Chapter 17

Getting Started with Social Business

Traditional organizations commonly perceive newly adopted social modes of participation, whether internal or external, as optional activities. This becomes a challenge particularly when the newly desired behaviors required by social business design are not clearly defined and supported by operations. Often the old way of working is left intact: workers collaborate and customers interact through legacy channels that are familiar and supported by long-standing process. Changing mind-sets to adopt a social business approach must be a conscious and deliberate activity, especially in the early days of implementing a social business design.

Clear and obvious motivations and incentives must align with the use of new tools to instill behavior change and sustain a new model of engagement as habits are rebuilt. Companies developing new social business efforts want a proven, reliable way to drive the adoption of social business strategy, whether workforce engagement, social media marketing, or social customer relationship management. However, as we have explored throughout this book, social media are not as controllable and deterministic as earlier methods. Social business participants must help sustain engagement, create value, drive direction, and build community as part of delivering a social business solution. Communities can't be owned or controlled in the way that workers or partners can, but they can be guided and inspired. This makes the process of improving adoption in social business a considerably different proposition from the way businesses used to engage before social media.

The Phases of Social Business Adoption

Social business has definite and distinct stages of uptake and adoption, regardless of audience type, and they are adjusted to the state of maturity and overall rate of social business adoption in the organization. The techniques used depend on the size and age of the community collected around the social business process. Adoption strategies can be organized around four major stages of maturity (Figure 17.1):

Figure 17.1 Phases of Social Business Adoption

1. Early adoption. The earliest and most sensitive stage, this is when only a core group of members is engaged and a weak network exists within a small sustaining community. Charter members must contribute to the hard work of cocreating the community, its processes, shared objectives, and expected behaviors. Adoption strategies during this stage focus on validation of direction, goals, and details of social business design. This is frequently known as the pilot phase.

2. Critical mass adoption. When the early adoption phase is successful, a deliberate decision usually is made to move into a self-sustaining situation. Until this time, considerable effort must be invested by the organization to recruit members able to draw in others and contribute themselves. When this is successful, critical mass becomes much easier to reach. Interestingly, research has shown that critical mass adoption can be as little as 10 percent of potential participants.¹

3. Mainstream adoption. Typically a sustained gap occurs between the first two stages of adoption and late adoption. Early adopters are usually much earlier than the rest of the potential participants. Mainstream adopters usually have specific issues that are holding them back from adopting the social business solution—for example, skill gaps, poorly understood internal constraints, or even local laws or cultural expectations. In this stage, issues are systematically identified and steps are devised and carried out to resolve the remaining adoption issues.

4. Sustainable adoption. All communities decline over time without care and nurturing. To self-sustain, communities must be allowed to evolve without external restrictions. In the long term, workers leave the company, customers switch products, and companies change their services, and all of these affect long-term social business success. Community growth and health must be closely monitored, aided by the social business analytics processes typically in place at this time. Strategies to head off atrophy or drop in participation are devised and applied.

The remainder of this chapter focuses on a variety of adoption strategies; some apply across all stages of adoption, and others apply only during specific ones. Adoption strategies vary as much as companies do, however, and the social business transformation process will build this into the business process redesign as much as it does incentives and motivations for participants.

Social Business Adoption Strategies

Adoption strategies for social business can be shared across a portfolio of social business efforts and then tailored to the local solution as needed. This is usually more efficient than reinventing the adoption strategies for each solution. Centralizing practices and knowledge drive the operational efficiency of the social business unit, which we discuss in the next chapter.

Internal Social Business Designs

Although the overlap between internal and external social business efforts is often considerable, most efforts are still separate. The top adoption strategies for internal social business efforts follow:

• Establish a clear purpose. Poorly articulated and vaguely designed social business efforts end up with matching outcomes. A clear purpose for an effort helps foster trust and sharing. When the high-level goals are explicitly identified, the audience can decide whether to join in and contribute to the social business process.
• Identify and engage adoption champions. One of the best ways to begin is to search out and identify natural leaders in the target community. Well-liked or respected members who participate early can spark the engine of viral adoption in the early adoption phase and encourage participation using social networks and good reputation.
• Leadership sets the tone. Leadership must clearly communicate how it wants workers to engage in and use social business solutions. Ideally leaders set personal examples through their own participation. Public and sustained involvement by a handful of business leaders helps greatly.
• Communicate clear policies for use. Social business policies have evolved greatly. They have undergone refinement from complex, multipage statements to simple and clear directives. One of the biggest lessons learned is that employees must be informed of what they can or cannot do in clear terms. Done well, this removes uncertainty about when and how best to use different tools and communication channels and enables participation.
• Validate social business design usability. Just as with successful consumer products, social business designs must be easy to use. In fact, research has shown that a solution must be significantly easier to use than the solution it replaces in order for adoption to occur readily. Social business designs that aren't carefully tested with their users as simple and effective will have low productivity and high cost of use.²
• Communication plan: A marketing campaign, consumer style. Communicating features and benefits of social business solutions to workers helps set the baseline for how tools are perceived and subsequently used across the organization. Initial perceptions play a key role in adoption. Messaging must be useful and engaging while communicating improvements and incentives. One collaboration lead at a large multinational said: “Employees already have a preferred product. By using market segmentation and a value proposition for each ‘segment,’ we identified what they would need and how they wanted it delivered. A good customer doesn't just try your product; they buy it often and endorse it. Focus the sales on finding the ‘good customers’ and the best markets.”³
• Effective community management. From the outset, community management (see Chapter Twelve) is one of the primary operational means used to foster the adoption of social business. Rachel Happe, a leading authority on community management, notes that “community building is a critical element of social business success and typically organizations cannot get there by deploying social technologies alone. There are a variety of contextual factors that can increase or decrease the ease of building a community but there are also some common best practices.”⁴
• Connect to the flow of work. This is social business tenet 10. Instead of focusing social business approaches to a horizontal or general-purpose communications method that is competitive primarily with e-mail, educate users on how to improve a specific work activity or business process using a social method applicable to a given situation (for example, “When new sales results come in, post them to your activity stream, so everyone who wants to see can use them”). In general, the most effective results come from efforts that aim the adoption work (with matching social business designs) at a specific business process or challenge. As Laurie Buczek, a social media strategist at computer chip maker Intel, states, “First, identify the business objectives.”⁵
• Share the adoption process. When the adoption process is open and members are encouraged and enabled to provide structure, share the rules of the road, and spread the word, they take ownership of the solution. Downstream, this results in more involvement and productive work. A key instance of this is SAP's Community Network, which uses a mentoring program to help enlist members to drive adoption through shared ownership.

External Social Business

When social business is used in external engagement with business partners and the general public, achieving adoption sometimes requires a complex blend of complementary adoption strategies. Some of these differences revolve around core motivations. For example, external participants are not usually remunerated by the organization in the same way that internal participants are. Consequently they have a very different set of reasons to get involved. Additional concerns in external social business include having to engage a much broader demographic, as well as the competition with other communities targeting a similar audience. The top adoption strategies for external social business efforts are these:

• Go to the audience, and draw them in. A new Web site can be difficult for new participants to find and engage with. Existing networks support ready-made social and participative audiences; communities created in conjunction or connection with large social networks or other existing audiences can reduce early adoption challenges.
• Employ unique content as a seed for participation. Initially in most social business processes, something must be used to draw in and ignite engagement. Developing or purchasing seed content—information, data, or tools that participants will find immediately useful and usable—is a required investment. Member acquisition costs can be higher than expected if influencers are not well engaged early. Seed content is often used until an initiative reaches the critical mass phase of adoption.
• Identify and enlist influencers. As used in many digital strategy efforts, influencers have access to large, aligned audiences. Engage individuals with well-regarded reputations connected to the purpose of the social business effort. It's worth noting that engaging with influencers can take place in different ways, depending on the desired adoption effect (for example, retaining existing participants or acquiring new ones).
• Solicit personal engagement from recognized business leaders. Involving the targeted participation of company leaders can drive recognition for and engagement from the community. Providing participants with access to noted figures by recognized members of the community leads to the recognition and rewards that are more likely to increase adoption and lead to productive outcomes.
• Reward the remarkable 1 percent. As little as 1 percent of a community accounts for the majority of contributions to an effort.⁶ The most valuable contributors must stay motivated and be rewarded appropriately. Rewards cover the range from simple recognition and acknowledgments to more formal business relationships.
• Engage in community management. As with internal business, community management is critical to the creation and maintenance of a vibrant and participative community. A leading community manager notes: “Organizations must allocate a full-time community manager that both encourages member activity and keeps the conversation on track.”⁷ Organizations often underallocate the resources for this function, which is vital to social business adoption.
• Keep it simple. The social business design must be usable by the widest demographic audience. It must be easy to join, invite others, and participate in to cut down on user abandonment rates and maximize the value being exchanged.
• Be authentic, and don't overpackage. The most polished and professional social business experiences don't always achieve nearly the uptake as ones that are grounded and basic, and seem more personal. Too much polish conveys a sense of contrivance and control. The exception here seems to be social marketing experiences, which are often designed to visually impress.
• Us first, the world second. Organizations must have a distinct presence in the social business process and drive it forward. At first, it will be largely the company and its core advocates; as the company's participation creates a foundation of activity and value, others will join in.
• Foster trust and a culture of sharing. It's not sufficient to merely establish trust; a culture must be created where the free and open exchange of ideas is encouraged and rewarded. Creating such a culture requires leadership by example and reward for valuable contributions.

Adoption methods are very much in flux as social business becomes more formal and structured, yet powerful techniques are emerging. Social media can now be measured and monitored better than ever before. The rise of social business intelligence, explored in Chapter Twelve, provides the ability to measure and thus manage social business adoption. The cycle of listen, analyze, measure, and respond becomes a powerful tool to spot roadblocks and critical situations that are holding back or preventing adoption or causing retention and sustainment issues. Adoption must always be driven by people who are helping each other to succeed.