A customer once told me they needed to get Super Awesome Highly Visible Group involved in their pilot social software environment, so that Guy Who Could Pay For The Whole Thing With a Wave of His Big Toe would see their success and haul out his checkbook. And then, of course, everyone else would want a piece of that social experience.
This reminded me of high school. Whatever the popular kids were wearing, doing, and saying, the rest of us would try to mimic. Classic The Tipping Point fare (I actually wore Hush Puppies in high school in the mid-80s. Omigod, you should’ve seen my hair).
So, who are the popular kids where you work, the ones with a bunch of organizational power? Maybe they’re the ones who bring in the most revenue. Maybe they’re so strategic to the company that if they all got hit by a bus tomorrow, your stock price would faint. You know who they are.
If you’re the woman responsible for a successful social software pilot, figure out how to romance that popular jock. Figure out the answer to, “What’s in it for me?” for them. Explain how your chosen social software solution can solve one of their current problems. If you can get them into your pilot, and it actually does help solve that problem, then poof! You’ve got the best case study you could possibly have. Use it to advertise the wonderment of your social software pilot to the rest of your organization, most especially that guy with the powerful big toe.
Great post (as always) Gia – as you say, the key is explaining how it helps solve problems. Justifications such as “the pilot group would never have completed their project on time if they hadn’t had social software and that would mean your favourite customer would be very upset” can be far more powerful than “it will have the project team an average of 1 hour 23 minutes per week which translates into savings of $x”
Posted on this yesterday at http://jonmell.co.uk/enterprise-20-roi/
Jon, you have a good point. Sometimes, just one critical story can do the trick. “We saved $2MM on a new system, because we found out that our newly acquired company already had it.” Great way to fund a production social enterprise environment.
So I’m sort of like a popularity repellent – like deet for cool people. Does that mean I should stop using social software to encourage the rest of my group to use it?