Corporate Social Networking Forum

After a brief intro from Chairman James Garner, and a spot of speed networking, we’re into the meat of the day…

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Suraj is focussing on Twitter today:

“Twitter is not just one thing, it’s a lot of different things to different people”. 

From personal communication device to brand monitor… it’s a building block to create applications to subsequently make money from.  How do you create an economy around your content?

“Twitter may be the beginning of a new way of using the web…”

How do you make social media work for brand and business?  There isn’t much of a business case that you can write yet and present to the board up front… until, that is, you can show them the actual conversation. 

I think this means that we should all just get on and do it, and then show people the results; ask for forgiveness, not permission.

This is a theme that reoccured again and again throughout the day… we’re in the middle of such a seismic change in the way the world works, you can’t expect everyone to ‘get it’ immediately, and unfortunately a lot of the people who you need to sign off budgets are loathe to do so without evidence. 

As a result, you may have to just get on and do something ‘under the radar’ first, then show the results to get sign off for the next, bigger project.

Twitter of course is low cost, but it takes your time and effort; it’s not like old school marketing that you can just throw money at…

SK relates the story of #amazonfail… from a niche Friday report, to a Saturday Twitter-buzz thing, to hitting the front page of the BBC website on Sunday, to hitting the Amazon share price on the Monday… all the while, the Amazon twitter account (which they had set up) was silent.

Even a company like Amazon isn’t geared to deal with with social media, because of the ‘chain of command’ – an ‘official Amazon statement’ will have to go through the proper channels.  Going through the proper channels, however, days hours, if not days.

One Jadu customer is Lichfield (Staffordshire) district council… all sorts of different council employees sharing news and information, out in the open, via Twitter.  Video from Lichfield speech, by a chap called Stuart Harrison (webmaster @ Lichfield DC).  

Talking about a Twitter management system created for them by Jadu to create a ‘multi-user’ account on Twitter, so if people switch roles or leave an organisation, the Twitter account remains intact.

Jadu make ‘evangelists’ as a marketing strategy (like Stuart) and work with them, get

Suraj’s Final points…

Twitter is about COMMUNICATING… sharing knowledge in real-time.  It’s not about advertising, and it’s not about ‘news’.

“It takes work – you have to ‘get it’ and that takes time.  Then you have to use it (all the time)”

“Using Twitter is not just about Twitter; it’s the first step in understanding what’s happening on the internet”

“People are tweeting already whether you like it or not; if you don’t get to them first, your competitors will”

First mention of the ‘monetise’ question… how will it make money?  Suraj likens Google Wave to ‘where Twitter may end up in five years time’.

Corporate vs. Personal accounts; Suraj has a work profile, a personal profile, and a group Jadu profile that they all contribute to.  There are ways and means to create a Twitter structure to suit your company.

I found Suraj’s presentation very knowledgable and interesting, a great opener.  Their work is starting to showcase what exactly can be achieved by using the building blocks of things like Twitter to create new useful/entertaining/connective things.  It’s the Lego analogy I’ve touched on before.

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Niall Cook, Hill & Knowlton, “Corporate Social Networking: Today and Tomorrow”

An overview of three things:

i) why are businesses turning to this NOW, rather than 2-3 years ago

ii) what is it we’re talking about?  what does social networking within businesses mean?

iii) how are companies making this stuff successful (it’s not a box you can ‘buy’)

i) Why Now?

As always, the technology has been around for a while… “but it’s a ‘perfect storm’ of economic, social, cultural that’s driving take up.”

It’s the credit crunch that’s making business turn to social software.

I’m already a huge subscriber to this theory; cost cutting is rife through all departments in companies, not just marketing… so when budgets disappear, what you’ve got to do is try things that are free… and embracing social media in the first instance is about as free as things get.

“In ROI, the ‘R’ doesn’t have to be huge if the ‘I’ wasn’t that much in the first place” – GREAT quote

Internal systems have stopped working.  Email, intranet etc is NOT EFFICIENT.  Email for communications, collaborated etc is not working, as people get absolutely overloaded. 

“Intranets aren’t working because they’re not collaboration tools, they are publishing tools.”

Companies are saying ‘it’s not that people aren’t interested in collaborating (as they use Facebook, Twitter etc), it’s the systems that we’re giving them that aren’t working.

Finally, the people inside our company are changing; people are more mobile, and working remotely more often.  Because our businesses are having to be more flexible (everything from winning new business to legal employment contracts).

Workplaces, businesses, employees… all are changing.  So the systems need to change. 

“Whereas once the CEO was ‘God’, employees now want them to be ‘Guide’…” not the person who tells people what to do, but the person who helps people do what they do best.

Employees now want inclusivity; they want to be involved.  Research shows that the more engaged employees are in the company, the more productive your company will be.

Finally, the digital natives are coming, THIS YEAR.  Gartner research shows that the people coming out from university into ‘manager’ positions are going to start arriving in companies.  Technology is not a ‘box’, it’s embedded into the way they’ve grown up.

ii) What is it, this ‘CSN’?

People need to connect, and share, to make things happen.  If people do things outside organisations, they want to be able to bring this ability inside the companies they work for.

Inside companies, people want to be able to communicate, share and co-operate with each other like they can on the outside.

iii) How do you set about doing it?

Speed & flexibility is now a must.  The old version of IT development within companies is dead; the expectations of employees are immediate, and can’t wait for the six months it takes for an IT dept. to ‘assess a business case’.

Then it’s about ‘ease of use’.  We all say that it should always about ‘ease of use’, yet everyone keeps rolling out hard to use, clunky systems.  Draw inspiration from the GREAT things on the web.

There needs to be demand; ask people what they would like, don’t just give them something and expect them to use it.

Then, deliver something of ‘individual value’ first… that’s how things get started.  People will do it at first if there’s individual benefit.

Finally, your organisational culture MUST be collaborative in the first place… there’s no point putting in a system to a ‘closed shop’ culture.

Here’s the thing: all day long, and when they go home, the people at your company are using fantastic, simple, empowering tools to bring them together with their friends.  They want to be able to do that at work…

These are all big, company changing themes… how people work together, the systems companies use to help that, the cultures that have to change to make that happen.  And because they are such big themes, change is going to have to come from the top, and be continually improved from the bottom.

Robert Johnson, Strategic Consultant, COI Strategic Consultancy: “Managing, controlling and motivating the modern employee“

Setting the context for ‘Corporate Social Networking’ from a historical point of view.

Whereas back in the 50s & 60s, employees were just expected to do as they were told… for the last 50 years we’ve been moving to a place where people are expected more and more to innovate for companies; the ‘intrapreneur’.

‘Baby Boomers’ started working in the ‘involve employees’ era of the 70s & 80s, ‘Generation X’ people arrived in the ‘Improve’ era, and ‘Generation Y’ were asked to ‘innovate’.

All three generations have very different characteristics, yet all three together make up an organisation today. 

Robert then looks at the 8 types of people you’ll find in both companies and life generally (taken from the Tom Rath book ‘Vital Friends’: Builder, Companion, Connector, Collaborator, Energizer, Mind Opener, Navigator, and Champion.

I think this Myers Briggs test, in addition to giving you an ‘ENFP’ type profile, will tell you which of these types you are at the end of the test.

Anyway, again it’s highlighting the different sorts of peopel exist across an organisation… there’s no ‘one-size-fits all’ solution.

So, what’s the employee’s role in the future of CSN?

i) recognise that sharing and learning are prized by the organisation

ii) seek out the information themselves

iii) be a good networker

iv) support others

v) be inclusive

vi) be sensitive to commercial boundaries

vii) use technology to add value

viii) consider their work/life balance (and that of others)

Also, think about the communications tools that employees have to share things with:

i) ‘No choice’ (email, phone, blackberry etc)

ii) ‘If I want to…’  (staff mag, flyers

iii) ‘Can find it myself (intranet, team room)

iv) ‘what are other people thinking’… this is the place where the ‘corporate social network’ should live perhaps – it’s not ‘by the company, for the employees’, it’s ‘by us’.

It’s vital to think of these sorts of things when building up a picture of your organisation I think… the difference between generations, the tools they use to communicate, and what you actually want them to achieve by sharing things.

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Panel – For & Against CSN

Euan Semple: Consultant, former BBC Knowledge Management Director @ BBC

Dirk Singer, co-founder, Cow

Trish Hunt, Corp. internal communications, Dell EMEA

Defining internal vs external SN systems:

ES: “Your best advocates, and your best marketers, are your staff… So are you representing your company, or your personal life… the boundaries are very blurred”

TH: “If you speak from a company perspective, you have to take on the responsibilities of that… we asked if we needed to put clauses in peoples’ contracts… but it’s about taking responsibility, we don’t think we need all the rules and regulations”

DS: “the arguments about ‘what if people waste their time, talk to friends, speak direct to customers’ were all had about email ten years ago”

DS: “the ’email guidelines’ were set in companies, the same should be set for new forms of communication”

ES: “social networking is fun, but does it add to the ROI of the company… I asked the same question about meetings, but because they are the ‘way things are done’ no one questions it”

ES: “HR is the embodiment of ‘command and control’, backed up by IT and Communications… because these departments have ‘the most to lose’ from a ‘power’ point of view”

DS: “An Australian blogger called Laurel Papworth has posted a list of 40 guidelines for internal social networks…”

If you click on the link, you’ll see that it’s a great resource; Laurel has drawn together the policies from 40 different sets of staff guidelines for how to use social media.  It’s a great resource for anyone wanting to create or refine one.

Good question from the floor… ‘is email dead’?

ES: “email is good… peoples’ management of it is not what it could be”

TH: “email is good for taking time, attaching more rich content etc… “

DS: “my colleagues are using twitter to contact me immediately, as I run tweetdeck in the background of my mac…”

TH: “At Dell, the intranet still exists, but it’s just not being used…

…no interaction, no place for questions… we use the blogs to direct people to the information in the intranet.  Blogs are something we use of a daily basis, internally, by ‘direct to dell’ blogs are the blogs where we talk directly to our customers (and new models come out of that, as do CSR programs etc).

DS: “We’ve created social network platforms for people… and we were sold some fiendishly complicated systems… the key to success is taking cues from the systems people use in their everyday lives”

This is key for people trying to design internal systems… just use the same, simple principles that made facebook, twitter etc a success… don’t try to invent (and complicate) the wheel…

ES: (responding to Google Wave question from audience) “Umair Haque has ten principles from being successful from Twitter that are counter intuitive to ways that we run companies today”

Final point… what’s the key to making a successful social network in companies?

All three – it’s about culture.  If your company doesn’t make people feel that they will be allowed to use the tools because of company protocol, they won’t.

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Now, time for a coffee…

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At this point, I originally wrote down that one of the big themes of the day was about company ‘culture’… but in hindsight, just boiling all this down into one word feels wrong… it’s MUCH bigger than this. 

Companies, especially those with their roots of creation firmly in the pre-internet age, are hostage to the old, siloed world of hierarchy, department and ‘chain of command’.

People, meanwhile, shifted behaviour to adapt to the new communication tools available because there isn’t an internal communications department who tell you how to talk to your friends at home, or an HR department that tells you who to report into regularly, or even an IT department who tell you which systems online you can and can’t use.

From memory, Charles Leadbeater’s We-Think covers some of this area too. 

I’ll come back to this later… but the overriding thought is that in order to make companies more efficient, we need less rules and regulations… make your company a free idea economy.

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Sonia is going to talk about two projects; one that’s up, and one that was MEANT to be up, but hasn’t yet been built…

“OurSpace”

This project has its roots in ‘ICE’ – ‘Intensive Customer Experience’.  A day training session that everyone went on, loved… but arrived back at the office , and nothing would really change.  A request came down to change this… “we need blog/forum/wiki”… somewhere to capture and share the enthusiasm from the ICE course.  For 12,000 people to communicate with.

So… AXA (being a typical finance organisation) didn’t have anything like this.  So they started to build an online community for AXA employees to share ideas and opinions.  Partially modelled on ”mystarbucksidea” and ‘dellideastorm‘.

I’ll put some slide images of the site up here when the presentations are shared.

It’s fully based on trust, a big AXA theme; trust in each other as colleagues, and the trust that customers have in the organisation.

There are two key components of the site:

i) OurIdeas – employees post an idea, or comments on existing ideas, and then vote for ideas.  The top three ideas are reviewed monthly by the ‘ambition 2012 steering group’

ii) OurForums – almost a crowdsourced employee handbook… how best to deal with customer issues and the like.

…and all this for a sub-£4k budget to design and launch the site.  OurForums used VBulletin, and OurIdeas used WordPress with additional plugins.

(The project was hidden from IT for the first few months though… because it would have been lost in the previously mentioned ‘year long business case’ issues)

The OurIdeas section is great; not only do you get to put up an idea, people in AXA can then improve on those ideas together (through comments etc), and then the better the ideas are made, the more votes the idea will get… and great ideas are evaluated monthly.

Finally, the light touch regulation of the ‘code of conduct’ has been largely carried over from their phone/email guidelines etc.

I think this a great example of how to create something pretty simple and effective to bring a company together, and crowdsource some ideas that will actually affect how the company runs.  And especially given AXA is a financial services organisation, change must be hard there…

…and to do it for such a low budget is brilliant.  Nice work.

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Lee Bryant, Headshift: “Why enterprise 2.0 will help you in a recession”

Good first point – “can we afford business as usual?”  Buying audiences through advertising, large bureaucratic structures and the like are not the way for companies to behave in this day and age.

We can add a social layer to enterprise tools in order to rejuvenate old, loved systems that companies have in place already.

“trust is cheaper than control”

A great statement that encapsulates something about the world of social media that should appeal to every department from HR to comms to finance…

…and of course it makes the things your here more believable than having a ‘corporate news army’…

So how do you make businesses more agile?

The social internet is being powered by evolution, in turn fuelled by ‘rapid feedback’.  Hundreds of thousands look, test and improve systems in the wide world.  Intranets traditionally lack all of this power behind them.  And IT people aren’t traditionally skilled in building user-friendly, constantly evolving systems.

We also need to address business networks.  Companies that adopt an internal social network will be more ‘immune’ to the ‘idea virus’.  The virus will move, down the hierarchy, from person to person in secret (e.g. Enron ‘off the book’ accounting).  Open and transparent social networks help make these viral threats less likely to take hold.

Internal tools are meant to share and use our knowledge more.  We waste the brainpower of people in organisations.  We generate knowledge and insights constantly that we could use to improve the systems in business… yet we don’t use them.  Think about how every Google search slightly refines the next search for that term.

3 things that are good about CSN:

i) 90% of project management is just ‘people’ – where are they, what are they doing, what will they do next.  Internal social networks helps with this.

People power helps organise information, and negotiate meaning.  But opening up the whole conversations, everyone will know what people actually mean, and what they know.

ii) Wiki-style intranet tools allow people to actively contribute to the ongoing project.

(Basically ‘who the people are, what they know, and getting them to build things together)

iii) CSN is currently building a case for investment, especially when peopel start asking ‘what’s next after a 10% reduction in headcount?’ 

Lee then rattled through the synopsis of ‘what to do next’… I’ll grab that from the slides when they arrive.

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Thijs Sprangers & Menno Braakman, Krem; “Case studies of creating success with CSN”

Two Dutch fellas… the first guy makes a good point when he asks ‘where’s the LinkedIn mentions?’. 

Krem are believers in ‘blended networking’, which is the mix of face to face contacts with online connections.  They believe that CSN can use the power of networks to make your relations ambassadors, and to make ambassadors valuable in a referral network.

‘Blended Networking’ is a nice concept… the combination of connecting the people online, but also seeing them in real life too.  Anyone can collect hundred or thousands of online contacts, but they’re right, contacts are a lot stronger through ‘blended networking‘. 

It goes back to something Euan Semple said earlier; companies are built on people doing business with other people they trust.

Thare are Three stages to Krem’s process;

i) Strategy & Concept

ii) Implementation & Launch

iii) Growth and Activation

They use a smattering of tools, from Xing to Ning, LinkedIn to Facebook, and adhere to the principle ‘fish where the fish are’; use the tools that people are using already.

I think the ‘fish where the fish are’ is an increasingly important thing to remember… by and large people do, but it’s good to reiterate: It’s really hard to make people join a new network, or sign up to a new service, just for your company.  Instead, put your company into the network they already use.

POST method: People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology (designed by Forrester, at the heart of their ‘Groundswell’ book)

People: Who are the target groups and what is their online participation behaviour?

Objectives: Determine the goals of the community

Strategy: Determine how the chosen goals will change the relationship with the target groups

Technology: Choose suitable technologies, media and functionalities that match the target groups, goals and strategies

I’d not seen this in full before, I quite like it… a clear, simple system.  The guys were going to present three case studies, each at a different stage of this process… but time ran out, so they only got through one, and it was for a company I didn’t recognise so it was hard to get a handle on…

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Panel: “How to implement a successful enterprise 2.0 strategy”

Iwona Petruczynik (Frost & Sullivan), JP Rangaswani (BT Design), Olivier Creiche (Six Apart), Zeinab Lenton (Sage UK)

(Disclosure: we put together the Krypton Factor & TrainYourBusinessBrain project for Sage)

OC: “McKinsey ran a survey of the main tools used in business, and they were the ones that people use at home anyway”

ZL “it’s about sharing, and it’s about collaborating… sharing what you did at the weekend, or collaborating on a project”

It’s interesting to think about both ‘sharing’ and ‘collaboration’ as Zeinab distinguishes here… because companies, whilst they may want people to focus on ‘collaboration’, must realise that people, no matter what communications tools they do and don’t have access to, will always do ‘sharing’… what you watched on TV last night, did at the weekend, what band you saw. 

But ‘sharing’ brings us closer together as people, we trust each other more, and our resultant collaboration is much more fruitful.

JPR: “Adoption of technology is about adoption… just get started and do it”

We’re all going to have to be self starters at this… carve out some of the time that the company has given you to do a job, and define how you think social media can best help you succeed.  And show people the results, don’t ask if you’re ‘allowed’…

ZL: “We’ve found the best way is just to get started: behaviours of posting content regularly is a something that’s actually learnt over time”

OC: “Brands underestimate the power of social media – KFC launched a promotion that was too good a deal, because people picked up and shared the deal so much that the affiliate restaurants started complaining, so KFC had to cancel the deal”

Again, another company not set up to deal with the way social media is making the world work now…