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SMILE GuideStrategy

No.2

Sponsored by

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Introduction: What is the process to develop a strategy for social?

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If we lived in an ideal world, strategies for enterprise social networks (ESNs) would be written before the launch of their platforms. Clear goals would be defined before their technology is deployed so that internal communicators and corporate relations people would know how to support them with their work.

However, that’s not the kind of world we live in.

The standard scenario we have been encountering again and again in the past 18 months talks of companies where IT-led steering committees convinced management to introduce internal social platforms without a clear idea of how to embed them into the company’s work processes. It often starts with a group of engineers on the ground or a few marketers scattered around the organization looking for a tool they can use to keep in contact with each other. Before you know it, two or three million pounds have been invested in a new network supported by technology like SharePoint, Jive or IBM Connections that nobody is really using apart from some fringe groups in R&D or IT.

Or it might be a case of what the MITSloan Management Review calls the “Because-it’s-there” syndrome referring to organisations that decide to adopt enterprise social networking just because that’s what their peers or competitors are doing. “Because it’s there” is the motivation Sir Edmund Hillary gave for wanting to climb Mount Everest and it sounds remarkably similar to a conversation a colleague recently told us about. This communicator working for a major financial services provider had been asked to set up an internal social network by her boss who the night before at a dinner party had happened to sit next to Angela Ahrend, the ueber-social CEO of Burberry about to become head of Apple’s retail operations. Charming dinner conversations and peer pressure are hardly the right reasons for embarking on an ESN journey. But often enough that’s what communicators are left to deal with these days: with the legacy of decisions made on similar grounds.

1 http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/why-social-business-initiatives-fail/

What is the process to develop a strategy for social?

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In order to succeed, ESN projects need a clear vision of how the interactions facilitated by their technology can support the company’s goals and become drivers of business integration and growth. Internal social networking requires a strategy.

In this paper, we will explore the process required to develop a hands-on ESN strategy. We will zoom in on its most essential components. We will explain how to make it relevant for different stakeholders in the organization, including senior management.

A strategy by definition is supposed to mark the start of a project. However, most of the strategies we have been working on were written a few months after the launch of their ESNs for the reasons indicated above. Internal communicators are called to deal with platforms that are suffering from the lack of adoption and breathe new life into them.

We have found that solid strategies turn out to be powerful drivers of adoption. But they also offer a number of other benefits to the organization, among which are:

• HighlightingexamplesofhowtheESNisusedaroundtheorganization

• Helpingemployeestomaketheconnectionbetweenthenetworkandtheirjobsandtoembedtheplatformintheirwork.

• Spellingoutthetrainingneedscreatedbytheintroductionordevelopmentoftheplatform

• Providingclarityastothebudgetsrequiredtosetuptailor-madecommunitiesandportalsforbusinessdivisionsandregions

• MappingoutownershipoftheESN

• Providingabasisforagovernancestructure

• Clarifyingtheroleofinternalcommunicationsothatthisfunctiondoesnotgetoverwhelmedbyanexcessivenumberofrequestsofguidanceandsupport

• Simplifyingcoachingandtrainingofseniorstakeholdersbymakingcleartothemthebusinessadvantagesoftheplatform

• Supportingtheculturalchangenecessaryforinternalsocialnetworkingtotakeoffbydescribingthebehaviourswewanttoencourageintheorganization.

• DefiningasetofgoalsagainstwhichtheperformanceoftheESNcanbemeasured.

• Creatingabig-pictureframeworkthatcanbeusedtobrieftechnologyprovidersincaseofupgradesorwhenmigratingtoadifferentsolutions.

A strategy by definition is supposed to mark the start of a project

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Context First: Set the scene for senior management

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ESN strategies need to be put in context. Before embarking on the actual drafting of the document, it is useful to gain an overview of current trends in social collaboration. For example, the report on the State of Social Business 2013 published recently by Altimeter states that only 17% of the companies surveyed are “truly strategic in the execution of their social strategies”.

The rest are “intermediate” in terms of social business maturity. Altimeter blames the lack of a clear strategy for the “social anarchy” that affects many companies and leads to “siloed, uncoordinated social efforts”. In our own research among our simply-communicate readers only 42% agreed that their social strategy was aligned with their business one.

This kind of information makes a powerful case for a strategic approach to ESNs. It helps to set the scene for senior management and to link the internal social media debate to other business priorities.

Set the scene for senior management

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“Social is like a marathon. You can’t train and run it in one go”.Kelli Carlson-JagersmaVice President of Internal Collaboration Enterprise Social Media at Wells Fargo

“Social tools will collect dust unless employees feel empowered to use them.”Sandy CarterGeneral Manager of Ecosystems and Social Business Evangelist at IBM

In the words of Kelli Carlson-Jagersma, Vice President of Internal Collaboration Enterprise Social Media at Wells Fargo, “Social is like a marathon. You can’t train and run it in one go”. She believes that it is important to practice and adjust. This is why in our ESN strategy, we have to be clear about the kind of behaviors we want to promote or discourage on the network.

For example, if we want to encourage employees to overcome hierarchical inhibitions and post comments on their managers’ blogs, we can’t have an exec urging them to comment. It simply doesn’t work. It’s too top down. What communicators need to do in this case is to help a manager create the right environment on his/her blog so that staff feels comfortable to participate in the discussion. The right way to do this is to mobilise a few champions or super users, get them to leave comments and create the right ecosystem for their colleagues to chime in. The strategy therefore should be focused on modifying behaviours so that a culture of bottom-up connectedness takes hold in the organization.

As Sandy Carter, General Manager of Ecosystems and Social Business Evangelist at IBM puts it, “Social tools will collect dust unless employees feel empowered to use them. For organizations with a traditional, hierarchal structure, this is a big shift in thinking that will affect how, when, where and what employees communicate. It can be a bit scary for executives to overcome this initial hurdle, but once done, the results will speak for themselves ”.

Another example of a behavior we might be trying to affect is the wide spread use of HR emails that employees have got into the habit of not reading. The HR team should be encouraged to abandon email in this case and to use the social platform for posting information like policy changes and corporate announcements.

2 http://www.forbes.com/sites/dailymuse/2013/12/03/how-social-is-changing-business-and-your-job-search/

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Governance: Guidelines and support

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A strategy should provide guidance in the area of governance.

It should reflect the ownership model chosen by the company for the network and define the role played by internal communications.

• “Directing the traffic”:approvingcommunitiesintheinitialstagesofaplatform,identifyingcommunitysponsors,advisingcommunitymanagers,provingexamplesofcontenttobeusedforpopulatingdiscussionsandcollaborativesites.

• Turningtheplatformintothechannelofchoicebymakingsurethatkeyinternalcommsmaterials(e.g.videoswithCEO’smessages,reports,resultsofemployee’ssatisfactionsurveys)arepostedontheESNratherthandistributedthroughconventionale-newsletters,emailorprintedmaterial.

• Managingstakeholders’expectationsbybeingclearfromthestartabouttheeffortcommunitymanagersandchampionswillhavetoputintothenetworkinordertoachieveresultsfortheirprojects.

• EstablishingandrunningaCenterofExcellence(COE)fortrainingusersandequipchampionswithtrainingtools(e.g.webinars,slidedecks)fortheirteams.

• DevelopinganarrativefortheESNbycollectivesuccessstories.

• MakingsurethattheESNstrategyisnotseeasanadd-onbutisfullyintegratedintothecommunicationstrategyandlinkedtokeycommunicationplans.

Guidelines and support

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The SMiLE Methodology:

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Every solid strategy is rooted in thorough research. Collecting intelligence about activity on the network helps us understand how people use it and identify the roadblocks that could threaten or derail full adoption of our ESN.

We therefore recommend conducting the following types of research before drafting your strategy:

Desk research • Analyseallrelevantdocumentsandresourceswhichprovidethebackgroundforthestrategyandwillneedtobequotedinthedocument.Theseusuallyinclude:

o Code of business conduct

o Corporate communication strategy

o Corporate communication’s social media strategy

o Digital channels guidelines and resources

o Social media standards and guidelines

o Brand guidelines

o Web copywriting guidelines

o Guidelines for commenting

Field research• Interviewallmajorstakeholdersandrelevantgroups.Aplatform’svaluedependsonmultipleenablers.Wehavetouseourinterviewingskillstogetuserstotalkabouttheirexperiences,theirexpectations,theirfrustrationsandtheirvisionforthefutureofthenetwork.Hereareexamplesofquestionsyoucanask:

o Could you describe your vision for the network? What would you like it to become one year from now?

o What challenges are you facing in your job that the network could help you solve?

o How have you been using the network?

o What are you hearing about the network from people in your business unit/region?

o Name an area in your part of the organization where the network could add value by improving how you execute a task or run a project.

o What do you think is the biggest hurdle that prevents people form switching from old ways of communicating and working to embracing the network?

o Who should own the network in your business unit/region?

o How are leaders engaging with the network?

o How would success look like for the network in your part of the business?

o How could a strategy help you to promote the use of the network in your part of the organization?

• Thepurposeofthisexerciseistocollectsufficientinformationandevidencethathelpusspelloutinthestrategyhowthenetworkissupportingtheorganisation’sbusinessgoals.

Research

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Monitoring

Spend time visiting the network and following its interactions. This will help you understand to which extent the potential of your ESN is being exploited and whether employees are using its features - including profiles, communities, forums, tagging and document sharing – in a way that supports your strategic vision. For example, if the members of a community are only using it as a big shared folder to store documents like agendas and minutes of meetings and no discussions are happening that would help them prepare for those meetings and cut their length, you will need to clarify in your strategy how the network can help employees to work more efficiently.

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Establishing links with business objectives

Once you have collected sufficient evidence and examples of how the network is being used, it is time to look at how this intelligence can be used to support your business goals.

Based on our experience, we have selected a few examples of business goals to show how to use facts and stories to establish the link to ESN.

Improving efficiencyPearson, the global publishing and education group, has launched Neo, a Jive-based platform, to create synergies between its different businesses around the world . ESN has changed the way meetings are conducted in the organization. In the past, the head of Asia Pacific would met with his team and usually spend the first day having his reports present their activities in an endless series of PowerPoints. The real work would only start the second day with people working together on problems. Thanks to Neo, the head of the region now requires his reports to make short videos of themselves describing what they do and what their biggest problem is. The videos then get uploaded on the platform and people are asked to watch them in preparation for the meeting. A two-day event has been reduced to one day thanks to internal social networking and a more efficient way of working.

Enhancing customer experienceTD Bank Group, North America’s sixth largest bank, has been using an IBM-Connections-based ESN to link its customer-facing staff in the branches with each other. Take the example of Adam, a small business advisor based in Western Canada. He is part of a community on the network that connects him with other advisors giving him access to their experience and expertise. Adam was able to answer a demanding and challenging question from a customer by going on the network and asking for his colleagues’ support. This simple interaction on the ESN landed Adam the deal and provided the customer with a better service.

3 http://www.silviacambie.com/publishing-on-steroids-thanks-to-jive/

4 http://vimeo.com/66663219

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Leading the market through innovationUniCredit, one of Europe’s leading banks, uses the Innovation Community of 600 people on its SharePoint-based network OneNet to incubate disruptive ideas. To launch the community in its early days, the innovation team organised a face-to-face brainstorming session. Twenty young colleagues from call centres and the branches were invited to come together for a day and discuss how to improve customer experience. More than 30 ideas were collected. Participants were then asked to continue discussing them online for two more weeks in a section of the community dedicated to this exercise. The Innovation team moderated the discussion, collected the five best ideas and assembled a jury to select a winner. The fact that this community chose service center employees for its first event shows that ESN can help organizations listen to staff on the front line and use their experience to address customers’ needs.

Thriving in a challenging environmentCEMEX, the Mexican cement producer and one of the world’s largest manufacturers of building materials, understood at the height of the financial crisis that technology could have give then company a competitive edge in difficult times. ESN gave them the opportunity to champion a new way of working, break silos and collaborate between operations and business units. SHIFT runs on IBM-Connections and has been instrumental in supporting five Global Initiatives, at the center of CEMEX’s business strategy. One of these is aimed at replacing the use of carbon with fossil fuel in its operations. CEMEX leads globally in this field and has won awards also thanks to the amount of collaboration made possible by its ESN.

Outperforming the competition through collaborationArchant, one of the UK’s largest regional media groups has been using a SocialCast-supported ESN to move from traditional publishing to a more open and collaborative way of working. Sales reps have been using Connect to tell their colleagues about their successful advertising deals. These posts have not only been giving a boost to staff’s moral with their confidence benefitting from the news that the company is doing well, they have also triggered competition among sales teams. Having information about profits, strategy and business performance openly posted on the network for people to discuss and share has resulted in higher revenue for Archant.

6 http://www.socialcast.com/customers/archant-new-ways-doing-business

5 http://www.simply-communicate.com/news/onenet-unicredit%E2%80%99s-journey-through-internal-social-networking

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Championing sustainability Unilever, the consumer goods multinational, has been organising for the past two years a web jam in which employees discuss the multinational’s sustainability program and initiatives with a number of external stakeholders, including NGOs, academia, press and business partners. The Sustainable Living Lab is a by-invitation-only online platform with different pages or “rooms” focused on topics that are key for Unilever’s sustainability agenda like Water scarcity in the home, Lower Impact Laundry, Reducing Packaging Waste, Hot Water for Showering, Mainstream Sustainable Living and A Recycling Revolution. The Systems Rooms focused on policy and alliances while the People Room concentrated on product innovation and changing behaviours. Some 2,000 from 77 countries participated in the jam in 2012. In 2013, 83% of all employees said that they had learned more about sustainability as a result of the campaign that included the Sustainable Living Lab and 79% said that they had spoken to friends and family about the company’s sustainability plan (up from 63% the year before).

Promoting integration and creating synergies across the businessPhilips, the engineering and electronics conglomerate, ran an all employees jam on Connect Us, their SocialCast-powered ESN, to launch their new Mission and Values. Staff from 43 countries posted 390 stories which generated more than one thousand comments. 32% of these comments originated from a different area of the company than the one of the person who posted it. This exercise therefore provided high collaboration across silos.

Transforming the organization to meet the challenges of global online publishing Thomson Reuters is a mayor player in publishing, financial information, specialist knowledge such us pharma, legal, tax as well as news services. Today, 85% of its 40,000 staff use The Hub, the company’s ESN implemented in 2011, which not only has helped to reduce the number of emails but also dramatically increased the level of transparency around the whole business. There are 6,000 groups formed around specific projects or long-term communities. It has become the way for colleagues to collaborate across borders to solve business issues including employee engagement and innovation.

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Gaining competitive edge through leveraging better knowledge managementPwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) is a multinational professional services firm that employs more than 180,000 staff worldwide. By its own nature is a fantastic knowledge-sharing organisation that depends on person-to-person connections. Being that is the corporate culture, PwC decided to introduce a system capable of leveraging it. Spark is its Jive-based enterprise social network that since it was introduced has fitted with the company’s way of working. To date, it connects 100,000 people and - at the same time – allows them to share conversations with the rest of the world in a very open way.

Not only did Spark defragment the organisation and made a large firm feel small, but its benefits have also been in some cases revolutionary. For example, in the San José office one team inverted the way that projects get resourced with talent. The classic model is to win some business and then assign people to the task. At San José they allow people to bid for the work that they find interesting once it has been brought in. Another Team has combined Spark and Office Connector for proposal development. They found that they saved 80% of effort on document versioning compared to the old system. By having the proposal in one place and sharing it with everyone, they managed to get proposals out far faster with a dramatic saving in all the inconveniences that are necessary when many minds are concentrating on one proposal.

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The UAMO ModelWe recommend our UAMO model to frame and present the content or your strategy.

Understand: help the organization understand how an environment of collaboration and sharing can help achieve business goals.

Adopt: accelerate the organisation’s ESN readiness by clearly identifying the role of corporate leaders and champions.

Motivate: advocate the use of your ESN for key corporate communication moments to help embed it in the company’s culture.

Own: integrate your platform into the company’s workflow and measure results.

The model with its four components builds the core of the strategy and provides a framework for collecting and organising examples, both internal and external, in the form of case studies and stories that bring the ESN to life and make it more accessible.

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The SMiLE Matrix: 5.

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The SMiLE MatrixThis Matrix measures the extent to which your organisation has the technology in place to collaborate against your tendency to collaborate.

We place in the high performing ‘Agile’ quartile of the SMiLE Matrix companies such as GE, PwC, Philips, Diageo, BASF, Pearson, Unicredit and UBS.

We score on 6 criteria - 3 technology ones and 3 cultural:

Internal social media functionality

50% of the score is determined by the number of employees who can access the social intranet from their desktop. i.e. if all staff can get online then you score 50 points.

25% of the score is determined by the number of employees who can also access the social intranet from a smart phone or tablet away from the office

25% of the score is determined by the number of other business applications that are integrated into the platform (e.g. directory, room bookings, client CRM, etc.)

Propensity to collaborate

50% of the score is determined by the number of those employees who can access the social intranet who actively engage on it at least once a week.

25% of the score is determined by the number of groups that are active on the intranet. This is an algorithm based on best practice. The maximum score is given if you have 1 group for every 36 employees.

25% of the score is determined by the number of bloggers in the organisation. Again this is an algorithm based on international best practice.

Measure yourself against the SMiLE MatrixRate your organisation to gauge just how social your large enterprise actually is. See if you are in the Agile zone and who is Unsocial, Unwired and plain Undecided.

http://www.simply-communicate.com/toolkits-templates/toolkits/social-media/smile-matrix-reloaded

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About the Author

Silvia Cambié is leading expert in social media inside the enterprise. Silvia advises organisations like Unilever, Diageo, the European Commission, Reed Elsevier and Johnson Matthey.

She is the co-Chair of SMiLE London and has won IABC’s Gold Quill Award for her digital campaigns.

About Jive Software

Jive (Nasdaq:JIVE) is the communication and collaboration platform for modern, mobile business. Recognized as a leader in social business by the industry’s top analyst firms, Jive’s cloud-based platform connects employees, customers and partners - transforming the way work gets done and unleashing productivity, creativity and innovation for millions of people in the world’s largest businesses. More information can be found at www.jivesoftware.com or the Jive News Blog here.