The Name of the Thing

The name of your social intranet or social business platform is important. It's what people should be entering into their browser everyday (if not bookmarked or set as their home page).  They should associate certain things with it.  It's a brand.  Don't be fooled into thinking it's anything else.

There's a philosophy out there that says the name of a thing (or person) has a huge influence on the nature of that thing.  My husband looked into it when we couldn't figure out why our amazingly beautiful cat, Zella, was so hostile.  She loved my husband, put up with me, and hissed and clawed at everyone else.  So one day my husband decided to look up what the name Zella meant and found out it was a German derivative for "the hostile one".  The name fit.  If he had only named her Fluffy or Rainbow we would have had a very different cat.


My point is that real thought should be put into the name of your social intranet.  Your end-users will associate negative or positive connotations you may have not thought through if you make the naming decision too quickly.  Some names I've seen used at multiple companies are "Connect", "Engage", "The Hub", "MyCompany", "OneCompany", and "The Mix".  The interesting thing about The Mix is one consumer products good company and one medical devices company both used that name.  The fun thing is they could both use slogans like "Mix it Up" or "Are you in the Mix?".  

Try to find something that plays off your company name, culture, or corporate mission.  You want to grab the hearts and minds of the end-user.  When I was at my last company I ran an idea campaign to crowdsource the name.  We ended up with Hal (a "2001: A Space Odyssey" reference for all of you non-geeks out there) as our new intranet name.  It was perfect.  It exemplified our company culture and by crowdsourcing the name got a lot more people invested in the name and the new intranet.  At my current company our intranet is called Brewspace.  It's another great play off the culture but also plays into the concepts of innovation and collaboration with the thought of brewing up ideas.

So please don't make your social intranet name an afterthought.  If you don't have a brain that works that way (mine doesn't) bring in some brains that do.  Or crowdsource it.  You want a name that will inspire people to work differently.

Do you have an awesome name for your social intranet?  Please share it in the comments.  (And for the rest of you there is no shame in cloning greatness.)

  This post was written in memory of Zella, the beautiful and hostile cat, whom we lost this week.

It's #SocialFriday Y'all (aka how to eliminate email)

So you've deployed your social business platform internally, you've built in the business value, worked on formal communications and education, but are still having troubles breaking some folks of the email habit.  (And here's why you should care.)  This is a story of a viral technique that worked for me that you might want to give a go.

I was an internal social evangelist at a company that had a high number of power-users but like many organizations there were certain departments that tended to be less active participants than others.  And as we continued to bring new team members on board we needed to make sure they saw how deeply ingrained social was in our organization.  We were very social at our company however the point of #SocialFriday was to eliminate all email unless it was external or truly confidential.  It’s just a matter of showing benefits in order to get people to break the email habit that has been beaten into us for 20+ years.

The genesis of #SocialFriday happened at a customer site.  Ronnie (PM extraordinaire) and I were onsite working with the customer project team which included Vinicius and Ryan.  As an exercise we walked through Vinicius’s email inbox to see how much was truly confidential and how much would have benefited the larger community.  About 90% of his email could have been eliminated.  Some of the discussions still would have needed to happen but by happening in a community there would have been more transparency.  Other discussions would have been simply eliminated because Vinicius may not have cared about that particular message and would have chosen not to follow that community / channel.  The other portion of email that could have been eliminated was because there were multiple branches growing from an original email root and it was hard to tell which ones he needed to save in order to stay on topic.  We started talking about ways to get people out of email so that the knowledge would be shared and captured for current and future employees (think project status or an answer about the best temperature at which to melt cheese - yes, cheese).  Ryan had the great idea of turning on his internal Out of Office message in Outlook and forcing people to communicate with him in the activity stream/microblog.  Since the customer hadn’t deployed at that point it was just at the brainstorming phase for them.



Well Ronnie, PM extraordinaire, took the brainstorming session to heart and started turning on his Out of Office message on Fridays.  Many of us soon followed suit.  Here’s my OOO message:

It’s #SocialFriday y’all.  I've purposely turned on my out of office for internal emails.  I will be participating in an activity to help dramatically reduce email and increase transparency with what's happening in our accounts and in the solutions consulting organization.  If you need me, don’t expect a response via email today unless your message is truly confidential.  You can target me @christys in your activity stream.  If this is customer-related please target the customer community as well. 
I hope you join me in the #SocialFriday effort!

It got to the point that many people’s OOO messages just said something Zen like “Find me in the stream”.

I didn't turn on my OOO the other days of the week (in fact I eventually stopped altogether) but if I did get an internal email I’d often answer it in the activity stream, targeted at the person who asked.  The increased transparency benefited everyone.  At one point I received an email from one of our sales reps about how we were using a certain product feature at a customer deployment.  Instead of answering via email I answered in the customer community and targeted the sales rep.  Lo and behold our VP of Product saw the comment and chimed in that we were about to release a new feature and if we made a small tweak it could benefit the customer in the use case I had described.  Did I think the customer would use it?  Yes, please!  If I had simply responded to the one person in email it would have ended there.  Instead we made a customer happy with a new feature I didn’t even know was in the works.  That’s pretty cool.

So yeah, we started our #SocialFriday effort to eliminate the majority of internal email but it turned into #AllSocialAllTheTime.  It just goes to show that a little reinforcement never hurts even in the most socially savvy organizations.

What about you?  Any tips to share on how you are changing behaviors to take advantage of social business in your organization?

The Importance of Social Business Value

Adoption is important in order to see value from social business tools.  Adoption should never be the end goal though;  usage statistics are signposts along the way toward what should be your real goal of business value.  It’s easy to rely on adoption or usage statistics as success criteria but if you stop there you are selling yourself short.  Why did you choose to implement social business tools in your organization in the first place?  Are you trying to improve communications, collaboration, and innovation?  If so, what does that mean in your company?  How does that affect your business?  What sort of measurements can you put in place to measure success?  Optimized production, increased revenues, decreased travel costs, improved customer satisfaction, decreased downtime – those are all end goals you can aim for depending on your industry and what’s important to your business.

Adoption isn’t a success measurement but that doesn’t mean it’s not important.  If your end goal is to increase cross-selling in your sales organization thereby increasing revenues, well, you had better make sure there’s adoption on the sales team.  If you are trying to reduce call escalations in the call center, a good part of your adoption efforts should focus on the call center.  I’m not saying you should ignore the rest of the organization but success breeds success leading to viral adoption in other parts of the organization.  Focus on some key successes and others will follow.

Recently I was on site with a customer during their social business platform launch.  We had been planning for a while and this was when it all fell into place.  End-users would finally be accessing the new tools in production.  This particular customer followed the recommendation of identifying a few key areas of the business where they knew social could have high business impact for them and then we gave those groups the white glove treatment*.  The white glove treatment means:

• We spent time with key stakeholders from the groups ahead of time understanding their business and their goals.
• We ran use case discovery workshops with representatives from the groups to understand how they currently communicate and collaborate, what their pain points are, how they’d like to be able to work, and what the potential obstacles might be.
• Post workshop we mapped out the right tools and processes to match the problems (and didn’t fix anything that wasn’t broken just to make it social)
• We spent extra time with the community managers of each group to migrate any existing content and to configure their communities to meet their needs.  We also trained the community managers in engagement techniques, specifically to the needs and potential obstacles we heard during the workshops.
• We ran in-person launch “tours” to small groups of end-users, by specific group so we could focus on their use cases so that the stories resonated with the individuals.

I was extremely happy with how well these sessions went last week.  One of the potential obstacles that we ran into during the use case development workshops (these are oil & gas engineers by the way) was that some of them felt that social tools would be a waste of time.  Many of the engineers don’t use social tools in their personal lives and couldn’t picture using them at work.  They were fine with picking up the phone, leaving a voice mail, and waiting on an answer.  During the launch tours last week the reaction was overwhelmingly positive.  Engineers are a smart bunch and when they see a better way of handling a process they get it.  At the end of two days the level of Q&A and knowledge sharing happening within the engineering communities surprised me in a positive way. I knew it would happen but it happened even faster than I expected.  Without the white glove treatment (which includes good community managers and sponsors) the community would still have taken off but not at this rate and with this level of quality conversation and problem solving.

I’m the first one to admit that the white glove treatment isn’t scalable and frankly isn’t necessary for every single group in your organization.  However, for those groups upon which you are relying to take your company forward and make a difference in the way that you do business, the white glove treatment is essential in ramping up the “what’s in it for me” to the end-user, which amps up adoption, which in turn delivers that business value to your organization.


*Thank you, Cristina, for the term “white glove treatment”.