Social Media University, Global (SMUG)
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Day Two of the ALI Conference is about to start. Today’s agenda includes case studies from Cisco Systems, Rolls Royce, Best Buy, IBM and American Express. Chris Heuer from the Social Media Club and The Conversation Group will be leading a group exercise. And our conference chairperson, Michael Rudnick, will tie it all together.
I’ll be blogging again as an embedded report from the front lines. Look for dispatches throughout the day here and on Twitter.
J.C. Bouvier of the International Fund for Animal Welfare and Kevin Reid of Issue Dynamics presented this case study. In his previous career, J.C. started Avid’s podcast series.
He took the job with IFAW, a more pragmatic organization than PETA, to promote the Stop the Seal Hunt campaign, aimed at getting the Canadian government to take action.
Goals:
Campaign Components
Goal was to get 300,000 actions taken.
Evoca is a way to upload and share audio…like YouTube for audio.
Results:
IFAW also has the Stop Whaling campaign, with similar elements.
Kay Sessions Golan (PDF file), Director of Employee Communicaitons for the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), presented her case study on CDC Connects, the CDC’s On-Line Newspaper and Intranet Portal.
Note: one of the downsides of internal communications is it’s usually hard to benchmark against other organizations. You can’t see their intranets. So Kay showed screen shots from the CDC Connects project.
CDC started its internal blog after having attended a conference like this one. It took about 9 months to get started. They’re using WordPress installed on their servers. It’s “real” blogging software.
Why a blog?
If you think you’re “controlling” the message now, without a blog, you’re deluded. A blog let you introduce the subject and engage the conversation, instead of having it happen without you.
CDC’s intranet blog is a moderated blog that allows anonymous comments. They did have some trust issues, so they wanted to encourage honest feedback. They were concerned they would get just the “suck ups” – the virtual Eddie Haskells – if they required people to give their names.
This is a little bit risky. Michael Rudnick, our conference chairperson, says the CDC policy is the exception, more than the rule. If employees know that IT can trace comments back to the source, it may diminish trust.
CDC has developed and refined its blog rules over a few months. One of the rules is that the comments need to be “on topic.” They engage in conversations with the negative commenters, asking them to provide specific suggestions for improvement.
They do one new post a week. Categories have included: Business Services, CDC History, CDC Now/Futures, CDC Stays Healthy, Facilities/Scenes, General (the catch-all) and Public Health in Action.
What they’ve learned after 51 posts and 2,400 comments:
Kay says they’ve thought about using WordPress for crisis communications. That’s a great idea. I’ve blogged about that previously here. You could do that in WordPress, or in Facebook, or both. If you have WordPress on your intranet already, it takes about 15 minutes to start a new blog to handle this.
Sheira Ariel and Carrie Motamedi from Sun Microsystems presented Embracing Social Media: Why, When & How?
Sheira asked whether social media are “just for fun” or also for business.
I actually think social media can make business more fun. And if your goal is more engaged employees, wouldn’t having more fun lead to more productivity?
She gave the example of IBM using instant messaging to put together a proposal for a client really quickly. Likewise, I’ve suggested using Twitter to quickly activate a crisis-response team.
On any given day, half of Sun’s 35,000 employees are working remotely. This makes a stronger case for using the collaborative power of social media.
A year ago they were using traditional communication vehicles: Town Hall meetings, E-mail, Static Web content, Newsletters, Conference Calls. Now they’re adding Global Town Halls, blogs, IM, Facebook, Wikis, Video/Podcasts, WebEx, SecondLife.
The Sun culture supports social media. Then-COO Jonathan Schwartz launched his external blog in 2004. As CEO, he challenged the employee communications group in 2007 to focus on “building communities” instead of just “doing communications.” They renamed their group to include the “communities” element: Global Employee Communications and Communities (GECCO)
Schwartz’s mantra is “Everything always in beta.” This enables them to experiment.
Sheira’s Guiding Principles & Tips:
Five Common Social Media Goals
Matching Tools to Goals
Sun has about 5,000 people on Facebook. Socializing that happens in Facebook builds relationships that help create collaboration. It’s pleasure that leads to better business.
Sun has a PR group focused on social media. They also have experimented with events as ways to “slip in” new technologies on a pilot basis.
I created an event on Facebook within Social Media University, Global. I hope everyone who is attending the conference will indicate their attendance at this event by:
Michael Rudnick of Watson Wyatt is the chairperson for this conference. I met him when he chaired another ALI conference, in Chicago. He did a great job facilitating that event and tying the presentations together.
We started with obligatory (I guess) safety warnings about what to do in the event of an earthquake. Not something that’s typically a big concern in southern Minnesota.
Michael’s presentation was on The Read/Write Intranet: How to Drive User Engagement and Productivity.
Employees want personal, straightforward, relevant information they can trust. They’re increasingly skeptical, though, of anything “corporate.”
They also want a “consumer-grade” user experience. They see great UI on the Web, and wonder why their companies have such a clunky interface, lousy search, and no ability to interact with (or help create) the content.
Key issues for Communicators:
Too many corporate intranets are in the Web 1.0 mindset, which indicates (to me, at least) that we don’t have a problem with people taking the long-term view. It’s fine to have a long view, but you need to at least start implementing some things to avoid getting bogged down.
If TechCrunch can keep busy covering start-up companies that can launch with as little as $50,000 in capital, why can’t Fortune 1000 companies fix their intranets?
Web 1.0
Web 2.0
Facebook isn’t “just for kids.” The over-35 demographic is the fastest growing. And large companies are saying, “So Far, So Good.” He cited a McKinsey study of companies that have adopted Web 2.0 tools, and most of them are saying they wish they would have started earlier.
Michael says that by the end of 2008:
In response to a question about using Facebook-like services for employee directories, Michael said there are several companies that offer “white label” products. He says one obstacle is that most companies would want them hosted on their intranets, fully behind the firewall. Actually, Jeremiah Owyang has a complete listing of these vendors.
Michael seems to be a big fan of Microsoft Sharepoint. You can see the demo here, but he says it doesn’t really show how you would incorporate this into your workflow to get things done. One idea he has is to have hands-on demos for whatever your technology initiative is…like the Apple store…so people can interact with your geeky “geniuses.”
That’s what Social Media University, Global is all about. Not many people will actually get to visit “Old Main,” but hopefully through the online curriculum they can get some ideas for how these tools can be used practically.
Michael’s Key Lessons:
We had lots of great Q&A with Michael. Please continue the conversation in the comments below.
For information about auditing SMUG classes or applying for admission, click here.