Intranets

Friday, August 28, 2009

Revitalizing StopBlocking.org

With only so many hours in a day, I have to choose where to commit my energy. As a result, some projects take a back seat. But after pondering two sets of data, I’m recommitting myself to my Stop Blocking initiative.

But it won’t do any good if I do this by myself. I need help to keep the wiki updated.

Bear with me, and I’ll explain all.

First, the data

By themselves, both of these sets of data are intriguing. Juxtaposed, however, they’re startling. One one side, you have organizations warming up to social media, particularly as a channel for marketing. On the flip side, you have a surge in companies that are blocking their own employees’ access to social media.

Add to the mix the fact that internal social media—also known by names like enterprise web 2.0—is gathering steam, and you’re faced with a genuine conundrum.

Let’s review these stats, starting with business embracing social media. According to Equation Research’s “2009 Marketing Industry Trends Report,” reported by eMarketer, 59% of brand marketers use social media, and the ranks will swell to 82% in the next year. A mere 13% claim they have no plans at all to jump into social media marketing.

This data reinforces the results of other research, like a study from the Association of National Advertisers that shows 66% of marketers have used social media in one form or another this year.

Returning to the Equation Research study, the results indicate that only 7% of companies don’t see social media as a good use of employee time.

Clearly, the companies surveyed by Equation weren’t the same ones analyzed by ScanSafe, which earned a boatload of free publicity when it released a study reporting a 20% increase in the number of companies blocking access to social media in the last six months.

So, companies want to market through social media but they don’t want their employees using it? First, that means employees will have to go home to participate in their own companies’ efforts. And second, if everybody follows suit, the total pool of consumers engaged in those marketing efforts will plummet.

But it gets more interesting when you look at the results of the Nielsen Norman Group‘s recent study, “Enterprise 2.0: Social Software on Intranets: A Report From the Front Lines of Enterprise Social Software Projects.” This in-depth research revealed that social software adopted by companies that produce significant results are nearly always introduced as under-the-radar grass-roots initiatives by front-line employees. That is, once social software efforts prove their worth, the powers that be push their implementation.

Let’s be clear: Employees who are not permitted to innovate with social media will not be able to introduce beneficial tools to the enterprise, ultimately costing these companies in untold ways, from innovation and collaboration to increased market share and profitability.

Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman group nails it:

Social software is a trend that cannot be ignored. It is bringing about fundamental change to the way people expect to communicate with one another. Companies cannot use social tools with their customers and not also allow their employees to utilize them.

Yet, according to the data, that is exactly what’s happening.

So let’s summarize:

• Companies want to market using social media.
• Companies rely on employee grassroots efforts to identify social media that will pay off internally.
• Companies are blocking employee access to social media.

Is it just me or does the math just not add up here?

And now, the call to action

I started Stop Blocking a few years back out of frustration over the knee-jerk reasons company denied employees access to social media. The blog was meant to provide updates on research and news items related to the topic. The wiki was designed to provide an archive of resources people can use to make a case against blocking in their organizations.

There has been plenty of evidence to add to the wiki which I have neglected. For example, there’s the University of Melbourne study proving a 9% productivity increase among workers allowed to use social media at work. Or there’s the BizInfo/Blackline study that revealed 65.3% of business professionals claiming that web 2.0 services help them to achieve business objectives and 78.1% who believe social media increases collaboration among employees.

I’ve written extensively about this elsewhere on this blog and over at StopBlocking.org. I’ve catalogued and attempted to debunk the reasons companies implement blocks. None of them hold water in light of the evidence of the real business benefits that accrue to organizations that prudently allow their employees access to the Net. I could go review all of these, but this post is already running long enough.

I will add the latest studies to the wiki. I will cross-posting this item to the blog. And I am committed to getting back to maintaining the blog. But I need your help.

What can you do?

• Send me resources—When you find a study or survey that either related to employee use of social media, blocking access, corporate policies or anything else that helps build the body of knowledge, please send it my way.
• Link to StopBlocking.org—The only way this initiative will build into a movement is if it’s visible.
• Put the badge on your blog—There are several versions available.
• Share success stories—Blog about the benefits of access to an open web in the workplace, and let me know so I can link to your posts.
• Make the case—Use the information at StopBlocking.org to make a solid business case for open access in your organization.

Saturday, November 01, 2008

Take an intranet 2.0 survey

Toby Ward, president of Prescient Digital, is looking for more people to take a survey on the use of Web 2.0 tools on their intranets. He’s seeking participation even from those who don’t have any Web 2.0 functionality built into their intranets; the survey asks about the obstacles you’re encountering. By participating, you’ll automatically get a copy of the survey results. Toby will also award a $400 prize to a randomly-selected participant. The survey asks about tools used, vendors, budgets, levels of employee and executive participation and overall satisfaction. You’ll find the survey here.

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

FIR Interview: Niall Cook on “Enterprise 2.0”

More and more companies are implementing social software for employee use, and many more that aren’t find that employees are taking advantage of services that exist outside the firewall in order to do their work more collaboratively. One of the first books to appear on this subject is “Enterprise 2.0: How Social Software Will Change the Future of Work,” by Niall Cook of Hill & Knowlton, the global PR agency. In this interview, Niall provides an overview of the book and explores some of the issues arising from integrating social media into an organization.

Listen to this podcast now:

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About our Conversation Partners

Niall Cook is the Worldwide Director of Marketing Technology at communications consultancy Hill & Knowlton. He frequently advises the agency’s Fortune 500 clients on the effective use of technology to support internal and external marketing strategy. Prior to joining Hill & Knowlton, he held positions at the online currency beenz.com, Answerthink Consulting Group, UBS and Reed Elsevier. He hold an honours degree in Typography & Graphic Communication and lives in Suffolk, United Kingdom.

Niall has arranged a 20% discount code on the book for FIR listeners. Visit the Enterprise 2.0 and use the code G8AQL20.

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This FIR Interview is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years. Information: www.ragan.com.

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Saturday, August 30, 2008

Web 2.0 in the workplace

I’ve been noodling around with a PowerPoint-slash-video approach to explaining the value of Enterprise Web 2.0 (or whatever you want to call social media behind the firewall) ever since I read an article that rejected its usefulness. The presentation has been evolving over the last couple months, and I finally decided to just finish it rather than continue trying to tweak and refine it. It is long—nearly 25 minutes, too long for YouTube—so be warned. I’m hopeful it will prove useful for someone somewhere.

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Non-threatening ways to get your company started with social media

As organizations seek to expand their communication efforts to include social media, they often find themselves facing the same hurdles that were faced and ultimately overcome by earlier adopters. Efforts to introduce social media have been hamstrung by questions of time commitment, IT issues, and legal concerns.

Usually, blogs are the tactic that face these obstacles (although I have also heard of other challenges, such as a legal objection to the construction of a special-purpose Facebook page). The assumption that blogs must be the company’s point of entry into social media is most likely based on the fact that blogs were the first social media tool. By the time other tools, like Twitter, came along, tens of millions of blogs already populated the Web and companies from Sun Microsystems to McDonald’s were already showing results from their blogging efforts.

While there are plenty of good reasons for a company to blog, there’s no rule that says blogs must kick off a company’s foray into social media. In fact, if you start with something that isn’t threatening to the lawyers or likely to raise much concern among IT staff, the successful implementation of smaller, less flashy tools can pave the way for more involved engagement.

If your company hasn’t touched social media yet, consider starting with these approaches:

• For your external communications, add a “share this” link to every article or page
• For internal communication, add a rating-and-comment feature to every page

Share this

People increasingly use aggregation tools to find interestithe websites of media outlets like The New York Times or CNN. (Max Kalehoff says he visits the Times site only to read particular blogs.) Democratized content sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and NewsVine —where the users determine what’s important rather than a gatekeeper—are also growing in popularity. Even in the world of search, it’s not unusual to hear someone suggest that they get more targeted results by searching Delicious or Furl than Google.

It’s altogether possible that a reader will submit a news item or press release from your website to one of these services. It’s far more likely, though, if you make it easy by giving them the utility to submit with just two clicks (one to open the “share this” box, the other to submit). Consider the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). A search of Digg produces several pages of results, most of which are less than flattering with headlines like “FDA’s handling of proposed cancer drug defies compassion” and “Shame on the FDA.” There is, however, a link to an FDA press release about the formation of a nanotechnology task force. The press release itself features no links at all. A “share this” link would certainly lead far more people to do so—people to whom it might never occur to share at all without the nudge.

In fact, if all of the FDA’s press releases contained “Share This” links, it’s likely that more positive material would find its way to Digg, Delicious, and other sites where they would be visible to people who would otherwise never see it, providing some balance to content submitted by the agency’s critics.

It’s important for organizations to get their messages out to where people are spending their time and consuming their information (which is not your dot-com website).

Rate-and-comment

Most intranets are hard to navigate and contain content of questionable value. The simple act of letting employees comment on and rate a page can make good content easier to find and increase the usefulness of a lot of that material.

A simple YouTube-like five-star rating system serves a number of purposes. It gets employees accustomed to interacting. It provides an at-a-glance indication of how valuable other employees have found a page (assuming it has amassed enough votes). And a “highest-rated pages” listing can help direct employees to useful content (as opposed to most-viewed).

Enabling comments on pages lets employees enhance the content with their own experiences and observations. Consider the page containing the travel policy. An employee might add a comment noting that his expense report was kicked back multiple times because currency conversions were wrong, then directing employees to the right resource for calcuating conversions.

In both the external and internal cases, the value of social media should become evident in relatively short order and serve as a basis for introducing those blogs, Facebook pages, and other tools that help organizations engage in dialogues with their publics.

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

ThoughtFarmer: A lesson in excellent blogger outreach

Just today, I’ve received half a dozen pitches by email. Some are nothing more than press releases without even a passing effort at personalizing the pitch. Others make nothing more than a passing effort. So it’s a welcome relief—not to mention an entertaining and engaging experience—to get a pitch that is personal, creative, and attention-grabbing.

The pitch began with a cryptic email from Darren Barefoot, who asked for my mailing address because he had something to send me. (It helps, when making this kind of request, to already know the person to whom you’re reaching out, which speaks to the importance of having relationships vs. blasting out material to bloggers who have never heard of you.)

A week or so later, a package arrived at my house. It contained what you see in the image below:

• A letter welcoming me as a new employee of a ficititous company called Tubetastic Inc. (slogan: “We make tubes. A whole series of them.” This pitch was going to people who would appreciate the dig at U.S. Sen. Ted Stephens and his famous speech supporting an end to net neutrality in which he described the Internet as “a series of tubes.”)
• An org chart showing exactly where I’m situated in the new company (I’m the Tubular Comptroller, part of the Operations department, reporting up through ZDNet’s Dan Farber, Tubetastic’s Director of Tube Distribution.) The org chart also shows me who else has received the pitch.
• A name badge complete with my photo, copied off my website.

There’s no hint in the welcome letter of the pitch behind the package. Instead, Darren (who signs the letter as an HR rep) informs me I’ll be featured in an upcoming edition of the company newsletter, then invites me to learn more about the company by logging into the company’s intranet. The letter includes a username and password. Who wouldn’t log on?

What I found was Tubetastic’s intranet fully loaded with Enterprise Web 2.0 features: Twitter feeds, blog posts, a presence status (like Facebook’s), a newsfeed that updates me on what other employees have been doing (also like Facebook’s), and my profile. This is where the draft of my “interview”—set to appear in the company newsletter—is waiting for my comments as well as an answer to an additional question. The profile also includes links to the latest articles from my real blog along with the ability to edit my profile, which already contains all the information a typical employee directory would offer (title, reporting relationship, mailing address, phone number, email address, etc.).

The top of the home page features a link that will explain everything. This is the pitch: The intranet was created using a tool called ThoughtFarmer. I followed a link to a ThoughtFarmer page that includes YouTube videos, screenshots, and other resources that go into more detail on this “ultimate intranet.” The elevator pitch tops the page:

ThoughtFarmer is the ultimate intranet. Forget the impossibly complex, seldom-used corporate intranets of days gone by. ThoughtFarmer is a simple, social way for employees to collaborate, share ideas and find information.

What’s special about ThoughtFarmer? It combines the best of wikis and social networking. It’s an intranet for intranet-haters. Plus, it sits behind the firewall, just where your IT manager wants it.

At this point, I was spending a fair amount of time noodling around both the faux Tubetastic intranet and the ThoughtFarmer site. I must confess, I was pretty impressed with ThoughtFarmer, which includes a slew of features ranging from single-signon and polls to inline tagging and image galleries.

What I didn’t see is any reference to the kinds of resources that reside on the old intranets that are still important: benefits enrollment, work-related online applications, database access, requisition forms, new-hire recruitment tracking, payroll stubs and the like. Most employees use intranets to complete tasks, so these are important. My guess is that you would continue to host these resources right where they are and link to them from tabs you’d create, such as “Human Resources” and “Work Tools.”  Maybe someone from ThoughtFarmer will confirm that in a comment here.

But the point is that I spent time with this product site—and wrote about it—because the pitch was compelling. If I had received yet another press release introducing ThoughtFarmer, it would have gone where all the other press releases I receive go—into my email trash. So, what did Darren and the ThoughtFarmer marketing team do to stand out?

• They made the pitch personal. They made it clear they knew who I was and that I wrote about intranets with some regularity.
• They piqued my interest by asking for my mailing address without giving me a hint about what I’d receive. I only accepted this offer because I knew Darren.
• They sent the pitch to me in the regular mail in a package that cried out to be opened.
• They spent time and effort to create something different. While mock intranets have been around for more than a decade, this is the first one I’ve seen that listed me as an employee.
• They made the pitch interactive. I really can modify my profile and get engaged with the intranet at a number of levels.
• They actually had a compelling product to show off.
• The personalized profile, the name badge, and the other personalized elements are cool, but none of it feels even remotely close to a bribe.

Now that’s blogger relations.

 

Monday, March 31, 2008

Social media, intranets, and tools

I’m getting a little tired of the chorus of voices that suggest companies take a step back from integrating social media into their intranets because, after all, social media are just tools. We need, the authors of these opinions insist, to focus on strategy in our internal communications.

I am a huge proponent of strategic communication. The approach taken to any communication challenge should be designed to meet measurable objectives. Those objectives need to support a broad strategy. And you should devise the strategy to reach a business goal. I always chuckle when I hear that a social media consultant on his first visit to a client, without any research to support the assertion, blurts out, “Your CEO should be blogging!”

But the wholesale rejection of social media from the enterprise because, well, they’re just tools misses a bunch of points. Most employees use social media for knowledge and information exchange with one another. The fear that democratizing publishing will somehow produce an army of citizen journalists all reporting reactive news just hasn’t materialized in the companies that have adopted social media. Meanwhile, most communicators that have integrated social media into their formal communications have, believe it or not, embraced a strategic approach. The tools of social media just work better than older tools for some communications.

There’s more: IT professionals surveyed by Forrester Research have found that social media do add add value through such measures as improved productivity. Employees will use it whether it’s formally introduced or not because it’s better for collaboration than existing resources.

But what bugs me most is the idea that a tool has no power. Taken individually, each social media tool probably should be viewed as “just a tool.” Collectively, though—and in the context of the conditions that led to their adoption—social media are turning communication models on their heads. Companies ignore the fundamental changes to communication at their peril. Conversation has become more important than message delivery, for example. In an interview John C. Havens conducted with Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz for our book, “Tactical Transparency,” Schwartz said that building a community of customers turns the company’s products into community assets. “Somebody who feels part of a community is going to be a much more aggressive evangelist for our products than someone who just paid $29.95 for it at a big-box retailer,” he explained.

And, of course, Sun is using social media with evangelical fervor, along with more conventional community-building tools.

Internally, social media engages employees in conversation more easily than older tools, which is likely to make them much more aggressive evangelists for the company and its plans than someone who gets a company magazine, regardless of how proactive the reporting is.

Besides, and correct me if I’m wrong, isn’t the printing press “just a tool?” Yet if you could ask anyone from Martin Luther to Thomas Paine about the power of print, they would most likely suggest the printing press, while just a tool, also changed history.

Social media are having just that kind of impact. They are tools, but they are also much, much more. I hate to throw out a cliche, but restricting our view of social media at work to the realm of “just tools” is a classic case of missing the forrest for the trees.