Enterprise Social Media - getting it to work

Thinking back over HRTech last week, the highlights of were the conversations: especially with Charles, Euan, David, Kate, Nicole and Ray.

@Euan ran an excellent session on social media - in a refreshingly conversational format - and it struck me how much people are still struggling with both the concept and the practicalities. Some of the issues (for example industry regulation) are pretty intractable - but I'd like to tackle a couple of the tractable ones. I guess I'm in a good position to do this, having been fortunate enough to be in large organisations that have given me the freedom to experiment and to make mistakes - and because we now have a successful social media solution operating at scale, that we designed and built from scratch. At the time of writing we have about 1,500 videos and around 30,000 unique users.

So without further ado here are three things that may help:

1) 'For Business Purposes Only' kills it: if you have a spare moment, listen to the conversations that take place in your office. When Kate Fox, the anthropologist did this she found that about 60% of conversations are 'gossip'. Gossip may sound like a waste of time, but it is how people build relationships and trust - which are vital if work is to be done. When we asked the chaps who founded the highly successful Army Rumours Service about the secret to success, they pointed out that people were free to say whatever they wanted - and that meant that about 70% was just whingeing and gossip. Look at any successful social media environment - it is largely gossip.

I imagine you are already worrying about people using the company network to gossip - even though they are already doing it verbally - you just don't want it to be visible to everyone. Welcome to the 21st century. There is no success in this space without some risk. Taking that risk will mean trusting people to self-moderate, and supporting them in developing those skills. It also means 'setting the tone'. I sometimes jokingly refer to this as the 'post cat pictures' strategy. By actively encouraging less formal posts, you send the message that the water is fine. On the whole, though, people are pretty cautious about what they say.

2) People are there to take, not give: this is a bootstrapping problem. Probably you have never posted a video to YouTube. Quite possibly you have never commented. Almost certainly you have watched a lot of YouTube videos. The first time you visited YouTube it wasn't a blank page with the instruction 'post your video here'.

And yet we do this with our Social Media environments and expect them to work. Think of it like a party: ideally when people turn up it should already be in full swing. This means priming the pump - for example by actively generating or curating content, or by persuading an existing network to start conversations that are interesting to a wider community. Think about your 'content strategy'. Before we launched theHub we already had 500+ videos. Think of content primarily in terms of its emotional dimensions: is it content that will excite people, that they will be proud of or compelled to comment on?

I find that people thinking about SoMe in their organisation are transfixed by the fear that someone will post something inappropriate. This is not a major problem in my experience. The problem is that hardly anyone will participate, and you will have to build an ROI story based on the products of a small team of evangelists. It's obvious really: your colleagues aren't stupid - anything they post is most likely identifiable, visible and permanent. Posting anything is a high-risk, low-return situation.

3) Usability trumps functionality: 'user experience' is the result of design - something which is much more that the 'look and feel' of a product, something which describes the way in which the designed object integrates with the user. If the design is good - if it is 'frictionless' - then it will fit easily with the user, will feel intuitive and enjoyable to use (contrast an iPad with early personal computers).

I often see social media platforms designed primarily around functionality - and for this reason alone they fail. They may not be compatible with users' mobile devices, they may look ugly, they may be complicated to use or simply fail to accommodate the uses to which users wish to put them. A simple example would be SoMe platforms which do not allow users to share their blogs externally; accept that people will make their own decisions about the people they wish to share content with. If your platform prohibits extended sharing, people will choose more flexible solutions.

It takes time to get a platform to work. Doing these three things is no guarantee of success, but failing to consider them will generally result in failure.