I’ve met with many organizations around the world that are rolling out social software to their employees, and in almost every meeting the topic of adoption best practices comes up. People buying social software want to make sure their employees will use it. They want to understand the best way to phase-in enterprise social networking and work with employees to post and share information.
These questions are logical because they are almost always coming from their past experiences with existing portals and intranets that may not have had the ROI and usage expected of them. Therefore, many prospective buyers of Enterprise Social tools want to really map out adoption best practices, with a heavy emphasis on driving people to actively participate, and measure and track that activity, i.e. posting messages. While I agree that tracking and driving activity is important, I think there is a fundamental flaw with this as the basis for whether a company should invest in an Enterprise Social Application. Here is what I mean. No matter how much time you give it, or the strategies you put in place, an organization will usually not get more than 80% of their employees regularly posting on their enterprise social network. I would argue that the number of people positing shouldn’t even be a metric by which you measure success for your social solution. Unlike many intranets where the information is static or out of date, the true value of enterprise social comes from having your entire company engaged in real-time collaboration anywhere they happen to be.
The reason I am making the point that working towards getting everyone to post isn’t critical is because oftentimes user engagement can be a passive thing. Of course people who share their knowledge and experiences by posting are critical, but a passive user who is quickly and easily engaged through social business gets tremendous value out of the platform even if they don’t post. Right now, most people in a company are only engaged with the people immediately around them or on their team. So even if only 50% of employees regularly post, the rest of your colleagues will get substantial value on all the information made available to them. Product Teams can post research documents and marketing collateral, HR can post updated safety guidelines, sales executives from across the world can share private updates on contracts, and a colleague on the manufacturing assembly-line floor shares an idea for how to do something better. Having this information come to you the instant it’s posted so you can review, act, or collaborate on it is critical to the company.
An enterprise social solution is the most modern and effective way to utilize our employees’ individual knowledge, experience, and ambition for higher job satisfaction, quality, and efficiency. I would argue that because of the low cost and time to market of social solutions like tibbr, an adoption strategy shouldn’t be about phasing it in to drive activity, but rather that it needs to start with a plan to get everyone engaged with one another to truly leverage your most important asset: your employees.
