Helping corporate communication find value with an #ESN

Photo by Eric Ziegler

In my previous post, I talked about helping team find the value in using a new technology.  In this post, I am going to focus on one very specific example. Helping a corporate communications team that is stuck in their old methods of communication style.

In the traditional corporate communications world, most teams are just familiar with the intranet and email as primary vehicles to communications. In many cases this specific team will resist the desire to change communication methods. My guess on why they resist? They don't see the value. They are uncertain and doubt that a new method might be better. As I stated in my last post, to help a team like this find value, their biggest concerns, their biggest issues with communication need to be understood.  For example, are they seeing a drop in people reading their communications?  Are they hearing that people only hear about events after they occur?  Are they hearing that people can't find appropriate content?  

So when a new technology like an Enterprise Social Network (#ESN) is implemented, identifying solutions that will reduce the issues they see today is a great way of getting a team like this to adopt the new technology. So the question is how can an ESN help corporate communications with these hypothetical issues?

By using an ESN to advertise and promote the latest news article or event, people visiting the ESN will start to read more of the content. It is a secondary channel to share and obtain a greater readership. And if done well, the reach of the message could be even larger, as people share and re-share the information.

In addition, by sharing out the enterprise social network, the sharing and resharing will have an impact on the ability for people to find the best and most appropriate information and content. Similar to the internet, social plays a huge role in how search works. And by having employees engage with the content will allow search engines to automatically assess the most important information and will allow people to find the content faster (through multiple channels including the ESN and search).

This statement might seem out of place, but ...  the concepts of traditional inside the enterprise marketing has to adapt. Especially as semantic and social in the enterprise collide. The quality of the content that is created is all that much more important.  The higher and more relevant the content, the more likely it will be found.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search.

Adoption is about helping to find value

Photo by Benjamin Ziegler

In the enterprise, when a new technology is brought in that all employees would use, the challenge is often not with the implementation but convincing all employees to adopt and use the new technology. A great example is an Enterprise Social Network (#ESN). How do you obtain adoption that meets your business needs and goals? Grass roots? Top down?

Often much of the effort of adoption center around some type of marketing campaign. And more often than not, to do the marketing of a new communication technology requires using the old communication technology.  eMail, intranet, etc. are likely the tools that will be used to market the new ESN. These are still important, but are there other ways?

One of the methods to help with adoption is to work with enterprise business units to help them realize the true value of the new tool. Find groups, small teams in the enterprise that will benefit from the new tool. Look for reasons they might not have realized were there to help them understand the true value of the new product. Listen to the employees of that team. Hear how they work, not just how they communicate. Look for opportunities of  how their jobs could be enhanced and then work with them over time to start using new techniques to make their work "betterer".

Working Out Loud can not be Automated

Photo by Eric ziegler

Not sure how I ended reading an old post by +Bertrand Duperrin but I did.  Maybe something was calling to me.  Maybe it is just purely coincidence that I re-read his blog post. Either way, it has triggered me to write a blog post for the first time in several months. Let's dig in.  

Bertrand Duperrin, posted a blog post back in August of 2012 called Employees don't have time to waste narrating their work. What caught my eye originally was the title. First reaction, huh? You have to be kidding me. Bertand might be just trying to be sensationalistic with his title, I am not sure.  But it did catch my eye and cause me to read his blog post. While the title is interesting, I have to say that the blog post hits a nerve. Bertrand starts his blog post with a concept that I agree with ...

It’s impossible to think about emergent collaboration and self-organized structures without visibility on others’ work. 

This first sentence makes me think of +Change Agents Worldwide (@chagww, #CAWW). Why?  #CAWW is a self organized emergent collaboration organization that is about helping individuals, teams, companies, employees, etc. be more effective.  #CAWW works as a network of individuals that interact, share, and cooperate and collaborate on different topics and ideas, always trying to improve upon ideas that will help organizations be more effective. It is almost like he wrote this sentence with the concept of #CAWW in mind. 

In Bertrand's 3rd paragraph he continues down the same path by stating ....

collaboration, cooperation, problem solving and even innovation requires something to be shared so trigger the dynamic. Moreover, people often don’t realize they can be helped : sometimes we believe we’re doing right while we’re doing wrong, we’re doing right while we could do better, differently.

While the first sentence could be interrupted several ways, this statement does not align with the title at all. Only after you get more than half way through the blog post do you start to see where the title becomes relevant.  I believe this statement best summarizes the rest of the blog ... 

if people’s work’s worth being narrated, people should not always be the narrator. Their time is too precious to ask them to play the role of transponders. 

So now I get it.  People's time are too important to waste on working out loud (#WOL).  Bertrand continues and discusses the idea of having systems do the narrating by automatically creating activities in an activity stream - weekly reports, updates to profiles, etc.    I understand where he is going, but I think this concept misses the importance of working out loud (#WOL).

What do I believe? The idea of working out loud is not about the automated interactions? There is some value, but the biggest value is sharing information in a way a system can never do. Sharing information includes asking questions or putting a thought out that could trigger a thought by someone else. Automatic system updates are too prescribed to cause an emotional reaction by the receiver and bacause of that, the value it just not as high.  

I will say though, I do agree with his concept of having people jump out of their every day work systems to work out loud is not effective. To get people to be most effective, the system to work out loud needs to be integrated into the systems they work in every day.

Automatic system updates are the antithesis of what social networks are about. While an automatic update might provide value, they do not deliver come anywhere close to providing the same amount of value as working out loud.