Just realized it'd been a while since I caught everyone up on how our little journey is going.
There's good news all around -- and a lot more to do.
So, let me catch you up ...
The Quick Refresher
EMC wants to get good at social media. We put up a behind-the-firewall platform (dubbed EMC ONE), built on Jive's Clearspace, and went live back in late Sept. The goal was to learn how to drive social media adoption and behavior.
I've shared lessons learned as we've gone along -- now I want to share with you some good news.
It's Working
First, there's no question in anyone's mind that this was a good idea. All doubters, skeptics and proposers of alternative courses of action have now gone eerily silent. It's real obvious now.
We're at about 1000 active licenses. About 900 of them are "lurkers" -- that's OK, we kind of expected that. I think everyone has gotten over the economic waste of paying for 900 licenses that really aren't being "used" as we'd like. Compared to what we've done here, that's splitting hairs.
The "core" -- about 100 hard-core early adopters -- are making this a fun and useful place to hang out.
Our "hit rate" on community formation is improving. The first wave was awkward, most of it stalled, but the second wave -- people who were able to watch the interaction on the platform, and propose/build communities from experience -- well, they're doing much better, I think.
There's spontaneous, value-generating interaction. I don't want to share company secrets on a public blog, but there's at least 2-3 "aha!" moments I can point to that created substantial, non-arguable economic value through interactions and discussions.
There's buzz. Everyone seems to have heard about it, is curious, comes over to check it out. Sometimes, they wade in and start participating.
There's blogging. And there's some real cool internal blogs being written now, from people I didn't know. There's some fluff as well, but that's to be expected.
We were concerned with rapid adoption swamping our ability to provide a service. That's not happening. Given the viral form of promotion, plus the natural human reluctance to jump into a new social situation, we have a steady measured pace of people coming on board.
The "tone" of the environment is pretty good. It's friendly, informal, not stuffy, constructive. No problem with flaming, or rants, or ... everyone is behaving themselves very nicely.
And There's Now A Hunger To Do More
Many, many people have now seen what a open social media space looks like. They're thinking about what could be done, and how to get there.
It's one thing to ask people to buy into a vision. It's entirely another thing when you put something tangible in front of them, and then ask them to buy in.
We have our challenges. We haven't cracked the code on repeatable community formation. We need to "legitimize" the platform (and its attendant social behaviors) to a wider audience -- there's a lot of social reluctance we're hearing about.
But there's no way we can turn back now. And, given our experiences, there's few -- if any -- decisions I'd revisit and wish we'd done differently.
I think we did this the best possible way, and we're getting the best possible results.
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