Creating an Evolving Social Technology Strategy

A S O C I A L M E D I A W H I T E PA P E R F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 1

Creating an Evolving
Social Technology
Strategy
How to match the blistering evolution
of social media with effective internal and
external social technology strategies

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Abstract
This is not your average white paper on social media.
This paper will not cram your business culture into a one-size-fits-all jumpsuit, nor promise to
help you Twitter your way to a shapelier bottom line.

Instead, we offer clarity on fast-evolving crowd-linking behavior. We recommend tools for
building a long-term social-technology strategy as a way to connect, build your brand, boost KPIs
and monitor change.

And we will deliver a healthy dose of high-altitude truth: Social technologies are evolving too fast
for many to keep up with.

While progressive companies are tying themselves in million-dollar knots just building Facebook
apps or chasing the latest Twitter-marketing strategy, Perficient proposes that firms take a more
holistic view:

The most popular social technologies did not even exist eight years ago, so the trick is not in
deciding which ones deserve your money or man-hours.

The trick is learning how to anticipate and leverage trends in human interaction in ways that will
keep your business responsive, agile and synched with the ever-shifting DNA of social media
evolution.

The trick to mastering social media is this:

It’s not the software. It’s the culture.

Creating an Evolving Social Technology Strategy t 2

Social Technology Strategy Matters
Social networking is booming. That’s obvious.

Web users love it: In the past year, activity on social-networking sites in the United States has
increased by a massive 83% – and that’s
just the average, according to a report
out from Nielsen Online.

In 2010, Twitter users sent 25 billion
tweets1, and Facebook participation has
jumped to a staggering 500 million+
users worldwide2.

People now spend 22% of their internet
time on social-networking sites – up
from just 6% three years ago3.

Social technology succeeds because it Time spent on social networking has nearly quadrupled since 2009.
augments a basic human need: forming
relationships based on interest and sharing information with friends old and new. Now,
connecting and collaborating with like-minded people (or people with specific, needed talents
you lack) is push-button easy and eye-blink instantaneous.

Social technology is more than just a fad – it’s a bona-fide revolution in human interaction,
offering huge potential for new and better ways to do business.

As your employees, partners and customers grow accustomed to making connections on
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr or YouTube, they are responding more actively to companies
that actively communicate via social media.

Savvy companies large and small have launched highly successful marketing, branding and
community-building campaigns via popular social platforms. Most eCommerce sites have


introduced some form of comments and rating, allowing better customer service and product
usage and high-quality feedback to suppliers and manufacturers.

Others are growing
their business and
improving efficiency,
collaboration and time-
to-market performance
by empowering
collaboration and
communication with
internal social media
tools.

But at the same time,
web users can be fickle,
trying one social
medium after another.

For instance, MySpace (the 800-pound gorilla of social technology not five years ago when
NewsCorp. paid the massive sum of $580 million to buy it - http://www.nytimes.com/
2005/07/18/business/18cnd-newscorp.html) laid off more than half its staff after watching
Facebook and Twitter steadily erode its market share.

But Twitter’s wild growth is also marked by an extremely low retention rate. Fully 60% of new
Twitter users walk away from their accounts after just one month, compared with users on
MySpace and Facebook, 30% of whom abandon accounts within a month of setting them up4.

Choosing the right platform for your purpose today may seem obvious – Twitter and Facebook for
reaching users, SharePoint and services such as Yammer or Jive for empowering your employees’
collaboration and communication.


Deeper in this paper, we will discuss the latest analytics and best practices for using the currently
popular social media platforms, connecting with people and capitalizing on your social
technology investment.

But because platforms and audience tastes and needs evolve permanently, developing a
controllable, scalable and sustainable social media strategy turns out to be far more critical than
learning how to leverage the existing tools.

The questions you should be asking yourself are: What kind of customer conversations will we
always want to invite? How can we get better market intelligence without spending more money?
Which communities of interest need more consistent brand traction? Who do we want to be two
years from now? Five? Ten?

Perspective – Keeping social technology “real”
Social media is an extremely young –
some would say juvenile – business
domain. Here is a bit of perspective:

Twenty years ago, the Web as we know
it did not exist.

Eight years ago, search technology as
we know it – the concierge-like, almost
prescient blend of well-sifted and
MySpace, circa 2003
categorized links, maps, images and web
services offered by Google, Bing and less-known search engines – did not exist.

In 2003, MySpace was in its infancy and most of what we know today as the vibrant and
powerful world of social media – Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, YouTube, FourSquare – did
not exist.

Yet the social activities supported by all this “new” technology are as old as business itself. The


concept of the Agora – from which “I shop” and “I speak in public” stem – dates back to ancient
Greece.

Social technology simply enables basic human behavior: seeking knowledge; talking with and
about ourselves and each other; sharing information and ideas, products and services, facts and
opinions.

As technologists work to make all this “easier”, they are really just responding to cultural cues
from the users, refining what “works” and shedding what fails, which makes for a ceaselessly
moving target, at best.

So, every move you make in social media and technology should boil down to how easily it lets
you interact with users, and how much power it gives them to interact with each other under your
brand. Companies’ corporate communications departments do not control their brand anymore,
the consumers do.

Again - it’s not necessarily the tools, it’s how you use them.

Social Media Technology Perspective – SLATES
Probably the most influential social media technology perspective is summarized in “Enterprise
2.0 : The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” by Professor Andrew P. MacAfee, published in 2006
in the MIT Sloan Management Review5. In this research article, Professor MacAfee has
synthesized his vision of six components of Enterprise 2.0 technology he called SLATES.

SLATES is an acronym that describes the business-impacting capabilities of social media, derived
from the effective use of Web 2.0 technologies in and across enterprises. It stands for Search,
Links, Authorship, Tags, Extensions and Signaling.

Later on, Dion Hinchcliffe6, a leading social media visionary and consultant who created the Web
2.0 University, further refined SLATES to fewer words.


They are:

Search: Discovery of information drives reuse, leverage and ROI

Links: Using URLs to forge thousands of deep interconnections between enterprises
content, 24/7

Authorship: Ensuring all individuals within and across enterprises can easily publish
content on Enterprise 2.0 platforms

Tags: Allowing natural, organic, on-the-fly- organization of content from every point of view

Extensions: Extend knowledge by mining patterns and user activity. (Ever purchase a book
on Amazon and seen the phrase “other customers who purchased this book also
purchased these books?”)

Signaling: Make information consumption efficient by pushing out changes

Understanding SLATES’ implications is key to defining a sustainable social media strategy.

“Open Hand”: The five best practices of social technology
Equally important is the human factor. To quote the old software developers’ gag: PEBKAC –
Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair. No matter how the Next Big Trend in technology or
audience behavior affects the platforms you choose this year, your challenge is dealing with people.

Your company’s success in social media and technology should be guided by a unified,
transparent strategy, framed within five core best practices that we think of as the “Open Hand”:

• Welcome

• Engage

• Listen

• Adjust

• Refresh

We will discuss these in context a bit later.


The bottom line is, your work in social technology will differ from your other IT endeavors
because of its very nature as something that is raw, human, direct and dynamic.

Social technology should help you build, nurture and manage ever-changing relationships –
whether with your employees or your customers. In the end, people will remember how you
treated them far more clearly than they will the technology you used to communicate.

Welcome: Give the people what they want
Market research likely already guides your business strategy.

Use this intelligence to identify social-market venues, Design social spaces and communication
channels that invite people – current customers as well as prospects – to interact not just with
your brand, but with your people. Make them easy to use, open, smart.

Tailor your marketing voice to the social space – but be plain: You’re inviting a conversation with
them because you want to understand their needs for valuable new products or enhancements to
current products. They need to know you will bring actual value to their lives, not just a sales pitch.

Then:

Engage: It’s all about the conversation
If social media is the “voice” of your brand, then tone is everything.

Whether you blog, tweet or post into threaded discussions, whether you open a customer-support
forum or live-tweet your next product release – you must treat your users like humans. Each one
is smart, opinionated and unique. Each one deserves human interaction.

Be humble. Be cheerful. Be as open as you can. In short, engage with people at their own level,
and you’ll gain more market insight and brand traction than you ever thought possible. Identify
allies and early adopters, and recruit them to help build the culture you want.

Most importantly:


Listen: Active listeners enjoy better conversations
In every interaction make sure you “hear” what users say – and then respond swiftly, directly and
authentically.

Listen on a strategic level, too: Turn some of your market-research resources towards monitoring
social media discussions about your market space – or even your company (more on this below).

Find the influencers and pay attention to what gets their attention. Then:

Adjust: Monitor, validate, adapt
Are you providing exactly what people want – in interactions as well as your product? Anticipate
their needs. Do what you can to accommodate their desires. And acknowledge criticism so they
know you’re listening.

Did you screw up? Admit it. Humility bolsters brand loyalty just as fiercely as defensiveness
corrodes it.

Are you losing users to a competitor’s online space or strategy? Spot what they’re doing – do it
better – and then look for ways to make your social media presence even stronger.

Remember – you are entering the social space for the long haul. Keep honing your company’s
instincts for survival there.

Refresh: Watch the people, not the machine
Social technology itself will continue to evolve. Just as new tools will replace the tried-and-true
(remember: MySpace —> Facebook —> Twitter), your users’ behavior, habits and needs will
inexorably change.

As deeply as your company may invest in one particular social technology now, it should be
ready to switch platforms, tactics and targets to match your users’ changing tastes.


Younger social media audiences can be a good barometer for trends in platforms and behaviors,
but if you’re serving a broad customer base or workforce, make sure you understand what’s
happening in the over-30 crowd, too.

Audiences are growing sophisticated enough in social media that future technology may begin to
stratify broadly not just by medium (as in Twitter versus Facebook) but also in interests, age groups,
geography, socio-economic status and segments we cannot yet imagine. If you are not dedicating
some portion of your staff to social technology strategy yet, now would be the time to start.

Strategies for External Social Technology
Know the audience
Social media users – as a cross-section of your customer base – are growing logarithmically in
number, and they are no longer skewing sharply young:

According to a recent study by the Pew
Internet and American Life Project,
social networking among adults aged 50-
64 is growing even faster than among
18-29-year-olds7, this means that your
audience – whether your company uses
social-technology strategies for external
marketing or internal workflow – is far
broader and better plugged-in than they
were just two years ago.

However, use does not necessarily mean
sophistication — while middle-aged
adults are eagerly joining Facebook, they
are not native networkers like the current
Sites such as TwitterCounter can help you track influencers and
generation of younger adults who came
follower counts at a high level, while more-sophisticated listening
of age right alongside the medium. platforms can give you better views of the conversation.


Likewise, your work in social media
will encounter more resistance from
older users.

Externally, this means you may be
(initially) less successful reaching
older audiences with social media
strategies.

Internally, however, the picture
changes: Younger employees are
often the first adopters, fastest
learners, strongest evangelists and
best source for feedback on using
social technology for collaboration.

They are also more likely to welcome
the innovation and help older, less- Source: Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life
adaptive users understand new Project Surveys, September 2005 - May 2010.
All surveys are of adults 18 and older.
collaborative tools and learn how to
use them.

Look down the road to anticipate the social media experience your audience will have two, five,
10 years from now. Build towards it today, and you’ll be ahead of the curve.

Find the conversations already in progress
Chances are your brand is already under heavy discussion. If you have a strong, eagerly watched
product pipeline, people are talking about your next release and comparing it to your latest. If
you are a service company, they are comparing notes about how well or poorly they were served.

They might be crowing about your work, or idly slagging your brand, trashing your wait staff and
kibitzing about comparison-shopping against your competition


Solid social strategy is based on intelligence, and for that you must listen not to experts, but the
actual conversations. Whether you choose DIY tools such as Google and Technorati, or license
social-monitoring platforms such as Alterian’s SM2, Radian6, Jive, IceRocket or ScoutLabs, good
intel is critical to your ability to make smart decisions.

Get a feel for how people are talking about you - and how you can engage with them - before
barging in and making a mess with tin-eared chatter or ham-fisted marketing tactics. Here’s a list
of monitoring solutions that may prove useful: http://bit.ly/CMHbl

Choose the right stance and voice
People want to engage with brands they are watching so that they can make the most informed
purchase choices possible.

People also innately want to belong, to feel like they are “in” on something.

Screen Twitter for consumer influencers and vociferous users who are focused on your market
segment, follow them, and connect. Get a feel for the give-and-take and the topics that get them
buzzing.

Are they keenly interested in upcoming product releases? The R&D process? Competition? The
evolution of your brand? Build your social voice on platform stances that hook into these interests.

If people are obsessed with whether your next product will be able to beat your competitors’ next
product, then open a dialogue with them in the form of a Twitter feed on R&D progress, or a
Facebook wall devoted to customer feedback on next-gen feature desires.

The better you understand the culture and needs of your audience in a social media setting, and
the more intelligently you position your social technology efforts, the more naturally you will be
able to join their conversations.

Know the territory
Get to know your audience, find their influencers, speak their language and give them what they
want.


Contrary to the drumbeat message coming from hundreds of self-styled “social
media experts” on the Web, social-based marketing is not your guaranteed route to better
profitability.

Do it wrong and you expose your products to hostile criticism, your operations to time-sapping
consumer relations (and potential litigation) and your very brand to ridicule.

Social media audiences are smart, opinionated and ruthlessly inventive when they feel they are
being pandered to by brands that do not “get” them:

Chevrolet learned this the hard way.

Several years ago, Chevy published a “Make your own Tahoe spot” tool on the Web. Anyone
could log in, edit together ravishing footage of Tahoes in the wild, superimpose their own text
messages, and create commercials. Big mistake.

Culture-jammers quickly co-opted the tool to publish hundreds of negative commercials8. So,
Chevy succeeded only in crowd-sourcing a new brand for its Tahoe SUV as a bloated, polluting,
accident-prone land-barge9.

Likewise, Skittles launched a Twitter-based viral marketing campaign in spring, 2009 – and then
quickly killed it after profane responses wound up being Twittered right back onto Skittles’ own
home page.

And in spring, 2010, a well-known food company posted a message on its Facebook wall10 that
probably seemed like an innocuous request to respect its brand: “To repeat: we welcome your
comments, but please don’t post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic -
they will be deleted.”

The resulting backlash flooded the wall with barbed criticism, raw insults and, of course,
Photoshopped logos.


Doing social media right, however, can revolutionize your relationship with customers, open new
lines of business and re-energize your brand.

Carefully applied social media strategies can streamline business processes, encourage employee-
driven innovation and collaboration, shorten R&D cycles, attract critical sales leads, and actually
rebrand your company as smart, grounded and visionary.

The secret is understanding your audience, giving them natural ways to interact with your brand,
and doing it with integrity.

Now, you need to plug into social media to research the behaviors, attitudes, customs and
language with which your potential customers are discussing you.

Because in much the way that Capt. James Cook never quite got the hang of talking to the
Hawaiians11, your very survival in social media hangs on your ability to understand its ever-
shifting cultures and to connect effectively.

Without this understanding, you risk market missteps that will help your competition tear you
apart.

Key Strategy: Befriend the influencers, recruit the advocates
Tools
• Run keyword searches on your brands and products in all the major social media platforms.

• Identify not only the discussion trends and audience interests, but also the “influencers,”
the people who are talking most often, most vocally and to the greatest number of people
about your world – both good and bad, in any medium. Learn how often they engage in
dialogue with users and brands.

• Check these influencers’ “follower counts” in Twitter, their friend counts on Facebook,
their subscriber numbers on YouTube, the comment traffic on their blogs and so on.

• Identify the people with the biggest audiences and most persuasive voices. For the most
popular, measure the number and tone of negative critiques they draw.


Tactics
• Follow the influencers Find them with tools like Klout12. Connect your profile with theirs
in Facebook, on Twitter, in YouTube, Flickr and other media-sharing sites. Get to know
their habits, their likes and dislikes. They are valuable because, online, people really listen
to each other when money is at stake: Fully 60% of people believe consumer opinions
posted online, and 90% follow friends’ online recommendations13.

• Figure out what tickles them, and what sets them raging. Strike up a dialogue – be
humble, honest and respectful of the sway they hold in their sphere of social media. After
all – they could become your best allies for disseminating news, swaying opinions,
gathering intelligence and making friends with your future customers.

• Keep your discussions “real” and your social media voice honest and open; they’ll
invariably respond in kind – and recommend your brand to their followers.

• Offer them access – not just access to previews of your upcoming products and services
but to direct connections with your mission drivers – the people whom your audience
would be most interested in “meeting.” Consider hosting Q&As, live chats or even on-site
visits with design directors, brand creators and any celebrity consumers of your products.
“Insider views” shared among influencers and your customers can have tremendous viral
power.

• Identify and recruit brand advocates These users may not have popular blogs, nor the
number of social media followers enjoyed by influencers, but if they are clearly friendly to
your brand, then alliances with them can be valuable – they can spread the word beyond
social media.

• Reach out to them via private messages (on Twitter or Facebook) and offer them “early”
information about upcoming products, “inside” tips about industry trends, or other
intelligence. Treat them as you would sales leads, for they can help attract permanent
audience to your brand as powerfully as traditional marketing helps generate sales.


Key Strategy: Develop publishing streams, develop voice
Tools
• Microblogging, via status reports Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and Google all allow
“microblogging” – short (140 characters, in Twitter’s case) status reports. You can set up
your company’s Facebook page (or pages) to “pull” Twitter feeds so that your social media
authors need post only once to have the post appear in both places. Find ways to talk with
your audience, not just at them.

• Multimedia content Media companies learned long ago that good movie and TV trailers
“go viral” the minute they hit YouTube. But other companies are just starting to leverage
YouTube and Flickr as vectors for “free” word-of-mouth advertising.

• Blog, blog, blog It may seem almost old-fashioned and quaint at this point, yet some of the
most successful social media strategies are built around a central, “human” brand voice.

• Ratings and review Rating and comment tools let your customers share their feedback on
your site, directly in the purchase path. This feedback fuels consumer decision-making to
drive sales, decrease product returns, and build trust in your brand.

Tactics
• Microblogging Tweeting constantly about your company’s latest exploits may please your
closest fans but the steady drumbeat of outbound marketing will turn off everyone else.
Instead, consider how you might offer services via the medium:

For instance, JetBlue mixes it up with a blend of product offerings, flight-status reports and
answers to support questions from users14. More than 1.2 million people follow the
airline’s Twitter feed. Ford Motor Co. maintains nearly a dozen Twitter feeds, focusing on
product lines and lines of business. Here is a list of even more ways that large companies
are using the medium to their advantage15.

• Multimedia content While Flickr and YouTube are obvious paths for posting pure
marketing content – straight and guerilla – they can also be used for “inside our company”
views that help Web users identify with your brand as a collection of employees who
share their interests.


Show people your “guts”: Consider publishing videos about your non-privileged
manufacture processes, your corporate culture, even your extracurricular activities if
you believe people will connect with them.

Share your tastes: Music playlists published on services such as Spotify or Blip.FM
can help reinforce your image as a tastemaker in your markets.

Parade your “heroes”: Some of Pixar’s most popular videos on YouTube turn out to
be those of director/exec John Lasseter discussing the studio’s creative process. If
your products have dedicated users, give them content about the creation of the
products they love. People share – and re-share - whatever they find engaging. Brand
enthusiasm is contagious.

• Traditional blogging Choose the busiest, most engaging voices. (For instance - General
Motors CEO Bob Lutz’s “Fastlane” blog was lauded for its damn-the-torpedoes frankness.)
But execs are often busy, and rarely are they your most authentic writers. Your best, most
reliable and most-forwarded blog posts may come from somewhere far below the
boardroom. Pick bloggers who understand that a good blog has to be:

a) authentic and engaging

b) informative

c) modest (or willfully brash)

d) occasionally clever and, most importantly,

e) refreshed at least every day or two.

This list17 points you to some smart efforts by large companies that are enriching their brands and
expanding their reach through traditional blogging. The Social Media Business Council18 is also a
good source of best practices for corporate blogging.


• Empower all interactions The tools you choose for blogging are not nearly as important as
the transparency of your blog and, thus, your brand. Make sure you:

• Publish trackbacks

• Maintain a generous blogroll (linking to your influencers in particular, and even your
competitors)

• Enable commenting but respond directly and courteously to all comments, no matter
how harsh. The risk of “bad” content appearing on your blog will be far outweighed
by the respect your positive stance generates.

Key Strategy: Be indispensable
Engagement is the secret to successful social media campaigns. Sure, cute viral content and clever
games can help spread your brand. But they are swiftly consumed and costly to refresh.

Bring information, edification, even order to people’s daily lives, and they will engage with you
day after day. Something alive and active is attracting customers to your brand. Publish that.

Tools
• Domain status reports Keep people posted not only on what you are developing for them,
but also on the state of your industry and the legal, political and cultural events surrounding
it. Become the pulse of your market sector. JetBlue is one example of how magnetic good
status reports can be. At the other end of the spectrum is Kogi BBQ, a business with a Twitter
feed19 that boasts 80,000+ followers. The feed is actually posted by the staff of a small
Korean taco truck company broadcasting the location of its upcoming stops. A taco truck.

• Live support Real-time help – whether in the form of a tweeted answer to an anxious
question, or a detailed message forum post from a fellow user replying to a newbie’s cry
for help – can be a powerful brand-builder. It shows that your company not only puts out
a good product, but also backs it up.

The cost of maintaining a dedicated call center dwarfs the light commitment of running
peer-to-peer help forums or a user-generated knowledge base or even posting your support
staff to monitor a dedicated microblogging channel.


• Responsive experts Fielding an expert to answer how-to questions in real-time can bring
a tremendous ROI by growing audience and broadening your brand’s footprint.

Tactics
• Be useful Provide information that helps people make decisions.

• Talk about the world, not just the market sector. Remember where your goods and
services impact your customers’ lives. Engage them in their world.

Think: hunting lore for gun-makers, auto racing for oil companies, safe driving for insurance
companies, health tips for pharmaceuticals and so on. People will always flock to a ready
source of genuine expertise in their world – no matter how broad that world may be. Make
your brand the expert, and they’ll think of it when it comes time to buy - or recommend.

• Be authoritative, not combative Hype and braggadocio about your superiority over your
competitors won’t win you followers: Being responsive, authoritative and real definitely will.

Key Strategy: Crowdsource your R&D
Notwithstanding the secrecy challenges (and the lesson from Chevy’s disastrous Tahoe
experiment), you can bring a hugely positive stamp of transparency to your brand by inviting your
customers into the design and research-and-development cycles.

While much fuss over companies like Audi, Fiat and LocalMotors crowd sourcing new car
designs20, your company can create an intimate connection between users and your R&D
department in several ways without giving up your secrets:

Tools
• Ideation Simply put, ideation is like plugging a suggestion box into a voting booth. You invite
customers to post ideas for new products, services or features – then let them view and rank
the ideas. The tastes of your target audience drive the most popular ideas to the top.

• Virtual R&D labs Focused message forums can help you debug current product
challenges, or workshop entirely new concepts.

• Open contest Offer a prize, in exchange for the best ideas from your target audience. The
winner has his/her concept built.


Tactics
Unlike other strategies explored in this paper, this one is more concerned with considering your
company’s competitive and legal exposure than with maximizing traction for the tools you
choose. The tools are straightforward – but how you use them can be complicated:

• Legal concern Intellectual property rights: Opening your doors to consumer input can also
expose your brand to the threat of intellectual-property-theft – or accusations of the same.
Make plain the terms under which you are soliciting your audience’s help, particularly who
owns the idea in the end, and how much the “creator” should be compensated.

• Secrecy vs. confidentiality vs. transparency Journalists and professional bloggers who fall
into the “influencers” category can usually be trusted to honor press embargoes of a few
days or even weeks. But if you’re crowd-sourcing next-gen products and features that give
your company a distinct competitive edge, you’ll want to ensure you have two things in
place: Top-notch security and rock-solid NDAs with all participants.

Key Strategy - Offer an open platform
Most companies will realize that it’s generally better to welcome customers to branded spaces in
existing platforms – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr – than it is to try to reinvent the wheel. The
giants are laboring hard and iterating fast on their own next-gen user experience, and it would be
unwise to try to develop your own, in hopes that people will use it to engage with your company.

But owning your own social ecosystem can give you a formidable level of control that you cannot
approach by tweaking Facebook templates. Configuring a commercial-grade platform to your
business goals can prove to be a worthwhile investment.

Tools
Open-source platforms such as Joomla and Drupal offer robust, endlessly customizable toolsets
and a strong, fast-refreshing base of functionality thanks to active development communities.

However, they may not be as secure and robust as commercial solutions such as Telligent
Community Server, which can be set up and run with less tech support, thus providing a higher


ROI. Telligent’s tools for controlling spam and abuse and its scaleable moderation framework
make it a solid choice for external communities.

Tactics
We have already covered tactics for using each of the components found in these systems. But
overall, your internal social strategists will want to take a holistic approach to configuring,
launching and managing external communities on a stand-alone platform, weighing how each
available tool - and the overall mix - can be weighted and maximized to further your business
goals and community strategy.

Governance Communities, like terrariums, need management. Setting them up with no plan for
handling their evolution is a recipe for letting the real-world equivalents of algae, fungus and rot
overwhelm your beautifully encapsulated garden.

Decide on goals, analytics benchmarks and failure thresholds that will guide ongoing
management. Assign a manager to every space. Then assign a community coach to help managers
react appropriately
to challenges such
as activity surges,
trolls, flame wars
and unforeseen
events in the
marketplace that
spark debate or fan
criticism of your
brand.

Gartner’s famous “technology hype cycle” graph – as true for corporate social
technology today as it was for the Web in 1995. Source: Wikipedia – http://bit.ly/fHMw


Summary: Core Strategies for External Social Technology
• Connect with your customers Speak in voices they can believe in. If you can make the
conversation engaging, informative and entertaining – and give them a stake in the
discussion – they’ll join your brand for the long term.

• Pay attention, invite interaction Befriend the tastemakers. Watch the conversation and
give customers a say in what comes next. Know what people need today and may come
to need tomorrow, and invite them to keep you on the right track.

• Be transparent, be human Avoid facades and pseudonyms. Users of every stripe – from
bright-eyed fans who love your company to battle-hardened trolls who seek only to
destroy you - will likely see your community leader as “some marketing suit at the
company” unless he shows himself to be human too.

Interact with customers as if they were not just vital to your business, but important personal friends.

If you stumble, lean on your allies. Defensiveness and denial are blood in the water to trolls, but
your other users are your best allies: turn them to your favor – and you may even disarm your
attacker – with good humor and self-deprecation. (Below are some great resources for spotting
and handling trolls21.)

• Stay useful Provide valuable information and insight within and beyond your brand
domain. Be what people need and want you to be – in business and in conversation.

• Stay fresh Match the way your customers’ conversations are evolving and speak to what
matters in their daily lives, to stay ahead of the next social-tech tide.

Don’t be afraid to continually reinvent your methods and tools for interaction.

Strategies for Internal Social Technology
While the same best practices are critical to a healthy and sustainable social technology strategy
inside your company as they are outside, the landscape behind your firewall is completely different.

So, too are the types of communication and collaboration you are enabling.


In external social media, you are engaging people at their most enthusiastic and hospitable. They
want to interact with your products and services because they like what you do (or what they’ve
just learned about you) and they have chosen to spend their spare time on exploring your brand.

Internal social media engagement can be almost the opposite:

• You are trying to connect your employees at their most socially vulnerable point – they
feel burdened with existing duties, pressured to perform and nervous about keeping up
“professional” appearances in social settings.

• If they are not already die-hard social medianauts they may just be dabbling, and they
worry that spending time on it at work will cost them time, reputation – even their jobs.

• They are about as comfortable yakking casually with each other on the company intranet
as a group of 14-year-olds facing off at their first high school dance.

Furthermore, you’re asking your employees to weather a seismic shift in their business
environment. Ideas like replacing emails with instant messages, chain of command with wiki-
based brainstorming, or even something as “light” as posting your expertise on your internal
company profile can seem like radical departures from the norm.

A 2009 report from TMC/Intellicom22 shows that private enterprise has been adopting social
technology much more tentatively than the public – and in a limited fashion. Those surveyed were
using social tools primarily for intelligence-gathering and marketing, with collaboration – the
most powerful and transformative use of social technology for enterprise – taking a distant but
slowly-rising third place.

A study commissioned by Cisco in 2010 found that only one in seven companies surveyed even
had a formal process for adopting consumer-oriented social technologies, and only one in five
had policies in place governing their use23.

But the latest numbers from Gartner24 show that adoption is heating up - Companies spent $769
million on social software in 2010 - up by 15% over 2009 - and expenditures in 2011 are
projected to grow by another 15.7%.


The ROI is strong for companies that embrace social technology, and the impact is overwhelmingly
positive. In short, it’s a trend that most companies will ignore at their peril. TransUnion, one of the
nation’s three largest credit report companies, reports that it is enjoying a savings of $2.5 million on
just a $50,000 investment in social-networking tools. Upon being pressured to set up a public
Facebook page, TransUnion opted instead to build a social ecosystem behind the firewall . Now,
some 2,700 TransUnion employees can use SocialText’s wiki, instant messaging and social-profiles to
solve business problems with brainstorming instead of spending more on hardware and software25.

Meanwhile, a report from usability expert Jakob Nielsen found in more than a dozen case studies
that enterprise social technology – even when led by guerilla efforts and pilot programs from
within the enterprise – is profoundly successful and self-correcting26:

Among the findings by the Nielsen Norman Group (cited here27):

1 Underground efforts yield big results Companies are turning a blind eye to
underground social software efforts until they prove their worth, after which they
integrate them more thoroughly.

2 Front line workers are driving the vision Many senior managers still consider social
tools something their teenagers use. Young workers, who do not need to be taught or
convinced to use these tools, expect them in the workplace.

3 The business need is the big driver Social software is not about the tools, it is about
what the tools enable the users to do and about the business problems the tools
address.

4 Communities are self-policing When left to their own devices, communities within
enterprise intranets police themselves. Workers tend to retain their professional
identities, leaving little need for the organization to institute controls.

5 Organizations must cede power As companies have been learning from using Web
2.0 technologies to communicate with their customers, they can no longer fully
control their message. This is true, too, when Web 2.0 tools are used in internal
communications.


Dion Hinchcliffe, a prominent supporter of what’s coming to be known as “Enterprise 2.0”, maps
the adoption flow this way:

Hinchcliffe also offers “14 Reasons why Enterprise 2.0 Projects Fail,” and they have far more to do
with properly managing the wetware – the organic community using the tools – than with
investing in the right software28.

Hinchcliffe cites flaws ranging from technology tunnel-vision and failing to grow the community
ecosystem to impatience, lack of planning and what might be gently labeled “managerial hubris,”
but again, the tasks of successful implementation boil down to this:

The biggest challenges you will face in implementing enterprise social technology are not fiscal,
nor technical – but cultural.


Best Practices
Again, while the audience and purposes for internal social technology differ from the external, the
five “Open Hand” best practices for sustainable communities should drive your efforts:

Welcome: Make work easier
First impressions and rollout strategy are critical to the success of your social media tools.

Your employees will see any major new social technology initiative like this: “Wait – I already
have plenty to do – and now you’re loading me up with social media tasks? Excuse me while I
just give up the rest of my so-called life.”

The key is choosing collaborative tools and workflows that actually do save time and money.

Build communities around lines of business, and provide tools for sharing best practices, finding
resources and getting fast, useful answers.

Design and deploy tools to reduce the flood of regular email: Set up document libraries, status
dashboards, workflows, forums and P2P (peer-to-peer) communities that put all critical
information within employees’ reach on a need-to-know basis – rather than fire-hosing them with
everything and forcing them to filter out what they need.

Establish metrics and human monitors to measure the frequency, quality and success of your
staff’s social technology engagements.

The more helpful your social tools are, the more likely people will use them – and contribute
their own help to others who need it.

In other words, build systems that welcome interaction, self-help, problem-solving and informal
mentoring.

Finally, make sure your leaders understand and fully back the mission: Retooling traditional
workflows for social technology can be disorienting and challenging. It is critical that a voice
from the top articulate the reasons behind, expectations for and benefits of taking the plunge.


Engage: Staff it, recruit process champions, build culture
It’s one thing to set up a threaded discussion board for sales execs to share best practices.

It’s another to sustain a community that gives as much to the discussion as it takes away.

Identify smart, social media-savvy employees to “own” each of your social spaces. Then make
sure they engage constantly, invite new ideas, and guide regular traffic into those spaces.
Reinforce participation with encouragement, and share best practices broadly.

The more people see an online space being used to good effect – and the more they see useful
information posted there on a regular basis – the more likely it is that they will add participation
to their daily routine.

Listen: They’re telling you more than you think
As with any solid public social strategy,
listening to your users is vital to the success “People who do surf the Internet for
of your internal social media culture.
fun at work – within a reasonable limit
of less than 20% of their total time in
But in addition to monitoring what people are the office – are more productive by
saying – about your products, your processes about 9% than those who don’t.”
and their interests and needs – you should be
– Dr. Brent Coker
listening to what they’re hinting at (or not
(Study, Department of Management and Marketing at
even telling you) about the way things are The University of Melbourne - http://bit.ly/Nigw)
running.

An open and responsive social culture online can help you gauge (and affect) morale, manage
expectations and streamline processes – but it can also help you spot trouble as readily as
innovation.

Carefully-managed and open social culture that encourages frank dialogue, constructive criticism
and swift response can be foundational to your company’s ongoing internal health and social
growth.


Adjust: Enable collaboration, but address valid issues
For better or worse, social technology allows instantaneous communication – and swift virtual
collaboration.

Some companies fear the worst: that social tools let employees dawdle, grumble, vent, and offend
in ways they could not before. Indeed, 54% of U.S. companies surveyed say they already block
Facebook and Twitter within their networks29.

But while your first instinct may be to clamp down, this can actually kill the fragile social culture
you’re working hard to enable.

Let your existing company policies manage such behavior. (Remember – Nielsen’s study found
that most enterprise communities are self-governing, and that users by and large remain
professional).

And – as with a good external strategy – handle valid criticism with humility, sensitivity and
speed. If someone gripes relentlessly and bitterly about a known problem, address the tone and
manner of the complaint as you would someone shouting out in the lunchroom, “This company
sucks.”

But be sure you also address the problem. Even cranks tend to have a point.

Refresh: Make things happen in that space regularly
Employees get busy.

In open, non-workflowed social tools such as forums,
Forums thrive with steady,
wikis and microblogging activity streams, even your most
engaged but very light-
active social media users will “fall off the map” from time
handed moderation.
to time, while less-active ones will make only token
appearances.

Give them reasons to engage: Float (and solicit) new ideas. Bring in outside voices; present “guest
speakers” who will post and respond to ideas on a special topic for a day or a week at a time.


The logistics of using social technology to engage and encourage collaboration among your
employees are casual, low-impact and. thus. far less costly than real-time lectures, meetings,
discussions and debates.

People engage when they want to and when they can spare a few seconds. Give them reasons to
return often and take part.

Strategies
Computers have buried the modern workplace under a distracting avalanche of “convenience”.

Emails pile up unanswered in in-baskets. PowerPoint presentations have
33% of all email
empowered the most boring among us to be even more boring. Track-
is unnecessary.
changes puts a dizzying array of full-color fingerprints all over that nice,
Gartner Report
clean document you thought you had authored.

And the Web (for less-restrictive offices) is an open license to waste time on YouTube and, well,
kill work cycles browsing social media.

Policies and procedures can help most companies manage the worst of these diversions.

But the smarter companies are actively empowering their workers not just with digital tools, but
with collaborative culture powered by crisp infrastructure and solid strategies such as these:

Key Strategy: Remove the glass ceiling, knock down the cubicle walls
One of the great boogeymen of enterprise social technology is the fear that by giving employees a
voice, you lose control over them. As we have seen, this could not be farther from the truth.

In fact, by inviting open discussion of processes and products – social technology gives
employees in investment in your success, empowers them to help you on both conceptual and
practical levels and gives management valuable intelligence on evolving internal culture.

Blogs and forums can also serve as a gentler social-technology on-ramp for companies that are
concerned that a full-bore initiative would be too jarring for the existing culture.


Tools
• Internal blogs A good blog – regular, informative, opinionated and engaging – can swiftly
and economically improve communication and understanding throughout your
organization.

The flexibility and accessibility of blogs also makes them extremely powerful: Done right,
one or more blogs can keep your employees informed on news or insight. Enabling
comments – and responding to them quickly - can invite dialogue to explore deeper
issues, work out problems or spark brainstorming on new innovations in your processes
and products.

• Threaded discussion forums Properly built and moderated forums can support an
unlimited array of business tasks. Whether left open to all or restricted to task-specific user
groups, forums can provide IT support, answer human resources questions, share best
practices, air out workflow challenges and reinforce mentoring and team-building work.

• Ratings Providing a mechanism for rating blogs or documents is an invaluable source of
feedback to the authors and to the readers. For the authors, it provides a incentive to
improve their work and for the reader an indicator of relevance – especially when the
ratings are connected to users’ profiles.

Tactics
• Tailor your tools to business needs Clear focus is just as important to a successful internal
blog as a strong voice. “All Things HR” won’t enjoy near the readership of a blog focused
on “HR Advice and Answers,” for instance.

Know what you’re blogging about, then gear the blog’s title, content and tone towards the
audience and business need that it most directly addresses. If you have multiple blogs in a
single line of business, you can always aggregate them into a single feed, benefiting
anyone who lacks time or interest to follow each one individually.

Likewise, forums should be crafted to serve specific lines of business and cultural
constituencies, to attract and foster discussion among employees with common goals and
needs.


• Monitor and respond If you are blogging or monitoring a forum, make it a daily habit to
check for and respond to comments. Many blog and forum platforms include optional
email-notification for the comment stream though, of course, you will want to weigh
whether the benefit of instant notification is worth the hassle of extra traffic in your inbox.

Casual notes of “me too” or “cool!” don’t warrant a reply. But ignoring substantial
comments – or even leaving them hanging for more than a day – can invite unwanted
speculation about the motives behind your silence.

As with external social media, be human, be genuine: Compliment genuine insight,
accept praise and criticism with equal grace, and offer something back that will advance
the discussion.

• Be transparent, don’t censor With the exception of trade secrets or blatant violations of
civility or privacy, actively censoring or deleting posts is counterproductive and has a
chilling effect on discussion. Salty language, for instance, is better left in place and
commented upon so that it can serve as a reminder to everyone else that it’s not allowed.

Even unwanted criticism can launch productive discussions, and you will likely find others
springing to your defense. Killing a post or comment – particularly without a follow up
explanation – leaves everyone feeling more gun-shy and unsure of what’s “acceptable,”
while plainly disapproving and moving on clearly reinforces the culture of your
community space.

• Identify influencers and recruit moderators at all levels Your most active commenters
and forum participants may come from within the ranks rather than management.
Encourage the most active ones to take on moderation roles – providing positive
reinforcement of productive discussions and community values so that everyone
understands what’s expected and valued.

• Optimize for search As generally described below in “Key Strategy – Team Workspaces,”
good search technology and keywording practices will make your blogs and forums more
useful. When useful content flows through a community space on a daily, even hourly
basis, finding what you need can be as valuable as being able to respond to what people
are saying.


• Illustrate wherever possible People read (and respond more actively) to blog posts with
images attached. Not every post needs an image, but you’ll find that at least a mix will
improve readership and commenting response. If no internal images are available, you
can find a ready source of royalty-free photos and illustrations on all topics at the
Wikimedia Commons30 or, for a small fee, at iStockPhoto31. Use Google’s free Picasa tool32
to crop and size images.

For a solid example of how powerfully social technology can connect your company both
internally and externally, please see this case study33 on Perficient’s work for electronics
technology leader Cadence. (Perficient acquired speakTECH and its social-technology
practice in 2010.)

The community that Perficient built for Cadence can be found at http://cdnusers.org.

Key Strategy: Team workspaces
Traditional team-communications tools (phone calls, emails, memos, meetings) can seem cartoonishly
outmoded, compared with a well-built, fully-adopted and socially-oriented team workspace.

In the end, teamwork is still collaboration toward a common goal, and teams need the same
things they always have: A place to talk, a means for sharing work products, a way to track
progress and the ability to target communications.

Correctly built and supported with a strong cultural strategy, these tools and tactics can bring
much greater efficiency to the way your teams interact and drive towards their goals:

Tools
• Microsoft Office SharePoint 2010 Microsoft’s integrated suite of collaborative
applications gives your company not just a toolset, but a full ecosystem for collaboration,
including the ability to launch team spaces, share documents, track progress and
collaborate actively.

SharePoint is fully scalable for extremely large enterprises, and since it is under constant
development, it is keeping pace with the evolution of business practices.


SharePoint 2010 has been beefed up substantially over the 2007 version, offering
advanced social search, user ranking, activity feeds, people-tagging, bookmarks, improved
“MySites” profiles, better Outlook integration and enhanced features for blogs wikis and
forums that are too numerous to mention here.

• IBM Lotus Software delivers robust collaboration software that empowers people to
connect, collaborate, and innovate while optimizing the way they work. Lotus helps drive
better business outcomes by providing the wide array of tools forward-thinking
organizations today need to succeed: Messaging & collaboration; an integrated
collaborative environment including e-mail, calendaring and the ability to extend with
applications and collaboration tools; unified communications; integrated real-time
collaboration services; online collaboration services; social software; business
collaboration and networking capabilities including wikis, blogs, shared files, team spaces,
and communities; portals and mashups; and mobile collaboration and wireless tools that
allow you to collaborate anywhere.

• Telligent Enterprise Telligent’s Enterprise is an intranet-focused reworking of its class-
leading social-networking platform, Community Server.

Enterprise layers a user-centric UX and drag-and-drop configuration tools atop an already-
robust array of group spaces, enhanced profiles, group-focusable microblogging,
multimedia content management and other tools.

Integrated, search-driven menus for navigation and bookmarking make the platform’s
already-strong social networking capabilities a solid choice for companies that are ready
to turn their teams loose in a powerful and scalable real time collaborative environment.

• Wiki A low-cost, user-editable website can be set up to bring focus, authority and flow to
ongoing collaborations among teams that work on everything from intellectual property
and software to pharmaceuticals and consumer goods.

As a standalone solution, or in concert with other tools, a wiki – supported with best
practices and features like editorial hierarchy, version rollback and email notification –
puts all of a team’s collective knowledge – and work product – in one place.


You can use the same basic platform as Wikipedia’s to build project-level workspaces or
company-wide knowledge bases. Learn more here: http://bit.ly/ywOZa.

• Forums Threaded discussion forums (also low-cost) can serve as archived conversations or
full-fledged knowledge bases. You can float concepts, workshop new strategies, develop
detailed plans and share best practices. Everything is stored for easy retrieval in full
context.

Two keys to success with forums: Make sure your categories, keywording and search are
solid; and establish and maintain firm policies governing the creation of new discussion
topics. The most important rule that your users must follow for keeping forums useful and
useable: Do not post a question until you have carefully searched the forums to make
sure it has not already been answered.

Tactics
Overall, you will encounter something of a training ramp – and probably active resistance – upon
launching any of these team-workspace services.

Shifting old-school business practices to a team workspace can seem dauntingly complex on first
sight, as employees wonder why they have to learn a whole new system and change their
comfortable way of doing things.

The cultural ramp will also be steep: even computer-savvy employees are often nervous about
seeming less-than-authoritative or “posting the wrong thing” in forums or wiki articles and it will
take time for people to adapt to these new layers of transparency and – in their eyes – exposure.

Here’s how to minimize the impact:

• Provide plentiful support Post clean, easy-to-read FAQs in central locations (your
intranet) and in context (within social tools themselves). Make experts available to
everyone, and make sure the mentorship cascades from one person to the next.

No matter the tool, a strong set of regularly updated FAQs (backed by go-to mentors) will
speed adoption and create a sustainable community culture for your tools.


• Analyze and strategize, then configure For instance - SharePoint and Telligent’s nearly
endless configurability might tempt you to install and mandate the use of too many
features – to the point where some go unused and others require more focus than your
teams are likely to give.

The surest tack for setting up effective teamsites is to analyze your business processes and
team structure carefully.

Then map tasks and user types to specific use cases. Which processes can you shift
entirely to a social intranet? Which threads can you compress into a single workflow? Do
team members have the interest and focus required to blog, or the work output that makes
permission-trimmed document libraries a necessity? Who should get e-mail notifications
on milestones versus regular events?

Answer questions like these. Analyze and strategize. Then configure.

• Implement fully, and discourage old habits For instance, if you are building a wiki to
discourage emailing multiple contributors multiple versions of a single document, then
push the stragglers from email to the wiki. If you are replacing folders on a networked
drive with a SharePoint document library, then eliminate access to the folders. Halfway
adoption puts a drag on everyone’s progress.

• Build a culture around benefits and expectations. Make sure your team leaders
understand the value of and best practices for encouraging participation in and managing
a team workspace. Forums, wikis and other, less-conventional team spaces thrive when
they become the go-to destination for collaboration.

Take time regularly to review successes and failures with key members. As with external
social media, two of the most important steps in keeping the workspace usable and useful
will be to listen to what’s working and adjust what’s not.

Perficient has set up numerous workspaces for companies in the consumer goods,
pharmaceutical and electronics industries, as well as for city governments and school
systems. You can learn more about one of them in this case study34.


Key Strategy: Crowdsourcing and ideation
Your employees’ interest in your company goes far beyond a day’s wages and benefits for an
honest day’s work. Their ideas for new products, processes and efficiencies could help propel you
to the next level in sales and success, but chances are you’re not asking them or, more likely, not
really listening.

Giving employees an active stake in shaping your product as well as your progress can enrich
your IP portfolio, boost morale and result in a more-unified market stance.

Tools
• Simple crowdsourcing In concept, you will need nothing more complex than a digital
version of the old-fashioned lunchroom suggestion box: An email alias
(ideas@company.com) can collect ideas easily enough – but employees have no sense of
whether their ideas matter unless and until they are publicly adopted.

However, devoting a standing forum topic or employee blog to exploring and sharing new
ideas – and building a culture that supports public brainstorming – not only collects the
ideas, it puts them into context with others and makes the practice part of the company’s
culture.

Crowdsourcing is most effective when it is completely transparent and most fruitful when
employees are actually competing with each other for affirmation in the creative space.

• Ideation system This is a more formal version of the basic idea forum: Employees post ideas to
a company-facing page. Subject-matter experts can complement these ideas with additional
information. Colleagues then rank the ideas up or down and add comments. Finally, a
notification workflow sends the top-ranked ideas to process-leaders and decision-makers who
can combine them with their overall new-product development portfolio for prioritization.

Larger enterprises can benefit from setting up ideation systems to focus on entire divisions,
business processes, product lines or specific projects.

What’s more, ideation metrics can show where the best ideas are coming from and which
team’s leadership in the area of creativity is proving the most fruitful.


Tactics
• Pose questions to solve problems Wide-open questions like “Where should we expand
next?” are invitations to wild speculation that can be fun but ultimately frustrating to
people who really believe they know what’s best for the company’s strategy. Instead, focus
on specific business needs, product directions or process challenges that can benefit from
diverse feedback and imagination.

• Transparency is critical If you tell people you’re elevating ideas from all ranks, make sure
your internal communications are clear when you put an idea into action. If you’re just
gathering creative input on a large initiative, don’t lead employees to believe that one of
their ideas could be the one that is sent into production to lead it. And if you expect to
choose only a handful of ideas to implement each quarter, make sure to state that plainly.

• Timing Keep ideation periods on specific projects brief – a week or two at most. Any
shorter and you’ll miss out from people who lack the courage to be among the first to
contribute. Any longer and you’ll burn people out on waiting for results that may seem too
few and far between.

Likewise, keep ideation open indefinitely for anything that could improve processes,
product lines or lines of business in the long run. Sometimes these ideas occur without
context – other times they have existed under the radar for some time and only exposure
and consensus can really expose how important they are.

• Deliver payoff If everyone understands that your ideation philosophy is “throw everything
at the wall and see what sticks” then you will have managed expectations and maximized
participation. The best ideas will bubble up to the top.

But always – always – announce the best, and praise the runners-up and most-creative
ideas. This properly rewards creativity, encourages participation and sets the tone for
future ideation sessions.

Perficient has set up ideation systems for half a dozen firms (ranging from manufacturing
to life sciences to business services), giving them a ready supply of company-tuned
innovation and their employees a stronger stake in their future.


Key Strategy: Chat, microblogging and real-time interaction
Some companies use chat tools on an informal basis, letting employees plug into AIM, iChat or
whatever client they are already using. Others take the enterprise route, setting up Windows
Instant Messenger or Microsoft Office Communicator.

In most cases, chat connects colleagues more swiftly and efficiently than email or even the phone
for one simple reason: presence. When you chat, you know whether or not the other party is
online, hence you can have the dialogue you expected – on the spot – without waiting for anyone
to return your email or voice message. Quick questions, requests for information, status reports,
URLs, pictures, even casual inquiries like “Who’s going to lunch?” flow back and forth in a few
keystrokes and a fraction of the time.

The rise of Twitter, Facebook and enterprise-grade “micro-blogging” systems like Yammer has
added another flavor to the chat mix: achievable, searchable, team-targetable conversation.

Enabling chat does encourage more casual non-work conversation to flow. But the time lost is often
outweighed by the benefit of ongoing conversation that can knit teams together more tightly, speed
communication and empower real-time collaboration almost as closely as a face-to-face meeting.

Active microblogging keeps everyone monitoring it apprised of current projects, which can
reduce duplication of work and invite knowledge-sharing beyond the confines of a team.

That’s one reason that a large nationwide financial services company contracted Perficient to
build a private micro-blogging system atop SharePoint, allowing the firm’s employees to message
their own workgroups instantly. By following teammates, colleagues and entire workgroups the
company’s employees are able to track – in real time – projects, trends and issues that may affect
their own work.


Tools
• One-to-one chat clients AIM, iChat, Lotus Sametime, Windows Instant Messenger and
Microsoft Office Communicator offer the same basic behaviors for text, audio and video
chat. However, Communicator syncs with Outlook and LiveMeeting, allowing easier
scheduling and real-time desktop sharing.

Consider using video chat in professional environments – even for basic one-to-one
communication – though it works well between small conference rooms, too.

• One-to-Many Twitter lets users send short text messages up to 140 characters in length
from their cell phones or computers to anyone who subscribes to, or “follows” them.
While it is essentially a public medium in that anyone can follow anyone else’s Twitter
feed, you can achieve some workplace efficiencies with direct (private) messaging, and
create social-media forums by using hashtags and keyword search.

• Yammer Virtually identical to Twitter in function, Yammer35 lets you set up a private
microblogging network for free, allowing only people with email addresses within your
company’s domain to join. However, extra features such as directory integration, message
export and actual ownership of your data cost considerably more36 at $5 per seat per month.

• Custom Perficient can build you a turnkey microblogging system – even one that
integrates with existing implementations. This will cost less and offer more than the
alternatives do, fully archived, behind your firewall. What’s important is to determine how
such a system fits your company’s culture and goals.

Tactics
• Go private Free, public-chat applications invite more non-work communications into
your work environment. Many of your employees already use apps like these (as well as
Google’s chat) to communicate with friends. Consider setting up an internal-use-only chat
network to keep your teams’ signal-to-noise ratios strong.

• Encourage focused use Set clear policy on how these tools should be used, but keep the
culture open enough to allow for innovation. Consider setting up dedicated channels or
hashtags for specific teams, initiatives or business missions. Use the employment contract
– not the technology – to regulate usage.


• Archive, archive, archive While your employees may never need to revisit discussions of
90 days ago, you might want to – plus, archiving is required for compliance with the
Sarbanes-Oxley Act37. Conversation is the mother of innovation, and revisiting brainstorms
can sometimes unlock solutions to ongoing problems.

Key Strategy: Intranet social networks
Your company may already be using seminars, user groups and so forth to encourage professional
knowledge-sharing and mentoring beyond the confines of project or team-specific collaboration.

But with the rise of social media and technology in the non-work environment, we often find
ourselves building in-house social networks for clients who want to harness this “new”
collaborative behavior to much greater effect.

Social networks connect and unite employees who have common skill sets, business missions,
expertise, career goals, professional interests and leisure activities. The better people know each
other, the more smoothly they are likely to collaborate.

A variety of tools are available for setting up social networks, but – again – the culture you deploy
will be far more critical to a network’s success than the platform you build.

Systems like these – if implemented and adopted thoroughly – can greatly accelerate
collaboration by letting people find others with needed skill sets, interests and experiences.

Picture your widely distributed sales force in a networked situation: They are able to ask
questions, share techniques and tactics and discover needed mentors and subject-matter experts
among colleagues regardless of their location, in a single venue and in real time.

Think about the benefits of bringing your IT division’s troubleshooting discussions, training
sessions and testing environments completely indoors, where finding the right in-house expert
who understands the company’s business as well as the technology in question – is no more than
a search query away.


Tools
Enterprise-grade social platforms are evolving rapidly and will continue to evolve in three main
areas: external, internal and industry focused. Early providers were either generic social-
networking platforms such as Jive, Mzinga and Pluck or point solutions such as Bazaar Voice.

For the startup or budget-conscious enterprise, open-source solutions can offer some of the same
value and critical functionality as the commercial solutions – but they also require you to be more
self-sufficient on the IT front.

The two leaders in open-source community/content management systems are Joomla38 and
Drupal39. Both have powerful, extensible frameworks, active developer/support communities and
strong adoption in the market, but they require a good deal of in-house investment in IT expertise
and lack SharePoint’s complete Windows-ecosystem integration.

Another, more lightweight option, Ning, may be useful for smaller companies and startups that
want to try out basic social-networking technology before making a real investment in something
as robust as SharePoint.

Tactics
A white paper (even one of this length) is too restricted a venue for adequately addressing the
thorny business of shaping an entire social network to your company’s specific and surely
complex needs.

Perficient has a long list of satisfied customers using our enterprise social technologies, and we
can help.

Sticking with the core philosophies we have outlined above – and repeated below – will help you
shape your social solutions for maximum efficiency and minimum drag.


Summary: Core Strategies for Internal Social Technology
In the end, your choice of technologies alone won’t matter nearly as much as your strategy for
this new era of social interaction.

Only solid business analysis, flexible implementation and active engagement will ensure your
success, whatever tools you use.

As public social technology gravitates towards the next post-Twitter flavor of the year, you will –
undoubtedly – want to keep your social technology up to speed with it.

Likewise, your ability to implement strong strategies and adapt them to changing business needs
will keep your company’s social initiatives moving forward as society finds new ways to interact –
and filter those interactions for maximum usefulness.

Be ready for constant change.

And keep these goals in mind:

• Take the long view Map your existing corporate culture and long-term goals to the way
people use social tools – and keep pace with the way it’s changing them.

• Choose tools that save time and work Carefully map your business processes to specific
social tools that – once adopted – will speed collaboration, reduce workload and foster
focused collaboration.

• Own the space, empower the employees Follow the five “Open Hand” best practices of
sustainable social technology:

• Welcome

• Engage

• Listen

• Adjust

• Refresh


• Launch authoritatively, manage well Adoption moves faster when driven from the top.
Culture grows best when managed by people who understand it in the larger context.
Technology works best when tailored to the way people use it.

Finally, and most importantly:

• Don’t fear the people: They want to do a better job. Empowering their ability to
communicate to, share information with and understand each other can only advance
your company’s progress.

Your existing personal-conduct policies can address all the “problems” of commercial social
media that frighten too many companies away from enterprise social technology.

The greatest danger in enterprise social media is ignorance.

Implementing social technology halfway, with insufficient understanding of its power and nuance
(or not implementing it at all) will cost your company time and money as your competitors simply
do a better job of going social.

Contact
Do it right. Tap your employees’ natural social behaviors with tools and strategies that enhance
collaboration, accountability and productivity and you’ll be bringing your entire company to a
significant next stage of evolution.

Contact your Perficient representative to learn how, or:
Email: Sales@Perficient.com
Visit: www.Perficient.com


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