What would get employees talking to each other?

SalesForce released a new enterprise social networking service today called Chatter with the aim of encouraging people to do what they do on Facebook et al with their colleagues.

It’s one of those issues that’s considerably easier to suggest than to implement as the two environments are very, very different. In community building there is an oft used rule of thumb that for every 100 people looking at a social community, 90 will just read, 9 will reply to topics and just 1 will start new discussions. As with all rules of thumb this isn’t going to be the case every time but it’s worth considering that whereas Facebook, LinkedIn et al have the numbers to make this work, in your own internal network your numbers will likely be much less.

As with most things in life, it’s worth investigating what you wish to get out of this before you get started.

If it’s gaining a more social understanding of your employees then it’s probably safe to say that use of existing platforms such as Facebook is likely to yield better results. There are already many ‘I work at …’ style groups on Facebook so that would seem a good opportunity to mingle with your employees in their natural habitat.

If however you’re looking to improve your corporate knowledge base and encourage knowledge sharing then this offers much more potential. Of course building a platform does not mean people will come, so here are a few steps you can take to encourage knowledge sharing within your company.

Tips for encouraging knowledge sharing

1. Outline your vision for this.  You first need to create a culture of knowledge sharing so need to communicate the vision that this is a positive thing both for the individual and the company.
2. Reinforce through actions.  You then need to reinforce this vision through actions.  Reward positive behaviour, not just financially but through praise and recognition.
3. Start with the natives.  There will inevitably be people who will take to this like a duck to water.  Start with these people and get them sharing knowledge extensively.
4. Use success stories to cross the chasm.  Use any success stories that these early adaptors achieve to help sell it to the rest of your employees.
5. Lead by example.  You have to do what you’re asking people to do so you should be one of the main users of your internal network.
6. Embed into human processes.  If you can get these positive behaviours included within inductions for instance it will help reinforce behaviour and create the right kind of knowledge sharing culture.

Don’t forget to look outside as well as inside

If you can get that far then you’ve done very well, but don’t restrict yourself to improving the knowledge sharing within your company walls.  There is a whole load of knowledge outside of your company.  Communities of practice exist in a vast array of areas that can see your employees tapping into the knowledge base of thousands of peers from around the world.  The CMI for instance is soon to launch a management community that will be a great place for managers to learn from others.  Look out for these kind of opportunities and encourage staff to learn from these communities.  This kind of social media is miles from the waste of time that Facebook et al can appear to be.

I’m a great believer in the power of communities and getting employees to talk to one another is a great thing.  It would be interesting to hear from people that have done this successfully.

Tags: Community, Facebook, km, Knowledge Management, LinkedIn, Online Communities, Social network, Social network service, Twitter

Frustrating experience with my Everton fan page

A few years ago I setup an Everton fan page on Facebook as there was no official page at that time. It proved really popular with fans and quickly grew to 20,000+ followers.

Recently Facebook have been cracking down on pages and as mine was not an official Everton authorized page my publishing rights were revoked. Finding out how to contest this decision was an incredibly difficult job, but that’s probably for another blog.

What has amazed me however was the response from Everton when this issue was put to them to see if they could help out.

Instead of seeing the potential for communicating with this large list of fans the club instead started threatening legal action for using things like the club logo and daring to use the clubs own Facebook application on the page. The only way they would help is if the page was changed to something not mentioning Everton at all.

Talk about biting your nose off to spite your face. Such a shame as football clubs are such a natural audience for social media as fans are so willing to do an awful lot of work on the clubs behalf. Sadly few clubs seem willing or able to let go of control and leverage this enormously powerful resource. A message to the clubs should surely be that the brain power of these supporters is just as important, if not more so, than the money you can extract from them.

Tags: everton, Facebook, fan pages, social media

Skittles on the Intranet

Posted by adi on Mar 8, 2009 in Default

Skittles made a bit of a splash in the media world recently with a relaunch of their homepage that essentially created an overlay for their various web properties, starting with a Twitter page displaying all tweets mentioning the Skittles brand name.  You could also check out their Flickr photo gallery or their Facebook fan page.

Nice enough idea, but I suspect it will enjoy its five minutes of online fame before falling by the wayside.  However, imagine such an approach is used internally on the corporate Intranet.  The single great feature of the so called web 2.0 applications is that it puts you in touch with customers as never before.  The problem generally is that those customer voices are generally only heard by the web savvy people within a company.  The overwhelming consensus still seems to regard Twitter as an oddity that will have nothing of use for them.

Blammo, this would shoot that down instantly.  The modern marketing credo puts the customer at the very heart of everything the company does, it’s not just enough for marketing folks to care about the customer, it’s something that each and every employee should care about.  But unless you’re customer facing it’s often difficult to know what your customers are doing, what problems they’re having and generally how they’re finding your products.  Now that can change.

The Skittles website will probably fade into obscurity within weeks, if it hasn’t already done so, but by jove it doesn’t half offer up a great opportunity for how to put social media into the faces of each and every person in your company.

Tags: Brand, Facebook, Flickr, Marketing, Skittles, Twitter

Reviews and word of mouth come up trumps

Posted by adi on Oct 23, 2008 in Work

I wrote on Tuesday about the importance of reviews and word of mouth after a survey came out in support of email to communicate with the younger market out there.  Lo and behold today has seen a study by Rubicon Consulting bestowing the virtue of reviews and word of mouth in your marketing campaigns.  Some of the key findings of the study were:

• The Web is the #2 resource for customer support information, after user manuals. It ranks ahead of calling the manufacturer or asking a dealer.
• Website categories that get the most daily usage are search, social communities like MySpace and Facebook, general news websites like CNN.com and NYTimes.com, and online banking.
• The websites that Americans value most are (in order), Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Facebook. Although Yahoo’s financial challenges have generated a lot of press attention, it continues to have a very large and loyal following.
• Young people (age 22 and under) are much noisier online than their elders. They account for about half of all the content and comments posted online.
• Facebook appears to be ahead of MySpace in terms of number of users in the US, and perceived value of the site.
• Despite extensive publicity, the community sites SecondLife and Twitter reach only a few percent of US Internet users.
• Democrats are more active online than Republicans. Democrats are more likely to participate in online communities, and say they are more heavily influenced in their voting decisions by information they find online.

Of course to do well in these areas requires both an excellent product and a good deal of time and effort to liase with the communities in your industry.  Unfortunately many marketers want a short cut when interacting with communities and cannot resist spamming at the first opportunity.  The following steps are a good start for those wishing to use communities as part of their marketing strategy.

1) Lurk, work out how things are done.
2) Respond to posts, share knowledge.
3) Start posts on topics of interest.
4) Discuss with the admin/owner any way that you can help them.

Tags: Facebook, Google, Marketing, MySpace, Twitter, Yahoo, YouTube