One of the biggest challenges these efforts face, whether they are internal or external, is that engagement via social media is generally perceived as a voluntary activity. As in, workers can collaborate and customers can choose to interact with a business through older channels that are often more familiar and better supported by the organization itself. Or they can engage through social channels. For people to choose the social path of engagement as the most suitable one, there need to be motivations and incentives that are aligned with that path.

As companies seek to ensure the highest level of success with their social business efforts, I am seeing that they want a proven, reliable way to drive adoption of their social business strategy, whether it’s an Enterprise 2.0 initiative, a social media marketing program, or Social CRM effort. But social media is not as deterministic and controllable as the channels that have come before it. It’s one of the reasons I say that adoption of social media can only be co-created. It is as much up to the those engaging to create value, sustain engagement, and build community as it is to those that sponsor them. You can’t own a community like you can buy software or a marketing campaign, social business is a two-way street like nothing quite like it. This makes adoption of social business a very different creature from the way businesses used to engage before.

Fortunately, after over half-a-decade of experience in scale, we can see the broad outlines of adoption, which have stages that are very different based on the state of maturity and overall rate of social business adoption in the organization. In other words, as much as we might like it, there is no “one size fits all” approach to it. Fortunately, we can organize around these different stages, which fall roughly into four parts given below. Specifically, these are:

Phases of Social Business Adoption

• Early adoption This is the most nascent and delicate state, where there is perhaps only a seed of community and there is no network effect yet or core membership that can help with the essential work of social business building. The goal is to validate the direction, tools, and social business design. This is often called the pilot phase.
• Critical mass adoption This is transforming a successful early adoption phase into broader uptake that is self-sustaining. I’ve previously observed that this critical mass is around 20% of workers, but has been verified as even less.
• Mainstream adoption There is usually a long pause between the first two waves of adoption and late adoption. Early adopters are often very early and the remainder are often represented by those who have challenges in engaging in a different way, for a variety of reasons. Specific steps must be taken to address these adoption issues.
• Sustainable adoption A successful social businesses contains communities of people, their business activities, and supporting tools. They will largely self-organize and grow on their own once you’re well into the critical mass phase and beyond. However, these communities can also decline over time without appropriate care and nurturing. Employees move on, customers decide to leave, your company changes direction. All of these affect the long term health of your communities, and so specific adoption strategies are required for as long as you have a thriving social business environment.

This post is part of a four part series on social business adoption that will explore each of these phases, with early adoption being examined here. For this effort, I’ve contacted over a dozen experienced social business practitioners, tapped into my research, and aggregated the results of numerous case studies. The outcome is what you see here and while it’s probably as definitive as you’ll find, it’s a necessarily limited view of a rapidly moving new field. Also, in the end, what drives adoption best is whatever actually works for your social business project, and what works best for your project often isn’t what’s in the check lists, no matter how good. Social isn’t as predictable or as deterministic as we might like, and that’s the challenge. Of course, it’s also a large part of the opportunity to drive innovative new outcomes you could never otherwise achieve or imagine. So while your mileage may vary somewhat, the adoption strategies presented here can be a very useful jump start of your social business journey.

Recognizing that that although social business is part of a single continuum across workers, business partners, customers, and the marketplace, that internal use of social business and external uses involve participants that have a very different relationships with the organization. Adoption strategies therefore vary the most between these two groups and so they are presented here separately, though there is often significant cross over, particularly in areas like community management and connecting social business activities to relevant business outcomes and bottom-line benefits.

Note that these adoption phases also take place during the journey of becoming a social business in the large and will be directly informed by that journey. Individual social business efforts, and their adoption strategies, should be loosely connected to what the entire organization is doing and “calibrate” to align themselves in the same direction.

Early Adoption Strategies – Internal Social Business (aka Enterprise 2.0)

While the blur between internal and external communities continues to increase, for now most efforts are still separate. Listed beow are the top adoption strategies for external social business efforts. Begin with these but experiment along the way and find the adoption patterns that are unique to your environment, culture, and constraints.

• Establish a clear purpose. Ill-defined and vague social business efforts end up with a similar outcome. As Susan Scrupski, who formed the active and highly engaged Social Business Council (disclaimer: this is a Dachis Group online community), conveyed when I asked her what the single most helpful action she took to foster adoption was this: “We established a clear purpose for the community, combined with fostering a sense of trust and a culture of sharing.” Clearly stated intents and objectives let participants self-select, join in, and find what they are looking for while contributing more of the same.
• Identify and engage adoption champions. Locate and identify unofficial leaders in your target community and get them involved and participating early. They will ultimately do the bulk of the work during the early adoption phase in drawing in participation using the social networks and good reputation.
• Help leadership set the tone. One of the biggest triggers for adoption is when leadership clearly communicates how they’d like workers to participate in social business. While setting a personal example through participation is best, all it takes is direct, regular, and public involvement by several well-respected executives.
• Communicate clear policies for usage (cans and cannots.) Social media policies have come a long way from the 7 page fine print of years gone by to simple and clear directives. Specifically, the lessons learned over the years have distilled to focus on explaining exactly what employees can and can’t do in the most understandable terms. Bonus points for providing effective suggestions on when they should use social business solutions.
• Test social UX usability with workers. Inexplicably, usability of a social business design is too often under-tested or performed as an afterthought despite it being one of the biggest drivers of early adoption. If you don’t have budget set aside for A/B testing (which is proving to be the very effective, though more expensive) and time in the schedule to fix the biggest usability barriers you discover, you will take an adoption hit.
• Use a consumer-style marketing campaign. How you communicate to workers and the tone you use will set stage for the way its perceived, and in the early days perception of everything. It must be credible but it must also be memorable and convey what’s new and provide motivation to join and try it. John Woodworth of 3M Lab Collaboration used this approach successfully: “Employees already have a preferred product. By using market segmentation and a value proposition for each ‘segment,’ we identified what they would need and how they wanted it delivered. A good customer doesn’t just try your product; they buy it often and endorse it. Focus the sales on finding the ‘good customers’ and the best markets.“.
• Strategic community management. Especially early on, the facility of community management is one of the only real assets you have to drive social business transformation and adoption. Rachel Happe, co-founder of the The Community Roundtable and a world authority on community management, notes that “community building is a critical element of social business success and typically organizations cannot get there by deploying social technologies alone. There are a variety of contextual factors that can increase or decrease the ease of building a community but there are also some common best practices“. I’ll note these best practices in this list.
• Connect to business purposes. This seems obvious stated this way, but many look at social business approaches as a horizontal or general purpose communications method more akin to e-mail to IM than a way to improve a specific business activity. Sometimes this is true of course, but the best results often seem to come from those that aimed their social business design at a specific business opportunity. As Lauri Buczek, social media strategist at Intel, recently noted in Mark Fidelman’s Sure Fire Ways To Become A Social Business, “First, identify the business objectives.” Ken Domen, an enterprise collaboration lead at a large enterprise, conveyed to me that finding a “killer app” that solves a particular business problem better than before is a strong adoption technique. For example, Ken finds that IM and calendaring apps, embedded contextually in his social environment, to be particularly effective.
• Proactively share the adoption process. Communities are built by their members, not companies alone. Time after time, as I see particularly effective examples of social business, I see that this is a core value. The more the process is open and members are encouraged and empowered to provide structure, rules of the road, and spread the word, the more ownership, involvement, and productive work results. Experimentation should be encouraged. A leading example is SAP’s million-plus member Community Network (case study) with their SAP Mentor program.

Early Adoption Strategies – External Social Business

As social business scales up and goes external, successful adoption has a new, though often complementary set of requirements. Some of the differences revolve around motivation in that external participants aren’t typically paid to work for the organization like internal participants and so usually have a very different set of reasons they are involved. Other issues that tend to be unique to external social business includes appealing to a much broader demographic and competing with similar communities elsewhere on the Internet.

• Identify and engage influencers. Enlisting those with strong reputations and contacts related to the purpose of your social business effort has long been understood as an effective adoption pattern. Engagement with influencers takes many forms and should be connected to adoption whenever possible early on.
• Use content as a participation seed. At first, there’s little in a new community to draw in initial participation. Rachel Happe says this is one of her top three adoption patterns: “Create a content calendar that provides members with something they value and creates opportunities for them to interact.” Obtaining seed content can be resource-intensive and can require more investment than expected if influencers are not well-engaged early. This should be sustained until at least the critical mass phase of adoption and usually beyond.
• Go to the audience, draw them in. Building a community on a far corner of the Internet makes it hard for new participants to find it. This is one of the reasons that Facebook pages have become so popular, by going directly to where a vast, already social and participative audience is. There are many approaches to this but it can greatly aid adoption when integrated properly.
• Personal engagement from key business stakeholders. Having the presence of company leaders and providing structured access to them by recognized members of the social business ecosystem provides the deep engagement that’s more likely to both increase participation and lead to useful outcomes. SAP’s Community Network does this proactively (see case study link above.)
• Reward the remarkable 1%. By now just about everyone is familiar with the 90-9-1 rule, where 90% are passive browsers, 9% contribute a little, and 1% account for a disproportionate amount of the value created. These are rough numbers for external social business participation. While the specific technographics continues to fluctuate a little as the market evolves, the key to driving adoption is ensuring that your most valuable contributors are incentivized appropriately to contribute, once you identify who they are. While timing and perceptions of conflict of interest can be issues, rewards typically run the gamut from simple recognition to more formal business relationships.
• Proactive community management. Community management continues to make my top list of what helps define a successful, vibrant social business. Rachel Happe includes this in her top three list as well, noting “allocating a full-time community manager that both encourages member activity and keeps the conversation on track.” The biggest misstep I see many social business efforts make is greatly under-resourcing this capability early on. SAP’s Gail Moody-Bird has observed that resources like this “are not a part time job for everyone.“
• Keep it simple. To be usable and effective for the broadest demographic, simplicity in joining, user experience, and conversation are essential to reduce abandonment and maximize the value being exchanged. This is Rachel Happe’s top adoption point as well, “keep the functional environment simple so new members quickly grasp how to participate.“
• Be authentic, don’t overproduce. Over the years, as I’ve collected best practices for online communities, I’ve noticed a common pattern. The fanciest and slickest social business experiences don’t necessarily achieve nearly the uptake as ones that are simple, basic, and straightforward. Though social media marketing aspects of social business can be an exception, excessive polish conveys a sense that too much lipstick is being put on. As John Hagel has talked about a trust paradox and social business, that being truly genuine and letting human realities be exposed is much more likely to sustain adoption and less likely to actively repel participants.
• Employ the “Us First, World Second” strategy. Time and again, when I’ve spoken to social business efforts, they explained how in the early days everyone was on deck in the organization and helped create the seed of participation. I’ve even heard it phrased that at first “it was 90% us and 10% them, and then later it was 90% them and 10% us.” Driving early adoption in this was is successful but unsustainable at a high level for long and must be timed right. “All hands on deck” may be problematic for your organization for various reasons but it’s a powerful tool for early adoption when it can be used.
• Build trust and a culture of sharing. This is one of Susan Scrupski’s adoption lessons and has been repeated by just about everyone I’ve spoke with over the years. It’s not just enough to build trust, the culture must be one where the free exchange of ideas is valued and encouraged, because that’s the observable value that drives innovation, better decisions, and more. Building that culture requires leading by example and rewarding contributors both.

Note that this list cannot be exhaustive and there are literally dozens of techniques large and small that one can attempt to drive adoption of social business. You should also never forget the fundamental cycle of listen, analyze, measure, and respond. However, these cover the more widely used and repeatable techniques that I’ve seen of the many social business efforts that I’ve examined over the years. I’ll be covered the remaining adoption phases in upcoming posts but welcome your feedback to improve and extend this list.

Some refer to this position as a Chief Social Media Officer.  I don’t think the social business evangelist necessarily needs a specific title, but I do believe the person to shepherd social business possesses five characteristics.

• Passion for the business
• Appreciation for the organization’s cultural heritage
• Limitless determination and stamina
• Ability to influence
• Skills to maneuver the political landscape

These five characteristics are in addition to excellent interpersonal skills and a passion for social media.

Passion for the business

Passion for social media isn’t enough.  The evangelist has to be passionate about the business and people associated with it.  People who are passionate about the business are deeply committed to it and driven by intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic rewards according to John Hagel.

Appreciation for the organization’s cultural heritage

Culture makes or breaks social business.  For many large companies, social business requires a cultural shift from traditional structures (command and control, information hoarding) to shared responsibilities and transparent processes.  This shift does not happen overnight because it requires a change in behavior. This also requires new types of motivations.  An evangelist needs to understand and empathize with colleagues who are apt to resist change in order to know how to motivate them.  If colleagues feel the evangelist has blue-sky hopes that are unrealistic for the organization, they will lose faith that the evangelist can impact real change and resume old ways of working.

Limitless determination and stamina

According to Jaime Punishill, Director of Strategic Planning and New Channel Development at Citibank, the time it takes to evangelize social initiatives within an organization should not be underestimated.  During our Social Business Summit, Jaime said he spends 25% of his time giving the same exact speech about why and how Citibank should operate as a social business.  Jaime illustrates the need for an evangelist to keep pushing the vision and maintain momentum through ongoing education, especially when social initiatives lack desired results and disillusionment overcomes initial excitement.

Ability to influence

Evangelists need a vision that gains buy-in and support from the top (C-suite) as well as the bottom (entry-level).  At the end of the day, the evangelist must have the political capital to influence the right people within an organization to make change happen.  This can be as simple as getting as many people as possible within the organization to participate in the socialization process.  When people participate in the process, they feel more invested in the outcome, which increases the likelihood of that outcome occurring.

Skills to maneuver the political landscape

Many businesses are consumed by debates over who owns what piece of the social strategy, especially during a time when resources are scarce.  The evangelist should be able to rise above and maneuver corporate politics without getting tangled by them.  This means the evangelist is best positioned when he or she can operate independently of a specific department or group.  Obviously, this isn’t possible with an evangelist who emerges (versus hired).  To be effective, the evangelist must be aware of competing agendas and demands and find a compromise that will maximize benefits for the whole.

Does your business have a social business evangelist? Are there additional characteristics you would add to this list?

Tribes

While Foursquare is an individual competition, Tribes puts people into teams to accomplish quests and earn rewards for business outcomes like completing an e-learning course, or submitting your time report. You and your tribe grow experience points by doing things like sharing knowledge. Each Tribe has a leader, and members can even switch tribes if they have the permission of both Tribe leaders. If you are into such topics as game theory, social psychology, and game mechanics you will understand how this goes far beyond the simple mayorship or a completion badge.

When there’s an impetus and/or incentives that make people want to contribute, participate, and collaborate in achieving goals, your organizational culture fundamentally changes.

Behavior Modification

The recurring theme heard in every organization’s journey into becoming more social, is how to change the company culture to lose its command and control attitude, organize itself more like a network, be more collaborative, and to stop hoarding and start sharing information.

What better way to change behavior than to introduce elements of gaming and competitiveness? Think of the Foursquare leaderboard. Everybody wants to see their name in the Top 10. What if your Tribe is depending upon you to complete a task for success? Peer pressure is also a powerful motivator. You might just find that people are turning in their expense reports on time for a change, completing that online e-learning program that they’ve been neglecting, or finishing quarterly reviews of their staff.

Mindfulness

In Kate Niederhoffer’s talk at the Social Business Summit in Austin, she referred to a study in social psychology by Elliot Aronson in 1992 that showed that you could change someone’s behavior if they were made aware of an issue, and made a commitment to change their behavior. Not changing creates a hypocrisy condition that introduces an uncomfortable level of cognitive dissonance. One way to make people mindful of a desired behavior is to make a commitment to the rest of their Tribe, and to be on a continual quest to earn badges and points for desired business outcomes.

An example of this might be an employee who you would like to attain a Project Management Professional (PMP) certification status. Rather than just another task, this could become a quest in which the employee is made aware of the benefits of the PMP course knowledge, and makes a commitment to their Tribe to complete the quest. Having the quest badge uncompleted on their intranet page for all their Tribemates to see creates constant mindfulness of the task. Someone in a mentor role could also assign points or other benefits for using PMP principals on-the-job.

The Push/Pull of Your Team

Applications like Foursquare and Gowalla are in their infancy, but it is this type of technology, attention to culture and behavior change, combined with support for processes that will help organizations become more socially calibrated.

The way that we work, interact, and reward people in the enterprise of tomorrow will be very different. How likely is your organization to adopt similar concepts?

Two weeks ago, Kate Niederhoffer spoke on the “Social Psychological Principles of Change” at our Social Business Summit here in Austin. Mainly, bringing about change by promoting positive behaviors, rather than punishing negative ones.

In her presentation, Kate said to start focusing on changing behaviors rather than changing attitudes. As humans, we have an inherent need to belong. We want to be in agreement with the people around us so that they’ll like us and we’ll fit in. As a result, we will agree to ideas that we don’t fully accept. More and more, social psychologists find that people will generally say they support the stated goal in a group setting, i.e., “Let’s do social!” but then actually behave in the opposite way when no one is looking. So, their attitudes end up saying, “YES!” while their behaviors say “no.”

How can you change individual behaviors and, in turn, company culture? Realize that it’s easy to “talk the talk,” but you have to get people to “walk the walk” too.

1. Start by exposing people to their anti-social behaviors and show them how to develop new behaviors, possibly through a pilot program.
2. Don’t make a list of “no no’s.” I have personally seen companies make this mistake often, most obviously in their social media policies. A list of what not to do exacerbates anxiety and seems to more firmly root people in their old behaviors. If you want engagement, you can begin to encourage interaction by telling people what they can do, rather than what they can’t.
3. Introduce a new behavior set, not just new tools. Pair newbies up with those who have been playing in social spaces for a while. I think training is key to success. Once people know what they can do, help them understand how to do it. Fear of the unknown can be a major roadblock.

In reality, this concept is one we’ve been exposed to all our lives. Your mom tells you not to touch the hot stove, and all you can think about is touching the hot stove. Now, as an adult, you tell your employees not to email and all they can think about is emailing. It’s difficult to stop old behaviors and develop new ones, but your business can never be truly social without first addressing culture change.

What are you doing today to facilitate the culture change that a social business demands? If you’ve got the buy-in for “social,” attitudes are already in line. Now it’s time to start addressing the behaviors that feed your corporate culture. Don’t let your social strategy stall because you fail to encourage the right behaviors.

The Cloud Culture pamphlet discusses the fact that with the ubiquity of the Internet, we see more and more of our data (and life?) moving to the “cloud”. Think about our music, our documents, our private profile data, our pictures, our books, etc. This is a very interesting evolution to see but Charles argues that there is a potential threat here as well: who will own that cloud? Or differently said, will the cloud enabling companies “turn evil” one day?

I’d like to invite you to a 2-minute interview where he summarises his thesis:

While Charlie mainly focused on the cloud (which actually refers more to the Internet/WWW revolution, rather than the technical delivery model), I argue that this debate is applicable to a far broader domain.

Institutions fighting for self-preservation

Somehow the whole discussion that evening vaguely reminded me a bit of one of the statements in Clay Shirky’s excellent book “Here comes everybody“. Already back in 2005, Clay argued that often the first goal of established institutions is self-preservation, whilst the initial stated goal of that institution suddenly becomes a secondary priority.

When you loosely link that to my earlier blog post “Do you want to succeed or survive?” where I challenge certain decades-old business models that are in danger of becoming obsolete, one can only wonder whether the “fear” towards the cloud is also a fight for self-preservation?

Could it be that the fight between book authors and book publishers on the one hand and Google’s Book project on the other hand, is a fight for self-preservation of the book industry? Or can we take this broader and say that it’s between mankind’s fight for its heritage and culture versus “cloud capital” or “commercial cloud”?

There is a big fear amongst many people that Google’s Book project (but the problem is far more broadly than only this particular project) means that one commercial company is basically going to own, dominate and regulate access to mankind’s books. The fear is that one day Google will charge everyone that wants to access their library and that they can do whatever they want with that.

“Weird, or just different?”

Before you continue reading, I’d like you to watch this funny but very eye-opening 2-minute video on TED. Why? Because I want you to be very open minded for what’s coming and Derek Sivers kind of made his point that opposite opinions or views might be right as well.

So, to get back to the discussion of the Google Books project. What if I’d say that there is a chance that Google has done far more to preserve and promote mankind’s culture and heritage than a lot of governments on this planet? Isn’t Google kind of saving our culture by digitizing every book on earth? Isn’t Google opening up and giving access to special and rare books so that you and me (that are not part of some sort of elite academia) can read them as well?

Even more, because they are driven by commercial interest, they will probably execute this project in a far more efficient way (resource/time/money-wise) than any government on this planet. The French government has announced that they want to keep the French books in France and thus going to start their own book digitization project. Well, I only fear how much money this will cost for the French taxpayer. Especially, given the fact that they are basically duplicating Google’s work.

Déjà vue

The whole point I’m trying to make here, and I’m very grateful for Charlie to have bootstrapped the debate, is that technological inventions have a big impact on our society. This applies for the Internet, for cloud computing, cellphones, social media and many others and that they provide both a big opportunity but also a potential danger.

However, whether it is an opportunity or a danger that depends on how you look at it. We’ve seen many cases where for instance the Internet has disrupted (and destroyed?) whole industries. Executives that were used to run a business for 20-30 years, all of a sudden found out that their tried and tested methods don’t work anymore.

So if you are an old-skool music executive you will probably see the Internet as a big danger, but some young artists and record labels have already embraced the Internet and regard it as an opportunity to get more easy and cheaper access to the market.

But let’s be honest, how much different is this than for instance the switch from coal to oil? The switch from horses to cars? The switch from cruise boats to planes? Our whole history is full with examples where one innovation destroyed a whole industry, well this is exactly the same thing here with the Internet and the cloud. Whether we want or not, it is happening.

Government as regulator and enabler instead of solutions provider

But how do we deal with the dangers (if there are any?). How do we ensure that Google does not “become evil” as many fear?

Well, rather than the government being a solutions provider (as the French government that wants to spend loads of tax money on the book project), I’d like to see them more as a regulator and solutions enabler.

I’m quite liberal, but I am realistic enough that the whole invisible hand theory is rather a textbook theory than the ideal market philosophy so yes there is a role for the government here.

It should be a watchdog to the industry to assure that companies don’t become evil. It should supply research grants to these companies and force them to develop open (industry) standards. And yes, if the industry would become evil one day, then I don’t have a problem with the government stepping in and take measures.

And as my final thought: how bad is it actually if Google would charge us for instance 25 Pounds, Dollars or Euro per year for accessing their library? Don’t you think that we’d pay per person far more tax money to have a government project with the similar size and reach?

Just think about it: every opportunity can be seen as a danger, and vice versa.

Footnote

My thanks to Charles Leadbeater, the Counterpoint think tank and the British Council for enabling this much necessary debate!

Top performers need to learn quickly to advance their careers. It’s no longer acceptable to wait for our next performance review, often months away, to get critical insights on how we can improve. Managers often forget about important advice and it’s usually too late to do anything concrete about what we do hear!

We need constructive feedback and coaching much more frequently to excel in today’s fast-paced business environments. A quick comment or simple kudo, such as Nice job!, can be just as valuable as more thorough advice on what we can do to improve.

This is what top performers I’ve worked with thrive on – a more interactive, social dynamic at work in which they can be faster at:

• Course-correcting
• Identifying their strengths and opportunities for improvement
• Sharing useful insights and advice with team members

Alternatives to traditional performance management are out there. Oft-quoted and much respected Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer describes the requirement clearly: “Encourage managers to have frequent, ongoing conversations with their staff about performance.”

It can be challenging to get people talking regularly and about the right things. To create effective dialogue, we need to make it easier to adopt the social behaviors of top performers:

• Getting useful feedback and advice from the people they work with
• Giving feedback to help their team improve
• Doing collaborative 1:1 coaching to align their team and get results

There are a number of simple ways to encourage these behaviors, including:

• Make it quick and frequent – brief exchanges increase participation and relevance compared to lengthy surveys, meetings and reviews
• Make it easy to engage through existing tools – including mobile devices and email
• Provide a way to share anonymous feedback – this helps overcome traditional barriers, such as management hierarchies

Making it easy to participate is the first step in creating a constructive and hiveminded work environment. Together with improving focus and alignment, it will give people at all levels within the organization the ability to take control of their own development while also helping their peers, employees, and managers grow.