etwo : Adoption Easy Peasy

People are making 500 billion influence impressions on one another about products and services every year. - Source: Forester Research Inc.
This is my first of several items on adoption and approaches of garnering adoption.

Adoption in the world of Enterprise 2.0 is probably the hardest part of Enterprise 2.0. The creation of the technology is easy peasy (as my son likes to say). the implementation of the technology is easy peasy lemon squeezy. But building something with the hope that someone is going to use it is not easy peasy.

Web 2.0 adoption is not that different than the Enterprise 2.0 adoption. You need to get out and do advertising and marketing. You need to get the grass roots movement going, trying to get people to advertise by mouth for you. You need to make things interesting and worthwhile for people to join and participate. but the hardest thing for companies and Enterprise 2.0 is to find the enough people to help with the grass roots movement and to obtain the "free" advertising that they provide. The numbers you have within an enterprise is not as large as many web 2.0 sites garner and have.

While you have the option to do a top down push to use the Enterprise 2.0 technology you are implementing, you have to be very careful with this approach. My feelings are that this could be perceived as heavy handed and pushed from senior management. This type of push can cause the type of reaction you would get from your teenage kids when asking them to do something for you.

My recommendation is to help start a grass roots movement and see how things take off. If after a period of time (6 months - 12 months), the movement has not been successful, reassess the approach. Determine why the movement was not successful and if necessary ask senior management to become involved.

Check back again as I add additional thoughts on adoption.