Focus on the Easy Adopters, the Rest will Follow

Social adoption strategies are not easy to implement in ANY business, and if anyone tells you differently they are lying!

The reason?

How can you convince people to change their communication and collaboration processes and implement a new social business infrastructure, when in their eyes the current model is not broken?

Let's see if any of these arguments sound familiar to you...

"What is the ROI of 'Being Social in the Workplace' anyway?"

"Social? That means I need to learn even more tools huh?"

"So you want my workforce to spend all their time on Facebook?"

"I'm already social, I sent a tweet last year"

These are what we call Social Barriers, the human instinct blockers based on fear.

Overcoming the fear of change is not easy and yes it is a generation thing. The younger generation are entering business with a good knowledge and understanding of social without the added baggage of pre-defined traditional business processes. Adoption is therefore natural and unforced.

So how do you overcome these Social Barriers in the workplace?

Focus on the Easy Adopters, the rest will follow...

There are are couple of ways to face these Social Barriers, and deliver a social adoption strategy:

1. Face them head on - provide use cases, and counter arguments to defend your position and show that 'Being Social' is nothing to be afraid of. Convince them that it will INCREASE the productivity of your workforce, IMPROVE the collaboration opportunities and STREAMLINE their communications
2. Focus on the Easy Adopters, the rest will follow - work with those in the organisation who see the vision and are ready and willing to change. This will help you refine your social adoption strategy and create new Ambassador's. The more Ambassador's you have the easier the Social Barriers will come down

The latter is an approach I have had a lot of success with, which has also helped influence C-Level buy-in.

You could choose either of these approaches or you can do both in parallel, just don't be afraid to change tactics if you find an approach is not working for you.

Every business WILL go social, it's just a matter of when, and how you approach it...

The Death of Email by 2018

By 2018 email as we know it today will be a thing of the past. Will I be proved to be a: GENIUS or FOOL Time Remaining:

In September 2008 I predicted the death of email as we know it within 10 years, to be replaced by something more collaborative in the social world we now find ourselves living in.

When I first made this death of email prediction people laughed in my face, literally.

Don't get me wrong I don't dislike email, it's a great linear communication tool but it has limitations in today's world particularly when we talk about collaboration.

Does this sound all too familiar?

An email arrives in your inbox that has been sent to 30+ people asking for feedback on the attached PowerPoint presentation. Person A responds with a 'reply to all' message with their feedback. Person B comments on their feedback with a 'reply to all'. Person C responds with a 'reply to all' adding their feedback on the presentation. Person C also responds with a 'reply to all' commenting on the feedback of Person A and Person B and so it goes on.... Before you know it there is a discussion going on in your inbox and you now have 50 unread emails that were not there when your meeting first started an hour ago.

Factoid: According to the Radicati Group, the average corporate user sends and receives 110 emails a day. If we say it takes on average 90 seconds to either read or write an email, that equates to 2 hours 45 mins a day or nearly 14 hours a week on email.

I spend more time on email than I do with my family.

These days companies are always looking to increase productivity of their employees and for them to be more efficient, whilst needing to communicate and collaborate more easily. Spending 14 hours a week on email is no longer an acceptable working practice.

Was the Death of Email crazy prediction really that crazy?

Let's be clear, life did exist before email and businesses did function (I know the thought of the death of email brings some of you out in a cold sweat).

If you look how technology has evolved over the last forty years since email was introduced, and how it has influenced behavioural changes in the way we communicate and collaborate, it stands to reason that at some time in the near future email will become a thing of the past.

If we only look back five years to July 2006, the first tweet was sent which begun to evolutionise how we communicate. Today there are over 200 million users generating in excess of 200 million tweets a day and handling over 1.6 billion search queries a day on Twitter. This is being used by many as an alternative communication channel (not replacement) to company emails.

Facebook was opened to the public in September 2009. Three years later it has 200 million users and today it has reached over 600 million users. It has also recently introduced an alternative to email that they brand as "definitely not email".

Google Wave came and went in 2009/2010 but the concept of an alternative to email was born. A lot of media hype around the failure of this was down to product and the fact that people didn't get it. However there are other allegedly conspiracy theories around this, one being that it was pulled by Google because they felt it was competing against it's own Gmail product. Personally, I think they just under-estimated the cultural change of such an innovative concept.

Google+ (Google Plus) is the latest social platform currently in soft launch mode and soon to be released, which could see it also competing against the standard email.

Maybe the death of email is not as far away as we think....

Check out this incredible video by Red Sky Vision who have talked to a number of companies (Able and How, CorpComms Magazine, Melcrum, Headshift to name a few) about how social media in the workplace is changing their communications:

The speed at which new social technologies are being introduced is growing exponentially and it won't be long before the replacement for email will arrive (or maybe it already has).

For me personally, I cannot wait until that day and stand by my crazy prediction that this will happen before the end of 2018.

Email is losing ground to Social Communications

I recently delivered a Social Enterprise marketing campaign titled "Being Social...More Than Just Talking" where the purpose was to raise awareness inside the enterprise that Being Social is not just about tools, it's about a work style change.

The campaign followed Steve, a Sales Communications Specialist, who was a bit of a social sceptic but was open minded to listen. He went on a social journey of discovery and soon realised that by being better socially connected with his colleagues he could be more collaborative AND more productive. Though he didn't managed to reduce his caffeine intake too much ;-)

The campaign was delivered on 3 fronts:

• An introductory email to 25,000 employees
• A poster campaign
• A set of 5 Diary Entry videos (done in the style of Bridget Jones) - one released each day for a week

The campaign has been received very favourably (average marks 9/10 by the employees) and I have had numerous requests to do a follow up Diary Series. BUT what was interesting was the statistics on the initial email that went out.

The email introducing the marketing campaign went out on a Monday morning. Of those 25,000 employees who received it only 5,569 actually opened the email (22%) on the Monday. By the end of the week this figure had increased marginally to 6,310 (25%).

Just let me reiterate that:

three quarters of the workforce had not even bothered to open the email before deciding to discard or delete it

Now there are other factors that have to be taken into consideration here like:

• was it holiday season?
• was the subject heading interesting?
• does the sender have influence and respect of the employees?

The answers to these questions are no, subjective, and again subjective respectively (though the name of the programme was used rather than a senders name here to provide more credibility).

The conclusion I draw from this is that if you want to communicate a message to the masses you can no longer rely only on traditional communication channels but you must use a combination of both traditional and social communication platforms. This is true inside and outside the enterprise.

The days of email blast campaigns are coming to an end.

Welcome to the Social Communication Revolution!

Social Media: It's just a bunch of tools right?

Firstly, I would just like to announce that we have a new addition to the family Dylan James Christopher which is also the reason for the long break between my posts on my blog (he's only a few weeks old and I am blaming him already).

However, I am refreshed and back!

Ok, so over the weekend I realised that I have been having the same conversations over and over again with colleagues that Social Media is so much more than the technology. So I decided that I need to take a different approach to communicating this message.

So I have put together the following slideshare presentation to get the message across in a fun but clear way. Please let me know if I succeeded.....

Social Media in Business: It's just a bunch of tools right?

View more presentations from David Christopher.

Online Information Conference 2009

Come and see us at the OIC 2009 at the Olympia in London on Dec 1st, where we will be presenting on the social media adoption strategy we are applying in Oracle EMEA.

Date: Tuesday 1st December 2009
Time: 12:15pm
Track: The social web: Transforming the workplace
Topic: Social Technologies: Winning the hearts and minds
Whitepaper: Click to download

The presentation will focus on:

A. Individual adoption – Early Adopter Plan
How to develop and deliver a plan for introducing early adopters to social technologies, and a framework for them engaging with other like-minded individuals.

B. Team adoption – S.L.A.M Programme
How to develop and deliver a programme remotely, that focuses on the "change in mindset" required to embed adoption to a new way of working, without increasing headcount.

In this session we will also cover:

• Social Business Communities – the pillars to delivering a successful adoption programme
• Case Studies – helping the social technology buy-in of sceptics
• Solution Finder – a user generated solution helping individuals to find the right social tools(s) based on their role or specific activity
• Social Cycle of Innovation – utilising the "wisdom of crowds" concept to solve key business challenges

The learning points of this session will be:

• How the Oracle EMEA Roadmap to Social Adoption is changing the way its employees connect, colaborate and innovate
• How to use the collective intelligence of your employees to identify and overcome the change barriers to social technologies
• How to develop a scalable adoption programme for your own business
• That social technologies is about People…

Feel free to download our OIC 2009 Exhibition Whitepaper.

Hope to see you there.....