To Ensure Enterprise Social Success, Start with a Purpose

Owyang, Altimeter Group's partner of Customer Strategy, and Sandy Carter, IBM's VP of Social Business and Collaboration Solutions, the two presenters in an excellent IBM webcast titled "Why Be Social?" One of my favorites was Carter's suggestion that organizations could lay the groundwork for external social initiatives by first using social technologies internally.

Sometimes such efforts spring forth more or less spontaneously. That seems to have been the experience of the American Automobile Association. As described in a New York Times article, "a small group of tech-savvy users" adopted microblogging tool Yammer to communicate and keep each other in the loop on projects. The tool really took off after AAA's chief operating officer gave it a shout-out at a town hall meeting, and now some 3,700 AAA employees use it.

The article mentions the streamlining of communications, which seems to be the primary benefit of internally-used social tools like Yammer:

... Some of those silos have broken down, and some of the more time-consuming committees have been dropped in favor of using Yammer, greatly speeding up the decision-making process in some areas.

Interestingly, one of Owyang's tips from the webcast involved the importance of sharing the right metrics with the right audience, with him noting that C-level executives care little for follower or fan numbers. Yet number of users is perhaps the most common cited metric for internal social initiatives. Perhaps that's because enhanced collaboration is often a key goal of those initiatives, and it's hard to derive much value from collaboration if no one is using the tools for it.

The article also contains some suggested best practices from AAA's social media strategist. One of them, which I've mentioned in some of my prior posts on social technologies, is to recruit super-users of tools and make them "active curators," making them responsible for guiding use of tools, ensuring conversations remain relevant and suggesting topics.

Oddly, another tip is to get the human resources, legal and IT departments on board with a tool before introducing it, something it doesn't sound like happened with the AAA's adoption of Yammer. This is important, in part, because random technology selection can create even more communications silos than existed before new tools were introduced.

Though many people seem to equate "social" with "spontaneous," (and spontaneous collaboration is a valid benefit of social technologies), I think organizations will derive more value from their social efforts if they use them to tackle business problems that benefit from enhanced collaboration, instead of just throwing them out there with no guidance.

Identifying such problems is the first of four key questions that must be addressed for internal social initiatives to succeed, writes Andy Jankowski on his Enterprise Strategies blog. The questions:

• What business problems could be solved through improved collaboration?
• Which business processes are involved in these problems?
• How can you change the way management and employees execute processes to address the problems?
• How will you educate and train management and employees on this new way of working?

About the training, Jankowski notes this doesn't mean simply teaching folks to perform a set of actions with a new tool. Instead, you must give users a concise understanding of problems. The tools are part of a framework for analyzing and solving those problems.

I suspect the use of tools like Yammer tend to become far less spontaneous as more employees adopt them. As proof, the final best practice mentioned by AAA's social media strategist in the New York Times article involves ensuring relevant information is stored and organized so users can locate it. AAA uses a rather unwieldy combination of monthly wrap-ups, newsletter overviews and summaries of Yammer conversations on the corporate intranet.