Structure

• Make the login process as painful as possible.
• Assume that your Jive Social Business Software (SBS) environment is only about delivering and consuming content, and not also about connecting and collaborating.
• Ignore the fact that adoption happens virally – make your SBS environment an unwelcome and confusing experience for ad hoc joiners.
• Create a space for every permutation of your organizational hierarchy – try to mimic your intranet structure.
• Assume that structure is immutable.
• Assume seasoned participants look at the All Content page or space hierarchy a lot.

Communication

• Never let executives express their support publicly or repeatedly.
• Don’t get the word out to executives or general users – just build it, and let them come.
• Ignore middle managers – they will put a stop to all this “social nonsense” and tell their employees to “get back to work.”
• Just send out one email to everyone. That should do it.
• Call it a “collaboration tool” and not a “collaborative networking environment.”
• Be secretive.
• Don’t involve your Legal department until you’re about to launch.
• Avoid the Sharepoint zealots in your organization.

Training

• Don’t bother showing users when to use Jive SBS vs. some other application. Give them too many choices. They’ll just use email that way.
• Make sure all the help content is in extremely long text documents, and doesn’t include any images or videos.
• Don’t bother mapping “how we used to do it” to “how we do it in Jive SBS” in any of your help content. Users love change, and they pick up on new ways of doing things overnight.
• Actually, don’t create any help content at all.

Managing and Monitoring

• Don’t bother with real use cases – fluffy goals, like, “collaborate and innovate better” are just fine for measuring business value.
• Make sure to enable moderation on everything. People love it when they’re micro-managed.
• Disable blogs. Nobody wants to share their opinions, anyway.
• Force participants to request new groups. Self-serve capabilities are too enabling.
• Don’t do anything about lagging participation metrics. Let things slowly die.
• Never report on progress to anyone. They don’t think what you’re trying to accomplish is important.

Let’s take it to the Interwebs. You’ve got your LinkedIn recommendations, Facebook suggest-a-friend, and I’m too lazy to list whatever else is out there. Thinking inside the corporate box, I’m not aware of any commercial social networking applications that do a good job of enabling recommendations, other than the backdoor method of bookmarking their profile, then including a description about why and for what you recommend them. (For a very interesting look at the recommendation phenomenon from a Jungian dude, check out Michael J Pastor’s (@michaeljpastor) discussion about a related topic, reputation.)

Then there’s Twitter.

I asked Twitter: Is following someone in Twitter similar to recommending them?

Answers:

• Macker: it means they have something to say that I want to hear/read. so I guess that’s a tacit recommendation.
• rickysays: Not for me. I just follow people I know or who have similar interests. Wouldn’t necessarily recommend them all tho (no offense)
• turoczy: Not exactly. Follow some people on Twitter to hear their opinions, opinions with which I disagree. I don’t “recommend” them.
• tselrahc: It would be a recommendation for twittering, but I would not extend that to other domains. That’s my criteria for follows.
• stickfight: sort of, that and a mixture of the fact that they are one of the interesting animals in the zoo
• passepartout: Follow means ‘you interest me, for now‘ If I follow someone FOR A WHILE, I could recommend you.
• IainColledge: For me a follow does not have that high a status, I follow because I want to but not sure it is the same as a recommend

1. Rain and cloudy sunshine on a beach are still better than doing laundry.
2. One little additional tequila shot can totally undo an evening of fun.
3. It’s rather easy to de-pants yourself when jumping onto an inner tube.
4. Dancing in 4.5″ Vegas heels without breaking an ankle is a challenge.
5. Having a complete kitchenette in your hotel room and a hubs who enjoys cooking is awesome.
6. I didn’t know sand could get in there.
7. You meet the nicest people during a tropical storm. In a bar. On a beach.
8. Electricity and running water turn out to be optional amenities in the islands.
9. Weak-ass bikini top fasteners really create a whole new level of adventure and surprise.
10. Waking up every hour throughout the night to make sure you don’t miss your 4:30am alarm so that you don’t miss your flight home is exhausting, but effective.

Not impossible, but it does take some meticulous planning and lots of work to do it right, if my successful customers are any indication.

Here’s an approach that has worked for some of my clients.

Address three key targets in Phase 1 of your rollout:

1. Strategic people collections
2. Advocates
3. DIYers

Strategic People Collections

Identify one or two strategic collections of people and give them most of your love and attention. What makes them strategic? Well, they could be the folks who’re clamoring the loudest, have the most organizational power, or are the easiest to get up and running first.

These people collections - I’m staying away from ‘group’, ‘community’, ‘business unit’, ‘functional team’ purposely here - get all your love and attention. You spend most of your time crafting strategies for promotion, communication, training, and metrics for these folks. A natural by-product is that you can re-use much of this output for subsequent strategic people collections. Yes, this becomes an iterative process, so pay attention to what works and what doesn’t work the first time.

Advocates

In parallel, spend lots of love and attention on identified advocates, regardless of where they sit in your organization. Equip them to onboard their organizational network, wherever it happens to exist. These people are critical to a positive, rapid and widespread adoption experience. All it takes is one bad advocate to ruin the whole barrel, so be sure you find as many of these folks as possible, as soon as possible. You’ll want to create communication and training strategies for them as well.

Create an Advocate community so they can help one another, and so you have a convenient way to communicate with, train, and provide them with materials all at one time. You’re essentially planting thousands of seeds to grow a vast and thriving garden quickly.

Do-It-Yourselfers (DIYers)

Finally, develop a “self serve” approach for everyone who has no patience to wait until you get to them. These are the “let me do it myself, I don’t need no stinkin’ training, get outta my way” folks. But, you know they will need help at some point, so create a thriving peer support community. Find the natural helpers in your organization and create great self-help content that addresses key user scenarios - not just “click here to create a blog” stuff. If it makes sense, include what I call “bridging” help. This is content that helps your peeps map “how I do it now” to “how we do it in this new environment.” Here’s such a thing I created last year for a customer:

Sharing Files in Clearspace from Jive Software on Vimeo.

It’s a lot of work, but you’ll reach your business value lightbulb moment in about six months instead of 12 this way.

]]> http://giatalks.com/blog/managing-demand-for-a-social-software-environment/feed/ http://giatalks.com/blog/im-in-8th-grade-again-and-music-is-my-boyfriend/ http://giatalks.com/blog/im-in-8th-grade-again-and-music-is-my-boyfriend/#comments Sun, 03 May 2009 17:09:52 +0000 Gia Lyons http://giatalks.com/?p=228 Attending the Cloud Cult concert at First “Purple Rain” Avenue last night in downtown Minneapolis made me realize how young I’m growing. I’m slowly returning to my band geek and orch dork roots.

Why do I know this? Because I had an orchgasm when I saw the chick bass player pick up a trumpet during the opening band’s set. Had another when Cloud Cult’s violinist and cellist took the stage. AND trombonist.

Now, I have a thing for bass players, and especially for chick bass players, ever since I played with Michelle in our indie-whatever-rock band in Milwaukee (and trumpet players, thanks to high school band road trips and really cheap booze, but neveryoumind about that one). Damn, I can still smell the mold in our basement practice room, these 10 years later.

I guess my point is this:

Don’t let the tedious advance of life lead you into lazy complacency. Go to a damn concert once in awhile. It’s totally worth paying the babysitter.

So, we have social media software and that makes us cool and progressive :-) But what are we actually using it for?

That’s a big question that I am trying to answer, myself. You see, when you have more than 4500 people using a system, it’s hard to know what they all are doing. So, I’m trying to get them to tell me (see my post on Wiki Win of the Week) — and most important, tell each other.

Here’s a brief, somewhat random list of some of the ways we’re using our social business software:

Replacing endless email threads with discussions online that are available to all, not just those on the “cc” list. No need to file an entire long email thread and hope you can find it later, since it’s online. Nice that the discussion flows down, too, instead of forcing you to scroll up and down as an email thread does, to catch up or review it.

Thought-provoking discussions started in one division that spread to include input and ideas — and more questions — from people in other divisions, areas, functions and countries.

Read more…

In my work with clients who are rolling out social business software internally, the traditional Marketing approach to website branding doesn’t cut it in most cases (I have a bit of proof from one of my customers, who is a global branding machine). That’s because an internal SBS site’s branding needs to reflect the overall culture of your company, and not the branding you create for people on the outside. Sure, Marketing folks are definitely in charge of internal branding in most cases, but coming up with something that reflects what it is you’re trying to do with SBS needs to be a team effort.

So, who understands a company’s culture? I know you think I’m going to say HR. They are the traditional Keepers of Culture, but the folks who understand it the best are… the folks. Employees. From all over.

One thing I do in my workshops is conduct a quick brainstorming exercise: “What should we name our SBS environment?” It’s important, because it informs the tone and personality of your communications strategy at the very least. Usually, I have a few representatives from different business units in my workshop. It is amazing to hear how their interpretation of their culture sometimes differs from that of the communications, marketing, and HR folks. It’s a real eye-opener for the whole planning team, in many cases.

Now, here’s the twist.

In many cases, companies use an SBS implementation to effect change in corporate culture. Here’s my favorite example of this so far:

We wanted to fundamentally differentiate it from traditional ‘tools’ that emerged from their (rather large & MS dominated) IT department. After a lot of internal debating about names that tried to state what it did, how it worked etc etc, we just called it Oomph for testing. It’s a kind of power/speed term here in the UK (and also a rather bizarre german band).

And that’s what everyone is calling it now…..

In terms of explaining it, these are the words that employees recieve in the invite email:

“Hello x

This is an invitation to join a very special group of people helping to launch Oomph, x company’s new approach to sharing knowledge across the business.

If you’ve used Facebook, you’ll love Oomph. If you haven’t used Facebook, you’ll love it even more. You can blog, create discussions, share documents with colleagues, ask questions (and get them answered fast), create groups around areas of shared interest and a whole lot more.

We could bang on about how brilliant it is all day, so why not give it a whirl yourself? You’re going to be one of the key testers of Oomph before we release it to the entire company in September, so we’d love to see how useful you find it.

Yours

The Oomph team”

- Mark Rock

Bottom line: Make certain your internal SBS branding communicates the kind of cultural change you want to see happen.

So many approach an internal social business software (SBS) initiative with an “under the radar,” word-of-mouth, organic, viral attitude only. I totally understand this, because the thought is that, if we can get folks using it, we can eventually prove business value de facto, and the stratosphere executives and mid-level managers won’t be able to deny the obvious results.

Well, that doesn’t work in every organization.

Kathryn and I start our workshops with one of the most important things you can do to make success more probable: align your SBS objectives to your company’s strategic initiatives.

It must be obvious to all involved how your SBS objectives align to your organization’s overall business strategy. Don’t assume people will just “get it” - many won’t.

A common approach to creating your business objectives message includes the following steps:

1. Identify corporate business initiatives

Many organizations ensure that everyone knows what their key business initiatives are, and why they are important. Some are very high level, while others are quite specific.

Here are some examples:
•    Become a global thought leader in our industry
•    Become the premiere place to work in our industry
•    Significantly differentiate our products and services in the marketplace
•    Increase global sales by 5% within one year
•    Double our company’s revenue within five years

2. Define the problem and risk

Describe how your organization’s prevailing individual and collaborative work behaviors fall short of supporting one or more initiatives. Include how these “broken” work behaviors can lead to unnecessary costs or missed business opportunities. Include descriptions of how existing individual productivity and collaborative software tools are used today, if your goal is to displace one or more existing tools.

Let’s take the business initiative, “Significantly differentiate our products and services in the marketplace” as an example. Asking some of the following questions might help you arrive at a definitive problem statement:

1. How do today’s collaborative work behaviors prevent organization-wide innovative thinking from happening? Are there silos of stale thinking?
2. How are successful product development and service refinement practices discovered and shared across your organization?
3. How is competitive product and service information surfaced and shared throughout your company?
4. How are emergent market opportunities surfaced and shared? Are customer-facing employees invited into product and service development discussions?
5. How do people discover and learn from one another’s different points of view and experiences when developing new products and services?

Here’s an example problem statement:

Locating experts and assets is difficult and a barrier to innovation and everyday problem solving. It is difficult to determine who has the skills or knowledge I can leverage, or where we have already done something before. There is too much “reinventing the wheel” happening across our organization. These pose a significant obstacle to delivering world-class consulting services to our clients.

Consider including a real anecdote that demonstrates the problem, especially if it highlights any incurred unnecessary costs or missed market opportunities.

3. Identify the possibilities

Next, explain how to positively change those work behaviors by making SBS available to your organization. This is your chance to write what one Jive customer calls a “future history.”

Here’s an example:

With a social business online environment, which is a single, easy-to-use collaboration, expertise discovery, and organizational awareness and networking environment, employees will be empowered to discover and collaborate with each other and with external partners securely and efficiently. Employees will find individuals based on their expertise, location, or content contributions, thereby increasing their organizational awareness - who exists, and who does what for our company. This will lead to more people discovering, learning from, and sharing with more people, which will result in better collaboration with more rightly-skilled teams, and provide a greater chance for more innovative thinking across the globe.

4. Identify the benefits

Now that the vision has been created, re-write the anecdote used to demonstrate the problem to show how the use of a social business environment could reduce unnecessary costs or identify and leverage market opportunities.

This re-written anecdote should become the model for capturing the eventual anecdotes participants will experience when using your social business environment. Real-world stories about cost savings and leveraged opportunities will provide the repeatable sound bites that executives can internalize and share across their own networks, inside and outside your organization.

Need more? Check out some of our case studies.

Here we go.

Jive Social Business Software (notice there’s no Clearspace in that phrase? Yep, it’s gone) is HERE, BABY! First, let’s understand what Jive is trying to do for the corporate world:

UPDATE: You can download this video as a .mov file and reuse.

If you got all teary-eyed when the the big “SOCIAL Again” showed up, totally ping me in Twitter. This is the whole reason I became a freakin’ Lotus Notes instructor and developer back in the mid-’90s. To make work SOCIAL again. And now, my personal revolution continues with the best social business software evar!

Ok. Now for some deets.

First, go sign up for our April 9th webinar to hear from our customers Nike, Cisco, and Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang. While you’re at it, sign up for the March 19 Jive SBS 3.0 demo.

What’s New?

Bridging (aka “How’s the weather outside?”)

Here’s something you haven’t seen before. What if your marketing peeps could log into their internal social environment, and see their colleagues’ stuff, PLUS - get this - see what’s going on in your external community? You know, the one where your customers are yapping about your products and services, or are talking about stuff you care about. Yep. That’s bridging. No need to log into multiple communities anymore.

Social Bookmarks (aka “Where was that again?”)

We have it now. Hooray! Oh, and in addition to the usual bookmarklet on your browser bar, we’ve made it stoopid-simple to bookmark Jive content. It’s in the Action Widget:

Video (aka “Your Own Built-In YouTube”)

You want to upload videos? Done. Are they stored in the Jive database? Nope. (We’re not that dumb, y’all.) Contact Jive for how to buy - you’ll love it, I promise.

Analytics (aka “What are people doing?”)

Oh, you want metrics? How about a huge data warehouse of captured user behavior? You’ll finally be able to see who is downloading what document how many times, who is connecting to whom (and who isn’t), and countless other points of data. We’ve kitted up the most common metrics into an Adoption Dashboard, tailored for community leaders so that they can answer that constant question, “how’s your community doing?” at a moment’s notice. And, you can export this stuff to Excel, Access, Cognos, Crystal Reports, Business Objects - whatever floats your reporting boat.

Insights (aka “What are people saying and feeling?”)

You want to know how your customers feel about your brand? Or maybe how your employees feel about your company’s latest benefits change? Then you’ll want to check out the new Jive 3.0 Insights module.

Custom Content Types (aka “You want fries with that?”)

And for you developer geeks out there, we’ve made it ridiculously easy now to create your own content types. You want to create a custom “Idea” content type? Do it. You want to add a custom photo content type? Do it.

What Else Is New?

We dropped “Clearspace” as a brand, and we’re leading the way in the new Social Business Software category with Jive SBS 3.0.

We’ve also kitted up our Foundation capabilities with one or more of the new Modules, plus professional services and strategic consulting (that would be where I fit in), into solutions that target specific business needs:

• Jive SBS for Employee Engagement
• Jive SBS for Marketing and Sales
• Jive SBS for Innovation
• Jive SBS for Support

I spend most of my time helping customers with Jive SBS for Employee Engagement, natch.

So, go try out Jive SBS 3.0 and let us know what you think. We’re listening.

Yes. I slay dragons for a living.

The biggest bummer, though, is that I can’t really share what I do anymore, because it’s such a competitive differentiator for us. But, our customers can share, and when they do, we freakin’ listen. You should, too.

How EMC Slayed Dragons

I’ve lost count of how many of my customers have circulated Chuck Hollis’ whitepaper about EMC’s lessons learned when they rolled out social business software. These 35 pages detail EMC’s journey through business justification, vendor selection, governance, design, rollout, adoption, communication, education, metrics, enterprise content management integration (they do, after all, have Documentum), and positioning with a slurry of other software solutions they’d already deployed.

Here’s a great snap of EMC|One, courtesy of Chuck’s blog post:

If you’re looking for something that gets everyone in your organization on the same page re: social business software, then please read and circulate this whitepaper.

And get ready to start slaying those business dragons.