Hey, it has been a while! I was here every single day ever since my last post contemplating the thought of writing, thinking what to write about, how to write it; and after a long session of this mentally exhaustion exercise, I would simply close the browser without writing a word or in best case scenario I would draft whatever I wrote to improve it later! Needless to say that later would mean further editing that requires more edits at a later time and the vicious cycle of procrastination would go on and on! All I’ve got now is tens of drafts –close to a hundred- that never been published before and probably will never be because of my “Lizard Brain”!
Up until today, I used to over think the tiniest detail of everything I am about to do, trying to get it right! No, wait! Trying to get it perfect the first time around; and in the midst of this process, I failed to notice that I am not producing anything! I was daydreaming, literally! I would have this great post idea planned very carefully in my mind, references, videos and illustrations collected, and points to be discussed chosen, structure and opening planned… everything! But as I said, it’s all in my mind and that’s where it’ll remain after hours and hours of thinking, searching & writing!
I used to worry about my post title, the opening sentence, the grammar, the structure…etc, etc! I was terrified of being a mediocre amongst the great people around me; I didn’t notice that I turned to be nobody! I was very afraid of failing to the point I stopped trying!
“Focus on thinking, you’ll get more thinking.
Focus on doing, you’ll get results.“
- Dan Rockwell
Reading his post felt like getting slapped in the face! It was as if the post is directed to me and me only! I was thinking, thinking a lot; and that’s what I got in return, more and more thinking! I am sick of it, sick of having all of those great ideas and not being able to share them with the rest of the world! Tired of not trusting my ability to learn and improve as I go, tired of being haunted by the fear of failing to the point I lost my faith in my capability to stand up afterwards and keep going!
So, from today on… I am doing something about it, and I’ll get results! I’ll stop worrying about how I write & I’ll focus more on what I am going to write about, to be more specific, I’ll focus more on writing it, regardless of the bad grammar, weak structure, poor words selection or the lousy titles I pick! As long as I continue posting on a regular basis, accept my mistakes and learn from them, I believe I’ll get results and I’ll achieve something! I’ll be posting here daily, the topics will vary from personal, professional, and entertaining or simply whatever I’ve learned that day until I overcome my perfectionism!
I know this post could be better and it may need review, it sure does; but I’ve decided to let go and deliver instead! Starting today, I am quieting my lizard brain and I’ll start shipping!
You’ve got a business and you’d love to find new customers online. You’ve heard that social media can do that for your business, but you don’t know where to begin. If that’s where you find yourself, then you must know that there are 2 key elements you must have in place in order to succeed in social media:
1. You must have a plan.
2. You must be proactive.
Have a solid plan:
I’m not talking about a “social media plan” or even a “social media strategy”. I’m talking about a solid business plan which includes as part of your business’ DNA a desire to serve your customer base. If you view customer comments as “noise” then chances are your “social media strategy” is going to focus upon making your customers shut up. The current “trend” appears to be that consumers voices are becoming more easily “heard” online that the many professional marketers. Google is actively searching for online reviews and including them as part of the Google Places Page, a free page one website which business owners can claim and utilise.
In other words, the search engines appear to be interested in magnifying the voice of the consumer online. The wise business owner and CEO will keep this trend in mind as they plan for the future in all areas of their business. Think of social media as a huge party and run your business accordingly. The best social media plan is one that is integrated with your other means of customer communication, because that’s what social media is, communication with both existing customers and prospective customers.
Be proactive, not reactive!
Most humans don’t live proactively. So when we say “you must be proactive” when it comes to social media, it is assumed that you’ve already got a business plan that has customer satisfaction ingrained as part of your business DNA. Then, being proactive simply means not only listening to consumers but actively encouraging them to speak positively about your business. Giving consumers a place to be ‘heard” is a great start -but then the real job is cultivating the positive conversations. When satisfying your customers is part of your business goals, then listening to your customers becomes a priority. You want them to come back, you want customers to buy from you or use your services again, because you realize that it’s way more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to sell another product to an existing customer, you will eventually realize that listening to your customers is the best way to keep them.
In a recent article over at Mashable, Social Media Success: 5 Lessons from In-House Corporate Teams Amy Mae Elliott interviewed Kerry Bridge, head of digital media communications, EMEA and global public sector at Dell Computers. Bridge offers this simple reason for why Dell has been so successful using social media to generate sales for their business:
“Listening to our customers has always been at the heart of what we do. Dell’s heritage of direct customer connections and online leadership are the seeds of our drive to be a social media success.”
Throughout the article, you’ll see the same “thread” repeated over and over again. The “Social Media Success Formula” outlined in that article can be summed up as this:
Strong products + a sincere desire to improve customer experience + a proactive commitment to communicating effectively with consumers = social media success.
Social media strategy is not a “set it and forget it” type of proposition. While many of the communication tools which are an integral part of social media are “free”, using those tools takes time to learn to use, and they require a significant investment of time on the part of the business owner. Companies like Dell, Ford and Southwest have teams of social media pros who work full time participating in the social media conversations online.
You may not have the resource to fund a full time social media team dedicated to communicating with consumers, but almost every business can launch a self hosted blog where consumers can come and share their thoughts. You have to put forth a bit of effort in crafting those blog posts, and if you do that well then you might have to drudge through spammy comments, but if you’ll invest that limited amount of time into your business blog, you’ll find real gold in the authentic comments from actual consumers.
Blogging can be one of the most powerful tools your business can use to build your business’ brand. This statement might be a bit confusing to anyone who thinks that “branding” begins and ends with logos, colors and images used on signage and in advertising. Sure, those visual design elements are crucial elements in building your brand, but in and of themselves these elements are NOT your brand. Rather, the careful creation and execution of those elements will help consumers identify your business and help guide them on their journey to “branding” your business.
It is not your marketing team or advertising agency that builds your “brand”, but rather it’s your employees, the ones who have direct consumer contact, who are the “brand builders” of your business. United Airlines learned this important lesson in 2009 when a social media crisis arose from some exceptionally bad customer service, by not just one employee but many. Social media is really great at telling customer service stories and the root of “branding” is customer service.
You may THINK that your “brand” is a shiny logo, carefully chosen font and a tag line assembled in a committee meeting, but in reality, your “brand” is truly in the hands of your customers. Just as the cattle who are branded are not wielding the hot metal rod which marks their flesh, a business must accept that consumers are the ultimate “branders”. Consumers have ALWAYS had the power of “branding” a company, remember word of mouth?, but it’s only been since the web got “social” did businesses begin to sit up and take notice of that power.
So often, business owners tend to look to blogging as a way to generate sales leads instead of a way to build trust with prospective customers. Capturing sales leads is best done with a squeeze page, building trust is best done via a conversation! Of course, the IDEAL situation is if you could sit down and talk with each and every prospective customer. You could then explain in person why the customer should choose to do business with you and your company. Even if you are able to do that today, count on the fact that you won’t be able to do that 5 years from now. Your business blog posts can provide that information in a timeless manner. Those trust building business blog posts are doing double duty for your business. Not only are they educating consumers to help build the trust needed to close the sale, they are also working hard to build your brand, AKA your online authority if you’re a consultant or other independent service provider.
Whether you’re blogging for your business or not, your clients are sharing their tales of their interactions with you. Good, bad, or indifferent, they are the ones “branding” your business.
In the end, your business blog can act to support the good, upgrade the indifferent, and mitigate the bad. So why aren’t your blogging for your business yet?
If you work in an organization of any size, it is very likely that you are already being discussed in social media somewhere. One of your employees did something wrong on the internet today somewhere. Eventually, you are going to hear about it or be asked to assess the severity of their action. You will be asked to make a recommendation on how to handle this event. You need to be ready! You can gain major points by being positioned to provide leadership in this area.
Whether you call it Web 2.0, the social Web, the social networks or any other name, the new network economy is about communities, collaboration, peer production and user-generated content. It is a place where business reputations are defined by customer opinions and ratings, where press is delivered by independent bloggers, and product development and insight is driven by customers. As digital natives, those who have grown up with the Internet, flood the workplace, your employees will expect to be part of the social Web and they’ll have a lot to contribute.
If you want to know how to get your co-workers, employees or team members to buy into this “crazy” thing called social media, then keep reading as I’ve gathered some tips from the experts to help you succeed in your mission!
1. Start an education campaign.
Provide your team with information. There are many sources of information available that explain what social media tools are in quick and entertaining ways. Articles from trade publications are incredibly helpful since they are coming from a source that your team may already know and respect. When you find these articles flip the publication open to that page, attach a sticky note saying “thought you would find this interesting” and leave it for them on their desk, remember to follow up personally to see if they liked the article or had any questions. It is important to give the article that personal touch; it shows that you think the content is important enough to go out of your way to highlight it. For this to be effective you can’t just send them a link to an article online.
However, if you want to leverage your online resources (and as someone interested in social media, I would assume you would) you can also direct your team’s attention to some online videos. Video hits a much different cord with people than an article. Done correctly, a video can provide a great deal of useful information much quicker than in an article. Here are some suggestions to get you started:
2. Team up with internal and external social media users
Find others like yourself that are interested in the opportunities that social media provides and engage in some thoughtful conversations about how utilizing these tools could impact your organisation. Once you have a chance to vocalise your thoughts with people that are supportive of the technology, it will be easier to have similar conversations with those that still haven’t seen the light.
3. Suggest social media solutions
When you are discussion solutions to meet your training needs look for opportunities to add a social media component. Here are a few examples:
• Instead of learners taking a test or writing papers to show their competence ask them to make a 5-minutes video on the topic.
• Create a forum so new employees can post questions and get feedback from their coworkers as they learn the ropes in their new company.
• When starting a new product or service, create a blog as a news centre and repository to make sure each employee is kept up to date on any developments. This kind of constant communication will reduce the amount of information they will need to learn through formal training sessions when the product or service is ready to launch.
• The next time a group of people attend a conference ask that they post any insights they gather on their Twitter accounts and assign them a hashtag for your company. You’ll be able to get three main things out of this. First, this will allow the attendees one more way to network with people at the conference, give them the ability to share their knowledge with the colleagues back at the office in real time, and in the end you will be able to get a sense for the ROI on the conference.
4. Help stretch the budget by using a “free” option!
Most of the social media tools out there are free. Maybe not all the good social media solutions are free, but in these hard economic times spending a few hundred dollars is better than spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.
5. Take a look at what your competitors are doing.
In your searches through those articles from the first bullet point did you find one highlighting your competition? This is a great opportunity to spotlight both the reach of social media and how it can be used in your industry. For example an article was just published by ASTD entitled: Twitter: Inside the Enterprise, Up the Next Hill by Marcia Conner. It talks about how employees at Humana are using Twitter to enhance social learning.
6. Invite your coworkers to your social networks.
What if they don’t know what LinkedIn is? Introduce them personally! Send an invitation to you colleagues and ask them to join your online network. The key to making this work is to follow up with them in person. Make sure they got your invitation and take a minute to share some of your experiences with them. If you want them to take advantage of social media remember that it is just like any social gathering, it is easier to walk into the room when you already know somebody there.
7. Give the gift of social media.
As I mentioned before there are many resources available on the evolution of social media. Present your boss, co-workers, or employees with a copy of the latest book to get their wheels turning. A few books come to mind as perfect introductions to the topic. “Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World” by Don Tapscott is a research based book looking at the effect of technology on Millennials (those born between 1977 – 1997). The book discusses how their brains process information differently than previous generations, as well as ways to attract and educate this audience. I also recommend Bernie Borges’ book “Marketing 2.0: Bridging the Gap between Seller and Buyer through Social Media Marketing” as it is a great social media resource even if you aren’t involved in marketing.
These tips should provide your team with a pretty good introduction to social media. Hopefully they start to understand that social media isn’t so “crazy” after all. Then again, when the Internet first hit the mainstream it was considered crazy, and we all know how that one worked out!
Do you use social media at your workplace? How it was introduced to you? Did it face any resistance? Please, share your experience with us!
Booz Allen Hamilton is one of those organizations that pops up every time Enterprise 2.0 is mentioned. It seems they must be the only large business doing stuff in the Enterprise 2.0 space! BAH just flicked the switch on the next generation of their intranet, hello.bah.com. According to a release from one of the technology providers (this is a collaboration between Microsoft and MindTouch (see disclosure)), the next generation Hello includes a bunch of new functionality for BAH users, including rich user profiles, an integrated user experience (e.g. connection to PeopleSoft), more powerful search, and better contextual information so that content and people can more easily be found. It’s also made use of user-centric dashboards and a content rating system.
Hello.bah.com lets Booz Allen’s staff blog, create wikis, and communicate with those with similar interests. Employees find information faster, contribute to professional and alumni communities, locate mentors, build their brands as subject matter experts, network with colleagues in offices across the U.S. and have fun in the process. Because many of the firm’s employees do not work full time from a Booz Allen office, hello.bah.com is all about connection, says associate Megan Murray. “Hello.bah.com removes geographic boundaries, which is especially important to new hires and those working on client sites. It takes connections within the firm and makes them visible, so you can find good information quickly and hit the ground running on your first day”.
The innovative portal is easy to use: It features tools with which employees are already familiar, such as blogs, podcasts, RSS, and wikis. Its homepage consists of Communities, People, Forums, Blogs, Wikis, and Bookmarks. Staff who dig deeper can aggregate their activities with topics such as Alumni, Business, Diversity, and Social Technology. There are also over 50 Technology Focus Groups (TFGs) creating communities around interests such as Wireless Communications and Emerging Technologies.
MindTouch provided the infographic below to explain about BAH and the Hello.bah.com application itself:
According to Walton Smith, who headed up the project for BAH, Hello has created operational client delivery efficiencies and increased sales. Further, because of Hello, Booz Allen is seen as a progressive leader by top government institutions, which is leading to increased business opportunities for the company. The first is a positive result, the second is a short term aberration caused by BAH being an early adopter of Enterprise 2.0, other organisations are unlikely to see these benefits.
Smith sees the value in Hello as coming from the ability to link subject matter experts with knowledge consumers, as he says:
“From my experience in the consulting industry, relating consulting engagements to people and to work product was always a major challenge. Who were the experts? Where were the client deliverables? How can we win new accounts by leveraging what has already been created in the firm? I rarely found the answer to all three questions. Moreover, scheduling time with the subject matter experts was a difficult task. They were either engaged with a new client half-way around the globe or had left the firm. Now, with Hello, content and people are linked contextually. Simply do a subject search and the results map out the relationships to content and people. That’s powerful stuff”.
Online business networking sites can be valuable tools if they’re well planned, regulated, and consistently maintained. They’re especially useful in creating new resources for a targeted population. For example, senior consultant Aaron Cohen wanted to implement best practices for onboarding within IT. But when hello.bah.com was launched, he saw an opportunity to streamline the orientation process for new hires. “I gathered resources from multiple websites and consolidated them into a wiki called Get Onboard, a one-stop shop with information new hires need,” Cohen says. “I wrote it as one person giving advice to another about job roles and initial career development“. Although it’s not the authoritative version of Booz Allen’s corporate policies, Cohen’s wiki includes a great deal of useful information, such as descriptions of technology resources and an overview of client expectations. Because there is so much information available and it’s difficult for a new employee to find it all, a wiki is a particularly good format for this kind of resource.
Hello.bah.com allows staff to draw on Booz Allen’s resources and create a community that works for them, the firm, and its clients.
“We show users where the walls are and how to be responsible. But when it comes to social networking, we all agree: It’s the people that are the most important components. We need resources to connect us, do our jobs, and get answers faster. Hello.bah.com makes all that enjoyable, too”. - Scott Edington, Senior Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton
Anyone who’s worked on even one team project in an enterprise can tell you what a nightmare document management can be. E-mails follow divergent paths. Spreadsheets and Word documents get passed around, and nobody’s quite sure who has the most recent version. The admin who’s been taking meeting notes and storing them on her hard drive goes on vacation. Marketing strategies change, but nobody remembers to ask the Web folks to update the company intranet.
A wiki is collaboration software that solves all these problems yet, unlike many traditional content management systems, remains simple enough for non-technical employees to use. Although wikis have been around for over a decade, they’re just starting to take off in business. Like the Web did when it first caught hold in the corporate world, wikis will likely go through a period of wild growth, fierce competition, and inappropriate usage. Our field guide to wikis will show you the best uses for this valuable collaboration tool.
What Is A Wiki?
Wiki.org defines wiki as “the simplest online database that could possibly work.” Inspired by Apple’s HyperCard programming environment, the first wiki software was created in 1995 by Ward Cunningham as a way to manage the Portland Pattern Repository’s site content. Named after wiki-wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, wikis are essentially Web pages that anyone, or at least anyone with permission, can create or edit.
The most well-known example of a wiki is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by, well, anybody who feels like it. Sound like utter chaos? Not so. It’s a well-researched, well-written, and highly regarded source of information. If one person makes incorrect or inappropriate changes to an entry, others can roll the page back to the way it was before, or keep the changes and edit them further. Thousands of people police the site (or at least those areas in which they have expertise), fact-checking and editing as necessary, so the quality of the content generally remains high. Because wikis were originally conceived as an open-source project in the extreme, there are those who argue that a true wiki should have no authorship restrictions. In rare cases like Wikipedia, this works, but usually it’s not a viable option. In the corporate environment, wikis are best implemented behind a firewall for a wholly internal user base.
Swing And a Miss:
The Los Angeles Times created a wiki that it hoped would focus on the war in Iraq. The editors wrote an opinion piece entitled “War and Consequences” and invited anyone who cared to rewrite the editorial to take their best shot. Unfortunately, the users of the Internet saw fit to spam the wiki with porn and profanity, and after 3 days of maintenance, the newspaper took it down.
Is it fair or even accurate to blame the Times’ failure on wikis? Absolutely not. Perhaps the Times expected too much; perhaps it misjudged the juvenile capacity of some Web users. But the real problem with the wiki was that the Times sent a wiki to do a blog’s job. Wikis are structurally capable of handling conversation, but it is not their forte; instead, wikis excel at collaboration. They are intended to maintain a series of unique documents as their content evolves and to provide an organic means of organizing that information.
Why Wiki?
Thanks to the Web, and networks in general, the cost of publishing and sharing information has diminished substantially, which makes wikis the killer app for corporations. Prior to wikis, an expensive enterprise application would have been required for sophisticated information management. But because most wikis are based on open-source code, they’re free for companies who opt for an open-source distribution, or relatively cheap for companies willing to pay for their implementation and support. Wikis are designed to facilitate the exchange of information within and between teams. Content in a wiki can be updated without any real lag, without any real administrative effort, and without the need for distribution, users/contributors (with wikis, they’re one and the same) simply visit and update a common Web site.
Wikis can centralize all types of corporate data, such as spreadsheets, Word documents, PowerPoint slides, PDFs, anything that can be displayed in a browser. They can also embed standard communications media such as e-mail and IM. Heavy-duty PHP-based wikis can directly interface with company databases to bring in audio and picture files. A wiki’s functionality is limited only by the programming skills of the person who implements it.
It’s important to note that placing a document in a wiki does not necessarily make it editable by everyone with access to the wiki. For example, the marketing department can make a PowerPoint slide available to the sales team or the company at large without letting them change or overwrite it. What’s more, wikis have built-in version control even for those who have edit privileges. No changes can be made without creating a record of who made those changes, and reversion to an earlier version is a matter of a few clicks.
Wikis Vs. Traditional Content Management Software:
There is plenty of project management and collaboration software available, so why use a wiki instead? Wikis are cheap, extensible, and easy to implement, and they don’t require a massive software rollout. They also interface well with existing network infrastructures. Wiki software maker Socialtext, for instance, has concentrated on making its platform work with existing global ID and registration systems behind corporate firewalls. Furthermore, wikis are Web-based and thus present little or no learning curve in the adoption cycle, and they allow the user to determine the relevancy of content rather than being dependent upon a central distribution center or a linear distribution chain. After the initial setup, users, not administrators, control a wiki, to the benefit of both.
A major benefit of many wikis is their ability to organize themselves organically. In other words, users can create their own site structure, or ontology, rather than have it imposed on them by the developers of content management software. That said, wikis need to be used by people with a shared cultural language so that the ontology and navigation make sense to everybody. Wikis are well-suited to the workplace because a common corporate language is already in place. Finally, it is the inherently collaborative nature of wikis, as opposed to the workflow structure of content management software, that distinguishes wikis and gives them the upper hand. A traditional project management tool simply cannot reproduce the environment of collaboration and involvement that wikis create.
Where The Wikis Are?
So, what companies are actually using wikis? Wikis have found their greatest initial success in a few specific areas of the corporate landscape that require heavy doses of content management, such as project management and specification control. According to a Gilbane survey of 73 companies, it’s mostly small businesses (those with less than $25 million in revenues) that are experimenting with wiki technology.
That’s no surprise, given the software’s affordability and ease of implementation. However, several large enterprises have successfully deployed wikis as well. Nokia has been using Socialtext wiki software for a year and a half to facilitate information exchange within its Insight & Foresight group. Yahoo uses Twiki software to help its development team overcome the problems associated with working from a variety of separate locations. Michelin China also uses Twiki as a knowledge management tool. Jean-Noel Simonnet, from the company’s IT department, writes, “Our purpose was to share ALL the information, procedures, setup documents, so that we were less dependent on a particular staff member knowledge, so that nobody in the team has any document left in a personal directory”. Kodak, Cingular, Disney, Motorola, and SAP are also among the notable companies with wiki success stories.
What are these enterprises doing that the L.A. Times could or did not? Two things distinguish these successful implementations from the Times flop: They are behind company firewalls and for official use only. As would be expected, this significantly reduces the likelihood of misuse, and ensures that the wiki is a tool rather than a playground. In other words, in order to be of value to the corporate community, a wiki needs to comprise a set of internal documents, an intraweb that can be maintained by its users from within a browser.
Wiki Tools:
Leading the charge of enterprise wiki solutions are Atlassian, JotSpot, and Socialtext. JotSpot was started by the co-founders of Excite and is a cross between a wiki and a database. JotSpot was built from scratch and is not open-source, but is free to use by open-source projects. By offering additional features such as forms and integration with external data, JotSpot is able to overcome the issue of wikis being essentially limited to handling text documents.
Socialtext is based on the open-source Kwiki software and has managed to land some powerhouse clients like Nokia and Ziff-Davis. The company even ships a standalone appliance with the software preinstalled.
Atlassian Software’s enterprise wiki is called Confluence. Atlassian’s codebase is composed almost exclusively of open-source libraries, and like JotSpot and SocialText, the company contributes to the open-source community and open-source projects may freely use its code. Although its software packages are not strictly open source, Atlassian does provide licensees with the source code.
On the strictly open-source/non-commercial front, there are several major players:
Twiki can be expanded dramatically with server-side plug-in modules that allow for specific handling of functions like calendars, spreadsheets, RSS, barcodes, and so on.
Zwiki offers a plug-in WYSIWYG HTML editor called Epoz that supports all the major browsers.
Perspective is popular with some large companies and seems to be the wiki many big businesses get their feet wet with first.
Each of these wiki distributions has its own pros and cons, but each is a stable and functional package right out of the box. Which one you choose will depend upon your budget, the features that matter to you, and your IT department’s ability to implement and maintain it.
Consider implementing a wiki if:
You want to establish a company intranet quickly and cheaply without sacrificing functionality, security, or durability.
You want to publish a range of corporate documents in one universally accessible location and let employees manage those documents with a minimum of effort, lag, and risk of redundancy.
You want to manage and organize meeting notes, team agendas, and company calendars.
You need a project management tool that is cheap (if not free), extensible, and accessible through any Web browser.
You need a central location where shared documents can be viewed and revised by a large and/or dispersed team.
A wiki might not be right for your organization if:
You need to use complex file formats. Some wiki platforms can support only text or HTML files. Consider using a PHP/SQL-based wiki platform that can handle robust file types. Avoid wikis based on PERL.
You don’t have a staff member who can take responsibility for its use. A wiki is only as good as its ontology (or the search engine it uses). You will need somebody who can establish conventions for naming pages and maintaining links.
The collaborative format isn’t appropriate for your group or workplace. Peer review is not always the best solution for content management.
You’re looking for an exchange of views. Wikis are not the best tool for airing opinions or carrying on conversations. If that’s your primary goal, use a blog instead.
Watch Out For Wikis!
One of the fundamental challenges to all companies is to ensure that information flows through and between groups with as little decay as possible. A wiki is a highly effective means of handling this task. It turns document management into something that can be easily tuned to users’ sensibilities rather than preconceived notions imposed by the developers of content management software. Content management packages will likely be around for the foreseeable future, but they will be under increasing pressure from wikis. As is evidenced by the enterprise wikis currently on the market, content management is likely to hybridize with the wiki into a new, more robust application that combines the strengths of both tools.
Have you been using wikis at work? or at your classroom? How did you go about it?
Are you using Twitter to reach your customers and followers? Do you update your status on Facebook several times a day? Maybe you daily ask questions of one of your specialized LinkedIn groups?
You can replicate this experience inside your organization. There are a number of internal solutions that allow employees to share messages and information with each other, including Yammer and Socialtext. Laurence Smith, Vice President of Global Learning & Development at LG Electronics in Seoul, Korea has become an advocate of Yammer as a way to drive greater innovation in the design of the company’s training programs.
Just a few years ago, Smith says: “when we wanted to revise a classroom training program, we would write a survey, send this to all business unit HR leaders around the world, analyse the results and then use this input to design a new pilot.” The total time elapsed was several weeks to several months and often yielded limited feedback. But today, Smith and his team start a conversation on Yammer and use tags to create a dialogue with employees.
One program in the development stage is FSE (Foreign Service Executive) Soft Landing. It’s targeted to managers assigned to a new country who need to understand the local culture and norms. Instead of starting with a survey to gather input, Smith and team start a conversation stream on Yammer and tag it with #english and #expat. Within a few days, they read through streams of conversation. In the case of the ExPat program, they discovered that several modules already existed. At one location, there was a portal for arriving expats with content on local contacts and country-specific materials. The result, says Smith: “Rather than ‘re-invent’ the wheel, LG Electronics Global Learning team combined the best of the existing modules to develop a standard best practice approach saving time and money. Most importantly, it was actually a better solution as it incorporated the best from each region“.
At Meredith Corporation, the publisher of Ladies Home Journal and Better Homes & Gardens, micro-blogging tool Socialtext Signals is the platform of choice. Using Signals, the marketing function can post alerts to employees and partners on a wide range of marketing issues, such as researching competitors, brainstorming new ideas for a direct marketing campaign, or analyzing the outcomes of current campaigns. Says Dave Ball, Vice President of Consumer Marketing for Meredith, “Signals allows us to break down the silos and easily share information with each other internally. We also use Signals to communicate with groups of external vendors, so we can brainstorm current campaigns with them, propose new ideas and share best practices. It is amazing how much we have cut down on email traffic while increasing our productivity“.
So, If you are considering implementing micro-blogging inside your organization, here are 3 lessons to consider:
Start small and monitor results:
Consider pursuing a strategy first coined in The Economist: Ubiquity First, Revenue Later. Build an audience first and then uncover how it can lead to increased employee productivity or faster time to competence. Since micro-blogging is a modest expense, (often as low as $1.00 per user per month) there need not be elaborate ROl studies prior to piloting the service. However, you do need to identify key business goals you want to measure as micro-blogging rolls out across the company, such as increased brainstorming or greater ease in seeking feedback from employees. Then follow the impact on revenue.
Provide training to employees:
Train employees in how to use micro-blogging effectively, as well as in your social media policies and guidelines for sending signals or alerts through out the enterprise. Training can consist of webinars, online training programs, or face-to-face Lunch & Learns. Whatever the delivery mode, both LG Electronics and Meredith Publishing agree training employees is vital to the success of micro-blogging.
Integrate Micro-blogging into your workflow:
Lead by example when you launch micro-blogging inside your company. Smith and Ball personally use micro-blogging to get work done in their day-to-day jobs and integrate micro-blogging into their workflow, so it is a productivity tool rather than “another thing” to do during busy days.
You can think of micro-blogging as the convergence of Facebook, Twitter, blogs and wikis, with a character limit. Are you using micro-blogging inside your organisation? Tell us about your experience!
We are in the midst of a communications revolution. Use of social media for communication purposes continues to grow, while “old school” messaging media like email is on the decline. Facebook reportedly has reached 500 million users worldwide. Much like the Cloud computing there is an almost buzzing excitement around social media, and many companies are wanting to exploit social networking. The promise of increased intimate customer interactions, input and loyalty, and enhanced sales and expanded market share can result in some organisations overlooking the troubling issues arising out of social networking. Many of these issues are legal in nature and could increase the legal risk and liability potential of an organization employing a social media strategy.
Social Media Legal Issues
A basic formula can be used to identify and analyse the specific legal risks of a particular social media use:
The inherent characteristics/capabilities/limitations of the social media platform to be leveraged + the organisation’s specific intended social media strategy and uses = the relevant legal issues and level of legal risk present.
Some of the legal risks involved with using social media in the organisation:
Information Security:
Organisations that employ social media face several information security legal issues. These legal risks can be broken down into three broad categories:
1. potential liability due to a breach of the organisation’s security as the result of an attack originating through the use of social media.
2. potential legal risk associated with social engineering and spoofing attacks against users or “fans” of an organization’s social media presence, persona or application.
3. legal consequences of leakage of third party confidential information as a result of social media use.
As might be expected organized crime views social networks as fertile ground for committing fraud. One of the biggest risks is in the name of the medium itself. Social media yields social engineering. Fraudsters leverage the central component of social media that makes it so attractive: trust between “friends”. As such social media users are tricked into downloading applications infected with malware because it was “recommended” by a friend and a computer attack occurs, or they visit a site that looks like a brand name company’s fan page and are enticed to provide some of their personal information to criminals.
The direct risk to an organization allowing its employees to use social media on company computers is obvious: if malware from social media infects a company computer and steals personal information, credit card numbers or trade secrets, the company may have to provide notice of a security breach and could face lawsuits and regulatory actions arising out of the breach.
Companies may also face liability for failing to detect and notify social media users of scams associated with the company’s name or site. If an organisation becomes aware of a spoofed fan page that looks like its own, or a criminal disseminating a malware-infested social application that looks like it is sponsored by the organisation, legal repercussions could arise.
Finally, social media sites and the activities of multiple users for or on behalf of an organisation could result in information leakage. If that leakage involves confidential information or trade secrets of an organisation’s customer, or perhaps certain financial disclosures in violation of securities laws, liability could arise. This risk can also be indirect in its nature, and there are several social media corporate intelligence companies that will data mine and aggregate information about competitors in order to discover leaked secrets, plans and trends.
Privacy:
For many companies the Holy Grail of social media is in depth and detailed personal information about their current and would-be customers. Social media provides a platform for much more interactive and intimate communications between companies and their customers. In turn companies seek to use this knowledge to sell their products and services back to these customers in a way that does not affect the trust relationship that is often gained in the social media context.
Social media platforms enable the gathering of information, including personal information, in ways that were unimaginable only a few years back. Companies leveraging social media, depending on the platform, can gain access to this personal information. This raises a host of privacy concerns that could increase legal risk. Most social media sites have terms and conditions that may result in legal liability if an organization’s collection or use of personal information violates those terms.
Laws such as COPPA may have applicability with respect to an organisation’s “fan” page. Finally, to what extent do an organisation’s privacy policies apply, if at all, to its social media activities? All of these issues will become increasingly important as use of social media becomes the norm.
IP Infringement:
Social media sites allow users and companies to post content, including content that may be copyrighted or trademarked. Posting can be performed not only by employees of organizations using social media, but also fans and visitors to a company’s social media site. Organizations may face infringement claims (direct or based on vicarious liability) due to copyrighted or trademarked materials being posted by them or by third parties.
Disparagement and Defamation:
Social media environments provide a forum for defamatory statements to be made about individuals, and disparaging remarks to be made about companies’ products and services. Organisations with overzealous employees attempting to get a leg up on competitors may post comments or remarks that may not be fully accurate or true about an individual or a competitor’s products or services.
This could lead to a potential lawsuit and liability. Social media sites and blogs that allow comments may also involve such statements made by third parties over which the organisation has little to no control. While defenses may exist, including potentially Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, this area of law is notoriously fact specific and varies by jurisdiction, and it could pose problems for companies.
Employment Law Issues:
The use of social media in the employment context raises a lot of tricky legal issues. First, many organisations use social media as part of background checks on candidates for employment. During employment, the issue is to what extent an employee may have privacy rights concerning its use of social media while at work, and to what extent the employer may monitor such activities. Using social media activities as the basis for firing or taking disciplinary action against employees may run afoul of the law.
Advertising Law:
Organisations that use social media to promote their products and services should also be concerned about advertising laws. For example, some social media activities may amount to a contest or sweepstakes and may need to have appropriate disclaimers and notices. In addition, for social media sites that allow users to rate products or services, an employee that rates up the products or services of their company may violate advertising laws concerning testimonials and endorsements.
How to Assess the Benefits And Risks of Implementing Enterprise 2.0?
Implementing Enterprise 2.0 is about change. New technologies are deployed, work processes evolve, and possibly organizational structures shift. Benefits and risks are associated with any change. A governance-based approach to Enterprise 2.0, as taken in this report, requires examining, understanding, and addressing these benefits and risks in order to take make effective decisions in guiding the organisation.
The potential benefits and risks of Enterprise 2.0 apply very differently depending on your organisation. Following are some of the factors that will impact how benefits and risks may apply:
Organisation Size:
There are greater potential benefits to larger organizations in enhancing internal workflow and communication, however there are increased challenges in achieving them.
Employee Distribution:
Organisations with more office locations, in more countries, with more staff working sometimes from home, will have significantly greater benefits from implementing web-based technologies.
Age Distribution:
Companies with a younger employee age profile will find Enterprise 2.0 initiatives particularly relevant and useful. However there is also specific value for organizations that have a significant proportion of their staff retiring in coming years, for knowledge capture and connection.
Industry:
Each industry has specific characteristics that impact the relevance and value of Enterprise 2.0 initiatives. For example investment banks have imperatives of effective information flow and tend to have younger technology-savvy staff, though also have specific regulatory and security constraints.
Knowledge Intensity:
Productivity and value in knowledge-based industries such as professional services are driven by effective collaboration, though some information is particularly sensitive. Industries such as mining are often also knowledge-intensive, though more process-oriented fields such as call centers will experience value in different areas.
Regulation:
Some industries such as financial services, accounting, law, construction, and government sectors are subject to specific regulations that need to be addressed.
Organisational Culture:
Clearly current organisational culture will impact both where the initial benefits are likely to accrue, and real and perceived risks.
Stakeholder Outlook:
The outlook of key stakeholders will impact both real and perceived benefits. For instance, politicians’ highly risk-averse approach will affect government department initiatives, while the composition of the board of directors will also influence how issues are assessed.
Current Technology Systems:
The state of current information technology systems will affect where there is the most value in implementing web-based systems, and how potential risks such as IT security are best managed.
What About the Risks of not Implementing Enterprise 2.0?
Unauthorised Use of Web Tools:
Without a coherent, well-communicated framework for use of Web 2.0 tools, staff may use unauthorized external tools in an effort to perform their work more effectively, leading to IT security risks and lack of integration with existing systems.
Fragmentation of Information:
If staff use Web 2.0 tools outside of a clear, coherent firm structure, there is a significant risk of fragmentation of information, meaning that information and activities will not be accessible by the rest of the firm.
Increasing Difficulty in Attracting and Retaining Talented Staff:
If organizations are perceived by graduates and young staff as a laggard in adopting new technologies, this can impact the firm’s ability to attract and retain talented people.
Reduced Competitiveness:
Competitors that are swifter in adopting and gaining benefits from Enterprise 2.0 approaches may achieve significant advantages in their cost of production, speed to market, and customer reach. These benefits will be extremely difficult to replicate.
Can you think of more risks or benefits? Share your opinion, I look forward to hear from you!
