Facebook is addictive, but what does it take to drive adoption of enterprise social software? In their research paper “Enterprise Social Software, Addressing Barriers to Adoption,” UC Berkeley students Michael Chung and Ayush Khanna explain what adoption strategies work. Each strategy is outlined below.
Find a champion – power user, evangelist – to drive broad acceptance of the tool
The champion must…
- Have a power of influence and see a business case for the tool;
- Be well-known and fairly senior;
- Already familiar with Facebook and other social tools helps;
- Be a natural “thought leader,” with a strong understanding of your business and an eagerness to generate conversation around it.
Define a specific use case
- Convince your employees, give them a “genuine reason” to use the product.
- Provide use cases that align with the corporate culture and priorities.
Find the right audience
Department: each department will have slight different needs for using a social tool. “It is very important to understand the context in which populations of users existed,” and pinpoint their exact needs to help them get started with the tool.
Age group: “age has a clear influence on the propensity to use social media.” It helps to introduce your social product to young workers, your new hires as part of the on-boarding process. Some organizations use a “reverse mentoring” process, where older employees learn they can provide knowledge more easily to younger generations by using technology the younger generation already understands.
Right culture: choose use cases that fit an organization’s culture and priorities.
Geography: “Organizations have different geographical distributions, and this played into their specific needs for Enterprise Social Software.” Use the social tool for cross-regional communication between distributed teams.
Bottom-up and top-down influence
- Enterprise social software is by nature bottom-up, but needs top-down executive support for it to succeed in the enterprise. Executives need to understand the benefits of the tool early on to help with overall adoption from their employees.
