Public Relations Strategery

Last night, while flying home from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference – Santa Clara, I thought about all of the sessions I attended, the people I spoke with, the demos I watched, and I kept thinking back to something that Dawn Lacallade said in her presentation on Wednesday afternoon:

“If you want your Enterprise 2.0 efforts to be successful, you have to use words other people understand and care about.”

She went on to say that instead of talking about social media, social business, building communities and why your organization needs to use blogs, wikis, and microblogging, you should be talking about increasing sales, increasing productivity, and cutting costs. If you’re talking with Director of HR, he doesn’t care that you are managing 100 new communities or that 1,000 Yammer messages were posted today. He wants to know if the attrition rates are going down or that new employees are getting acclimated more quickly. For you, building communities might be the goal. For him, those communities don’t mean anything unless they can help him reach his goals.

Paradoxically, sometimes the best way to implement social tools are to not refer to them as social tools. This isn’t a new concept – do a Google search for social media leadership buy-in and you’ll come across thousands of articles and case studies all saying some variation of, “focus on the business objectives, not the tools.”

For Enterprise 2.0 to be successful, we have to take it much further. This about much more than what words to use. It’s about integrating the use of Enterprise 2.0 tools into the actual business. It’s about realizing that these tools are a means to an end, not the end itself. It’s about understanding that a social business community that isn’t tied to actual business goals isn’t sustainable.

In this article, Chris Rasmussen explains how five years after the launch of Intellipedia, there’s still a long way to go to integrate it into the way the Intelligence Community does its work.

The United States Intelligence Community (IC) has made tremendous strides over the last several years with the introduction of a wide range of social software tools such as wikis, blogs, user tagging services, and social networking services for knowledge management and information sharing.  Looking back over the last five years there’s little question that “information sharing” has increased across the board and the Web 2.0 tools mentioned above have helped with this moderate cultural shift.  We have successfully automated the digital watercooler, created a massive unofficial knowledge base, and improved search by increasing the amount of links, but is this it?  Are process gains in informal channels the optimized promise of Web 2.0 at work? What about the official channels?  Content exchange is the lowest rung of the collaborative ladder when compared to joint knowledge co-creation in official channels and this has not happened within the IC.

This is where the Enterprise 2.0 industry finds itself today.You’ve brought social tools to your Intranet? You’ve created a dozen active, vibrant communities behind your firewall? That’s great, but don’t go patting yourself on the back too much. Now, let’s drive it deeper into the business. If your goal this year was to bring Enterprise 2.0 to your organization, your goal for next year should be to integrate those tools into one or more of your business units. If you spoke at the this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference and talked about community management or your implementation of SharePoint, Newsgator, Yammer, Socialcast, Clearvale or any of the other platforms, next year, I want you to bring a leader from another part of your business who can talk about how he’s used the platforms and the communities to have a tangible impact on his business.

Becoming a Social Business isn’t enough – you also have to become a better business.

A community of practice (CoP) is, according to cognitive anthropologists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, a group of people who share an interest, a craft, and/or a profession.

Over the last year or so, the term communities of practice has entered the social media buzzword lexicon along with virtual collaboration, engagement, platforms, and Enterprise 2.0. Senior leaders want to establish them, new employees are being told to join them, and middle managers are being told to support them, but what, exactly are they?

Nowhere in the definition above does it mention the words website, wiki, blog, or social network. Nowhere does it say that it has to be virtual or physical or even either/or. There is no reference to the tools that are used to facilitate the communication and collaboration, nor is there a defined set of characteristics that define how a community of practice works or what topics they discuss.

A group of people who share an interest, a craft and/or a profession. Sounds pretty simple, right? Sounds like we might already be members of dozens of communities of practice – at work, at church, at school, etc. It’s just a group of people communicating and collaborating openly around a topic that they all care about. CoPs have existed for as long as people have had a desire to learn from each other.

Whether your organization knows it or not, your company/government agency is already filled with CoPs. Just because all of their communication and collaboration doesn’t happen to occur on your designated SharePoint site doesn’t mean that people aren’t already communicating and collaborating around a shared topic of interest. Whether it’s the group of new hires who coordinate the monthly happy hours or the new parents who get together over lunch to discuss work/life balance, communities of practice are alive and well within most organizations. They just might not be the ones with a unique URL on the Intranet.

Are you creating a community of practice or are you just creating another website? How does your CoP stack up to some of these statements?

• People voluntarily spend time helping others in a community of practice. People visit a website to download what they need.
• CoPs focus on adding value to their members. Websites focus on getting new users.
• The success of a CoP is measured in anecdotes, efficiencies, and employee satisfaction. The success of a website is measured by hits, visits, and referrals.
• The members of a CoP volunteer their expertise to create new tech features. A website has paid developers who add new features.
• A CoP is built around conversation. A website is built around content.

Communities of practice have been around for decades, and for decades, they’ve helped countless organizations navigate major changes, increase productivity, cut duplication, and make work more enjoyable. In many cases, the use of social media has enhanced these CoPs by providing more tools and opportunities for people to connect with other people. Unfortunately, social media has also given rise to zombie communities filled with content on blogs, forums, and wikis, but which lack any actual human interaction. What are you building?

For more about Communities of Practice, check out Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge, Harvard Business School Press, 2002 by Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William M. Snyder.

Don't be like Cleveland...prepare for when your star leaves

UPDATE: Slides embedded!

We all know the story – local high school star LeBron James joins the hometown Cleveland Cavaliers, becomes a star, leads his team to the playoffs for five straight seasons and then “takes his talents to South Beach.” Without their superstar, the Cavs finish the next season with one of the worst records in the league, something my home state of Ohio was very unhappy about!

What if your social media “star” left your organization? Would you turn into Cleveland?

Over the last several years, as social media has become increasingly ubiquitous in many of our daily lives; government, nonprofit and commercial organizations have begun using social media to connect with their internal and external stakeholders. While some organizations have taken a systematic approach to building out their social media presence, many, especially those that were early adopters, relied on social media advocates within their organizations – people who saw the value of social media and evangelized for its use.

We all know the type: the one that others call “that social media guy/girl” that was willing to take risks, challenge the status quo, and sometimes drag their organization kicking and screaming into having a Facebook Page, engaging with customers on Twitter or helping their research department to use a wiki to share knowledge. In my organization, Booz Allen Hamilton, one of those people is Steve Radick, who played an integral part in advocating for building out a social media practice for our clients as well as helping the firm to adopt our internal Enterprise 2.0 site, Hello. In my own work, I’ve helped clients to build social media programs from scratch, making first steps in taking advantage of the latest technologies to engage with citizens, patients and employees for Military Health System organizations and other agencies.

But what happens when your star leaves? What happens when your “social media guru” is promoted and doesn’t have time to Tweet like they used to? What happens when the consultant who has been updating your Facebook Page completes their contract? Or that intern you asked to make viral videos for you goes back to school? How do you sustain your social media program so that it doesn’t rely on the power of one or two personalities that have been driving it forward?

These are some of the questions I’m looking forward to engaging with PRSA International Conference participants in during my session “When a Star Leaves: How to Sustain Social Media Efforts Over the Long Term.” Based on the experience of myself and my colleagues at Booz Allen who have helped to build social media programs with staying power for Federal Government agencies, I will give you some best practices to help you think strategically about how to set up your program to stand the test of time as well as discuss what to do now to prepare for when your “rock star” moves on.

While I’ll have more to share in Orlando, here are five tips you can start thinking about in the meantime:

1. Plan your social media program as if your star won’t be here tomorrow: Your star’s role will likely change in the next year, whether by their action or because of changes in leadership. Assume the torch will need to be passed to someone else, and plan for it
2. Structure your social media program to be scalable and future-proof: Anticipate demand for help, for social media across your organization will increase as different departments see how it can be successful. Additionally, think about social media in a platform-agnostic way, creating practices, policies and strategies that are easily adaptable as technologies and trends change
3. Don’t stop at a star, build a whole constellation of people who understand and use social media throughout your organization: Think about creating a social media coalition within your organization. Identify champions in different departments and engage them regularly in meetings to share successes and challenges
4. Integrate and normalize social media into daily communication practice across your organization: Digital and social media are integral for communicating with your consumers and valuable for communicating in your organization. Find ways to incorporate social media into your communication, training and performance systems
5. Make sure your star knows their success will be judged by your organization’s ability to sustain the social media effort after they are gone: Mentoring and nurturing talent is integral to long-term success. If your social media program disappears when your star disappears, your program, and your star, will be seen as a failure

Stick around for the last set of workshops on Tuesday afternoon at 2:15 before you head home (or to Disney) to join me in an engaging conversation on making your social media program stand the test of time. I look forward to talking with you, and will be providing an update of how it goes after the conference. See you there!

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]