My Socialtext colleague Michael Idinopulos has written a terrific new blog post on How to Beat the Social Software Adoption Blues.
I won’t bother rehashing his cogent insights, but I do want to draw your attention to his conclusions, which provide the most succinct checklist I’ve found for getting social media traction within an organization.
A tip o’ the hat to Michael, for this great list:
“When I compare Socialtext customers who struggle for adoption to those who achieve mind-blowing success, the difference comes down to a few simple, actionable best practices:
- Make it your Intranet. This is the single biggest thing you can do to drive adoption.
- Make it the primary destination for must-have information: HR Forms, the company directory, new hire information, IT support requests, C level blogs. That’s honey which attracts people to your site–even people who don’t care about social software per se.
- Integrate with your company directory and, ideally, Single Sign-On (SSO). People are busy; if you require an extra login prompt or worse yet an extra password to manage, you’ll lose a lot of them–upwards of 50%, according to some Socialtext customers
- Integrate with enterprise search. This one’s pretty clear, but it’s remarkable how few companies actually do it
- Integrate with existing enterprise applications. When social software provides a window into other enterprise applications, it moves to the center of your company’s flow of work.
- Launch to your whole company, not a small subset. Take a look at my earlier post on why you should Skip the Pilot. “