Social business adoption best practices #e20s #socbiz

Back after a nice French lunch, Claire Flanagan and Rachel Happe talk about adoption/change and community management.

Claire simply had too much slides and information to give you a good summary. Which is great (to be clear)! I'll share a couple of notes from the talk below.

A nice overview of research Jive did on the value companies are getting was shared by Claire (and is inserted in this blogpost).

Business value of internal social was only realized when organizations did the following:

• senior leaders role-modelling
• integrate social into day-to-day activities
• removal of other tools

So, how to change your organization and get them ready for internal social? Claire shares the following steps:

• process (define what the new way of working looks like, definitely for executives - use cases, which is not persona-focused, focus on processes)
• incentives (reward open leadership, bonus tied to 'open' objectives)
• comms/marketing (executive 'launch' message, success stories)
• training/support (executive training, reverse mentoring)
• role models (recruit execs as 'advocates', use 'external' benchmarks)

Next up, Rachel Happe about driving engagement in (online) communities. Community management is the new management, according to Rachel.

Rachel starts by relating to the different communities out there: drama central, ghost town, a clique, etc.

Recommendations for engagement:

1. define the engagement you need
2. build effective engagement recipes
3. community management (I think...)

So, what is engagement? Valuable engagement advances something, like ideas, relationships, solutions, trust & reputation, and expertise or skill.

Engagement can look very different depending on the goal you have. It also depends are where you are in the relationship with the people you engage with. When you first run into someone, you engage differently than when it's your family.

I liked how Rachel recommended us to use different audiences and platforms to build community and engage with them. Different phases in work ask for different audiences and tools/platforms.

Models for the Social Business Transformation #e20s

The 2nd day at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit starts with a panel discussion about 'Models for the Social Business Transformation' (track 1). Panelists are Luis Suarez (IBM), Jerome Colombe (Alcatel-Lucent) and Nicolas Rolland (Danone).

Jerome starts with a presentation about his experiences at Alcatel-Lucent. This company is in a huge transformation. The transformation was done in less than 2 years, and started just after Ben Verwaayen started at Alcatel. Engage has become part of their DNA.
They set up a platform called Engage. Now with 60.000 profiles (80% of the org.) and 4.000 groups. There are two official community managers, but the rest is managed by the employees themselves. People decide for themselves what they do with the platform.
They analyze what's happening in the platform with social network analysis.

Benefits for Alcatel were:

1. It restructured the internal communications
2. Commitment to convince and help colleagues (engagement of whole of larger part of organization)
3. Emergence of crowdsourcing principles

Risks and pitfalls (the dark side) are:

1. Copycat of bad hits (copying the existing the existing silos, official vs UGC for comms)
2. Bypass organizational decisions (challenge all decisions made before, sensitve topics, question re-organizations)
3. Questioning impacts for social networting (overload of info, anonymous comments, outdated threads)

Alcatel learned as they went along.

Nicolas also tells about the social business steps Danone is taking. Collaborate, innovation and acceleration were drivers for the roll out of social networking tools in 2009. Opened it for everybody (100.000 work at Danone, 40.000 have a computer). In the 1st year 10.000 people joined. The system allows you to fill in a profile with skills and create communities.

After the 1st year they wondered how they would reach everybody. The network was not the intranet (and it should be they found). So they worked on connecting to mobile devices (with wifi access everywhere within Danone) and video. They are also trying to move towards integrating learning and gaming in the network.

Danone does not find that English should be the main language in the network. English is not used the most in Danone anyway (more Spanish, Indonesian).

Mastering the Social Work Mindset - HR and Enterprise 2.0 #e20s

This breakout (track 3) at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit is about 'Mastering the social work mindset'. Breakout speakers are Anthony Poncier and Ellen Trude.

Anthony kicks off with a sort presentation about HR and Enterprise 2.0. (Last year there was only one participant from the HR department at this Summit. This year there are many more.) HR should be on the wagon because people are the core of organizations. McKinsey recently stressed that the role of HR in E2.0 is essential. Why? Because of the inter-generational cultures (millenials, etc.), new job descriptions (like the community manager), talent management, impact on visibility and mobility (career development, L&D), etc.
It's important to look at and change the tradition HR processes for E2.0 success.

Ellen doesn't like the word training relating to social media and enterprise 2.0. Training is too much a one-way lecture. At Ellen's company they developed a social learning environment. The courses are designed for the people and not the other way around. In the environment they start with suggestions for tasks not a prescriptive tasks. The trainers are facilitators and the participants train each other. The results surprised Ellen. There was huge amount of feedback between participants. It relates to workplace learning, instead of formal learning. Learning is more integrated into work. There was an immediate translation to their work.
Another interesting thing Ellen tells about is how the HR department goes out and listens to the organizational social networks to find out what is working well and how to improve social learning.
Ellen is convinced the Training department has to change their mindset. The Training department will not be needed in the future. It will have in the networks.

Community and Engagement Management #e20s

Next breakout (track 1) at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit is about 'Community and Engagement Management'. Breakout speakers are Joanna Walczak (Lecko), Jerome Colombe (Alcatel-Lucent) and Jon Mell (IBM).

Joanna kicks off with a presentation about what should be understood by engagement in enterprise 2.0. Engagement is the Leitmotiv of community management. Engagement is linked to the employees' awareness of being part of a systemic organization.
A first step of building a successful community is that to acknowledge that the community already exists. The community should be more than sharing ideas. And it should be related to the corporate strategy.

How do you prove the value of the community for the organization? Prove that these new kinds of interactions are genuinely productive, help transform fruitful interactions into capitalizable assets, make individualism and collaborative behavior compatible through 'gamification', and, give some feedback  about the Return on Engagement.

Also provide moderation guidelines for the community. Resist the urge to control the community, bridge between those that express themselves easily and those that don't and deal with conflict quickly and openly. (Although conflict is not seen too much because employees mostly engage in communities with their full name.)

Jon Mell shares an interesting example of a company that allows communities to be set up (using a tech platform), sets up metrics to measure the engagement in the community and if it doesn't live up to the engagement metics, they'll kill the community.

Jerome shares the Alcatal approach. He mentions that they have about 500 (official) community managers in place. They are an important part of the corporate strategy and change the strategy of the company regularly. 60k employees are in the social platform.

The discussion was mainly about if structure and/or management is needed for community (tools).

I asked a question, based on the above: Would you say a vibrant community is one that a company can try to kill but lives on anyway?
Another question was about the business case for a community.

Behavior is...

... motivation filtered through opportunity.

Recently I read this quote in an interesting interview/discussion betwee Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink. I've been thinking about this quote ever since. Is this true? Why am I thinking about this quote so much? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this quote. Its context can be found in the article, of course.

Another nice quote from the article that was an eye opener to me is:

I think our nature is to be active and engaged. I’ve never seen a 2-year-old or a 4-year-old who’s not active and engaged.

As a father of kids and as an old kid, I know this is true...