So, you’re a seasoned IT leader and you’ve finalized your decision to deploy a leading enterprise social media platform that is aimed at transforming the way your company does business. The C-levels are onboard and eager to jump in (or so they hint), the newbies / recent grads can’t wait to work the way they are accustomed to…..but then there’s the rest of the crew – the majority that are already overwhelmed with the latest technology advancements and the grind of everyday tasks. They chant in unison: “No more new stuff,” as you cringe behind your desk.

In the past, commonly used excuses for not implementing an enterprise 2.0 platform included, ”People over 30 just don’t get social networking and “Workers aren’t comfortable with transparency.” Another obstacle we’ve heard is “Social media doesn’t deliver real business value and can waste a lot of employee time” as mentioned in the book, The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees.  As research shows, companies are jumping past their fear of change and tossing these myths out the window. Experts such as Chief Strategy Officer, Peter Kim of the Dachis Group says, “Social business is huge, and it’s not going away.”  It is clear that bringing social software into the corporate workplace is rising as companies are realizing the true cost value. That value can manifest itself in numerous production efficiencies and cost savings. In the case of Socialtext client, McKesson, their Physician Practice Solutions support center was able to experience a dramatic 67% decrease in average speed to answer from 33 to 11 minutes. One reason for their results was their ability to leverage Socialtext as a better way to provide answers and information to their support personnel.

Now that you’ve assessed the benefits, moved past any obstacles and are committed to making the social software plunge, the question is, how are you going to get people to use it? The word adoption, despite its positive benefits, can cause stress. No matter how you look at it, adoption means work; but that work doesn’t have to be hard when adoption fundamentals are embraced.

Let’s back up a bit. Before you can plan your adoption strategy, the first step is to choose the software that is best suited for your users so that adoption will be welcomed. This Brainyard article - Enterprise Social Networks: Must-Have Features Guide - is a good resource that highlights a variety of features and options.

Once you’ve selected your enterprise 2.0 software, create a roadmap so that your adoption is a fluid process.

The Adoption Strategy:

Here are six areas to focus on according to industry veteran and Socialtext, CCO Michael Idinopulos.

1.      Make sure your champion team is in place. Champions are people within your company that will eventually become your triggers to user engagement. Choose champions that represent different aspects of your company, are team leaders, or who are passionate about being part of a project that will be highly visible. Since this is a huge but very rewarding venture, these people can streamline the process when each has a defined task.

2.      Launch with a bang and replace your intranet with a vibrant social dashboard. This opening page can house everything including all company forms, new hire info, suggestion boxes, competitive intelligence, calendar events, C-level blogs, the company directory and more bringing accessibility to information one click away.

3.      Create engagement with hands-on activities for new users. The first could be filling in their profile with personal info, photos, professional experiences, areas of expertise, interests and more. These profiles can identify potential project members with specific skill sets or interests. It can also replace the company directory as a more dynamic social profile and communications platform.

4.      Focus on ongoing activities. Practice makes perfect and shifting daily routines to the social intranet will help users ease into usage where they’ll be social without even knowing it. Suggestions include, sharing company news via microblogging (signals); posting interesting articles and useful materials through the activity stream; posting meeting agendas and notes prior to the meeting; taking notes live directly in the wiki; and creating Q&A forums about products, services, processes and more.

5.      Integrate existing systems of record into the flow of work. A social enterprise platform should allow you to pull information from third party applications and external websites as well as build proprietary widgets that tie into your own internal systems. Using APIs to enable custom integration that automatically imports data to wiki pages from internal systems of records such as your company directory, company intranet, document management systems (Sharepoint, RSS feeds), CRM systems and even email, will automatically increase adoption.

6.      Leverage the community by bringing them into the conversation. Your platform should allow for an infrastructure that lets users create an active community. Take the first step by posting ideas, questions and tips that have worked for you. This would also be a good project for your champion team. Learning from your peers provides insight and knowledge that can move any organization forward into positive results.

Overall, you want to take the “stress” out of the process. With a plan in place, it’s also important to let the adoption process unfold organically. Too much too soon can overwhelm employees and slow up usage. As people determine they are benefitting, they become more engaged and usage goes up. At this point they are more open to exploring other areas within your platform. When enterprise social software is placed in the flow of work, software gets adopted. With a strong plan and team eager to embrace this challenge, you will have the confidence you need to watch your adoption go through the roof.

For a more detailed analysis of how to increase social software adoption, download our free whitepaper, 6 Steps to Drive Social Software Adoption.

The opening section of the following slides shows how social software has evolved from tools that “help individuals be more productive” to “services that let people share and discover information with almost anyone, anywhere in the world.”

This is followed by information and tips that can help promote active and ongoing use of social software tools within your organization.

One of the main tenets of social software is sharing information with your peers, and one of the most popular ways of doing that is by sharing links.  These links could point to breaking news from a popular web site, a press release from one of your competitors, a question from a customer or important business content your authoring with your team. Regardless of the topic, Socialtext makes link sharing easy, by providing a variety of tools that integrate sharing into the flow of the way you work.

Workspace Pages

When you’re reading a Socialtext workspace page that you want to share, just click the “Signal This!” action in the page’s toolbar. This will display a dialog box where you can enter any additional text that you’d like to include (ex: “Team, here is a great page about…”), choose the group you’d like to share it with and add additional attachments or tags.  When you click Post, a message will be created in the Signals stream with a link back to the workspace page.

Web Pages

So what if you’re reading a web page that is not in Socialtext?  Using the “Signal This!” bookmarklet, sharing a link to any web page via Socialtext Signals is a snap, or well a click. Just like with the Signal This! feature mentioned above, you can post the signal to everyone or to a specific Socialtext group.

To install the “Signal This!” action on your toolbar, first go to the Signals page of your Socialtext account.  Next, scroll down to the bottom of the Signals stream.  There you will see “Use the Signal This! bookmarklet to share any page on the web via Signals.“  Click on the link and follow the instructions for your browser.

Notify Colleagues About Comments or Edits

The two examples above are about sharing links to something you’re reading.  But what about a Socialtext page you’re contributing to? Well, Socialtext makes it just as easy to let people know when you’re editing a page or adding comments.  In either case, before you hit save, just click on the checkbox to “Signal this edit/comment”, choose the group you’d like to notify, and when the page is saved Socialtext will automatically post a signal with a link back to the page.

Enterprise Microblogging is a great way to share information with your team.  As you can see above, with Socialtext there is no need to copy and paste URLs or move back and forth between different tools. Sharing a link is always just a click away.  So start right now. Go on and share a link to this article with your colleagues and show them just how easy it is.