The Adoption Blindspot

You probably hear people talk about deploying a social business solution in your organization as a journey.  I'm one of those people.  Deploying social in your organization is not a quick trip to grandmother's house rather it's going on the road to follow Phish.  There are stops along the way, it never really ends, sometimes it's smelly, but it's all worth it for the shared brilliance.
 
Anyhoodle, you are on this journey and at some point you or someone above you (like the person who ponied up the resources for the project) want to know how you are doing.  The easiest number to quote is an adoption rate.  Here there be dragons.  Adoption for adoption's sake should not be your success measure.  The usage statistics that tend to fall under adoption, like # posts, unique visitors, # comments, and all of those relatively easy statistics to pull (and so the most often used when a sponsor asks about progress) don't matter in the end.  90% adoption doesn't mean anything in the end if all everyone is doing is participating in a ballroom dancing community.  (Granted if your only business goal is adoption then that number does matter, but I have yet to run into a large corporation whose only business goal is employee engagement.)


 
Usage statistics and adoption numbers are signposts along the journey.  They can help you understand if you are still headed in the right direction.  They should never be your end goal.  When your fundor asks 12 months later for the results of deploying social business in your organization, she will want to know results against real business KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).  How has the company benefited as a result of its investment?  The McKinsey Group provides a great starting point for you.  Every year for the last few years they have surveyed companies that have deployed social business tools within their organizations and shared the business results these organizations are seeing.*  These results include:

• Increased speed of access to knowledge
• Reduced communications costs
• Increased speed of access to experts
• Decreased travel costs
• Increased employee satisfaction
• Reduced operational costs
• Reduced time to market for products / services
• Increased number of successful innovations for new products / services
• Increased revenue

If you set your specific end goals in the beginning, based on these types of business KPIs, it helps set the direction of your journey and set measurement baselines.  Of course adoption is important - if no one uses your new solution you won't hit your business goals.  Just don't get stuck focusing only on adoption - it will sit there in your blind spot and get in the way when you need to be more agile in order to hit your end goals.
 
What sort of KPIs are you measuring in your organization?
 
 
*The McKinsey Global Institute published a great paper last year that does a bit of a recap from the last few years of data from this annual survey.  You can check it out here.

The Importance of Education for Social Business Success

Education (formerly known as training) is an important piece to any internal Social Business adoption strategy.  I say “formerly known as training” for a couple of reasons.  One is that is the word "training" conjures up negative images of people sitting through hours of classroom sessions.  The second reason is that training has received a bad rap in the social business world. 

 

There's a philosophy that a good social business solution should be so intuitive, like it is in the consumer world, that training isn’t necessary.  I don’t completely agree with that philosophy.  First of all, consumer social media tools aren't as intuitive as people who have been using them for a while think they are.  I consider myself savvy but when I first started using Twitter I had to actively search out what RT, FF and hashtags were.  (As you can see in my very first tweet here, I hadn't figured those things out yet.)

 

 

 

 

Secondly, there's a large percentage of the user base in every one of the F500 companies I've worked with over the last 6 years that has never used any of the consumer Web 2.0 tools.  That means many of the concepts behind communities, microblogging, activity streams, ideation, etc., are completely new to them.  That segment of your audience needs to learn the concepts before they can figure out an intuitive interface.

 

More important beyond the concepts and clicks is the WHY.  If I work in sales WHY would I care to change the way I work to start using this new collaboration platform?  If I work in R&D how does it benefit me to start following another researcher in my organization that I’ve never met before?  Sell me before you tell me.  If you don’t get buy-in from your end-users before you show them a few things about where to click they will never use your system (except for your early-adopters).

 

I’ve found four main types of education to be important:

1. At the launch of your new platform.  It's a no-brainer to promote your new platform and educate people on what they can do with it and why they should care.  (I'm not talking about long, intensive classroom training sessions.  These can be voluntary townhalls, short videos, webinars, hand-outs, staffed tables in the cafeteria - whatever channels work best for your organization.)
2. 1x1 hands-on-sessions for executives.  Enable your executives to lead by example.  Admit it or not some of them may be intimidated by the new tools or may not understand the benefits of the new platform.  And they don't have time to figure it out on their own.  The more leaders with whom you can spend just 30 minutes, the more quickly they can start engaging and seeing business value. 
3. On-boarding.  As you bring new employees into the organization don’t forget to educate them about this great resource you are providing to them.  I prefer to have the hiring manager take the employee on a quick tour of the platform from that job role's perspective.  If the hiring managers can't fit this in then getting a script into the onboarding team's hands is important.  Either way getting a tour of the social platform incorporated into the onboarding process gets the new employees onboarded into the company culture and accessing company resources much more quickly than otherwise.
4. Ongoing as you iterate.  Both the beauty and a sometime challenge of a social business platform is you are never completely done with implementation.   You will regularly be adding to and refining your social business platform based on new capabilities, business needs, and employee feedback.  As you iterate, educate your users on what’s available to them and how they might make use of it.  HOW to use it might be obvious but WHY they should use it might not be.

 

Lastly, this isn’t a formal education initiative and so I’m not including it in my list of three, but make it easy for employees to share their successes.  Let them educate each other about new ways they’ve found to use the platform to save time, find info, innovate, etc.  Peers trust peers (look at Yelp) and so they may be more likely to try something recommended by a peer rather than by their managers or IT.

A little education about what’s in it for them can go a long way to driving adoption of Social Business within your organization.

 

Which educational methods have you found to be most successful in your social business initiatives?

 

 

P.S.  And since I'm talking about Education and not Training - I didn't list out important items like ongoing training for Community Managers, Help Desk, etc., that take a more formal, deeper functional dive, which I still categorize as Training.  I'm splitting hairs, I know. :)

Everyday Social Business

I work with customers every day who want to know how to roll out a social business solution within their organizations to improve internal communications, collaboration, and innovation.  They usually have the technical portion covered but the business aspect is new.  Even if they have Organizational Change Management expertise in-house there are aspects to social that go beyond traditional OCM.  These customers want to know what other companies have done and they want to be told exactly which steps to take.  There is a lot of great information out there - more and more every day.  What I've found in the six+ years since I've focused solely on social business is, there are a lot of 10,000 foot view conversations about what social business is, but not a lot of people talking about how to make it happen effectively. 

 

That "in the trenches" perspective is important because what I hear from my customers every day is they don’t want to philosophize – they need to do.  So I’m going to continue to write, now that I've left NewsGator, about Everyday Social Business from my in the trenches experience working side by side with the social champions at F500 companies.  We are making things happen together step by step.  I’m going to share my everyday “aha moments”, strategies, and tips and tricks with you so hopefully you can benefit and apply an everyday tactic to your social business initiative that makes you, and ultimately your company, more successful.

 

And I hope that you'll comment back with your "aha moments" because everyone is at a different stage of their journey.   Let's be social and learn from each other.