Ross Mayfield tells us that Socialtext’s mobile interface will offer much of the same functionality as Socialtext’s Adobe Air-powered desktop application, which launched earlier this year. Socialtext mobile will automatically detect when a user is logging in through a smartphone and provides access to the optimized Socialtext site.

Via a Blackberry, iPhone or Android, users can see and post to their company’s Twitter-like message stream and access their company’s Socialtext Workspace, an enterprise-ready wiki. The platform’s SocialCalc collaborative spreadsheet offering is also accessible via the mobile interface.

The message stream lets workers see the microblogging messages of the co-workers they are following. In addition, there is also an “activity” stream that generates a micro-message every time a person a user is following takes an action inside the Socialtext platform, such as creating a wiki page, writing a blog post, or making a comment. Socialtext’s collaboration tool has a newly launched freemium model and a paid service, but both platforms are available via mobile devices for free.

There’s no doubt that being able to access enterprise applications from mobile devices is useful to companies and their employees. But for many big companies, security is a consideration when deploying enterprise apps in a mobile phone. Socialtext customers can leverage Motorola’s Good Mobile Connection to provide behind-the-firewall secure deployment of Socialtext’s information on mobile devices.

Socialtext faces competition from Yammer, Jive and and WizeHive.

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Social Media has evolved beyond a series of platforms that enable content publishing, sharing, and discovery into a genuine, peer-to-peer looking glass into the real world conversations that affect the perception, engagement, and overall direction of the brands we represent.

Socialized media didn’t invent “conversations,” it simply organized and amplified them and established an opportunity for learning and collaboration.

Twitter and Twitter Search have ushered in a new genre of not only communications and associated search technology, but also dedicated ecosystems that transform and support how we as consumers share and discover relevant information in real-time.

Online discussions, rants, and observations are either alarming (and motivating) brand managers or fooling them into unforeseen enthrallment. But the reality is that real-time dialogue is fueling connections and perceptions in the statusphere, blogopsphere, online communities, and the social web in general. It’s this swelling tsunami of chatter that will only intensify and heighten as it forces a new genre of Social Customer Relationship Management (sCRM). Social CRM is no longer an option. It necessitates brand involvement to proactively share answers, solve problems, establish authority, and build relationships and loyalty, one tweet, blog post, update, and “like,” at a time.

In the world of business, social media, led by Twitter, is forcing companies to augment the offshoring of reactive customer service with the nearshoring of proactive customer engagement. The conversations that power social media are sparking a sense of urgency to identify influential voices and talk to customers in a place and time of their choosing (generally, in public and online).

For example, on Friday at during a panel at the CrunchUp on Real Time Business, Porter Gale, vice president of marketing for Virgin America, made it clear that Virgin America understands the promise, prospect, and value of listening and responding to the social stream.

Erick Schonfeld, who was moderating, asked Porter how her team mines Twitter for the perception of the brand and also for determining how they contact customers.

Porter revealed that the Virgin America team is small and applies roughly the equivalent of 1.5 people to monitoring and engaging on Twitter and other social networks. To her and the team, social media is representative of not only a listening system, but also a complete engagement channel. The word “marketing” doesn’t even enter the mix.

With more than 20,000 followers on Twitter, Virgin America is galvanizing a vibrant and active community of people who will respond in “Twitter time,” thus alleviating the modest team from having to engage in every discussion, whether it’s positive or negative.

The most common example Porter shared was a response to the question, “Should I fly Virgin?”

“The community closes the sale,” exclaimed Porter.

She also shared a story of how Virgin America invests in the good will of customers, simply by publicly acknowledging and supporting them in the same channels where they’re communicating.

During one flight, a woman who just graduated medical school to become a doctor, had tweeted her excitement about graduating and also flying @virginamerica. Instead of simply responding with a congratulatory Tweet, Porter and her team retweeted and asked someone on the flight to buy her a drink (the benefits of offering inflight wifi).

To her surprise, Porter triggered an immediate response, “Row 11 is going to buy her a drink.” And, to her further astonishment, the person who sent that Tweet was live in the audience at the Real-Time stream event.

Alexia Tsotsis, tech writer at the LA Weekly, shouted from the first row, “That was me!”

Everyone in the audience was a witness to a vivid demonstration of how interaction online extends into real world experiences.

More impressive is Virgin America’s use of the social Web for real-time customer service. They’re actively monitoring issues, frustrations, and recommendations to solve challenges as they arise. In several such instances, Virgin America has used Twitter as a real-time guest service recovery system in flight to address concerns and problems by contacting service staff in the air to alert them to issues – again, the perils and associated benefits of offering inflight WiFi.

Earlier in the day, Peoplebrowsr (disclosure: I am an advisor) showed a demo in which airlines were ranked by the sentiment expressed about each brand on Twitter, and Virgin America was on top. Peoplebrowsr highlighted the ability to analyze conversational sentiment by industry through the alignment of positive, neutral, and negative conversations and perception by brand.

Ross Mayfield, CEO and founder of Socialtext, discussed the nature of the social dialogue enterprises are being pulled into and how conversations require more than one person or department to engage. SocialText offers a dashboard for enterprises that wish to collaborate internally with coworkers and externally with customers and stakeholders.

Ross referenced the engagement iceberg, where he observes only a small portion of customer conversations and engagement as truly visible, with most occurring beneath the water line and thus, out of view.

He’ s right. In my research and experience, we’ve identified that every online conversation worthy of response directly matched specific divisions within an organization and usually rank in this order:

1. Support
2. PR
3. Marketing
4. Sales

It highlights the reality that every department eventually needs to socialize.

Ross then asked his fellow panel members as well as the audience, “Who’s going to own Social Media and the process of responding?”

My answer: No one.

Social Media is, for the time being, tuning-in new channels of influence to incorporate into the brand and marketing mix.  While it takes a station manager time to receive the signals and in turn, coordinate outward broadcasts, it is the divisions within each organization that will need to shift from an introspective support mode to an extrospective group of proactive collaborators.

But as Ross cautioned businesses and eager social media teams, “Before they collaborate with the community, they have to collaborate with themselves.”

If responsibilities and workflow isn’t established and most importantly, if guidelines aren’t drafted and disseminated company-wide, the intention of helping influential customers and advocates can quickly transcend into social, and very public, chaos.

We need rules of engagement.

As Erick pointed out in the discussion, “It used to be unhappy customers who would call into customer service lines to express frustration. Now if businesses don’t immediately respond with a resolution and nip these issues in the bud, they have the potential of spreading and getting out of control. At the same time, companies need to identify and amplify praise as it happens.”

Virgin America’s Porter Gale is trying to rally her team as well as the other departments that are affected by real-time conversations and the issues they raise. She hosts brownbag lunches, where PR, customer service, and other teammates discuss what’s happening with Twitter and other social networks. They also share and review strategies and tactics to teach and learn from each other based on their experiences.

There are social networks, and there are tools with which to identify conversations and facilitate interaction, but everyone agreed, that in the world of new service and marketing, we need to improve the literacy and education among the teams who occupy the front lines.

The “now” web is powerful. It’s building new bridges, networks, and channels. It’s absolutely changing the way people communicate, research, and ultimately make decisions.

Yes, the real-time Web is powered by conversations. But, what’s important to remember, is that conversations are personal and therefore sacred.
Broadcasting messages, or even worse, sponsored messages as a form of resolution or participation is foolhardy.

Companies such as Pizza Hut that relegate Twitter interaction to a summer “Twintern” will indubitably get what they pay for. We’ve already witnessed the public backlash when a twintern abuses Twitter on behalf of an unsuspecting brand. #habitat

The point is that it’s not whether or not an intern or junior staffer on the marketing and communications team is competent or incompetent. The reality is that businesses should view the role of engaging with customers, prospects and influencers as a strategic competitive advantage as well as an earned privilege.

As panelist Maynard Webb of LiveOps pointed out, “A brand can get damaged faster than ever nowadays.”

The true shift represented by the social and real-time Web is not simply the ability to surface relevant conversations as they happen, it represents the opportunity to learn from public sentiment and create a more aware and adaptive organization that leads communities through action.

Monitoring the conversation is not enough.  Brands need to jump in, but in a professional way.

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Basically, Socialtext Free 50 allows companies to sign-up and get many of Socialtext’s services for free, for up to 50 users. That includes the service’s social networking, wiki, site building and messaging tools. The only constraints are that you’re limited to one wiki workspace (paid accounts offer unlimited), and there is no support beyond the basic online variety. “We think we picked the right line of what can we give away,” Socialtext co-founder Ross Mayfield tells us.

So, you’re pretty much free to open those up to 50 accounts and let the users roam around as they wish. And if you determine you need more accounts, or just more options, there’s obviously an easy path to upgrade. The paid service starts at $6-a-month per user for a hosted plan, or larger companies can opt to pay $1,000 per month, plus $1 or $5 per user based on if they want hosted or on-site capabilities. The full pricing breakdown is here.

Alongside the Socialtext Free 50 launch, the company is also opening up the beta of its new SocialCalc spreadsheet service. SocialCalc’s development was lead by Dan Bricklin, the co-createor of VisiCalc — the first spreadsheet program that was ever made for PCs. It’s been private beta testing for a little while now, but is ready for public testing, Mayfield says. The general release is expected at the end of Q3.

As you might imagine, SocialCalc is a social spreadsheet service. But Mayfield feels it bests competitors such as Google Spreadsheets and EditGrid, because they’re doing more than just reverse engineering the dominant spreadsheet client, Excel. SocialCalc was built to make group editing simple, and to eliminate potential conflict issues when multiple people are editing a document. It offers a way to “work with structured data in an unstructured way,” as Mayfield puts it. And, unlike Google Spreadsheets, SocialCalc can be deployed behind a firewall.

Perhaps more importantly, SocialCalc ties into all of Socialtext’s other offerings (though, unfortunately won’t be included in the Socialtext Free 50 offering as of right now).

We’ve been seeing a resurgence of the freemium model in recent months. It seems to be working pretty well for some consumer-facing products like Pandora, which had a nice offering a couple months ago. It will be interesting to see how it works in the enterprise sphere. CubeTree, another social enterprise offering, launched with the model last month as well.

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In yet another sign that this will be the year of the activity stream, Socialtext is adding a Twitter-like message stream to its enterprise wiki/workspace service, The new feature is called Socialtext Signals, and it appears both as a widget in the Socialtext dashboard and as a standalone desktop app built on Adobe AIR.

Socialtext Signals is essentially an enterprise version of Twitter, much like Yammer. Employees within a company can micro-message each other without competitors or the rest of the world snooping. They will see only the messages of the co-workers they are following. In addition to the 140-character messaging between co-workers (the “signals”), there is also an “activity” tab. This generates a micro-message every time a person you are following takes an action inside Socialtext, such as creating a wiki page, writing a blog post, or making a comment.

The activity stream which Socialtext makes visible is very particular to its products, and in fact is designed to keep employees engaged with those products. Any time someone changes a page that you’ve created or edited in the past, it shows up as an activity. So constant updates from Ralph in engineering about the progress of a project serves as a reminder for everyone else to do their part as well. Unlike Yammer, there is no ability to create subgroups within Signals, or upload files. But then, you can always create workgroups elsewhere in Socialtext, and upload files directly into linked wikis. Signals just ties it all together. There is no mobile support either, however, which is a more serious gap.

Socialtext is used as a collaboration tool by 5,000 companies (subscriptions are as much at $15 per employee per month). Signals and the desktop app should go far towards increasing employee interaction with the service. Each update serves as a prompt to follow up on a project or keep it moving along, while Signals can also serve as the new watercooler. Companies that don’t need Socialtext’s other apps (the workspace and the dashboard, primarily) might want to check out a simpler enterprise micro-messaging service such as Yammer or WIzeHive.

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SocialText sells Wikis to companies, for the most part, although they also offer an open source version of their product. They offer customers a choice between a SaaS version and a higher end appliance, although the only real difference is where the server sits (your location or theirs). Founder Ross Mayfield says that of their 4,000 customers, 80% use the SaaS product, but 80% of their revenue come from the appliance.

The new products, Socialtext Dashboard and Socialtext People, are being demo’d now and will become available to all customers within 60 days, Mayfield says. The products are effectively extensions of their normal Wiki product.

SocialText Dashboard, pictured above, is a Netvibes-like customizable home page. Users can add SocialText widgets that show information from the company’s wiki – total edits, a list of workspaces, change summaries, etc. Other widgets are for productivity, like a calendar, or just for fun, like a YouTube widget.

All Dashboard widgets are Google Widget compatible, which means that, subject to security settings, they can also be added to sites like iGoogle. But more importantly, all iGoogle widgets can also be added to the Dashboard page. So you can, for example, pull Gmail directly into your SocialText Dashboard.

Users also create profiles (see below) and add “friends” within the organization. You can monitor the activity stream of mutual friends as well, which includes outside services such as Twitter.

For a lot of enterprise employees, having a single dashboard with secure company information alongside fun or useful outside services on a single dashboard is exactly what they need. It also makes SocialText the center of a worker’s day, which means they far less likely to ever lose the customer.

It’s clear that SocialText is forging ahead and trying to find a path that doesn’t make them sell against Google Sites, at least yet. Hopefully by the time those enterprise customers start to think about integrating some or all of Google’s productivity suite, SocialText will already be a daily part of employees’ lives. Then they can keep charging those attractive user fees.

SocialText has raised just under $12 million over three rounds of financing. Last November, Mayfield moved into the Chairman/President role to make room for a new CEO, Eugene Lee. The company has 50 employees.

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Personally, I find the UI to still be something that an engineer would love more than a graphic designer. But it is an improvement. Adding skins is a move in the right direction. What’s your favorite wiki?

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Tonight they are announcing their new CEO – former Cisco and Adobe exec Eugene Lee. Founder and former CEO Ross Mayfield becomes Chairman and President of the company. The company is also announcing a $6.5 million second tranche of its Series C funding ($3 million was announced in May 2007). The company has now raised a total of $14.1 million.

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I spoke to Ross for a few minutes this evening. He says he’s really good at the early stage and externally focused stuff – marketing, strategy, fundraising, etc. He’s looking for someone to complement those skills – a seasoned CEO who has experience growing a company through later stage hurdles and, particularly, to streamline operations. Ross will stay on as Chairman and president of SocialText.

Many companies go through this – the type of person who can make something out of absolutely nothing and get a startup off the ground often doesn’t have the skills or desire to manage the growth phase of a company. Ross also started SocialText in 2002 – and guided it through the very dark days of the downturn. I don’t blame him for looking for a partner to help him move the company forward. He’s been at this for five years and probably needs a break.

I also think SocialText is going about this the right way, with an up-front blog post saying exactly what they intend to do. Compare this to how Technorati handled their CEO search, which was done in secret and eventually leaked because the executive search firm tasked with finding the executive sent out the document to one too many bloggers. They weren’t able to control, or even contribute to, the messaging, and by the time CEO Dave Sifry confirmed the search a lot of damage had already been done to the company.

JotSpot, a competitor, was acquired by Google in late 2006.

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While still online, users can click the blue Unplug icon, which will then download a selection of wiki pages so that those pages become available offline. Once a user comes back online, the changes will be automatically uploaded.

“The blue Unplugged icon is similar to an RSS icon, which signals to a user there is a different way to use the content outside the browser. In this case, to use the content offline,” wrote Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, in his blog.

Socialtext Unplugged is an application within a single HTML file. When the Unplug icon is activated, it downloads pages as a Zip file, although re-synching occurs through Socialtext’s Wiki Web Services.

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WikiMatrix has over 100 wikis to compare. The wiki designers maintain the information on their listing because, as WikiMatrix founder Andreas Gohr puts it, “nobody knows a product better than its creator.”

WikiMatrix was launched about a year ago and Gohr says that it is popular enough within the wiki developer community that wiki owners are proactive about getting their sites listed. But he says that users’ knowledge of wikis usually doesn’t go much further than Wikipedia.

“Wikipedia was written to power an encyclopedia,” Gohr said via IM on Friday. “Not everyone needs an encyclopedia. Others might have the need to have the wiki integrated into enterprise structures. There are various different use cases for wikis and various different engines and each does things a little bit different. If you decide to replace the Intranet of a 5,000+ employee company with a wiki you may need to compare different choices. That’s what WikiMatrix is for.”

Users can also create their ideal wiki on the site and then see which wiki comes the closest to matching their needs. Gohr’s 10-person company also launched ForumMatrix.org last year as a spin-off, which is basically the same site but for forum software, although Gohr admits it isn’t as popular as WikiMatrix yet.

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SocialText has been in the market for four years. The 30 employee company has more than 2,000 customers and received funding from an all-star cast including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, SAP Ventures, the Omidyar Foundation, Joi Ito and Reid Hoffman. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Whales, Tim Draper, Joi Ito and SocialText’s Ross Mayfield make up the company’s board of directors.

The new version of the software engages head on with what has been the biggest problem for SocialText and wikis in general; user interfaces have been awful. Today SocialText has added a number of features intended to make adoption by nontechnical users particularly easy.

Users will see a new dashboard immediately upon login that displays recent changes, their watchlist, information from across all work groups that user is participating in and a whiteboard shared with co-workers.

There’s been all kinds of navigation and sorting capabilities added throughout the site; including autosuggest for tagging and inbound links highlighted. Full screen page editing is the last thing that’s been added to the UI that’s important. While a WYSIWYG GUI helps many new users feel more comfortable with wikis than they would otherwise, the need to edit inside the shrunken text box that many web2.0 tools demand can mitigate the impact of the GUI. Give people a full page to write on and they feel like they’re in Word.

All of these UI changes could be summarized by saying that SocialText users no longer have to feel stuck in wikispace – there are now familiar and high-level perspectives available from which to interact with the wiki functionality. The company has made a good screencast demonstrating much of these changes.

APIs

The other big news about the new SocialText is the release of a REST API for developers interested in mashing up SocialText wikis with other data and services. The API has already been used to create an off-line SocialText client and at least one Google Maps mashup. A SOAP API has been available from SocialText for some time.

While APIs are not uncommon in the consumer wiki space (see the excellent PBWiki, for example, who just released an API this week) SocialText’s open source enterprise APIs are just the most recent of a long list of valuable contributions they’ve made to the online community. From donating their open source WYSIWYG toolbar to the world (a resource intensive thing to build from scratch) to offering free hosted wikis to important projects like Mary Hodder’s Speakers Wiki (a list of tech speakers, many women, for conference organizers to refer to) SocialText has a history of authentic actions exemplifying the “give more/get more” ethic.

While there are any number enterprise wikis available, Mayfield told me that he expects demand for wikis to explode in the next year as Microsoft and IBM enter the market in force. Once wiki style online collaboration becomes an all the more common practice, Mayfield believes that SocialText’s exclusive focus on wikis, four years of experience in the sector, open source technology and straight forward pricing structure will continue to set them apart from the competition. To that list the company can now add improved ease of use and hopefully a diverse ecosystem of outside mashups via the REST API.

Other companies won’t stand still and the current state of ghastly wiki UIs can’t possibly last, but SocialText has been laying down open source roots for four years that will be hard for competitors to unearth.

Like Google’s new Spreadsheets application and other online spreadsheets, one of the goals of wikiCalc is to end the “email volleyball” issue (as SocialText CEO Ross Mayfield puts it) where spreadsheets are sent back and forth between users for editing. Most of the new online spreadsheets applications allow various levels of viewing and editing a single version of a spreadsheet, which is stored on a server instead of locally.

But wikiCalc is a much more significant, if less flashy, piece of software than Google Spreadsheets, particularly now that it is being paired with SocialText’s development and enterprise sales resources. It provides the first real non-Microsoft alternative for companies wanting to edit spreadsheets on the network but who are not willing to have third parties like Google storing their data. Upcoming versions of Office will have similar sharing functionality as wikiCalc, but at significantly higher price points. And wikiCalc, like all wikis, will have a true audit trail built in – every change to every cell is stored and can be rolled back. It’s like an infinite undo button.

Socialtext’s wikiCalc software will be released under an open source license for installation directly onto servers. Later, a hosted version will be available and SocialText will also distribute it to its enterprise customers via an appliance (like SocialText’s other products).

UPDATE: A screencast showing the product in action is linked from here.