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.

What is your Social Communications Transitional Strategy?

I was recently contacted by the managing director of a large enterprise asking for advice on what was the most effective way to communicate to his employees.

This was pleasing on two fronts:

1. He was starting to question that maybe traditional communication channels, (e.g. email, newsletters etc...), are no longer the most effective way to reach his employees
2. This strategic thinking was coming from the top

His assessment of the situation within his organisation was also spot on:

• email and SMS are the most widely used today
• newsletters are no longer read in any great detail
• internal social applications (e.g. Twitter style interface, RSS, social networking etc...) are only used by a small minority of the employees

So applying Forresters' P.O.S.T methodology (People, Objectives, Strategy, Tools) to his situation I began to build up a picture to of what his long term goals were and it was clear that ultimately he needed to be on a social platform.

As the style of communication he wanted to send to his employees was short key announcements highlighting key deals they had just won, changes to his organisation etc... the internal Twitter application seemed the best fit and gave many advantages over email:

• Ability to reach a much wider audience (i.e. people in your network will retweet to others in their network, and so on)
• Ability for users to discuss and comment openly on those announcements
• Ability to send, and for users to receive, the messages through the Corporations' Instant Messenger tool – providing ease of use as majority of people already use Instant Messaging
• Messages are stored centrally and accessible by all employees
• Ability to embed communications onto a portal page / website providing real-time updates with zero admin

But the challenge was how to move the employees from email to this Twitter style application. What was needed was a Social Communications Transitional Strategy.

So this is what I recommended:

1. Set a date for the transitional period (say 3 - 6 months) and use both email and the internal Twitter style application to send your messages - this is duplication, but a necessary step in the transitional strategy
2. In each email that is sent, highlight that there is an alternative communication channel (i.e. the Twitter style application) that people can choose to receive these announcements other than via email. Also provide links to any training material or step-by-step guides to help them with any setups that are required
3. Six weeks prior to the end of your transitional period, clearly highlight in each subsequent email that these announcements via email are about to come to an end. Emphasise that if they want to continue to receive these announcements then they must transition over to the Twitter style application immediately
4. At the end of the transitional period, stop sending any announcements via email and use only the Twitter style application

At the end of this transitional period, you will end up with only those employees subscribing to these announcements who find them of value. Those that don't won't subscribe. You have avoided spamming people unnecessarily long term.

So if you are finding it difficult to reach your audience through traditional communication channels, don't be put off by social communications channels just because they are not widely used yet in your organisation. Just use the P.O.S.T method and plan your Social Communications Transitional Strategy.

1.       Use both email AND OraTweet initially for a set period of time (say 3 - 6 months)

2.       In each weekly email communication, highlight that there is also a social platform (OraTweet) that users can use to receive these communications, and instructions of how to do this and how to integrate it with PidGin (my team can help you in this)

3.       In the last 6 weeks, start encouraging people to transition over to OraTweet and highlight that these email communications will stop after this time

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.....