It's (Already) Time to Rethink Social Media

Last week was exciting as I had my first article published in KM World. The premise of the article was to talk about how Social Media should not be the strategy—it supports a strategy as a driver of business value. It's how and where your customers talk about your brand. And it's changing the way we work.

Here are a few excerpts from the article and I hope you will go and have a read of the article in its entirety on their website. (http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/White-Paper/Article/Its-(Already)-Time-to-Rethink-Social-Media-75435.aspx)

Or if you are not a KM World member you can obtain a copy from the OpenText website here.
“Even though most organizations have been using social media tools for some aspect of their business for two to three years, most say that a steep learning curve has yet to be overcome where understanding and effectively using it is concerned. Worse, a woefully low segment indicates that they are doing it well in terms of leveraging multiple social media channels to achieve specific business objectives.”

“Not only is social media about establishing meaningful conversations (not just communications) with customers, it is about improving response levels and the quality of the overall customer experience. Achieving this takes more than just tools and techniques. It takes a real commitment from the organization and participation at all levels. The trouble is that many organizations have policies that preclude participation from staff that are actually best suited to respond to customers. Still, more than 45% of large organizations block staff use of public social media tools. In certain sectors, such as investment advisory firms in financial services, it is actually illegal for certain departments to communicate with other departments using messaging or any other social media tool.”

“By delivering enterprise-class social media applications that can extend to customer use cases for the Web, intranet and extranet scenarios, such as a social platform from OpenText, organizations can rapidly apply social media to existing team collaboration and content and knowledge management solutions to capitalize on the opportunities of social media while averting the risks it may pose.”

Thanks for reading and I look forward to the conversations!

Engagement in the Enterprise

It is a very busy time at Open Text as we get ready to launch the ECM Suite 2010. My involvement in this launch is working on the Engagement products. I have had several conversations over the last few weeks on what engagement and an engaged work force means and I was quite surprised to read the statistics that speak to the current level of engagement in the workforce.
According to the Gallup Management Journal’s Employee Engagement Index survey, in a typical workplace:
• 29% of employees are actively motivated and engaged in their jobs
• 71% are unmotivated and dis-engaged
• 54% are not engaged at all
• 17% are actively dis-engaged

In fact, The Towers-Perrin Global Workforce Study (http://www.towersperrin.com/tp/showhtml.jsp?url=global/publications/gws/key-findings_2.htm&country=global) found that engagement has reached what many would call a crisis level encompassing over 70 percent of the workforce and over 50 percent of management.

Many of the factors that are contributing to the dis-engaged work force include economic downturn, downsizing, information overload and a global work force. A dis-engaged workforce does not just mean unhappy employees; it can have much larger ramifications.

According to a recent study by the Gallup group; “actively dis-engaged employees — the least productive — cost the American economy up to $350 billion per year in lost productivity.”

Helping employees to efficiently manage information overload is one vital step to building a more engaged workforce. Providing knowledge workers with a platform that allows for knowledge sharing and collaboration is not a new idea; corporate intranets have offered this premise for years. But the paradigm shift we are seeing on the web, in how we communicate and interact with each other in the consumer world, is quickly making its way into the enterprise. We need to consider this shift as we revisit our corporate intranet platforms and ask ourselves, how effective is this platform and how can I make it better? What lessons can I take away from social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook?

A few key things to ask of your intranet: Does my intranet give my knowledge workers the ability to;
Make their voices heard,
Share their expertise with others,
Gain recognition and build reputation,
Connect with each other in real time.

If you answered no to any of the above, maybe it is time to look at refreshing your intranet platform to help better unify your workforce. I would recommend that you learn more about how you can apply social media such as blogs, wikis, comments, ratings and microblogging to your current intranet to help encourage a more collaborative, productive and engaged workforce.

If you have any examples of success stories in building out a more engaging social intranet I would love to hear them!