I keep kicking myself when I have to learn the same lesson over and over again.
I can get pretty passionate about new ideas and new concepts. Sometimes, I think they're going to change the world, or at least a significant portion of it.
What I fail to repeatedly grasp is that -- yes, I'm right -- but the pace of change can be so relatively measured that it feels very natural and evolutionary.
And our little social media effort is no exception.
Big Ideas Can Generate Big Changes
Now, in all fairness, there's an entropy curve you need to scale in any organization when you're considering some new (and relatively foreign) like a social media platform.
And getting people all worked up about the potential is par for the course, I'd offer.
We were no different here. We talked about the latent productivity within our workforce. We talked about engaging customers in valuable and profitable ways. We talked about creating our own powerful ecosystem of partners, bound to us by social media fabric.
At the end state, clearly a very different and attractive world.
And, to be sure, it's all happening. But it's evolutionary, and not revolutionary.
Go Read The Back Story
I've written before that social media is more about "social" than it is about "media". That means that the limiting factor is the rate at which people change behaviors, adopt new ways of doing things, and start seeing the benefits.
The behaviors and valuable nuggets are emerging, but our measurement scale is now in weeks/months rather than hours/days. It's like a very long airplane trip (something I am very familiar with). It can seem tedious when you're doing it, but when you step off the plane -- voila! -- you're in a different world.
Now, this is turning out to have some advantages as well.
Slow Adoption Means Less Risk Mitigation Anxiety
Not surprisingly, there are those that are very concerned about exposing the organization to unknown risks. IT guys who are worried about an explosive uptake, straining resources. Security guys worried about sensitive information in semi-public places. Command-and-control types who don't like science projects and loss of control. And so on.
A slow uptake puts many of these concerns to rest. If your experience is like ours, you can see event unfold at a slow, relatively leisurely pace.
We don't get hundreds of new users per day, we get a few dozen -- out of an employee population of 35,000+
We aren't blasted by a stream of new content -- new stuff goes up at the rate of a few dozen new pieces a day, easy enough to look at everything and see if there's any serious problem. The ClearSpace platform has an aggregator on its front page, so it's easy to see where the activity is.
We aren't seeing people load up terabytes of content, either. Yes, we have an artificial 15MB limit that we're going to drop soon, but storage (and server) utlization has been suprisingly modest, far below anyone's expectations.
Administrative requirements have dropped way off. Things were hectic when we had lots of people climbing on for the first time, but -- now that we have a critical mass of knowledgeable users -- the requests for "how do I?" have dropped way off.
Maybe This Is A Good Thing ...
Sure, we've lost the initial the adrenaline rush that we would have liked.
But, at the same time, substantive change takes time, and the more measured pace we've achieved gives time for people to be thoughtful, proactive and relaxed in their approach to this stuff.
And, the next time I have to pitch this to a major organization, I will have learned -- social media is big stuff, but it unfolds more slowly than I would have thought.
And, truth be told, is actually probably better in the long term than explosive adoption.
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