I'd like to say we had a well-defined plan to move from prototype to pilot to early adopters to mainstream, but -- like all things web 2.0-ish -- things happen at their own pace, and -- occasionally -- in ways that you don't expect.
This week, I think we made a phase transition from "interesting project" to "corporate legit".
Let me explain.
Some Background
Usually, I try to recap the story so far, but I'm feeling lazy today. If you have the time, scroll through the other posts (from bottom to top) to get a feel of the context.
Our communication strategy has been largely viral up to this point. Someone tells someone else about the platform, they get curious, they look around, and many of them participate -- a bit.
One of our biggest obstacles has been "fear of swimming". People have openly told me they don't want to participate for a multitude of reasons -- shyness, fear of retribution, getting into an ugly discussion, etc.
It's the elepant in the room. There's no getting good at social media if people are scared to participate.
The Leadership Meeting
We understand the badge of "corporate legit, corporate endorsed" will go a long way towards making people feel more comfortable. If senior management likes the idea (and everything that goes with it), that's a major obstacle removed.
There will be other obstacles, to be sure, but addressing this one is a big one.
Every year, EMC has a big leadership meeting in Las Vegas. 1000+ of our leaders come together for several days to reflect on 2007, and plan for 2008. If you're interested in this meeting, go see my post on my other (corporate) blog: http://chucksblog.emc.com
Not surprisingly, there are a fair amount of keynote speakers at the general sessions. And, of course, every keynote speaker wants to spend a bit of time on what's new, what's cool in their part of the world.
Guess what? We got our airtime.
Frank Hauck (the exec who leads the group I report into) spent 5 minutes or so showing screenshots from EMC|ONE (the name of our Clearspace-based platform).
He positioned it as a place to have conversations, and not a repository.
He said it was a way to find people, and start to build EMC's social computer.
He showed a screenshot of the home page, and all the communities and discussions that were going on.
He showed his blog
He showed an active community (competitive) and talked about how conversations lead to better materials for the sales force.
And, best of all, he showed the global potential by showing a blog post written entirely in Japanese. We had no idea what it said, but it was definitely cool.
The Reaction
I think people were a little taken aback. They couldn't 100% grasp what we were doing, how it was different, what it means, etc. Lots of interest, lots of questions.
I probably should write some sort of management backgrounder to help them a bit.
I also got a few emails and calls from senior execs, wanting to get together and discuss a bit further.
The Result ... and some Reflection
At EMC, if it got talked about at the leadership meeting during a keynote session, it's 100% official corporate legit. Technically, every senior leader in the EMC organization now knows what we're doing, and knows that the corporation supports it.
That's one for the home team, isn't it?
But, thankfully, we're ready for them. Now I'm glad that we spent a few months in quiet mode, building out our platform, learning how the dynamics work, recruiting a core of people to help out.
The IT side of things have been incredibly stable. We don't have many bugs to go fix. We can keep up with the arrival rate of new users and new communities pretty well.
There has been a temptation to accelerate promotion of our platform. I'm glad we didn't, and we waited for it to naturally happen. As a result, everyone who comes checks us out in any capacity will be impressed, and -- more importantly -- will want to engage and participate.
Hi Chuck
Many thanks for taking us all on this journey with you, your becoming a very valuable source of insight. I have a question, not particularily SM focused, but linked: Where does IM sit in your universe ? Do you see it as more document centric collaboration (another form of email) or do you see it as 'coversational' ?
Jed
http://ecm-stuff.blogspot.com
Posted by: Jed Cawthorne | February 13, 2008 at 04:12 AM
In our model, we have a place for IM, Twitter, IP concalls, webcasts, etc. -- that we collectively call "presence".
In terms of collaboration, we think in terms of synchronous (e.g. everyone has to be collaborating at the same time) vs. asynchronous (e.g. we all can drop in when we have a moment or two).
As we already have lots of ways at EMC for synchronous collaboration (phone calls, WebEx, physical meetings), we decided that the most valuable area to focus was asynchronous models.
Truth be told, I don't know whether we were smart or lucky, but -- in our case -- we ended up doing the right thing.
Cheers!
Posted by: Chuck Hollis | February 13, 2008 at 08:28 AM
Hi and thanks for the reply - synchronous versus asynchronous is a model we have used with our large (150,000) student population for some years, plus being a university with major research projects we are sometimes 'over endowed' with collaborative technologies. Thanks again.
Posted by: Jed Cawthorne | February 18, 2008 at 02:32 PM
What a tremendous blog Chuck, we are launching communities at our work but the software is no where user friendly as Clearspace, what great usability. Nathan from uses Confluence at Jansenn-Cilag and noted that it should be easy enough for your mum to use. I agree as you already have change issues to deal with, usability is something you can get right.
Tell me, in Clearspace would I have to have a blog in each community. Or do I only have one blog with the option of sending posts to a community/s.
If so, would the profile page list communities you're in, and besides showing all your content, have an option to limit your content from one community.
eg. Chucks blog posts from all communities
Chucks blog posts from on community
Posted by: John Tropea | February 27, 2008 at 12:17 AM
Hi John
Here's what I can do.
I, of course, can have my own blog.
By pre-arrangement, I can blog on several other "space" or "community" blogs.
And any community owner or manager is free to syndicate any content from literally anywhere.
What I'm missing (and it's a minor nit, to be sure) is the ability to write a single blog post, and have it appear in multiple blog spaces at the same time.
Not a big deal, though.
Hope that helps.
Posted by: Chuck Hollis | February 27, 2008 at 07:30 AM