Organization Roles For Corporate Social Media

Well, now that I'm getting seen a bit more often here in the blogosphere, I guess I have to spend more time sharing what we've learned.

Today's discussion is about how we handled some of the new roles needed for an enterprise-wide rollout of this stuff. 

Your situation might be different, but new things sometimes require new roles to be thought about.

And boy, did we think about this.

The Problem

There are some that think social media proficiency (or E2.0, or whatever) just happens.  Put something out there, people will discover it, and magic will happen -- eventually.  Self-organizing, self-generating, self-encouraging, and so on.

Look at Wikipedia, as an example, they'll claim.

Wikipedia didn't "just happen".  Several people put their heart and soul into it for quite some time before it "just happened".  And corporate social media proficiency is the same way, in my mind.

From a business perspective, we had a couple of other concerns. 

First, we wanted acceleration of business value.  We wanted to make sure we got to good just as quickly as possible.

Second, we had previous experience with tools and platforms that were just turned over to users to do what they wanted to do with it.  Suffice it to say that the results weren't exactly compelling.

And third -- we knew that for any corporate initiative to be successful, there had to be people clearly identified with the initiative: named, visible and accessible people who could present, chat, discuss, help, etc.

We knew we needed some new roles, but -- of course -- we weren't quite sure what those roles would be.  And, of course, there are all sorts of people who'll be their career on a poorly understood new project -- not!

The Model

The first key belief we had was that this had to be seen as a business function, and not an IT function.  Our IT people are great, but they run their business a certain way.

When someone was curious, had a problem, or a question, or wanted to discuss something, we wanted a nice, friendly and empathetic person for them to go work with.  No trouble tickets, etc.

We also knew that, in order to scale, we'd need "community effects" to take over.  At some point, it's community members helping community members, rather than everyone having to go to a centralized function.  I call this "passing out paintbrushes".

We had to invest in a small core to get the party started.  So we've ended up with two or three key roles in very short time.

How We Got Started

At the beginning, it was mostly me and Len Devanna.  Len is our eBusiness director, does a lot of this webbie stuff for EMC, and -- of course -- is as insanely passionate about this stuff as I am.  Len's blog is a good read, by the way.

Len hired a contractor that helped us work with IT to get the platform in house, get it set up, start hammering together some basic processes, do a bit of pre-population.  Len, myself and Mark Twomey (aka StorageZilla) also chipped in.

IT put some good project people up for us to work with, and they ended up going above and beyond the call of duty to help us get where we needed to be very quickly.  I'm not saying they broke any rules, but I'm sure a few were bent along the way.  Their passion was essential to all of this, to say the least.

We got the platform up and running -- which was good -- but when we turned around and asked the same contractor to start working with newbie users and coaxing them into the pool, well, it just didn't work out so good, and as a result, we realized we needed some different skills, and -- more importantly -- a very different personality.

Now, realize by now we had something we could go show people -- the platform was up and usable (but not in good shape), and that helped a bit to get more people interested.

So we started poking around.

The Inevitable Conversation

Word got out that we were looking for people to help, and we were in a rut for a while.  Folks who were very intrigued in what we were doing wanted to get involved, etc. -- but when we asked them "hey, do you want a position that's dedicated to this" almost all of them backed away.

Somehow, they just weren't interested enough to commit their careers to something like this.

We Get Lucky

Len finished a big project, did a minor re-org in his eBiz group, and appointed Jamie as his lead on this project.  It turned out that Jamie had just the right background.

She had done all sorts of webbie stuff and wasn't intimidated.  She had worked with our IT group and knew how to get things done.  She was a very fast learner, and figured out what was going on with Clearspace in a few days.  She had been at EMC a while, was well-respected and well-known.

Much more important were the social aspects.  She was nice and easygoing.  She didn't intimidate or try to control people.  She was supportive, but firm when she needed to be.  She was accessible and responsible.  She was very smart and well organized.  She inspired confidence.

And she thought this was really, really cool stuff we were doing.

We asked her to do a couple of things right away -- one was to reach out to all manner of "stalled communities", start to engage them and see what could be done to move them along.  She re-assessed our punchlist with IT, and re-prioritized what was important to fix and what wasn't.  She started to fix all of our self-help documentation, which needed a lot of fixing.

She did all this, and more.  Within two weeks, the whole tone and mood had changed, and we were making forward progress in big leaps and bounds.  Jamie is now my hero in this regard.

Key Lesson #1 revisited: social media is more about social than media -- anyone you have at the center of this had better have really good social skills as a starting point.  If you're making a list of technology skills, start over with a new list.  You can rent technical skills.  It's hard to rent the other half of the equation.

But I thought we needed more ...

We Get A Second Team Member, And A Third.

Jamie quickly become filled to capacity.  Between working with IT, fixing documentation, helping people, etc. I could see that we'd be quickly overwhelmed.  Sure, we'd eventually see enough self-replicating community skills develop, but it was looking to be a painful bottleneck in the near future.

The worst case would be someone was going to be interested in this stuff, and we wouldn't have the cycles to help them when they wanted help.  And they'd lose interest.

We found a bit of budget to hire a contractor to help Jamie out, and that was Chris.  Given our experience with the first contractor, we had a much better idea of what we were looking for with the second contractor.

Chris can do many things for us, but what he's passionate about is helping people to be successful in this environment.  He's proposing ideas for workshops, forums, etc. -- all around the idea to help people be more proficient at this stuff.  We now have a more scaleable "back-end" to the team.

Between Jamie and Chris, I think they can handle most of what we'll see in the near future.  And, if I'm wrong, I'm sure I'll hear from them.

But I started to think about the other end of the value chain -- "community outreach" I called it.

We have lots and lots of senior managers and individual contributors at EMC.  They're scattered all over the world.  I felt that we needed someone that could reach out to them, get them comfortable, and get them working in the right direction.

I ended up spending a lot of time with Susan discussing this.  Susan has been at EMC a long time, and is one of those people in marketing who's always working on the new stuff, the things that aren't exactly mainstream.  She had absolutely ZERO background in any of this, but her personal attributes were very unique and very compelling.

I thought this was pretty cool in a couple of ways.  First, she could be 100% empathetic with people who were new to this, and a little put off.  She was roughly in the same age group as many of the key managers, she could admit that she was recently a newbie (and it wasn't that hard), and -- most of all -- she engendered trust and confidence with just about everyone.

And she was absolutely intrigued with what we were doing here.

It turned out the Susan was looking for the next cool thing to do at EMC, and -- in a stroke of divine luck -- I was able to add her to the team.

It took about two weeks for her to get her bearings, but -- once again -- she started working with HR and Finance and Engineering and ... well, the vast EMC empire who was waking up to this stuff and wanted to give it a go.   

And, as a result, we've shifted into a much higher gear, and things are happening much much faster.

I think we're done with centralized headcount for now.  Maybe not forever, but we've got our core and that's going to carry us through until the "community effect" kicks in (it's already starting) and we can scale organically from here.

Lessons Learned

Don't look for too much previous relevant experience.  It doesn't seem to matter much anyway.

Look for good people who exhibit great social and community skills and are passionate about this stuff.

Set the tone -- we're having fun, we're learning as we go along, and so forth.

Use people who are already known to the company at large ... you'll cut several months off your ramp.

Mix it up with skills, personalities, strengths, age groups, etc.

You'll definitely need more than one person if your company is of any size.

It's a dedicated role.  Trust me on this.

Skip the resume, the traditional job description, recruiters, etc.  Network, talk to people, pass the word around, etc.  People will come find you.

Don't be afraid to use contractors, but you'll need a home-grown core for them to be effective.

If you have a non-IT group that you can build this off of, consider that.  Or, if there's an IT group that's seen as overly business-friendly, you might consider that.

And, yes, you'll need some sort of senior sponsor (like me) to put personal energy into this thing over a period of many months, get it off the ground, and nurture it until the team can run on their own.

And, to tell the truth, we're getting pretty close to that point ...

Comments

[Gareth]

I've really enjoyed and benefited from reading your notes. I've been building an internal community of about 400 users within a large bank, and the user base is growing by about 100 a month. The time overhead to bring new users onto the platform is significant - it takes training, evangelism / encouragement, follow up and a strong belief to succeed. I found that identifying 'avid fans' and expanding their user permissions to become leaders of mini communities within the larger community, helped grow usage and content on the platform. I don't yet have permission to start my own publicly available blog on this project - I was wondering how much benefit you got from sharing what you were doing with others? Best, Gareth

[Chuck Hollis]

Hi Gareth -- good to hear that you're having some success!!

Your company and my company don't see eye-to-eye on the important role that bloggers play, so that's an issue.

Frankly speaking, an internal blog has been more useful to me than an external one in this specific regard, so you might want to consider that direction.

Hope we can chat at some point!