It's widely
acknowledged now that the biggest challenge in achieving a successful social
collaboration implementation is getting people to use it. I write regularly
about the importance of having a "big picture" strategy for driving
adoption, but if you are tasked with bringing this about in practice it's also
useful to have some practical, immediately actionable ideas for ways to get
people interested and engaged on your new social collaboration platform. Here
are a few examples I've come across in talking to organisations for my case studies
in this space.
- Post news
and announcements on the platform instead of emailing. One of the easiest steps to
take if your new platform is owned by internal comms, this is
none-the-less a highly effective approach, particularly where the news is
pertinent to individuals' own situations (e.g. where it has implications
for their annual bonus) or involves major strategy announcements. Send
employees an email notification with a link to the news on the platform,
ensuring you also allow comments on news posts to encourage feedback and
reactions. Pearson's CEO switched all her
announcements to their social collaboration platform Neo, and serviced
offices provider Business Environment also used this approach,
driving down emails by a third.
- Launch a
competition.
From an internal marketing or communications standpoint, competitions are
great because they provide a specific event that you can promote
extensively for a very short period. The competition can take whatever
form you like, just remember that the idea is to bring people to the new
platform and encourage them to try out some of its features. Examples of
organisations that have used this tactic include Avanade which held an
Innovation Contest using the ideation features on its social intranet, and
Danish railway DSB which held a photo
competition conducted via its social platform.
- Host exec
"Ask me anything"/"townhall" sessions. Getting execs to participate
regularly on the platform is often a challenge in the early days, but
"townhall" Q&A sessions using the comments features of a
social platform can be a great way to show them the value of a more
interactive approach in a more manageable, bite-size way. It gives
employees greater access to senior management to ask questions, and
creates greater urgency to prompt them to sign-up to the platform than an
open-ended discussion group would allow. Macmillan Science and
Education
(now Springer Nature) regularly hosts 1-hour sessions with execs, who
appreciate the unfiltered interaction with staff.
- Use the
platform to support an event. There are several angles to this tactic: firstly, you
can use the event as a way to show people how to use the platform, as Philips did at its Leadership
Summit, creating a bespoke social app for the event with meeting materials
and discussion areas, and awarding people points for their activity.
Secondly, you can demonstrate the value of the platform as a way to open
up the organisation, as Pearson did with its corporate Summit event in
2015, holding a contest among employees to identify "roving
reporters" who could share news from the conference with their peers
via the platform, and conversely share realtime feedback from the platform
with conference attendees. Another approach is to display the equivalent
of a "Twitter wall", sharing live posts from employees with
those at the event.
There are many other
tactics, from photo days where you bring in roaming photographers to take
photos for people to use in their profile, to using gamification to bring out
people's competitive side through awarding points or badges for engaging on the
platform. The key is to be creative and persistent, and to remember that while
these tactics can help stimulate early activity, the goal is to help people get
real value from the platform, so the sooner you can identify specific use cases
that are relevant to your organisation and meet people's needs around team
working and workforce enablement, the faster your new platform will become
business critical.