Social media on a global intranet – how do you choose?

An intranet manager asked me recently how to prioritise ideas about social media for the intranet. They are a global organization and are currently attempting to bring all the local intranets under the same umbrella.

They ran a workshop, and lots of ideas were proposed. People gave lots of examples and even ROI figures in many cases. (I need to say “alleged ROI figures” because some of them were familiar examples currently flung about on the internet with little or no detailed information.)

Their question to me: So now what do we do?

My response to them: Don’t look at the others; look at yourself!

I suggested the following:

• List the 3 or 4 top goals of your organization (assuming your senior management have formulated and communicated them). If not, identify the top 3 or 4 goals of your intranet.
• Analyse each idea you’ve had so far, to see to what extent it supports the goals and what is involved in implementation.
• When analyzing, look at different aspects:
  • How much value/what benefits can this bring to the organization? (A little, some, a lot).
  • Formulate what the value would be. Look at how it can enable people to do something new, something faster, or something more effectively than before.
  • Do this from the viewpoint of “the employee”, “the business” and “the company as a whole”.

• Identify what is required to implement it, and how fast you can do it?
  • (How much effort, what cost).
• Investigate whether or not you can build on something that exists already?
  • Do you have an internal champion for this idea?
  • Do you have an obvious place in the organization to do a pilot?
• Is this an idea that can work in other countries?
  • How would you involve them? At the beginning (highly recommended!) or later?
• What are the likely obstacles you will have to overcome to achieve our goal?
  • How can you manage these risks: what actions can you take to make success more likely?
• How will you know when you have achieved our goal?
  • What will have changed? What will be different?

I know there will be some of you out there who will say: Make the tools available and see what happens.

I disagree with this approach, to a large extent, mainly because there are so many tools, so many ideas, and such an obvious need to have a reason for what you do on the intranet.

Time is limited, resources are scarce, people are preoccupied with lots of other things these days.

I strongly recommend thinking about what you do and why, and finding the most “fertile” terrains for experimentation.

Let me know what you think, and what you’ve done!

3 Responses to “Social media on a global intranet – how do you choose?”

1. Richard Dennison Says:
   August 7th, 2009 at 9:19 am

   Hi Jane – some great advice as always.
   My only concern with your approach is that it’s very ‘top-down’ … while I totally agree that planning is everything when considering any additions to your intranet, I think you need to acknowledge the ‘subversive’ nature of social media.
   Getting the right balance between top-down and bottom-up is critical. If you’re too heavy-handed you can destroy the organic nature of these tools and one of the critical success factors for me is the ‘fashionability’ of SM tools. If they look like another corporate tool you will lose that key advantage which drives user adoption.
   One thing I am certain of is that you can’t have bottom-up change without top-down support … even if that support is tacit. So I agree that ‘throwing things at the wall to see what sticks’ is not a strategy for credit-crunch times.
   The key is getting the right buy-in, careful planning, user engagement … while making it all look like a bottom-up act of subversive action!
   Keep up the great work!
   Richard

2. Jane McConnell Says:
   August 7th, 2009 at 9:52 am

   Richard – you’re absolutely right! When I wrote this last night, I was thinking about some of our conversations in Denmark earlier this year. I didn’t expect you to respond so fast! Thanks very much.
   By the way, you’ll be very interested in some results I got in the 2008 Global Intranet Strategies survey but waited for this year’s results before communicating.
   Preliminary analysis of early data in the current 2009 survey (still open) show that perceptions change about social media (both benefits and concerns) depending on whether an organization has adopted them, is in the planning stages, or does not currently plan to adopt them.

3. Vincent Says:
   August 10th, 2009 at 12:15 pm

   I Like this one and your conclusion Jane.
   Yes I heard too many time give them some tools and come back a few months later to see what happens…
   We have to think…more globally and put a strategy in place, communication, internal marketing, HR…

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