Red Rover

12 December 2011

Bringing Users to the Table… And Keeping Them There

A new report titled, “Rebooting the Antisocial Network”, distributed by InformationWeek and written by Michael Healey cites a growing number of businesses are implementing social architecture and external social networking to maximize engagement, knowledge sharing and transparency across their companies. But in many cases, employees just aren’t buying it. Healy reports, “87% of the 452 respondents to our 2012 enterprise social networking survey have social networking tools, but most only see small pockets of use among employees.” Across the board, respondents, the majority of whom are IT staff or IT managers, overwhelmingly agreed that adoption, or achieving sustained usage, was the greatest challenge of implementation. The question is, how do you prevent your company from reverting back to its anti-social behavior when social technology is introduced? Based on the report findings, here are three ways to keep your company from becoming anti-social.

Get Executives On Board to Get Employees On Board

You don’t want employees adopting social software simply because a manager says everybody has to — they’ll use it begrudgingly. So it’s important for executives and managers to support the technology and be able to offer a compelling explanation of benefits to the organizational and the individual user. Change management methodology in IT implementation is finally catching on and is being utilized to promote adoption and sustained use, or what we refer to as “process + technology”. However, not everyone will be thrilled with the change right away, so it’s good to have executives involved from the start, or what Healey describes as ”a critical big stick when you need it”.

“Without continued executive support (including the occasional poke with a stick), groups may slip back to emails, long meetings or other old methods of collaborating. In other words, both IT and business leaders must stay engaged with the social networking site, and apply pressure when necessary.” (p.17)

Get Help Steering the Ship

In addition to executive buy-in, you also need proactive community managers with a vested interest in inviting users and keeping them active in the network. Many companies make the mistake of assigning these tasks to someone who already has a full set of unrelated responsibilities and doesn’t have the time to tend to the community as it grows. Then they wonder why users haven’t flocked to the network. Well, it’s like throwing a party without a host. It’s awkward. You need someone to invite everyone over and then manage things. Community managers should be responsible for moderating discussions, tracking usage trends through analytics, and keeping the conversation going through content development and sharing. This is a full-time job, and you’ll need someone taking these responsibilities seriously if you want your social network to thrive.

“Almost a quarter of our respondents don’t have any full-time re- sources dedicated to social media, and another 32% don’t know if they do (Figure 15).” (p. 16)

Give Them the Features They Want

A robust internal network for the office will have the features employees are likely to use in their personal life and therefore may already be comfortable using (look-books or directories, status updates, short-form messaging, blogs, etc.), and will connect to the tools they are already using (email and calendar integration, listservs, shared files, etc.). Healey explains what your network needs,

“It also needs a handful of core elements, including search, like/recommend, following of discussions or people, the ability to embed content such as photographs and videos, personal categorization/organization and easy sharing…. You must be able to offer tight integration with email, a requirement 42% of companies ignore… Email isn’t going away, and not linking it to the social platform is a critical flaw that will hinder adoption.” (p.12-13)