Public Relations Strategery

Watch your local Pee-wee football team’s practice sometime and you’ll see a lot of dropped passes, missed tackles, and a whole host of other mistakes. But…what would happen if you put that team on Heinz Field and gave them all the same amenities as the Pittsburgh Steelers? Yep, they still wouldn’t be able to complete a pass, kick a field goal or break a James Harrison tackle. Clearly, just because they were put on a better field and given the latest equipment doesn’t mean they will suddenly learn to play football.

It doesn't matter what kind of equipment you give them, these players aren't going to win the Super Bowl

Similarly, simply adding the latest Enterprise 2.0 platform behind your firewall doesn’t mean your employees will suddenly learn to collaborate with one another. Collaboration doesn’t just magically happen because you went out and bought the latest Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business software. It happens because they have a reason to collaborate. It happens when they are rewarded for sharing information. It happens when they like working with the people around them.

Over the last few years, I’ve seen dozens of failed wikis, blogs, microblog platforms, forums, and idea management deployments, and I’m sure I’ll see many more. This is frustrating on a couple of different levels for me. First, since I suffer from HOLI (“Hatred of Losing Information“), I hate seeing the missed collaboration opportunities that result from these poorly implemented solutions. Secondly, I know that because of these failures, these organizations will most likely write off social media behind the firewall as some sort of snake oil.

Perhaps the most frustrating part of all of these failures is the reliability with which their failure can be predicted. If you’re implementing some sort of social media behind your organizational firewall, and you’re doing any of the following, I can tell you right now that you probably won’t be successful:

• The same IT department who installed your email system, your ERP system, or your databases is responsible for leading the implementation of your wiki, blog, microblogging platform, etc.
• You don’t have anyone talking about user adoption and community management on the team from the very start
• You don’t have a plan for funding this initiative beyond this year
• You’re measuring success by the number of “users” you can claim
• You’re talking about giving away iPads and candy bars to get people to use it
• There are numerous conversations among senior leadership about how to mitigate the risks of your employees using the tools “as a dating service,” to “goof around,” to complain about everything, or editing things they don’t know anything about.
• You’re more concerned with the available features instead of making it fast, reliable, and accessible
• The team responsible for the platform doesn’t even use it

Instead of trying to give the players the latest and greatest stadium and equipment, start focusing on improving their passing and tackling skills. Maybe you could have them run some pass patterns instead of installing a state-of-the art locker room?

• Do my employees have a reason to collaborate with people outside of their immediate team?
• Is collaborative behavior rewarded during the performance assessment process? Are they punished for hoarding information?
• Does leadership model collaborative behavior?
• Are colleagues encouraged to spend time with each other outside of work hours (softball teams, happy hours, etc.)?
• Are there multiple levels of approvals needed before anyone can share anything?
• Do your employees trust each other? Do they trust management?

If you’re interested in learning more about why your Enterprise 2.0 implementations are failing and what you can do to help them succeed, take a look at the webinar that I just did for UBM TechWeb.  The “It’s Not the Field, It’s the Players” webinar will be archived here, and the slides are now available below. 

[UPDATED TO INCLUDE THE PRESENTATION BELOW]

[slideshare id=9663453&doc=e20webinar-draftfinalslideshare-111012142902-phpapp02]

I like failures. I like hearing about failures and learning from them. I like hearing that other people have made the same mistakes I have and succeeded in spite of (in some cases, because of) those mistakes. I like hearing how one social strategy fails miserably in one organization yet thrives in another. Sure, I enjoy talking with my counterparts in other organizations about their successes, but I almost enjoy hearing about the failures more. At least then we get to talk about some real honest stories instead of an endless of marketing-speak talking about engagement, authenticity, and community.

I’ve written before about the need to start talking about failures at conferences so that others may learn, so that’s why I was excited to attend Kevin Jones‘ presentation, “Enterprise 2.0 Failures – And What We Learn From Them,” yesterday at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference here in Boston. Kevin is a Social Media & Network Strategist/Manager at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, and he gave us several “ways to fail” at Enterprise 2.0 based on his experiences at NASA. Update: Make sure you check out Kevin’s post on his presentation as well as his slides/video that he used.

Here are ten that I particularly liked:

How to Fail at Enterprise 2.0

1. Work in a Culture of Low Trust – Kevin said he was talking to one manager who said, “I just don’t trust my people. “If they bash another group, I don’t want that group to see it. Their English is really horrible – I don’t want anyone else in the organization to know that my people are idiots.”  You could have the greatest tools in the world, but no blog or wiki is going to work if this is the culture in which it’s implemented.
2. Rely on Stats – Trotting all of the latest industry stats on Enterprise 2.0 adoption and spending is great, but nothing resonates as well with a senior leader as actually getting them to sit down and use the tools until they have that “ah-ha” moment for themselves.
3. Underestimate the Political Landscape – Kevin had “a NASA employee assigned to watch over me to keep me out of trouble, but I still got my hand slapped multiple times.”  He was told by the CIO to let him know if he encounters any problems, but then another senior leader told him that he wasn’t allowed to speak to the CIO unless he was accompanied by this other leader. Not understanding the unique office politics at play and how to make them work for you is a recurring theme in Enterprise 2.0 failures.
4. Ignore people who have done this before – This is the “but I’m unique!” argument. Everyone thinks their organization is unique and different from everyone else that they ignore the lessons learned and best practices of others in their organization and assume that they know best. Unfortunately, they usually don’t.
5. Treat this as YOUR project – At first, Kevin thought of himself as the Head of All Things Social. He soon realized that he was spinning his wheels as others weren’t buying into his vision. Not until he gave others ownership over certain parts of the strategy did he start to garner support.
6. Treat this as an IT project – In Enterprise 2.0 implementations, the money often comes from the IT department, and unfortunately, that means that these initiatives are often implemented like an IT project. “Let’s just get the tools up and running – we’ll worry about the people later!” Enterprise 2.0 has to be treated like people project with an IT component, not the other way around.
7. Go Cheap – You get what you pay for, in terms of hardware, software, and people. Kevin mentioned that he led this huge promotional push to get people to log into the platform and it worked! Unfortunately, it worked much better than the IT people thought it would, and they didn’t have the right server space/bandwidth in place to handle the influx of people. So instead of a good news story about user adoption, it turned into people logging into a new collaboration site, only to receive a 404 error. You can’t commit halfway to Enterprise 2.0 – you can’t say, “well, we can afford the tools, but not the community managers” or vice versa.
8. Assume this is about collaboration, being social – Enterprise 2.0 isn’t about creating a Facebook behind the firewall or giving people a way to collaborate. It’s about using technology to help employees do their work. The ability to create a blog that your co-workers can read is meaningless to most people. The ability to easily update and share your weekly status report with your entire project team without having to sift through multiple versions in your inbox? Now that’s something they can get on board with.
9. Make Policy Ugly – Forcing your people to read and agree to a lengthy document filled with do not do this, do not do that legal-ese is akin to putting up a “Beware of Dog! No Trespassing!” sign on your front gate. That doesn’t say come on in and collaborate – that says, we’re protecting our butt because we don’t trust you.
10. Forget that you’re working with humans – These aren’t “users” or “visitors” you’re dealing with. These are people. These are your colleagues. They want to feel like they’re joining a community of other people who can help them, not using some impersonal tool with strict rules and policies governing their every move.

*The title is a quote from Ben Franklin