Companies are beginning to discover that social technology platforms provide a far more efficient way of communicating and collaborating. And, they give companies a way to dig out the “dark matter” of company knowledge that is buried in email inboxes and on hard drives. Unlike email, messages on social platforms are accessible to the entire team in real time, eliminating all the to-ing and fro-ing to get everybody on the same page. Even better, on social platforms, communications become content — forming a searchable archive that can be continually enriched with comments and additions by members of the online community. So, when the expert in the group answers the question about how to account for depreciation in Turkey, everybody can see it or find it later.
We estimate that “interaction workers,” (managers, professionals, sales people, and others whose work requires frequent interpersonal interactions, independent judgment, and access to knowledge) spend 28% of their workdays answering, writing, or responding to email. They also spend another 19% of the time trying to track down information (including searching through their own e-mail files) and 14% collaborating with co-workers. (And these are your most expensive employees, and the ones you count on to do more than routine work; they’re supposed to be innovating, figuring out how to improve business processes, and generally building you a better mousetrap — not wading through e-mail.)
These activities could potentially be done much more efficiently and effectively using social technologies — we figure by 20-25%. This assumes, of course, that time saved by communicating and collaborating via social technology is not used for viewing videos of cute kittens, but is dedicated to the most productive uses.
Naturally, there is also a catch: to capture this value, companies will have to do a lot more than buy some enterprise social technology. To get the improvement in knowledge worker productivity, organizations need robust and widespread participation by all sorts of employees (you never know where that dark matter is hiding). Firstly, social technologies will only succeed if they become part of the daily workflow, not an extra item on a to-do list that will never get checked off. Sometimes this means the company’s workflows need to change, sometimes the social tools must be adapted to workflows, and in many cases, both workflows and technologies will have to be adjusted. For example, in one computer-generated animation company, social tools did not become commonly used until they allowed people to post and interact on video clips — the preferred medium for discussion.
Participation, in turn, depends on having an environment of openness, information sharing, and trust — the sort of culture that many organizations have not yet established. For this to happen, leaders must take the lead — after all, these are social technologies. Leaders will have to role model the use of these technologies, explain how to use them to drive value, observe success stories and help them to scale up to the rest of the enterprise. At the same time, these technologies are only as effective as the degree to which individuals participate, so lessons from consumer social applications can be applied in the enterprise. How do you create applications that are as compelling to corporate employees as they are to those same people in their personal lives? Techniques such as self-reinforcing behavior loops (e.g. gamification), A/B testing, and mobile deployment can be applied in the enterprise, just as they are used in the consumer space. But overall, changing mindsets, behaviors and a culture that celebrates and expects sharing and openness is a real organizational challenge.
Like the rising temperature of the water the proverbial frog is sitting in, organizations are feeling the social era all around them, but failing to notice how significant a change it has produced. Because it has shown up in bits and pieces, via freemium models, crowdsourcing, online communities, virtual workforces, social networks, and so on, it is easy to miss how much the overall context has changed for the way value is created.
You might notice that I have used the term social era. It’s not to create more jargon, it’s to emphasize a point: that social is more than the stuff the marketing team deals with. It’s something that allows organizations to do things entirely differently — if we let it become the backbone of our business models.
How does this work? What are the rules? What does it mean for all parts of my business? That’s something I will be exploring in several posts for HBR. Here, let me start with three major shifts that I see:
Lean, not big. Most organizations operating today started when companies needed more operating capital. Being big was in itself a mark of success. And in fact, being big created a natural barrier to entry for competitors. The “big” mindset continues to form an organizational framework for many institutions. Take banking as a visible example. Bank of America recently considered a $5 fee for customers to get their own money via their debit card because they have to find a way to fund all those retail storefronts. But if they were launching today, banks would likely ask themselves how to accomplish the transactions (deposits, withdrawals, financial management) of banking without the physical commitment of banks. They might try what ING is doing with its café model. They might even reimagine what it is to lend money. Instead of competing with new startups like Lending Club or ProFounder, they might be the ones reinventing the space.
Conversations, not chains. Many organizations still operate by Porter’s Value Chain model, where Z follows Y, which follows X. These linear models optimized efficient delivery of a known thing. But this doesn’t help us when faster, fluid responses are what we need. Fifteen years ago, The Cluetrain Manifesto taught us that markets are conversations and that was a great starting point. But “conversations” can actually go deeper if you allow them to become central to how you work, rather than leave them on the perimeter of the work. How many companies have figured out how to shift from supply chain management to integrating customer feedback directly into their product design, distribution, and delivery? Because that’s the point.
Mass markets were a convenient fiction created by mass media. Television and major magazines could only reach only very vague demographic segments like “women of child-bearing age” and “college students,” so a lot of organizations still think of that as “targeting” their offer. But real markets are much more precise.
Finding out where any particular customers hang out and talking with them directly is central to accurately understanding demand and building it into the business model. Case in point: Gap missed many of its performance numbers in 2011 by believing that their only interaction with their customers happened at the cash register.
Altimeter Report: Making The Business Case for Enterprise Social Networks
View more documents from Altimeter Group Network on SlideShareData HighlightsThe report also includes input from 13 technology providers, 185 end users, and surveyed 81 ESN decision makers from companies with over 250 employees (see below in Related Resources for links to the data). A few of the findings and graphics from the report are included below. There was only moderate impact on business goals. On a scale of 1 to 4, the highest impact seen – improving collaboration between departments/teams — scored only a 2.91 (see Figure 5 below).
There’s an adage that is old for the intranet age (since they came to be mainstream in the early 90s) that says you shouldn’t put anything on the intranet that you wouldn’t put in print. It relates to the older adage that you shouldn’t print anything that you wouldn’t want anyone outside the company to read.
Your content is valuable. You wouldn’t want to share most of it with the outside world – especially the competition or media. However, if you are making content available via the intranet then it is possible it can be leaked externally. The number one leaking culprit, of course, is the employee.
There are three general positions or models to adopt vis a vis content protection:
- Open market – publish just about anything you can on the corporate intranet.
- Closed market – put sever constraints on what can be published.
- Asynchronous market – a hybrid model that entrusts employees with a certain level of responsibility to maintain confidentiality.
My own personal opinion is that if you’ve hired and trusted an individual to do a job that the organization deems crucial enough to justify the pay then most individuals are trustworthy and not likely to leak confidential information to outside sources. On the other hand, I wouldn’t publish any corporate top secrets either. As such I recommend most companies adopt an asynchronous model that assumes a certain level of responsibility and trustworthiness of employees but does not make widely available all information and data to all employees.
Regardless, intranet and corporate information managers do have a responsibility to inform employees of their responsibility and to limit the organization’s liability. Such action includes the development of several policies:
- Editorial policy
- Terms of use
- Acceptable use
Editorial policy
Your editorial policy is less of a legal security blanket and more of a definition of roles and responsibilities of those developing and maintaining online content. The editorial policy should include details on…
- content types
- style acceptability
- news determinants (e.g. currency, impact, etc.)
- formatting
- archiving
- photo treatments and bylines
- content management system rules and directions
- copyright and legal
- privacy and security
- governance including roles and responsibilities
- taxonomy (classification)
- site registration and indexing
Terms of use
Terms of use is a standard legal disclaimer. It says who owns it and declares the copyright, disclaims accuracy of content, etc.
Acceptable use
Acceptable use spells out the rules. Thall shall not…
- Email content outside of the company.
- Print and distribute content outside of the company.
- Release content to any media outlet.
- Rewrite or reproduce content for personal purposes or profit without the expressed written consent of the company (legal department).
Page footers
If you’re not already doing so make sure you have coded into your style sheets or CMS templates a footer that always includes the following:
- A legal disclaimer
- Terms of use
- Copyright stamp
- Name and email address of author
- Date of publish
While clients have hired me to develop these policies and standards the work is not really rocket science. It just takes a little time and thought that could save your organization some headaches in the future.
Don’t believe the hype – there is no silver bullet for effective knowledge management.
Were you to believe the constant bombardment of sales brochures, pitches, presentations, articles and related ‘spin’ it would be easy to conclude that knowledge management (KM) is some form of technology – a combination of various hardware and software components. This is what the technology vendors would have corporate managers believe.
In truth, successful KM depends more on people and process than technology.
KM Defined
Based on common definitions that can vary slightly from one to the next, simply put, KM is how corporate knowledge – both tacit and explicit – is stored, retrieved and reused for achieving corporate objectives. Notice there is no direct reference to technology.
Effective knowledge management requires three key components:
- Participatory individuals – employees who are willing, able and active sharers of tacit knowledge.
- Process and rules – defined rules and standards (e.g. corporate taxonomy) for categorizing and storing information and knowledge.
- Technology – physical infrastructure including software that enables the above and allows for effective knowledge retrieval.
“To many organizations, implementing a knowledge management strategy can initially appear to be a daunting and overwhelming task,” writes Antony Satyadas, in “Growing with Knowledge Management” for Line 56. “Many questions must be addressed before users feel comfortable investing in a KM solution, including: Where do I begin? What technology do I need? How do I ensure the process is managed correctly? How do I measure the effectiveness of my knowledge management solution?”
Planning
Of course, any initiative needs a plan and defined goals and measurable expectations (outcomes) before any technologies should be evaluated, purchased or implemented. The priorities and expectations of internal managers, executives, and information workers need to be understood, documented and accounted and applied to best practices before any technology is considered. Once specific goals, standards, and roles are identified and documented, then technology and evaluation criteria can begin prior to solution evaluation and selection (see Pssst, wanna buy a CMS?).
Education and change management are also requisites to any KM plan. “It is important to remember that more than 50 percent of a KM solution is about change management and ensuring that your organization’s culture and behavior patterns are appropriately accounted for in the strategy,” says Satvadas, who carries the title of Knowledge Discovery Leader at Lotus.
Technology
I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard or read the phrase “effective knowledge management system.” I’ll bet you $1,000 that if you asked 10,000 communications, human resource or IT professionals you might find 10 or 20 that could accurately define “effective knowledge management system.”
The truth is there is no one technology or system. In fact, effective KM often requires multiple technologies working in tandem under a set of standards that could include one, many or all of the following:
- search engine
- corporate portal
- document management
- content management
- directory
- instant messaging
- personalization
- profiling
- e-learning
- web conferencing
- blog
- wiki
- etc.
After several months of planning and investigation, one client of mine (Prescient Digital Media), a major energy utility, selected a portal product that included a content management platform with personalization, discussion forums, search and other utilities to work hand-in-hand with a new document management solution to reduce the average time employees spent on searching for information (based on an employee study, the average time spent searching for information on the corporate information was 18-20 minutes per day per employee) to less than 10 minutes, and to reduce the maximum number of clicks to reaching retrieval online corporate information to three or less (95% of the time).
Measurable goals are requisite to any solid KM plan.
Return On Investment
Much to the potential joy of your CIO and CFO, the benefits of effective KM are indeed measurable in terms of dollars and cents. Measurable benefits (hard and soft) can include:
- Increased customer satisfaction (which directly correlates with sales revenue)
- Reduced IT help desk costs
- Reduced software maintenance costs
- Increased employee productivity (reduced searching time, etc.)
- Reduced meeting costs
- Reduced paper costs
- Reduced paper and software distribution costs
Halliburton is one of the world’s largest providers of products and services to the oil and gas industries and winner of the 2003 Extended Enterprise Innovator Award for developing an extensive collaborative portal that relies on integrated ERP functions to serve customers, suppliers and employees.
In its first year, the portal influenced $120 million in sales, according to customer surveys; improved corporate efficiencies to the tune of about $500,000 by enabling better access to technical documents; and led to reduced payment cycles. (Source: Beth Schultz, Network World, February 17, 2003)
Bottom Line
Effective KM requires a lot of work, intelligent thinking, rules and standards, advanced planning, and a supportive culture (including supportive executives) not too the appropriate tools and technology. There is no silver bullet. The bullet is made of wood and requires a lot of carving, moulding, care and hard work before it can be fired with a successful hit.
While most small business owners are starting to realize that social media is a necessary part of any marketing strategy, as a social media coach, the question I get most often is how to add social media to a day that is already way too full. For those of us working as solopreneurs or small business owners, it may, at times, feel like we are working virtually around the clock so when are we really supposed to tweet, post or blog?
I’ll admit creating a social media plan that will stick is like starting an exercise program. You just have to take that leap and do it. You need to look at it, not as a series of social media tasks that need to be done during the day, but more of a lifestyle change that you need to incorporate into your entire way of thinking.
5 tips to make the social media lifestyle change
- Coffee and Twitter: For most of us, a morning cup of coffee is sacred. Without one, our day cannot get off to a good start. Try to incorporate tweeting with your morning coffee, Instead of reading the newspaper, read your stream to find interesting articles to share with your followers. If you still need to read the paper, know that most publications these days are online and make sharing with your networks very easy. In addition to coffee first thing in the morning, take a moment or two to tweet during your mid-morning or mid-afternoon coffee break as well.
- Change the way you look at the world: Instead of walking through your day with blinders on, as most of us do, focused on the tasks we need to get done, try looking at the world with a different set of eyes. Examine everything — images, articles, conversations you have with co-workers — and use it as fodder for posts, blogs and tweets. This doesn’t mean that you need to be online all day, it just means changing the way you think to include a social media aspect to your day. Taking mental notes to save for your social media coffee breaks.
- Blog on the weekend: We all know that blogging for business is one of the most important factors to getting found online. It improves our SEO, increases our professional credibility and lets our audience know who we are and how we interact. Blogging can also be the most time consuming part of any social media plan. During your busy workday, as your taking in everything that is going on around you, take mental notes and save the blogging for the weekend when our schedule is more open. Most social dashboards will allow you to schedule posts to go live at a later time.
If you try to order these 12 activities then the sequential order would be:
1. Get an intranet sponsor
Their involvement can be crucial in helping you get things done or decisions made. They can act as your ally in giving clear and decisive intranet leadership. The intranet sponsor may also have a dual role and also be a key stakeholder.
2. Define SMART objectives for the intranet
Ask and answer the questions – “Why is the intranet there?” and “How will we know if the intranet is a success?” This can be done in discussion with the sponsor and in conjunction with the stakeholders, but it shouldn’t be a once and for all activity. There is benefit in revisiting and refining the objectives, particularly after concluding the activities undertaken in step 3 and 4.
3. Observe end users
In the belief that an essential intranet is a key working tool it has to be of use and benefit to end users. To that end you need to be aware of how people across the organisation work. What are their daily tasks, what information do they need to help them make decisions and how do they source it. While surveys can help this, it is only through heuristic observation that you get a clear picture.
4. Determine user expectations
While getting this information you will offer no guarantee of everything being delivered but it will help you uncover the “must have” elements as well as the “would like to have” ones. It can help you make decisions on what features and content should be prioritised for the intranet launch, and what can follow on as part of the intranet evolution (see step 12)
5. Compile content inventory
Having observed and interviewed users as the information and task expectations you can list the content you currently have and assess what content needs to be on the new intranet. Is current content fit for purpose, is it accurate, relevant and valued? As a rough guide it is not uncommon to cull 25% of existing.
6. Promote the intranet
In fact this is something that has already began, as during steps 3 and 4; observation and interviews you will have mentioned the new intranet and hopefully begun to enthuse people that something better is coming. As well as word of mouth and informal promotion it can also be the first marketing activity. A teaser campaign to build anticipation for the new intranet could be one of the first obvious marketing activities for the new intranet. It could be focused around a naming competition (see step 10.)
Quite simply, our workspaces will have to change to digital workspaces. And only a few companies like Microsoft and IBM are talking about this. What I’ve seen in my research with executives and MTC Directors is that the world is moving faster, product cycles are shorter, and yet the workplace is still built for slower moving organizations. I can say with confidence that the workplace has to change dramatically in order to remain effective.
Here are 10 reasons why:
1. We’re going to be measuring emotional IQ in the workplace:
Happiness and sentiment for the enterprise? Sounds sappy right? But it’s going to happen. There are companies working on this now -because you get what you measure. And if you measure employee happiness to changes in their work and physical environments, management can make the necessary changes to increase productivity. Using the data, ethical leaders will rebalance the work environment to support greater collaboration, serendipitous encounters, informal knowledge flows and more profit.
Environmental Changes Needed- Sensors in the workplace that measure how people are using spaces and infrequently query employees on sentiment for a given topic.2. The right information will find us:
The user interface of the workplace is a major inhibitor to growth. Because people are not working on the most important things at the optimal time with the optimal people that can solve the problem. Why? Because we don’t know – what we need to know – unless we know to search for it. But information in the future will find us by checking our calendar for meetings and people, looking at our activity streams for trends, and studying the rest of the organization for information and people that may be important to our job.
Technological Changes- Big Data will become Smart Data and all of that information being aggregated by social platforms (SharePoint, Connections, Yammer, etc.), email (harmon.ie, Gmail, etc.), sensors in the workplace and mobile devices will soon be used to increase workforce effectiveness.3. The workplace will reinforce corporate goals and strategy:
Based on a recent study by Chris Zook of Bain, only 40% of the workforce knew about the corporation’s goals, strategies and tactics. Imagine if you had a football team, where only 4 in 10 knew what the game plan was. A physical environment that reinforces strategies and tactics and prioritizes them is paramount.
Environmental Changes- Using Smart Data analytics, digital screens and surfaces in the work environment will automatically display goals and strategies in the context of a meeting. Changes to strategy will automatically be sent to an affected employee’s mobile device in order to reduce inefficiencies.4. Employees will provide vastly higher levels of real time feedback:
Command and control management models will disappear over time. Employees will gain the ability to provide real time feedback to management through social platforms, mobile devices and automatically through their digital behavior (Smart Data will capture this). These feedback mechanisms will be built right into their work flow processes. Management will use that feedback to become more agile and adaptive to changing market conditions.
Cultural Changes– Management will encourage employees to provide consistent and relevant feedback on projects, customers and the organization’s strategy and tactics.5. Mobile devices will interact with our physical environments:
Why is it that we still can’t capture and interact with notes produced in our physical environments? Sure we can snap a picture of a whiteboard, but the picture doesn’t understand the contents of the whiteboard. That’s going to change. Harald Becker, who leads business strategy for Microsoft Office Labs showed me how mobile devices are interacting with smart boards and screens placed around a room. The technology enables bi-directional content sharing from screen to mobile devices with the press of a button. This will enable far greater collaboration and information capture for both manager and employee.
Environmental Changes- Digital smart boards and screens will need to be placed around the workplace. Mobile apps will need to be downloaded in order to interact with them.
A great report out this week from Ipsos-Reid reveals that Canada continues to be a world leader with a highly connected population – right up there with the Scandanavian countries, the United States, Korea and Hong Kong (did you know in a study of e-business readiness conducted by IBM and the Economist, Azerbaijan ranked 50th out of all countries? Who knew?!?!).
73% of Canadians are now connected to the Internet; 62% of households have high-speed access. Similar numbers are reported from the other leading countries.
What does this have to do with the intranet? Glad you asked…
A vast majority of organizations still only extend intranet access to a percentage of their employees. It often ranges from 33% to 75% of employees have access. With some exceptions (Cisco, IBM, Xerox and some other financially strong, leading-edge appreciators of technology), this is largely due to the fact that many, many employees, in most industries, do not have or work with a computer. In most organizations, no computer = no intranet access.
While some companies, particularly in the manufacturing sector, have established intranet stations or kiosks for employees without computers, the success of joint or shared workstations and kiosks have largely been lackluster. (One exception is Dutch Railway company NedTrain with an employee workforce of 4,000, the majority of which do not have dedicated computers. Despite the limited computer access, the company encourages employees to use centrally located touch-screen kiosks to access the intranet. The result: an astounding 2.5 million quarterly visits – or 200 intranet visits per employee per month).
Given the cost and cultural challenges of extending access to employees who don’t have computers some companies are extending intranet access to the employee at home (many companies offer home intranet access via a VPN or dedicated or password protected connection but often this privilege is only extended to executives and middle managers).
Others like Alaska Airlines have put their intranet on the public Internet – that’s right, a .com site on the Internet! Knowing that most of their employees work ‘on the road’ they got smart and put it on the public Internet (of course, secure areas are password protected and reside behind their firewall).
“…in the end, management doesn’t change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.”
— Lou Gerstner, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?
In a word, the role of the On Demand Workplace in IBM’s strategy is to be the vehicle through which workforce transformation takes place — to turn the IBM brand and values into enterprise-wide behaviour.
At the simplest level, the On Demand Workplace’s “work product” is a productive individual – where “productive” means not just cheaper and faster, but more creative, imaginative, independent, collaborative and opportunistic. We have to create a “horizontal” experience in which employees, wherever they sit, are free to collaborate, decide and act – and in which this vast, interconnected global business ecosystem operates in a way that makes it feel small.
For IBM, key to getting there will be an On Demand Workplace that provides:
- Content management and information architecture (IA) that are holistic, that organises the company without regard to geo or division or brand. (see also Guest Speaker piece by Sarah Goldman for more on IA)
- Instantaneous contact among people without regard to organisation, rank, profession or physical location. (see also Guest Speaker piece by Kristine Lawas for more on online, global collaboration)
- Common set of tools, applications and processes that are integrated end-to-end and that work automatically and ad hoc with one another.
- System that makes possible virtual team formation and marshalling of resources from around the world – all on demand.
In that spirit of where we need to go – w3 On Demand Workplace (w3 ODW) continues to evolve from it’s legacy role as our corporate intranet to a modern on demand workplace helping IBM employees be more productive by providing a single point of entry for the content and resources they need to do their work. “My ODW” today provides the capability to offer an employee a rich and personalised experience ranging from the content and tools presented for All IBM to know and use to the industry-specific content a seller needs in a specific geography or country in local language.
Over the past ten years content and sites has increasingly been converted to “look alike” from a design and standards perspective, but the problem has remained that the content has been generated by organisational silo – so in many cases – particularly for our sales force – the content not only looked alike it was alike! The only difference being the source of publication, e.g., brand, unit, corporate function.
Today, over 70% (i.e., 251,000) of IBMers have completed their w3 ODW profile and thus ready and willing to have timely, relevant content pushed to the array of portlets across all three tabs to help them manage their career, their clients and their life. The main challenges we face today are two-fold.
First, organising the delivery of content into a simple, integrated view that leverages the power of w3 ODW up-front and quickly directs employees to consolidated sites and resources as needed or required across the rest of IBM’s intranet.
Second, changing the mind-set of content creators and publishers world-wide to understand that the content is the valuable item to the end-user not the piece of real-estate they have created to wrap-around the information.
Through the creation of roadmaps to address integration from the end user perspective – this means the concern is how information is perceived by employees within the context of w3 ODW, rather than how information is most efficiently stored or manipulated within a given IT infrastructure – to developing compelling business cases demonstrating “value” tailored to the audience, i.e., employees, content authors, site owners and senior executives, we have are well poised to evolve.
What the On Demand Workplace will offer, for the first time, is an enterprise platform and management system adequate to the complexity and variety of our actual experience – something that can turn IBM’s size and breadth into assets, rather than obstacles. For IBM, “the way we do things around here” in the future will mean, to a very large degree, “the way we do things in w3.”
By Liam J. Cleaver, w3 On Demand Workplace, IBM’s Corporate Intranet
Intranet professionals are often plagued with the question of how to create a uniform user experience that is not only intelligent, but also meaningful for all users. While an intranet’s visual experience must be well organized, user tested and user accepted before it is deployed, so must the language and vocabulary you use to describe people and content. One way of ensuring the language your intranet uses is to create an enterprise taxonomy.
3 biggest challenges to implementing enterprise taxonomy:
1. User acceptance – constantly reviewing with users and implementing formal user-testing design standards
2. Integration – with other controlled vocabularies and their management
3. Subset management – delivering personalized versions of enterprise taxonomy to all end-users/applications
IBM’s intranet personalization experience is driven by our enterprise taxonomy. The enterprise taxonomy serves, first, as a dictionary of preferred terminology that can be created or adapted for the business environment; second, as a structured hierarchy of relationships of terms and concepts to support the businesses information needs; and, third, as a navigational aid for classifying people and content.
IBM’s personalization uses a common profile, which is made up of multiple taxonomies and controlled vocabularies. Librarians describe the technique of using multiple taxonomies and controlled vocabularies for classification as a faceted scheme: Parallel controlled vocabularies that create both a broad and deep classification system. IBM uses a faceted scheme so users can select multiple attributes, which enables users to describe their work environment, their knowledge and their interests. Based on the user’s profile selections, content is delivered to the appropriate profiles because the content has been organized by a rules based classification system using all of the taxonomies and controlled vocabularies.
The goal to create a usable intranet is to understand your user’s needs, build a system around user’s requirements and deliver what user’s need in a consistent and well-organized way. By using the controlled vocabularies for personalization applications, an organization will create a more uniform and meaningful personalization process.
Tips for how to create a controlled vocabulary in a global company:
1. Ensure you have the correct skills, experience and expertise on your taxonomy team
2. Ensure that the change management process and cycle (updates) is published and communicated to all stakeholders
3. Involve users and stakeholders from the beginning
4. Create rules before you build structures
5. Listen to your users
1. Social business is a journey not a destination. There is no short cut to social business easy street or a magic pill that can get you there over night, with no effort. Embrace the journey.
2. Social business is still being defined. If you want a text book definition, roadmap and 3-day succinct course on how to be a social business, it may be awhile before you find it. The social ecosystem is still evolving and even those living, breathing and sleeping this stuff are still figuring out exactly what it means to us, what and how we integrate. Check out this post “Definition of Social Business?” where I take a stab at a definition for social business.
3. Thinking is a requirement, not an option. Nope, you can’t throw the action of “get social” at the new intern and expect exponential results. Best thing you can do is roll up your sleeves and get ready to work.
4. Social media is not just about you. Think teams and community, not silos, interruption marketing and spam coupons.
5. Perfection is enemy of good. If you wait until everything is perfect, chances are you’ll be waiting a long time.
6. Change is guaranteed. There is only one guarantee with social media and that is change. Just as you learn a new tool or technology, it is bound to change. Accept it and know you’ll be in a constant state of learning and growing. It’s alright as we’re all right there with ya’!
One of the keys to success for retailers such as Dell and Wal-Mart is inventory control. Knowing what inventory or products they have, how much of it, and how it relates to customer demand (e.g. what are they buys, when will it run out, how much do we need to order).
Your intranet or website offers a product: content (either static, dynamic or in the form of a tool or application). And content remains king. It is the most valuable thing you offer your employees or readers. But do you know the state of your content? Is it up to date? Who owns it? How much do you have?
Dell and Wal-Mart offer a practical lesson for the world of intranet: success is partly predicated on knowing what you have.
The challenge is volume. If your intranet is like most, then your intranet portal and/or sites have a lot of content. It’s rare that I work with a client intranet that has less than 100 – 500 pages of intranet content per employee. IBM has more than 10 million known pages (more than 300 pages per employee).
While knowing what you have is important it can be time consuming but highly worthwhile for a number of reasons:
- business continuity – ensuring employees have the right information to do their job
- cost efficiency – stale or wrong information or data can be eliminated
- employee productivity – maintaining and prioritizing information so that the most valued and used information is easily retrieved
- business priorities – determine what content and information is needed to drive an effective business
“Intranets grow and become more content heavy, ownership moves from one department to another, and business processes as well as their user base will change throughout content’s lifecycle,” writes Paul Chin, an intranet consultant and writer, in Taking Stock: Intranet Content Audits. “Over time, content that goes unchecked can be lost, forgotten, or even become a burden on the system. It can be relegated to the darkest recesses of the system never to be seen again.”
Undertaking the audit is the most time-consuming task. We often recommend that a client use a web analytics tool such as WebTrends to identify all the pages and content on the various intranet servers and then visit each one-by-one to identify:
- content type
- content relevancy
- date of publish
- owner/author
- status: save it, update it, or delete it
One client of ours at a 750 person company used two summer students armed with a browser and an MS-Excel spreadsheet to track and document all 10,000 pages on their intranet. It took them one month and a half to document all 10,000 pages (about 3,000 pages per auditer per month). The good news was they identified all the content and found that only 4,000 of the 10,000 pages were of any value. In one full swoop they wiped out 6,000 pages which saved them a lot of server space and maintenance costs not to mention helped preserve business continuity and accuracy of information.
Content is king therefore it needs care and pampering.
1. Assess
- Prioritize your business objectives by determining what it is you are trying to achieve: employee retention, boost collaboration, enhance executive visibility, increase speed to innovation or turn your employees into powerful brand ambassadors.
- Map your communication by analyzing your current information flow and determining how employees engage your intranet or social media tools.
- Determine what your ideal social media ecosystem would look like. What cultural differentiators are you hoping to foster?
2. Align for Design
- Assess your perceived issues and actual limitations by balancing potential risks against projected gains in productivity, collaboration and innovation.
- Develop solid company guidelines for social media use and use metrics to measure how well your engagement
tools are working.- Align and train your leadership and get senior management buy-in to create a social networking mindset across business functions.
3. Implement
- Identify the most effective tools for your needs—from wikis and microblogs to robust knowledge-sharing and innovation platforms.
- Work closely with your IT teams to ensure your efforts are compliant with all internal rules, standards and architectures.
Many enterprises are understanding the value of social media to better engage and retain customers, to attract prospects, make sales, help customers solve problems: Social Business – Outside. But it seems to be much harder for enterprises to understand social on the inside and why that matters. Enterprises must come to understand that social on the outside won’t be substantially achieved – let alone sustained – if social on the inside isn’t working.
Social on the inside pertains to all company teams that touch customers, prospects, partners, and suppliers – basically the vast majority of the company. The commitment, usage and value of social on the inside and the outside must be real – employees, partners, customers will quickly figure out if a company is faking it. With healthy social practices inside a company, the support and growth of social for any interactions involving the enterprise human ecosystem – inside and out – should then be a natural and vital part of overall company strategy.
Here are the big questions:
- Can the enterprises that need to, change quickly enough to re-humanize?
- More importantly, will enterprises even choose to change?
This change – understanding and nurturing the value of all the people in the enterprise ecosystem – impacts how the company operates internally, how it does business externally, how the company effectively engages the human ecosystem that is truly needed for the company to survive as a successful business – inside and out.
From this change comes these rewards: big impact on continuous innovation / relevant product development, drawing the best out of employees, collaborating with customers and partners on future direction and products, listening to all of the people in the enterprise ecosystem to draw on their experiences and expertise for building and sustaining competitive edge >> all contributing to the success and relevance of company.
The strategic decision to become the social business has to come from upper management and boards of directors – it has to be a key aspect of the enterprise – or it won’t happen in any significant or sustained fashion. When an enterprise chooses to become a “social business”, the divide between social-inside and social-outside should blur as more and more as silos within the enterprise hopefully disappear, and as bi-directional connections to customers and prospects, partners and suppliers become more authentic and more immediate
The wiki is one of the most useful applications in an intranet. It’s certainly one of the most popular applications among Noodle users. And why not? It’s easy, it’s fast, it’s accessible anywhere. Wikis can be edited on the fly, and the more users are given access to create and edit them, the more collaboration can occur.
Organizations are using intranet wikis to document and share knowledge, promote collaboration, and even enhance learning. Below are 25 specific ways you can use wikis in your intranet:
1. Project Management
Create a wiki for a project or special event, and put everything in it: timeline, tasks, notes, progress reports, lists of vendors, images, videos, and everything else that will be needed for it. Those who are involved in the project need to go to just one place on the intranet to find whatever is relevant to that project.
2. Collaborative Documents
Working on an article or report together? Create a wiki where the different authors can directly input their contributions. This eliminates the email ping-pong of drafts that people eventually lose track of anyway.
3. Brainstorming
Need ideas to cut down on the use of paper in the office? Create a wiki where everyone can post their suggestions. Make it judgement-free, so everyone will feel safe to contribute.
4. FAQs
Capture frequently-asked-questions in a wiki. Employees can add, develop, and expand on the answers.
5. Glossary
If you use many acronyms and technical terms at work, a glossary wiki is a good way to put all definitions in a centralized place. Employees can contribute their own definitions. You never know which version will resonate best with each employee.
Here are 10 key actions to transform employees into ambassadors:
- Ditch social media guidelines for social media training – The internet changes everyday and with it, the norms, behaviors and destinations an ambassador must pay attention to. Static guidelines leave ambassadors with instructions that expire and little direction. The journey from employee to ambassador includes more than a set of rules, it includes the acquisition of skills. Those skills can only come from experience and training.
- Use game mechanics to incentivize participation – Building an organic audience is a long-term commitment. Not every ambassador will be energized by the prospect of daily production, reading, sharing and networking. To maintain momentum, break-down responsibilities into discrete and categorized actions. Weight each action by expected effort and reward accordingly. Make it all add up. Give ambassadors a set of quests that allow them to qualify for a particular specialty — set up a profile, make your first connection, unlock your newbie status. Design digital tools that monitor activities and allow constant feedback.
- Limit your audience to interest groups – The ‘mass web’ is an extremely competitive environment where the latest gossip, extraordinary news events and cat videos fight for attention. The size of the potential audience is huge, but the chance of being drowned out is even larger. Avoid irrelevance by engaging with interest groups. Focus on becoming a valued member of the community, not just a sponsor of it.
- Don’t get caught up in audience size – 100 good friends online can often trump 100,000 acquaintances, especially if those 100 friends are well connected. With a smaller network, the content that you produce and things you have to say become more focused. That focus improves the likelihood of engagement and strong referral. Good friends don’t just ‘pass things along’, they advocate for their circle of friends.
- Choose your speciality – There are many ways to become prominent online. Brands become obsessed with leading conversations and taking the authoritative role. But, not every brand has the qualities to lead audiences like a Seth Godin or Steven Colbert. There are other specialities. For example, Jason Kottke has won the attention of a large audience by exploring the fringe of internet and sharing links that would otherwise remain hidden. It’s not about what he says but, about what he finds.
You must decide – as an organization and as an individual team leader – what spirit you intend to convey with the participation of your employees in social media.
If your intention is for them to be simply mechanical amplification vehicles for a very carefully crafted marketing message, that can work. You’ll likely see some results in terms of absolute reach and volume of short-term message resonance. You will sacrifice a degree of credibility on behalf of your individual representatives and personality and genuineness on behalf of your brand in favor of a consistent, safe(-r) message. You will also likely sacrifice culturally, since your employees will realize they’re part of a marketing machine, not someone who is entrusted to help build and shape a brand.
If your intention is for employees to become individual voices for your organization and unique representatives of your company’s values, personality and diversity, that can work too. You’ll likely see results in terms of trust and affinity for your brand as well as better identification of your advocates, both internal and external. You will sacrifice a certain amount of stability and potential consistency of message in favor of communications that are more unique and individual. You’ll also sacrifice some predictability around outcomes and need to rely on strong education and culture initiatives to guide your teams and hone their own sense of good judgment.
The bottom line: governance and guidance is important. But it’s a means to more scalable social media, not the end.
We’ve said many times here — and will continue to — that social business transformation is far more cultural than it is operational. Getting your employees involved is no different, and your policies and guidelines need to consider not just what you don’t want to happen, but instead what values, vision and intent you want your teams’ social media participation to convey.
INTEL
Always pause and think before posting. That said, reply to comments in a timely manner, when a response is appropriate. But if it gives you pause, pause. If you’re about to publish something that makes you even the slightest bit uncomfortable, don’t shrug it off and hit ‘send.’ Take a minute to review these guidelines and try to figure out what’s bothering you, then fix it. If you’re still unsure, you might want to discuss it with your manager or legal representative. Ultimately, what you publish is yours – as is the responsibility. So be sure.
Perception is reality. In online social networks, the lines between public and private, personal and professional are blurred. Just by identifying yourself as an Intel employee, you are creating perceptions about your expertise and about Intel by our shareholders, customers, and the general public-and perceptions about you by your colleagues and managers. Do us all proud. Be sure that all content associated with you is consistent with your work and with Intel’s values and professional standards.
It’s a conversation. Talk to your readers like you would talk to real people in professional situations. In other words, avoid overly pedantic or “composed” language. Don’t be afraid to bring in your own personality and say what’s on your mind. Consider content that’s open-ended and invites response. Encourage comments. You can also broaden the conversation by citing others who are blogging about the same topic and allowing your content to be shared or syndicated.
If you’re hoping for your latest content to go viral, it has to do one thing: evoke strong emotion. Key word there is “strong”. If someone lightly laughs at something, or is slightly inspired, that doesn’t make them jump to the “share” button. It has to be to the level of awesome. Awesomely funny, upsetting, uplifting, offensive, whatever the emotion is–it has to hit it hard. P&G’s Olympics ad is doing that–to the tune of 5.4 million views. Your latest blog post on why you like your company’s product isn’t doing that.
If you hit one or more of those emotions, that’s when the spread starts. The key to long-lasting viral is to reach the Third Circle.
In the middle is you or your brand. When you push out content, it always hits a good percentage of your First Circle. That’s your brand fans on Facebook, your followers on Twitter, the creepy people still on MySpace. It can also be personal friends and family. A percentage of those in the First Circle will always share your stuff for a multitude of reasons. They know you, so there is more reason to find an inside joke funny, they think you’re attractive (that’s a hot logo you got there!) so they always “Like” whatever you share. That means your content can always easily reach the Second Circle. It’s getting the content to spread past that circle that is the difference between viral and spiral.
That Second Circle have little to no brand attachment or relationship to you. They will spread the content based on its own content merits. Once they start sharing it with no brand umbilical cord attached, you know you’ve got a good one on your hands.
Companies cannot survive (let alone prosper) without recognizing that Social as a phenomenon can allow us to redefine our organizations to be inherently more fast fluid and flexible by its very design. Not by doing a little bit more, or slimming down a bit here or there, or by doing a few things a little bit faster. No. We will not tweak our way into the future.
Today, too many organizations that think their status as an “800-pound gorilla” gives them an edge are struggling to survive, let alone thrive. They underestimate social to their great detriment. They see it as the purview of two functions: marketing and service. It’s either “Like us on Facebook!” or “We’re so sorry you’re having a problem.” While a few have figured out that they can use social to listen to the market — sort of like putting a stethoscope to the market heartbeat — they have yet to figure out there is more to this Social thing.
So before we can explore the Social Era, we need to disaggregate two words — social is not always attached to the word media. Social can be and is more than marketing or communications-related work.
When we look at all the parts together, we can see how Social affects all parts of the business model: the way an organization creates, delivers, and captures value. They also shift the ethos by which we lead and work.