How to successfully implement social software company-wide
In the post "Six Steps to Company-Wide Adoption", Michael Idinopulos at SocialText shares some advice about how to successfully implemend social software company-wide:
- Encourage a broad range of use cases. Different groups will find value in different ways: finding experts, managing projects, surfacing ideas from the field, communicating to staff, building social communities, monitoring competitors, staying in constant contact with customers, etc. Encourage the diversity, while looking for common patterns.
- Recruit energetic champions across the organization. It's very clear from the customer studies we've done that individuals play a major role in determining who adopts these tools and how. Enlisting energetic evangelists in their respective geographies and divisions is critical. You need both generalists who touch many different parts of the organization and specialists who can deliver deep penetration in local areas.
- Launch the tools with hands-on experiences for new users. Social software is fun...once you try it. Don't just show it to your company; create a moment that forces them to actually try it out. Use large-scale gatherings (physical and virtual) to pull in large numbers of people at once.
- Route repeated activities through social software. Use your social software to supplant email on routine information requests. Some of those activities should be common across the entire company, while others will be group-specific.
- Integrate with existing systems of record. Social software can be a great way to enhance CRM, document management, and other structured systems of record with more free-form context, conversation, ideation, and socialization.
- Leverage public communities. The Enterprise 2.0 world is changing fast, and your fellow practitioners are inventing new best practices every day. Use them!