I had the best time writing these. Enjoy.

Structure

• Make the login process as painful as possible.
• Assume that your Jive Social Business Software (SBS) environment is only about delivering and consuming content, and not also about connecting and collaborating.
• Ignore the fact that adoption happens virally – make your SBS environment an unwelcome and confusing experience for ad hoc joiners.
• Create a space for every permutation of your organizational hierarchy – try to mimic your intranet structure.
• Assume that structure is immutable.
• Assume seasoned participants look at the All Content page or space hierarchy a lot.

Communication

• Never let executives express their support publicly or repeatedly.
• Don’t get the word out to executives or general users – just build it, and let them come.
• Ignore middle managers – they will put a stop to all this “social nonsense” and tell their employees to “get back to work.”
• Just send out one email to everyone. That should do it.
• Call it a “collaboration tool” and not a “collaborative networking environment.”
• Be secretive.
• Don’t involve your Legal department until you’re about to launch.
• Avoid the Sharepoint zealots in your organization.

Training

• Don’t bother showing users when to use Jive SBS vs. some other application. Give them too many choices. They’ll just use email that way.
• Make sure all the help content is in extremely long text documents, and doesn’t include any images or videos.
• Don’t bother mapping “how we used to do it” to “how we do it in Jive SBS” in any of your help content. Users love change, and they pick up on new ways of doing things overnight.
• Actually, don’t create any help content at all.

Managing and Monitoring

• Don’t bother with real use cases – fluffy goals, like, “collaborate and innovate better” are just fine for measuring business value.
• Make sure to enable moderation on everything. People love it when they’re micro-managed.
• Disable blogs. Nobody wants to share their opinions, anyway.
• Force participants to request new groups. Self-serve capabilities are too enabling.
• Don’t do anything about lagging participation metrics. Let things slowly die.
• Never report on progress to anyone. They don’t think what you’re trying to accomplish is important.