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.

This is posing a growing challenge for organizations that are trying to assemble a mature set of social media capabilities across their business. It hasn’t helped that social business initiatives have — up until recently — consisted of very separate efforts focused primarily on social media marketing and internal collaboration (aka Enterprise 2.0) often with side bets on crowdsourcing and Social CRM. This has often meant the acquisition of very different social media products and services both on-premises as well as SaaS, each with their own social architecture, social identity, search functionality, etc. Now that the social business discussion is moving up to the CIO level in many of the large organizations I’m talking with, this has led to a growing desire to reconcile and make sense of social media platform investment and application portfolios across the enterprise.

To put in plainly, there’s a lot of work to do here, both on the IT side and the social media vendor side. It’s currently too difficult to integrate today’s social media products into a set of coherent and consistent social business capabilities with unified security, identity, discovery, analytics, management and governance. Some of the issues are technical and some of them are organizational but fortunately it turns out that gaining intellectual control of enterprise social media is certainly possible today. Frameworks and approaches of above 1.0 maturity for this now exist, such as Social Business Design (disclaimer: This is the process we use ourselves.)

So businesses have some choices to make today if they want to organize better around social media. The first choice is the set of platforms, technologies, and standards they would like to have. The second is the processes, organizational structures, and cultural/behavioral changes they’d like to see realized. And finally, the third set is the level of resources, prioritization, and funding that will be provided. IT departments will be affected by all of these, but the first and last ones the most, and yet they must also understand that it’s likely that social media is going to become a function in the organization that is somewhat similar to theirs. I currently see a growing parallel between IT departments and social business units, in that they supply capabilities across the business and support new business initiatives so that they’re successful in using technology to create better outcomes. Whether social business units ultimately become part of IT (not likely in most organizations in my opinion), move into HR or corporate communications, or become an independent unit is a trend that is still unclear, but these are the most likely scenarios of who ends up in charge of enterprise social media.

What is clear, however, is that social media is having an immediate and sustained impact on IT decisions at the moment. Sometimes this is a disruptive impact because social media now deeply affects how IT delivers on intranets, portals, collaboration, unified communication, content/document management, workflow, and business intelligence (at the very least.) This means there are some hard choices to make. They are also ones that once made will well situate the organization to much more naturally, gracefully, and effectively incorporate social media in the way it achieves top-line business objectives.

To reduce the undesirable aspect of social media impact and better capture the many upsides, IT departments should think carefully about several key issues related to 1) social media standards, 2) federated platform selection, and 3) on-the-ground consumer-style enablement of business uses of social media. In particular, this will help define a clear vision as social business service delivery is becoming increasingly blurry as organizations acquire a growing portfolio of internal and external social business platforms that also connect to existing IT systems that are in turn getting their own social media features. The list below will help focus on what’s important while enabling the business to meet its needs.

Preparing for Social Business as a Strategic IT Capability

I’ve covered the highest level management issues in getting a large enterprise strategically ready for social business before in Introducing The Social Business Unit and Organizing for Social Business: The Issues, so these are the concerns specific for preparing on the IT side of the house:

1. Vigorously encourage social computing standards, but don’t be held back by their immaturity. Enterprises have not pushed hard for standards in social software like we’ve done in previous generations of IT. Consequently most of the social media standards that exist today are consumer-focused. We cannot forget standards enable choice, interoperability, ensure pools of talent, prevent lock-in, lower costs, and provide many other benefits. Portable social graphs, open activity streams, standardized social applications are the focus here but there are other standardization issues as well. Not every vendor will support the emerging standards for enterprise social media and choices are going to be limited at first. It is essential for IT to defend this position and provide the advantages to the business in regards to social media. Security and mobility should also not be an afterthought in this discussion either.
2. Actively support business-centric social media platform selections. Unfortunately, I see IT departments encouraging the use of legacy platforms that aren’t what are sometimes called “born social”. There’s also more capability to acquire that just a base social network, social CMS, or social intranet platform. There is also social listening, analytics, management, compliance, and governance. Business users won’t necessarily know all the required moving parts for a mature and sophisticated social media capability but IT should and must. I’ll be exploring the social business stack soon to look at this in more detail, but the key is for IT to have a very open mind about building a set of strategic capabilities that makes sense for each of the various functions of the enterprise that will be heavily involved in social media. This is essential for genuine success since what IT either has on the shelf or wants to deliver as a one-size-fits-all to everyone is usually inadequate. Significantly poorer outcomes will also result when dealing with the platform capabilities of each part of the social business spectrum in isolation.
3. Proactively enable independent social media action on the ground with strong IT support. Social media is about empowering people and specifically here we’re talking about empowering workers with social media. They need tools, help, and support for their particular social business activity, whether that is sales, marketing, product development, customer care, or what have you. They will be looking, perhaps just once, at IT for help for service delivery with this. IT must enable and support choice and the widest possible options for both internal and external social business. Not doing so means that business users will be driven to service providers that can meet their requirements and deadlines, which often puts social media outside the range of IT involvement and governance. Preparing ahead of time for the growing lists of requests that I’m already hearing from IT managers means planning ahead and following an emergent enterprise architecture approach. Take this to heart and support centrally, while empowering locally.

For additional details, please read Reconciling the enterprise IT portfolio with social media and stay tuned for a deeper dive into the moving parts of what Peter Kim calls a modern holistic social business capability.

One of the classic intranet design challenges that never seems to get any easier is the design of the homepage.  Employee Communications wants corporate messaging and CEO announcements. IT wants applications and personalization features. Employees want the cafeteria menu.

Juggling these varied interests is tough. As the intranet moves from a few-to-many internal communications tool to a hub of social activity, collaboration, and community, the homepage runs the risk of becoming even more crowded, complex, and simply irrelevant to the everyday lives of employees.

The libertarians in the organization know the answer to this dilemma and have yelled it loud and proud for years: “Personalize! Let the user choose what they want!” The paternalists know they have the answer too: “Centralize and publish! Decide for the user!” And so the tug of war continues.
 
We’ve been of the mind that you can have the best of both worlds. Through implicit personalization you can turn facts that you know about an employee into a powerful filtering tool to provide them with relevant information. But before we tackle how exactly we’ve gone about doing that, let’s dive a bit deeper into what it means to be relevant in the first place.

Signal to Noise

As good, responsible information designers, we take seriously the issue of trying to reduce the signal to noise ratio on the intranet.

We have our work cut out for us: the highest possible ratio of signal to noise is desirable. But what is relevant? What is not? Relevance is a thorny word, one that’s used and abused constantly. But what does it really mean? I’m fond of this functionally oriented definition:

Relevance: something (A) is relevant to a task (T) if it increases the 
 likelihood of accomplishing the goal (G), which is implied by T.

So what’s the likelihood that you, as an intranet manager or interaction designer, are going to be able to reliably predict which pieces of information will be required for the task an employee is currently working on in their quest to achieve a particular goal?

Getting Things Done

When employees visit the intranet, they are engaged in productive inquiry – an activity where they are deliberately seeking what they need in order to do what they want to do. Said another way, it’s not inquiry in the form of general curiosity, but inquiry in the service of wanting to get things done.

Getting things done in the modern organization increasingly entails the creation of information. Productive inquiry (embodied through the act of searching the intranet, for example) begets collecting or communicating or creating information. Getting things done creates relationship between people and information. And when the action happens in the context of a social intranet, one which has the capability of storing the actions of any given user, we suddenly know a whole lot more about that person and what may be relevant to them.

We have a couple of ways on how we relate people to information in ThoughtFarmer. Our recent homepage redesign is a reflection of our thinking on this subject in action.

The Proxemics of the Intranet

To understand how we relate to information and each other on the intranet, we sought inspiration from the “real world” of material objects and physical space and the pioneering work of American anthropologist Edward T. Hall, to introduce a concept of proxemics to the intranet. Proxemics was Hall’s contribution to the study of how people relate to each other interpersonally and socially through their physical proximity to each other. Hall identified four expanding zones of relation: intimate distance, personal distance, social distance, and public distance. Each of these distances represented boundaries of physical space from centimeters (intimate) to tens of meters away (public) and represented the ability to engage in certain relationship-defining acts between people across those distances.

Hall’s expanding zones of relation represent a nice metaphor through which we can look at the relationships employees have with each other, with their company, and their content on the intranet. Intimate distance represents information all about you: your page edits, your comments, your status, etc. Personal distance represents stuff that’s been done to you or your content by others. Social distance is everything within your network, including your management relationships and group / division / regional relationships. Finally, public distance on the intranet is everyone and their activity in the organization.

We’ve adapted this approach to the homepage to create a useful filter through which we can enhance the relevance of information, all the while maintaining a middle ground between user need and organizational need.

News items can be published throughout ThoughtFarmer as a default content type within the system. Users have the ability to publish news on the homepage directly, within their departments and divisions, for their project groups or as “informal news” via a blog post. Our first step towards implicit personalization was to merge these news sources together, providing users with a mix of “global corporate” material and “local departmental” material.
 
Instead of just broadcasting them public news (the corporation, its initiatives, news from HQ) let’s throw in a mix of social, personal, and intimate content as well. City newspapers have known this model works for years to capture the attention of their audience. International, national, regional, and local current events all wind up sharing space on the front page of your typical daily city broadsheet.

The second design intervention was the redesign of Recent Activity or our “workstream” feature. The signal to noise ratio of this feature was previously way too noisy. On installs of significant size and activity, there was simply too much content to comprehend for the majority of users and the filtering wasn’t intuitive.
 
In version 3.6 of ThoughtFarmer, we’ve organized activity into Your Groups, Status Updates, and All Site Activity. Your Groups aggregates activity that is happening in the groups you belong to. That might be a formal project or an informal community on the intranet (i.e.: Digital Photographers). Users have further control (explicit personalization) by being able to filter which groups they want to show/hide on the homepage.

Status Updates are Twitter or Facebook like user updates, answering the question, “What are you doing?” This feature is now a familiar design pattern within Enterprise 2.0 software suites, enabling phatic communication throughout the organization.
 
And finally, should you want to drink from the proverbial information firehose, you can browse All Site Activity, an aggregation of high priority activities merged from every user across the site. We’ve recently spoken with a few intranet administrators and managers that find this feed quite useful and fascinating. They observe it flow by in real-time throughout the day, occasionally intervening or helping users out in different areas throughout the site where activity is occurring.

The Power of Defaults

The debate about personalization vs. segmentation on the intranet has been much discussed and researched by many pioneering intranet designers and consultants. As keen observers of user behaviour in the real world, we believe that well chosen default options are a sound design strategy. Adoption rates of personalization features are low, driven by a lack of understanding of the business benefit from the user and the inertia of human nature to simply be lazy and accept defaults. By placing the user at the centre of the information universe and using their relationships to information and each other as the default filter, we can provide them with an intuitive view of their world, making significant progress towards our goal of a more relevant and valuable intranet.