Rather than relying entirely on organic growth to ensure the success of an enterprise social network, the right initial planning goes a long way towards getting past initial networking barriers. While early adopters might shift their practices quite easily, your rollout must demonstrate a considerably higher value to the remaining users in order for them to change their established processes.
Widespread adoption is generally easier to achieve, especially where communication is relatively direct and processes are flexible. For larger enterprises, however, planned adoption can ensure that all teams are in position to take advantage of this new opportunity.
A planned rollout can leverage executive sponsors and team-level champions to push into the base of your organisation by enabling the most valuable use cases and give authority to the new tool. The project team can easily determine use cases and categorise them by their adoption stage, management buy-in and your supporting environment. For example:
– Is your goal to attack information silos through better information sharing? Then you should plan to bring in multiple teams into your pilot simultaneously.
– Is your goal to reduce the amount of time employees spend searching for information? Then your rollout should focus on enabling rapid access to information through email, mobile and desktop clients.
– Is your goal to reduce email load? Consider what existing email channels your new network can complement, expand on or replace. Migrating internal bulk email lists is often an easy step.
When compared to pure organic growth, a planned rollout is the fastest and most reliable way to boost participation out beyond the early adopters in a large organisation. Once the tipping point is reached, network effects enable a social network to leverage fixed, minimal efforts to drive ever-increasing adoption.
