How to Beat the Social Software Adoption Blues

Does social software adoption have you singing the blues? If so, you're not alone.

In the enterprise social software world, everyone's talking about adoption. There are breakouts on it at Enterprise 2.0. Lots of smart people are blogging about it. There's LinkedIn forum. There's even a whole Council dedicated to social software adoption.

Why is adoption such an issue?

The standard response is to blame organizational culture. Eavesdrop on adoption conversations and you'll hear things like this

• "Corporations incentivize for knowledge-hoarding."
• "People over 30 just don't get social networking."
• "Workers aren't comfortable with transparency."
• "We have a culture of email that's hard to change."

To borrow a phrase from always-quotable Dennis Howlett: What a crock.

To borrow another phrase from the also-quotable Pogo: We have met the enemy and he is us.

Social software adoption becomes an issue when companies impose their own barriers to adoption. Not cultural barriers, but operational barriers. They sabotage their own social software aspirations by making the tools available in ways that are guaranteed to frustrated all but the most determined users.

As I'm fond of saying: enterprise social software gets adopted when it's placed in the flow of work, rather than above the flow of work.

Most enterprise social software tools live very much outside the flow of work. It's almost as though the company is trying to keep them as far away from the flow of work as possible. I'm not talking about complex workflows or business process engineering. I'm talking about dead-simple, nuts-and-bolts usability barriers that stand between a typical employee and enterprise social software adoption. Take a clear-eyed look at most social software implementations and you will likely find that:

• It's yet another place to go for information
• It's not required to get any job done
• It requires an additional login and password
• It's positioned as a pilot, so everyone sees it as temporary

Given these barriers, it's no wonder companies are disappointed with enterprise social software adoption. It's almost as though they're going out of their way to prevent their employees from using social software as a real work tool. It's like they've invited their company to a fantastic party with great food, fantastic drinks, and a killer band. But they're throwing the party miles away from the office in a place no one has heard of. They're not providing transportation, and nobody has a map. No wonder people aren't coming.

If your social software implementation isn't getting widespread adoption, ask yourself which of these applies. You'll probably find that at least half of them do. Don't be surprised if they all do.

The good news is that these things are pretty easy to change. They're not big, abstruse, concepts like culture, psychology, generational mindsets. They are straightforward implementation decisions, many of which may be under your control.

Let's get specific. 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.

Companies that follow these steps are doing everything they can to drive their employees to social software, rather than away from it. The results are striking. I predict--and this is probably conservative--that you'll see a 2x - 5x increase in adoption when you implement these changes.

So which category are you in? Are you driving employees to social software, or are you driving them away?

Comments

[Emanuele]

Hi Michael,
thanks for the post.

I believe that adoption cannot and shouldn't be reduced to a matter of IT or even process integration.
While framing social software in the flow is a key strategy to connect the initiative to existing practices and business value, I think that our efforts shouldn't be finalized to adopting tools but to spread improved/more efficient ways of working.

If Enterprise 2.0 is at the end targeted to an effective change management, other than removing IT barriers, connecting to the intranet or better positioning the project, we need to overcome people connected barriers by focusing on their needs. This can be done first of all proving the personal and organization value that the project has, while actively involving employees in co-designing the solution. In a word empowering the workforce to make a difference in the future of the company. This often requires building trust, new leadership and management models, new incentivation systems, etc while the platform is simply an enabler of this quite deeper evolution.

Just my 2 cents,
Emanuele

[Diego]

Hi Michael, hi Emanuele,
I think the consideration of driving adoption through the integration of social tools in the flow of work could eventually help us achieve the cultural shifting and education needed "to empowering workforce to make a difference in the future of the company", don't it?
In workplace we find often resistance coming by people who aren't able to modify their working habits for integrating the social tools we put at their disposal because they can't see the real value of such tools.
So, I think it could be a potential win strategy to integrate tools in the day-by-day work processes to let people start using them and then build the cultural education and shiting needed.

D.

[Chris]

I'm squarely in Michael's camp and am growing weary of the perspective reflected by Emanuele and many others.

Culture changes, value propositions, empowerment--it all sounds good until the rubber meets the road and people have to muddle through unusable, seemingly useless web sites that look and function like they were built in 2002 with no real way to provide a fertile ground for social connection.

Get the tool right and people can use it in a culture that embraces social sharing, collaboration, and everything else. But if it's left to people with their heads in the clouds that the tool & technology is secondary as long as the attitude & culture is there, I'm seeing it firsthand they're simply kidding themselves.

[Nigel Danson]

Great article - agree so much we the best adoption solution is to make it your intranet