Thomas Sanchez, a 28-year-old software engineer at Cerner Corporation, brings his social networking habits with him to work. He has member profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and The A List, a local Kansas City social networking site, as well as uCern, the company’s corporate social network. Sanchez says, “I’m there partly to network with friends and colleagues, but it’s become the most efficient way to get work done. I no longer need to get buried in e-mails or voice mails in order to receive an answer to a question. Now, through using a combination of Twitter, Facebook and uCern, I can easily see who the experts on any number of topics are, just by viewing their profiles and reading their discussion threads. So in a matter of minutes I can identify an expert and quickly resolve an issue on the spot, often without having to send an e-mail or voice mail.”

THE CASE FOR BECOMING ÜBER-CONNECTED

This is the new world of work. The Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates that as of 2008, one third of all U.S. adult Internet users had a profile on a social network site, four times as many as in 2006.¹ While media coverage and policy attention usually focus on the growing usage of social network sites used by teenagers, adults make up the bulk of users, and their usage is increasing rapidly. In the one-year period ending in 2007, the percentage of Boomers consuming social media grew from 46 percent for young Boomers (ages 43 to 52) and 39 percent for older Boomers (ages 53 to 62) to 67 percent and 62 percent, respectively.² What’s more, Boomers are contributors of content rather than passive lurkers online. The proportion of Boomers adding new content on social networking sites doubled from 15 percent in 2007 to 34 percent in 2008.³

The statistics for Facebook tell the story of how social networking has penetrated beyond Millennials. The user base of Facebook is now larger than the population of the United States: more than 350 million. These users have uploaded more than 15 billion photos, making Facebook the world’s largest photo-sharing service.

The fastest-growing demographic on Facebook is 35-to 49-year-olds, who make up 24 million users.⁴ From December 2007 through December 2008, Facebook added twice as many 50-to 64-year-olds (13.6 million) as users under 18 years old (7.3 million).⁵ With more than 350 million users on Facebook, 50 million users on LinkedIn, and 44.5 million users on Twitter as of August 2009, social networks have become ubiquitous as most of us rely on them to live, work, and communicate with one another.

In the report “Global Faces and Networked Places,” Nielsen Online reported social networks and blogs to be more popular than e-mail as a form of communication.⁶ Two-thirds of the entire global Internet population is a member of an online social network, and this makes social networking the world’s fourth most popular online activity after searching, accessing portals, and using personal computer applications. What’s more, the time spent on social networks is growing at three times the overall Internet rate and accounts for roughly 10 percent of all time spent on the Internet.⁷

Companies are starting to take note of this transformation in how we live, work, and communicate with one another, by providing similar tools inside the enterprise. Our prediction for the 2020 workplace: usage of the social Web will become the premier way to attract, engage, and retain the best talent. Just examine the statistics in the sidebar “Did You Know?” to see how usage of the social Web is altering the way we all communicate with each other.

INNOVATIVE COMPANIES USE SOCIAL MEDIA TO BUILD CONSUMER BRANDS

Chances are you are already a member of a social network or using one of the tools of the social media. You may have seen a viral video on YouTube, contributed a comment on a blog, found a new musician on MySpace, or been requested to friend a former boyfriend or girlfriend on Facebook.

Companies are finding that social networking is fast becoming the way people communicate, collaborate, and find new business. This is creating an interest in launching social networks behind company firewalls to bring this spirit of innovation inside the company so employees can collaborate with one another and customers to cocreate new products and services. Before we cover how companies are using social networking internally, we’ll first examine how companies are adopting an external social media strategy to deliver improved business results.

Threadless: An Online Social Network for T-Shirt Enthusiasts

Have you ever had the perfect idea for something to put on a T-shirt? Then you should know about Threadless, an online social network where members collaborate with one another to create and rate new designs for T-shirts. Eric von Hippel, a professor and the head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management, as well as the author of Democratizing Innovation, has called Threadless a perfect example of a new way of thinking about innovation. Threadless members solicit advice on their designs from one another, post links to blogs, MySpace, and Facebook, and ask friends to vote on their design. Once a design is submitted, the community votes, and the most popular designs are manufactured and then sold on the Threadless Web site. Winning submission designers receive both a cash prize and store credit.⁹ Founded in 2000 by Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart, the company now has sales of more than $30 million and a user base that has expanded more than tenfold in five years, from 70,000 to more than 800,000 members.¹⁰

Many entrepreneurs know intuitively that users of products are often the best equipped to innovate, and a growing body of research supports this. A study published in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal suggests that a large number of companies are founded by user-entrepreneurs, people who go into business to improve a product they use every day. Though many thought the wisdom of crowds could create only software businesses like Wikipedia and YouTube, Threadless has proven otherwise. Jeff Lieberman, a board member of Threadless and managing director of Insight Venture Partners, comments, “To say Threadless is just a T-shirt company is absurd. I look at Threadless as a community company that happens to use T-shirts as its canvas.”¹¹ The success of Threadless points to a future where communities of enthusiastic users collectively create new products and services.

John Fluevog Boots & Shoes: Open-Source Footwear

At the heart of a successful consumer-facing social network is the belief that creativity comes from simplicity. With only sixty full-time employees, John Fluevog Boots & Shoes encourages its consumers to design new shoes through its Open Source Footwear Social Network. It allows anyone to participate by submitting a design for his or her ideal shoe. No fancy form or complicated submissions process is required.

Once a consumer submits a design for new shoes, it is posted online for a community vote. The most popular sketches are made into official Fluevog shoes and sold online and in retail stores across the country. Though the designer does not receive compensation, he or she does get a free pair of shoes along with public recognition. Celebrities such as Madonna and Scarlett Johansson now wear some of the shoes designed by John Fluevog consumers.

With this idea, Fluevog allows consumers who are already passionate about the company to contribute their ideas for new shoes. As Bill Taylor, the author of Mavericks at Work and cofounder of Fast Company, writes, “Few of us are in a position to hire lots of new talent or devote big budgets to product development. But all of us have customers who are passionate about what we do, filled with great ideas, and are eager to be more connected. So why not invite them to share their creativity with your company—and turn the best ideas into actual products!”¹² Fluevog’s open-source footwear program proves that innovation can come from anyone—inside or outside the company. The new job of a company’s leadership is to unleash this innovation. Winning shoe designs have come from such unlikely sources as a screenwriter in Moscow and a children’s book illustrator in Utah.¹³

In the case of Carrie Kozlowski of Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, the designer of the Hi Choice Vanny shoe, the experience of submitting a new shoe design actually led to a new career. Kozlowski says, “I’ve always been as crazy about Fluevog’s off-the-wall participative marketing as I am about [their] fabulous footwear…. About a year ago, I decided that it was time to get out of the über-boring insurance industry where I had been working (in marketing) for too long. I spiffed up my resume by adding ‘shoe designer’ for Fluevog, and ended up getting a job in an architectural practice!”¹⁴

Starbucks: My Starbucks Idea

It’s not just small innovators who are leveraging the power of social networks to create new products. Starbucks, with 172,000 employees in forty-nine countries, has a social network called My Starbucks Idea, found at http://mystarbucksidea.force.com, which allows consumers to share ideas and suggestions for how to make the Starbucks experience better.¹⁵

When a Starbucks consumer suggests an idea for a product or service, others vote on the idea, rank it, and share comments on it. Starbucks managers respond to the ideas and report back on what actions the company will take to implement the most promising ideas. The Ideas in Action blog, found at http://blogs.starbucks.com, is a companion to the My Starbucks Idea social networking site. It provides feedback on which ideas are selected for implementation and why.¹⁶

The results of My Starbucks Idea and the companion blog are indeed impressive. In one year, My Starbucks Idea received 70,000 ideas. Samples include:

• Starbucks Gold Card. A rewards card for frequent customers with which, for an annual $25 fee, customers receive 10 percent off most Starbucks products.
• Birthday Brew. Starbucks Gold Club members get a free drink on their birthday.¹⁷

Starbucks also engages consumers on its Twitter page with news and announcements. As of January 2010, Starbucks’ Twitter page had 728,517 followers.¹⁸ Looking at the page of a competitor, Dunkin’ Donuts, you see a difference in style, which may account for why Dunkin’ Donuts has only 42,192 followers.¹⁹ Finally, Starbucks has a presence on YouTube, as well as on Facebook, where the company shares its latest commercials and information about coffee blends, as well as examples of corporate social responsibility projects around the world. The Starbucks experience shows how the company uses social networks and a range of social media to drive innovation by involving consumers to propose new product ideas.

ÜBER-CONNECT YOUR ORGANIZATION

Imagine if a company could create a simple way for employees to have conversations with one another, share their knowledge, get involved in cocreating new products and services, and contribute these ideas to the organization. Threadless, Fluevog, and Starbucks are doing this externally with their customers. But it can also be done internally as companies tap into the energy and enthusiasm of their employees to drive greater business growth.

Many companies are now becoming über-connected, meaning they are using a range of Web 2.0 tools associated with the social Web. Working behind the company firewall, companies are able to connect employees, enable mass collaboration, and improve the company’s capability to innovate in the global marketplace. These companies are discovering that using social media is not just about implementing these tools; rather, it is about creating, nurturing, and energizing communities of employees, and in some cases customers and suppliers, to come together and propose new products and services.

Table 5-1 illustrates how companies are embarking on this journey to accelerate how they find and capture knowledge, broadcast and share the knowledge of employees, collaborate with virtual teams of employees, design new products, and finally engage employees more fully in the workplace. Über-connection is transforming how companies manage complex information, unleash innovation, accelerate speed to market, and gain alignment throughout the enterprise.

TABLE 5-1: THE STAGES OF ÜBER-CONNECTION

 

Accelerate

Goal: Find/capture information

Issue: Dispersing content

Tools: Forums, blogs, RSS feeds, widgets

 

Broadcast

Goal: Disseminate news/thought leadership

Issue: Locating experts

Tools: Blogs, blog hubs, video hubs

 

Collaborate

Goal: Collaborate across an enterprise

Issue: Increasing collaboration among the global workforce

Tools: Communities of practice, wikis, virtual worlds

 

Design

Goal: Unleash creativity

Issue: Solving problems and proposing ideas

Tools: Innovation jams

 

Engage Employees

Goal: Connect communities

Issue: Increasing innovation

Tools: Corporate social networks

 

Source: Future Workplace.

 

This is not meant to imply that a company moves through every stage along the way. Rather, a company must understand its unique culture, how comfortable it is opening up the enterprise, and what changes in the internal processes and company policies it needs to make to become über-connected. We recommend that a company start this process by identifying the business priorities that require greater communication, connection, and collaboration. These priorities can include decreasing the cycle time for innovation and new product/service launches, providing a vehicle to disseminate new knowledge, and allowing dispersed employees around the globe to create ideas for new products and services. The result: über-connected organizations accelerate employee engagement, increase employee productivity, and improve communications throughout the company.

Examples of über-connected companies range from large established firms, such as the 120-year-old IBM, with its 398,455 employees,²⁰ and Bell Canada, 129 years old with 54,434 employees,²¹ to smaller firms such as the 30-year-old Cerner Corporation, with 7,800 employees,²² and 10-year-old JetBlue, with 10,795 employees.²³ What will propel more companies to create a comprehensive strategy for becoming über-connected and leveraging the power of social media? The answer: five generations of employees will be in the workplace in 2020, and they will bring with them a set of digital expectations so they can communicate and innovate on the job with the same tools of the social Web they use every day to connect with their friends and family.

THE STAGES OF ÜBER-CONNECTION

Stage 1: Accelerate the Capture of New Knowledge

JetBlue began its journey by using social media in the internal communications department. The company created the Happy Jetting campaign to address some negative consumer perceptions of flying. Before extending the campaign to the pubic, JetBlue leveraged the power of social media to create a YouTube-style Web site, JetBlueTube. com. JetBlue then selected 125 employees to be brand ambassadors for this site.

These ambassadors were given a Flip camera to create videos of themselves and other employees narrating what Happy Jetting meant to them. The result was 369 videos posted to the company intranet and a deeper understanding of the new campaign.

Fast-forward to JetBlue University (JBU), JetBlue’s internal training department, with two hundred trainers responsible for training flight crews, operations, technical crews, reservationists, and customer service representatives. Murray Christensen, JBU’s director of learning technologies, saw an opportunity to use social media at JBU to find and capture knowledge and best practices across the training community. Christensen explains the reasons behind becoming über-connected: “We wanted to create a way to increase communication among our own staff. I still remember the old adage about the Xerox repairmen—the really important information about how to repair Xerox machines happened in the lunchroom or at the watercooler. So I felt it was important to give our faculty a way to easily share names of training vendors, come up with ideas to increase collaboration either in a classroom or on a webcast, and suggest ways to improve our training programs.”

The first tool implemented was a JetBlue University blog in which Christensen and Chief Learning Officer Mike Barger posted simple questions. For example, Christensen asked how the company could create portable learning transcripts, which automatically record all of a participant’s training courses, as well as his or her external degrees, certificates, honors, and awards. After only seven months, half of the JetBlue training faculty had become contributors to the blog.

Christensen foresees expanding the focus of the blog beyond capturing new information and best practices to mass collaboration on how to improve the training department. Christensen says, “Online participation in blogs and other types of social media will be an expectation of working in the twenty-first century. This needs to be clearly communicated and built into everyone’s performance goals. In a perfect world, employees will come to understand the importance of socializing their knowledge.”

Stage 2: Broadcast Thought Leadership

As companies expand around the globe, their employees need to disseminate knowledge and learn best practices from one another. They need to be able to find experts who can help them do their job. Nokia, with 124,292 employees spread across 218 countries, describes itself as having a culture that encourages employees to speak out and say what is on their minds, with the belief that good ideas will result.²⁴

In 2005 Nokia developed an Expert Directory. “Think of it as a ‘Dial an Expert,’” says Matthew Hanwell, the senior manager for Web experiences at Nokia. “Twelve years ago the phone book was a physical book. This evolved online to include your name, physical coordinates, organizations belonged to, what you are currently working on, and your skills and competencies, all pulled from the HR information system.”

Hanwell continues, “The directory reveals individuals’ online status to let you know if they’re available. It’s not Facebook, but it is the most used application on the Nokia intranet.”

Initially, there was resistance to creating the Expert Directory. First, Hanwell was told that company policy precluded posting pictures and revealing the organization’s structure, but he probed and found that this was company lore rather than policy. Then he was asked, “Won’t headhunters find our best people?” But he reasoned, “Well, shouldn’t we be able to find them first?”

After the Expert Directory was launched, Nokia’s R&D community began experimenting with setting up blogs as a support tool for discussing new projects. Over time, Nokia created a Blog Hub. This aggregates all Nokia employee blogs so they are searchable and ranked as to the most active, identifying the leading bloggers and what they are talking about.

Hanwell continues on why the Blog Hub was so important in the evolution of implementing social media. “Since blogging came in under the radar,” he said, “it was hard to find where people’s blogs were. You had to know where to find them. But by going to the Blog Hub, you could see what’s going on the blogosphere inside Nokia. This has driven participation and given information on who is the most read.”

With some successes under its belt, Nokia then created Video Hub, an internal video-sharing site modeled after YouTube, where any employee can record and publish a video to the site. Finally, Hanwell reveals, “We also learned that as we use these social networking tools, we have to train people. This is especially the case with making and posting videos. Everyone loves them, they show our culture and values in action, so we want to be sure all our employees know how to make a five-minute video using a Flip camera.” As Mary T. McDowell, the executive vice president of corporate strategy, says, “Nokia’s role is to keep the skids greased.”²⁵

Stage 3: Collaborate Across the Enterprise

One of the most extensive corporationwide applications of mass collaboration is IBM’s internal social network, Social Blue (formerly called IBM Beehive in its research prototype). As David Millen, the manager of social software research, points out, the organization’s business focus, size, and global footprint facilitated its early adoption: “IBM employees are used to working collaboratively, and being a technology company, we have a proclivity to use these tools, as well as a technical comfort level. Moreover, as one of the most global companies in the world—we operate in 170 countries and two-thirds of our workers are outside of the U.S.—we realize the importance of learning from each other.”

Social Blue, launched in 2007, sits behind the corporate firewall and is designed to be a place where IBMers share and discuss both professional and personal topics. Social Blue members friend their colleagues on the site and share photos, lists, and events. One of the drivers to create Social Blue was the vision of promoting communication and collaboration among IBMers with different skill sets and expertise. There are nearly 60,000 IBM employees who are members of Social Blue, out of an employee population of roughly 400,000, thus about 15 percent of the company. There are approximately 10,000 to 15,000 unique visitors each month, and 50 percent of visitors add new content. Members let one another know what projects they are working on, as well as rate and comment on their colleagues’ content.

Social Blue’s success is driven in large part by two innovations; one is called “Hive Fives,” and the other is known as “honey.” Both were created to increase the quality of content as well as the level of collaboration among members. Hive Fives are a way for members to post five things—either personal or professional—that are important to them. Samples include lists of “Five Reasons My Project Is on Target,” “Five Projects I Am Working on Now,” and “Five Marathons I Have Run.”

David Millen describes the power of Hive Fives: “At IBM we work with team members that are often physically halfway around the world, yet we must develop a shared vision and work together. Hive Fives allows us the opportunity to disclose important aspects of our lives, have some fun, and share projects we are working on to create better end solutions.”

What drives usage and motivates IBMers to contribute to Social Blue when they are most likely on several social networks outside of IBM? Millen addresses this by saying “If your manager is on Social Blue, you need to be there as well, so we drive usage by blending bottom-up and top-down participation. More important, Social Blue has created a content promotion system to recognize and reward IBM employees for sharing knowledge.”

The content promotion system is called “honey,” and figure 5-1 shows how this works for IBM employees.

Figure 5-1: IBM Beehive Content Promotion Process

Source: IBM’s Honey Content Promotion.

Each week, a group of fifty IBMers selects content from Social Blue that they deem to be unique and interesting. They anoint this content as having honey, and it is subsequently displayed on the Social Blue home page, in the e-mail digest, and on dedicated Web pages listing the current content with honey.²⁶

Content that displays the honey icon can easily be filtered and read by IBMers, and this is used to make new connections across the organization and promote greater communication and collaboration. IBM is finding that as employees form more personal networks throughout the company, they perform at higher levels and learn the value of becoming searchable.²⁷

Stage 4: Design Ways to Increase Innovation

Bell Canada wanted to create a way for employees to propose new ideas to the appropriate managers and improve the speed of decision making. Inspired by American Idol, the hit TV show in which the audience votes for winners, Rex Lee, a former director of collaboration services, decided to build an online tool giving employees the chance to vote on new ideas. The new tool, called ID-ah!, allows anyone in the company to submit ideas he or she thinks are valuable. Employees then view, comment, and vote on them.²⁸ ID-ah! is similar to the Starbucks Idea Exchange described earlier.

ID-ah! has been so successful that more than fifty new productive ideas have come from nonmanagement employees. In one year, 550 ideas were submitted. “This would never have happened in the past,” says Angie Harrop, Bell Canada’s director of leadership and collaboration.

Managed by a cross-functional partnership between human resources and the IT department, ID-ah! was developed concurrently with another tool, called ID-ah! JAM. Sometimes called an innovation jam in other organizations, this is a tool designed to answer specific business questions. The question is typically posted online over a two-to four-day period and is much like a virtual focus group. JAMs offer a safe and secure way to involve employees in proposing suggestions for business problems. Since ID-ah! JAMs were first introduced at Bell Canada, there have been thirty JAMs reaching six thousand employees, who have proposed nine hundred ideas and added two thousand comments.

Figure 5-2: Bell Canada's Web 2.0 Tools: ID-ah! JAM.

Source: Bell Canada, ID-ah! JAM.

ID-ah! JAMs target business issues ranging from how to increase sales of a particular product to how to increase customer satisfaction and allow a large cross section of Bell Canada employees to share their ideas and suggestions. One ID-ah! JAM probed how to increase customer satisfaction, involved more than a thousand employees, including a large number of customer call center operators, and resulted in 360 new ideas to increase customer satisfaction.

The power of the ID-ah! tool is not only in generating new ideas but also in helping to change the culture of the company, providing a means for employees to connect and communicate and encouraging employees to become more personally invested in the company and accountable for its success. Harrop notes, “The great thing about these tools is that they are available to all employees, regardless of level, location, or function. What’s important to consider, however, is that traditional change management principles still apply. Senior management has to support this and make a commitment to follow through on the feedback, ideas, and questions submitted by employees. Organizations should be careful not to push collaboration just for the sake of collaboration. It still requires careful planning, sponsorship, and support to be successful.”

Stage 5: Engage with Employees

Greater employee engagement in solving business problems is the most important reason why companies embrace über-connection. Deeply engaged employees stretch beyond the walls of their function and the boundaries of the company to engage customers. This was the driver behind the development and launch of uCern, the corporate social network of Cerner Corporation, a leading IT firm in the health care industry. Robert Campbell, a vice president and the chief learning officer at Cerner, describes how uCern got started: “I was presented with a business problem from my chief operating officer, Mo Zayed, who asked, ‘How can Cerner dramatically decrease the cycle time from discovery to adoption of new products and services?’” Senior executives from marketing, IT, human resources, corporate learning, and internal communications were pulled together into a task force to address this question. Rather than tweaking a current solution, this team decided to create an entirely new way to work at Cerner and recommended the development of an enterprisewide social collaboration platform.

Cerner, like many organizations, had an environment where knowledge was created in a single-threaded fashion, often by a single expert. As Campbell explains, “In this environment much of our current knowledge was locked behind password-protected Web sites, guarded in organizational silos, lost in e-mail inboxes, or stored on individual laptops. We decided to change the way we collaborated on projects. We saw a need to create more of an open culture and dramatically accelerate the cycle time of innovation throughout our company and our client base. Our vision was to create a culture where it would be as easy to collaborate on new business ideas as it is to share photos on Facebook. The tag line of uCern succinctly communicates the vision: ‘To put what we learn today into use tomorrow.’”

Campbell points to a number of critical success factors Cerner put into place to encourage employees’ participation in uCern. First, uCern was built into the workflow of each Cerner associate and is the customizable home page a Cerner associate logs onto after joining uCern. “Too often internal social networks are separate from one’s mainstream work. This is why they fail: because they are just another to-do on an already overcrowded list of deliverables,” says Campbell. So uCern was created to be a collaborative platform where Cerner associates could e-mail, share expertise, post a comment on a blog, access needed documents, and check relevant learning programs. For example, Cerner’s engineers use blogs and wikis as core tools for reporting on the progress of their work. Managers routinely scan them for project updates. As the progress of a project becomes more transparent, managers can reallocate resources where needed.

The second success factor behind uCern is the active involvement of Cerner senior executives. uCern is not an IT, marketing, or HR initiative. It is a new way to work at Cerner, one that allows for heightened transparency, accessibility, and collaboration so Cerner associates have an easy way to search for and find answers to work-related questions. Campbell notes, “We realized that the transformation to a bottom-up culture needed to start at the top—with our senior executives leading the way in a new leadership approach, one that encourages transparency.” For example, most Cerner senior executives have their own blogs, and associates are expected to contribute quality comments on a regular basis. It’s easy to identify the most insightful contributors, as blogs are aggregated into a blog hub, highlighting which blogs are most active, who’s commenting, who the leading bloggers are, and what they are saying.

In addition, Cerner encourages all associates to make uCern a success. Campbell provides an example: “The ‘help’ space in uCern is completely user-generated by Cerner associates. For example, when an associate asks a question on a discussion board, other associates post answers and each answer is rated in terms of its usefulness. The associate who asks the question assigns one point for a helpful answer and two points for correct and thoughtful answers. Associates then have their point totals included as input into their overall performance ratings with their manager, creating an incentive to post frequently.”

To manage uCern, Campbell created an entirely new class of roles that he calls “Community Gardeners,” to ensure adoption of uCern across the enterprise. Campbell adds, “Community Gardeners are professionals in the Corporate Learning Department who act as moderators for each community on the corporate social network. It is their job to generate interest in the community, post new knowledge, monitor growth, and solve problems that can derail adoption within the community. These Community Gardeners become the go-to people for each community, and their peers recognize them as thought leaders. They are trained in how to use all the tools in the community (RSS feeds, wikis, and blogs), and they encourage involvement by helping participants see what’s in it for them to share knowledge with their peers.” uCern was launched to Cerner’s internal population in 2009, and plans are under way to extend it to Cerner’s customers and suppliers in 2010. The goal, says Campbell, “is to create a networked company, where we link employees to customers and suppliers with the goal of achieving a host of business benefits, such as reduced cycle time for innovation, greater ability to share knowledge across the enterprise, improved access to knowledge experts, and decreased time to market for new products, resulting in improved customer satisfaction.”

Campbell believes that a common reason for failed participation in corporate social networks is fear among employees of not knowing what to contribute and fear of repercussions if they contribute content that is later deemed proprietary or inappropriate. Campbell recommends working through these issues with the HR, legal, and IT departments to create policies and guidelines for the usage of social media so that it becomes part of the culture.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS HAPPENING IN THE U.S. ARMY

You may be thinking that social media usage is only for high-tech companies like IBM, Cerner, or Bell Canada. However, the U.S. Army is inviting all personnel—from privates to generals—to go online and collaboratively rewrite the field manuals using the same software Wikipedia uses. The introduction of wikis is part of a larger revamping of the Army’s field manual system, which currently includes more than five hundred field guides on topics ranging from counterterrorism to how to stay warm during cold-weather operations. Of the total of five hundred guides, only about fifty are not open to collaborative editing on a wiki.²⁹ “The goal,” says Jake Pennington, the head of the Lifelong Learning Center at the Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, “is to tap the battle-tested experience of all those in the army to write and revise these field manuals rather than just rely on a handful of specialists in the Army’s array of research centers.” This vision has support at its highest levels. Lieutenant General William B. Caldwell, the former commander of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, who is now working in Afghanistan as commander, Combined Security Transition Command/North Atlantic Treaty Organization Training Mission, wrote on the Combined Arms Center blog on July 1, 2009, “by embracing technology, the Army can save money, break down barriers, streamline processes and build a bright future.”³⁰

In addition to using wikis, the Army also makes extensive use of blogs. Lieutenant General Caldwell is a visionary in this, as he supports the use of both wikis and blogs to communicate and share lessons learned. On July 13, 2009, one year following the death of nine soldiers in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General Caldwell wrote the following blog post on how others could learn from the sacrifice of those nine soldiers:

Lieutenant General Caldwell goes on to write in his blog post that it is our duty as a nation to remember and reflect upon the sacrifices made by our soldiers serving in Afghanistan. The Combined Arms Center and the Combat Studies Institute have taken the lessons from the Battle of Wanat and distilled them into a special case study. In addition, the Center for Army Lessons Learned recently published a handbook on Afghanistan that captures the best practices in small unit operations throughout Afghanistan.

Lieutenant General Caldwell’s blog generated a number of comments, one noting how important it was to capture the accomplishments and lessons of junior officers, like First Lieutenant Jonathan Brostrom, as well as the more experienced generals. As one commenter said, “Jonathon Brostrom is a prime example of great Soldier early in his military career that demonstrated the confidence and traits we expect from our leaders.”

The Command and General Staff College’s associate dean of academics, James Martin, calls the Army’s use of social media tools such as blogs and wikis “learning at teachable moments.” If the U.S. Army can embrace collaboration, why do corporations believe these tools are too dangerous to use? Is it time for you and your company to develop a strategy for using social media in the workplace?

DEVELOPING A STRATEGY FOR USING SOCIAL MEDIA

Too often, the buzz around implementing social media starts with the technology platform and the specific bells and whistles that need to be embedded into the network, such as blogs, podcasts, video, wikis, or discussion forums. But the real starting point is to identify why you are embarking on this journey, ask yourself what business goals you are trying to accomplish, and, most important, understand this is a cultural change initiative. The example from the U.S. Army shows how culture can change in order to accomplish a greater goal: improved communication and the creation of a repository of critical knowledge. Christopher R. Paparone, an associate professor in the Army Command and General Staff College’s Department of Logistics and Resource Operations at Fort Lee, Virginia, says this: “My view (not an official view) is that we have been much too rigid in our doctrine. By using a wiki, we begin to challenge dogmatic thinking.”³²

How can you start this journey? As we have worked with organizations, we have witnessed seven key steps in how they have crafted a strategy and implementation plan for becoming über-connected. These are shown in figure 5-3.

Let’s walk through these steps to better understand how your organization can become über-connected.

Business Drivers

Decide why the organization wants to use social media. Identify specific business results you expect, such as increasing speed of innovation, improving decision making, streamlining processes that affect customer experience, decreasing communication costs, increasing employee engagement, reducing the time it takes to get to market with new products and services, unleashing greater creativity across the enterprise, and positioning your company as one attractive to Millennials. Next, agree on the scope of the initiative. Will this be directed to internal employees, or will it target customers and suppliers as well as employees? Finally, determine the mix of tools you will use, such as blogs, wikis, a corporate social network, and innovation jams, and agree on how these will interface (if at all) with other technologies your organization has, such as an enterprise resource planning system or a human resources information system. As you embark on this journey, remember the importance of viewing this as a business initiative rather than just an HR or learning one.

Figure 5-3: Developing a Social Media Strategy

Source: Future Workplace.

Coalition of Stakeholders

Ask yourself what discipline areas and skill sets need to be part of your effort to integrate social media into your organization and/or department. A cross-functional collaboration encompassing the corporate learning, HR, IT, legal, and internal communications departments is crucial to integrating social media into the organization. Early on, the team must create a shared vision statement to describe the strategic intent and agree on a disciplined approach to launch this in the enterprise. Assess the environmental readiness of the organization to accept more open forms of communication. The team also needs to be clear about what blend of skills is critical. Some to consider: project management, social media usage, internal communications, information architecture, and marketing. Finally, recognize that becoming über-connected will change the way work is done within the company.

Social Media Boot Camp

Provide an opportunity for cross-functional team members to experience various types of social media and discuss, debate, and brainstorm if and how these can be introduced into the organization. One of the best ways to build momentum is to create a learning experience in which the team actually uses various types of social media to create and publish ideas and network with one another. They can use this experience to propose where the organization should enter the über-connection journey and identify the specific business objectives they hope to impact.

Launch Plan

Once the vision is crafted and the team has been assembled and exposed to the power of social media, the next step is to develop a plan for how this new initiative will be introduced to the organization. Start with the business drivers you want to impact in the organization and how you will measure success. Then propose what new roles and responsibilities need to be created to properly launch and manage this new initiative. Typically, three roles are crucial: community moderators, community administrators, and internal marketing and communications experts. The community moderators are the facilitators and guides. They may be your employees, work for a third party, or be experienced members of the community. In all cases, they are the go-to people who are responsible for keeping the community alive and thriving. The community administrators have the most technical role and need to know all aspects operating the online tools. They will need to create and maintain an easy-to-use environment that will function well and support all stakeholders, while ensuring usage metrics are easy to track. Finally, internal marketing and communications professionals will be responsible for sharing the vision of the organization, as well as planning and managing all communications, including the rollout and ongoing management of the social network.

Pilot Offering

Often, becoming über-connected starts small, with a proof of concept. This may mean using one department as the pioneer, as was the case with the JetBlue University blog, or taking one business challenge, as Bell Canada did to increase customer satisfaction and create an Innovation Jam. Whatever direction you pursue, remember that this is a cultural change and will require senior management support and participation. It is both a top-down and a viral effort. Designate a group of social media pioneers in the organization—these are the enthusiasts who are avid users of social media in their personal lives and see the business advantages of being über-connected. You can think of these enthusiasts as your ambassadors. Be sure to recruit them early and encourage them to report back on their usage. Finally, adopt an iterative approach to development; your system may go through a long beta stage as you continually improve and enhance it based on comments from users.

Communication

The implementation of social media blurs the line among marketing, internal communications, and corporate learning. A new key alliance partner will be the internal marketing and communications department, which will develop a set of social media rules of engagement as well as a communications plan to integrate social media solutions across the organization. One of the most important keys to the marketing and communications plan is dispelling the common myths and concerns surrounding the usage of social media at work, such as “It’s only the Millennials that will gravitate to using this at work,” “If we build it, will they come and participate?,” “Employees will end up sharing company secrets,” “It’s a security risk for the enterprise,” “It’s still too new and just a fad,” or “It will lead to decreased productivity as employees spend their days networking online.” A successful marketing and communications campaign will anticipate these concerns and build a strategy to address them.

Measurement

Finally, it’s important to monitor usage and gather feedback on how employees use social media, along with their suggestions and enhancements. But social media measurement is one of those topics on which everyone has an opinion while few can agree on the solution. The key is to identify both qualitative and quantitative metrics before you launch your social media plan. McKinsey’s global survey of 1,700 business executives from around the world entitled “How Companies Are Benefiting from Web 2.0” provides one view on the types of hard business results companies are experiencing as a result of implementing social media inside the enterprise. These are broken down into three categories: internal processes, customer-related processes, and external partners and suppliers.³³

Once these business metrics are articulated and agreed to, they can be tracked and monitored as your organization becomes über-connected. As the authors of “How Companies Are Benefiting from Web 2.0” point out, “Successful companies not only tightly integrate Web 2.0 technologies with the work flows of their employees, they also create a ‘networked company,’ linking themselves with customers and supplies through use of Web 2.0 tools.”³⁴ These business benefits not only accrue inside the company but also extend externally as companies use the social Web to distribute product information more easily, to encourage greater participation by their customers, to provide feedback, and to enhance products and services in real time.

The key lesson here is to think holistically about the business benefits of using the social Web—this is not just a human resources or learning initiative but one that can change the way work gets done and deliver sizable business results.

IS THERE A DARK SIDE TO CORPORATE SOCIAL NETWORKS?

Consider the recent experiences of Virgin Atlantic and British Airways. As reported in the Economist, Virgin Atlantic had a public relations nightmare when some of its cabin crew posted derogatory comments about the airline and some passengers on a Facebook forum.³⁵ Among other things, crew members joked about how they felt Virgin customers were “chavs,” a disparaging British term for people with flashy bad taste. The following week British Airways experienced similar problems when some employees described British Airways passengers as “annoying” and “smelly” on Facebook postings.

Many companies have a love-hate relationship with social networking and the social Web. On the one hand, employers want their employees to use the latest tools and encourage innovative thinking inside the company. But they also worry about losing secrets to rivals or damaging the employer brand, as in the case of Virgin Atlantic and British Airways. And when companies decide to bring the tools of the social Web inside the enterprise, they find they must provide employees with clear, concise guidelines for what they can share about the company both externally and internally. In addition, companies are finding that they need to monitor all this online activity—some are hiring firms such as Cyveillance to troll social networks for confidential or damaging leaks; others are simply signing up for Google Alerts to get updates each time someone includes certain words, such as a company name, in a post. While there is much to decide before launching an internal social network, the payoff is substantial: a searchable and digital archive of the conversations and institutional knowledge inside a company.

As a way of countering possible abuses, a growing number of companies—including IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Intel—are creating instructions on how to use the tools of the social Web without violating company policies. This applies to both external social networks, such as Facebook, and internal corporate social networks. The Intel Social Media Rules of Engagement provide a set of comprehensive guidelines for how Intel employees can participate in social media while adhering to the company communications policy.

CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS IN BECOMING AN ÜBER-CONNECTED ORGANIZATION

As you embark on your journey, be aware of key success factors that have helped others:

• Start with business goals and integrate usage of social media into work flows. Identify the goals you are trying to accomplish by using social media inside the enterprise and agree on specific metrics. Also, be aware that usage is heavily dependent on integrating social media into each and every employee’s work flow, as well as ensuring that senior leaders role-model and champion the usage of social media in how they communicate with their teams.
• Recognize that the biggest hurdle is your culture and internal processes, rather than the technology behind the creation of the social media tools. Focus your efforts on finding ambassadors, and make it easy for them to share and participate in your social media pilot. Involve senior executives; they must buy in, or this will not have lasting value. Focus on building a culture of co creation so employees at all levels have a voice and see the power of “we.” Recognize that in the Web community, status is built upon making meaningful contributions, so be sure to include ratings by peers in your design. Finally, examine how you can integrate the expectations for social media usage in your company’s performance management practices so the quality of one’s online contributions is part of the overall performance management system.
• Understand how being an über-connected company can enhance your ability to recruit top talent. Survey your new hires. Understand their digital expectations when joining the organization? Becoming über-connected also creates the need to develop a new set of digital literacy skills for your employees. And these will be increasingly in demand as we head into the 2020 workplace.
• Remember to jump into the social media world yourself. Join several major social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Conduct a search for how your competitors are using these social networks, and report back to your team. Learn the language of social media by reading the glossary of key social media terms at the end of this book. Once you have created your own profile, start looking for friends and topics you want to keep abreast of—jump in by following thought leaders in your industry on Twitter, connecting with colleagues on LinkedIn, and adding new friends on Facebook. You must be a user of social media in order to understand the potential for adopting this as a tool to transform your business.
• Create guidelines and policies for employees’ usage of social media. Becoming über-connected has the potential to create improved business results, such as increases in collaboration, innovation cycles, and attraction of Millennial prospective new hires to your company. But it also requires you to create a set of guidelines, polices, and maybe even new roles and responsibilities as you begin to educate your workforce and monitor usage. It’s not too late to jump in, but before your organization does, be sure you are clear on your business drivers and the rules of engagement for using social media on the job.

BECOMING ÜBER-CONNECTED: THE KEY TO CREATING AN EMPLOYER BRAND

In today’s marketplace, it’s not enough for companies to be connected to employees and customers via a Web site, e-mail, blogs, or instant messenging. Rather, companies need to become über-connected and provide employees with access to the same social Web tools they use in their everyday lives to communicate, collaborate, and connect with one another. Ultimately, creating an über-connected organization has the potential of developing a more engaged workforce, creating a stronger employer brand, and making the workforce more agile.

SUMMARY

• Give those who use the products a chance to be involved in the creation process. Users of products are often the best equipped to drive their innovation, as they are the ones who interact with them in the real world on a daily basis. Any company in the business of selling a product needs to learn how to harness the power of customers who are passionate about their products by inviting them to share their enthusiasm and creativity.
• Consider where your organization is on the journey to becoming über-connected. Using social media is becoming an important way to share knowledge, collaborate with team members around the world, and allow employees to contribute new ideas in the workplace. Blogs, wikis, and corporate social networks are all becoming important ways for the members of a globally dispersed workforce to interact with one another on a personal level, have discussions in online forums, and contribute their knowledge.
• Understand that transparency is necessary to your success. Using social media works best for companies if it is done in an open, authentic manner. Let feedback from your employees guide you in shaping your network, and be responsive to the needs and desires of the community.
• Recognize that creating internal social networks can also be about having a one-to-many relationship. For some companies, establishing a social network can be a way of connecting the company to customers outside the company. This works to enhance the company’s brand and to expand its reach while increasing collaboration and community building.
• Finally, make sure you focus on the business needs you hope to impact before looking into any specific flashy technologies. Too often, the discussion surrounding the implementation of corporate social networks starts with what technologies should be used. But the better starting point is to identify the business needs for launching a corporate social network and the specific business results you hope to create.