In June, my executive management said, “Gia and Derek, go figure out what’s broken about enterprise social software pilots and fix it. Like, yesterday.”
What’s the problem?
It seems that social software pilots, regardless of the technology chosen, either never achieve flight, or if they do, they plateau soon after all the early adopters jump aboard. They can’t seem to attract the rest.
How might we fix that?
Like any good science endeavor, we went in with an hypothesis:
People need help with the adoption stuff, and on the cheap.
The idea was that we’d provide inexpensive user/developer/administrator/operations tutorials as needed, plus assistance in crafting a custom technical and adoption strategy. We’d spend up to 30 days doing this, using a private instance of Clearspace to communicate, collaborate, kick the tires, and tell dirty jokes. Our executive management eighty-sixed the dirty jokes part, unfortunately.
The point was that Derek and I would be your personal shoppers, and that would be our only job. So, in July, we busted some serious ass building strategy workshops and high-level education series, complete with short videos. We figured out a meeting timeline designed to keep you engaged. All of this is delivered through a private, secure, branded, hosted instance of Clearspace 2.5 for each and every customer who qualifies for our program (we call it “NextSteps” internally).
The output is a co-authored Executive Report that answers questions like these (not an exhaustive list):
- “What specific use cases and users are we targeting for our pilot?”
- “Who are the critical contributors and how will we entice them to participate?”
- “What technical customizations do we need to encourage use?”
- “What is our internal education strategy?”
- “What is our internal communication strategy?”
- “How will we measure this?”
Folks could then use that Executive Report to guide the implementation of an on-premise (or hosted) pilot for n number of users. We’ll help you with that, too, because included in that cheap price I mentioned before is assistance with SSO configuration, light theme creation, and something Derek calls the Big Hit Customization. This usually involves integration of person data into Clearspace Profiles (think PeopleSoft, SAP, LinkedIn, some old MS Access database, whatever), or some other feature that will deliver a delightful user experience.
How’s this working so far?
That’s my next post…
you are not kidding…so many options…it is now hard for anyone to figure out how to place educated bets and drive broader adoption. will be interested to see your results. shame about losing the dirty jokes, would have made it a little more entertaining.