We Have Been Live One Week ...

... and I have to say, I'm delighted overall. 

Everyone who rolls a big IT thing to users should have this kind of positive feedback.

I thought I'd capture some of the learnings and experiences here.

A Bit Of Context Here ...

If you're not current with the story, we decided that our first phase social media project would be to roll out a behind-the-firewall platform to get people comfortable with social media behaviors.

Once we felt that we had suffiicientlly robust communities (and community behavior) we could take a look at venturing outside the firewall.

Clearspace (deployed by our IT guys) was the choice.  We did it fast, and there were more than a few rough edges when we went live.  In retrospect, this was the right thing to do.  We learned more about the environment (and operational procedures) in the first few days that couldn't have been predicted.

How We Announced It

We announced availability virally -- we all pushed email announcements to people we knew who were interested in what we were doing.  We wanted people to "find" us, and not have some sort of official corporate announcement.  That, and we wanted to ramp slowly with people who might be more inclined to be patient with us.

If I had to do it again, I'd do it the same way.

But the second order effect was more interesting.  Before long, we saw people on the platform that none of us knew.  Yes, they were EMC employees, but they weren't who we expected to join in initially. 

That was cool.

One person even started up a personal blog immediately -- no one we knew, not someone we expected, but off she went.  Marvellous, it was.

The Community Focus

We positioned the platform's primary purpose as community building.  We set up a simple methodology: a few docs to get them thinking about it the right way, a place to fill out a proposal that we could all see and discuss, followed by creating a sandbox for them to start playing.

This is working out OK as well -- up to a point.  About a third of the proposals we saw in the first week were right on -- they had the community focus right, they had their authoritative voices lined up, and so on.

Another third were strictly speculative on our part -- not exactly what we had in mind, but seemed reasonable enough, so why not?

And the last third had a line of thinking we'll see again and again -- the massive end-state picture.  And you'll run into the same thing, I'm sure.

More than a few proposals had impossibly large audiences and impossibly large focus areas.  We're talking about communities that could be tackling dozens or hundreds of topics simultaneously.

Yes, maybe the community grows to that state over time, but it certainly doesn't start there.  We had to dial these people way back and suggest that they pick a single hot burning topic to get the party going, and then incrementally grow their communities.

We all agreed as to what the end state might look like.  We didn't agree on how best to get there. 

That being said, when we patiently explained our thinking to people, at least they understood what we were talking about.

Basic Processes Need To Be Documented

We're quickly putting some basic process in place.  How do I sign up?  How do I get help online?  What are the known bugs, and how do I work around them? How do I feedback?  How do I propose a new community?

We had lightweight processes in place for some of these, but we're going back and improving our docs as we discover more.

Our fast cycle approach is working though, I like it.

Don't underestimate resources, either ...

We are keeping our user-facing admin very busy.  She's trying hard, but we can fall behind if we're not careful.  She's a full time contractor. 

Behind her, there's an IT group that's probably spending a half-headcount just keeping the environment running, fixing things that don't work yet, and planning for the inevitable upgrade we'll be facing soon.

I spend an hour or so a day coaching, replying, etc.  I could spend more.  The other guy I'm doing this with is probably spending the same amount of time doing the same.

As more people join in, community effects will probably help out, but initially, we probably still have a few more weeks of babysitting to make sure that all of our users are intrigued and want to play.

The Platform Seems Stable

Once you encounter (and understand) an issue with the platform, you can move on.  It seems pretty stable, and reasonably fast.  I like it.

We had a nasty experience with permission setting.  Seems a certain IT staffer wanted to help a bit and started monkeying around with permissions without telling anyone.  Definitely a no-no. 

Instead, if someone wants to fool around, simply download a full version of Clearspace to your desktop, and experiment all you want.  Just don't do it with the production system, please.

And In Conclusion ...

We're seeing people climb on board, several per day.  It's always fun to go back to the platform and see another bunch of avatars interacting, commenting, etc. 

And it's only been a week ....

Comments

[Garrett Dimon]

From what I've seen, I'm pretty darn impressed with the situation. I'm even more impressed to see a company as large as EMC launching something with rough edges and letting actual usage determine what needs to be polished.

In my humble opinion, the team behind it has done a great job, and I'm really looking forward to see how things developer over time.