Why do so many organisations struggle to implement social media effectively for internal use? Is it because they’re seen as too costly, a fad, or a distraction from real work? Why do so many of these platforms – often predominantly designed for business use – thrive on the web but struggle for a foothold within the corporate firewall?

It appears to me that organisations try to introduce too much web 2.0 culture into these projects while continuing to have rigid expections.

The objectives for social media on the web are emergent: they are the result of uncoordinated initiatives, with the benefits only becoming apparent as the site is used. Business change on the other hand is typically vision-led: there’s a clear idea of the business benefits before work starts and these are based on evidence derived from organisational learning. Moreover, on the web, adoption of new tools is viral. Within organisations, adoption is typically enforced.

Many organisational social media projects are sold to the business by middle management, early adopters who use similar tools outside the office. They believe that because a tool is widely used externally, it will be rapidly adopted internally too. This is rarely the case. The web provides a user base that far outstrips any organisation’s and staff have more pressing priorities than trying out a new technology. Moreover, executives need a concrete business case to approve a project. Saying “Twitter’s great” simply doesn’t cut it. The differences in approach are transparent:

Promoters of social media within organisations must meet pre-agreed objectives and promote the tool from the lower rungs of the management ladder. This guarantees frustration all round: project advocates believe executives are being obstructive, but executives wonder why the project isn’t achieving its business case.

You need to shift the axis. Don’t focus on the problems social technologies will solve. Compel your staff to use them as a communications channel and find out what benefit they bring. You can reduce the risk of failure by constraining your spending, so the tool is less painful to throw away, but you need top-down leadership to drive the programme or people will just focus on their day job.

A few practical steps:

1. Choose something that’s familiar and frequently used.
   Staff need to grasp the tool’s basics quickly. If it’s overly complicated, your efforts will be invested in training rather than measuring benefits. It’s also got to be something that’s used on a daily basis. If you have a wiki on best practice, for example, it’ll get contributions for a week or two then just become forgotten about.
2. Make sure it’s throw-away.
   To prove the concept, select something cheap or hosted, with low start-up costs. And make sure that you don’t put content or data in it that’s critical to your business strategy that you then can’t get out again.
3. Don’t customise it!
   The world is littered with pilot projects that thought they knew better than the software before they’d used it, or tried to integrate it with other tools and turned into never-ending testing. Just run the technology as it is, in the simplest way possible. If it works, then consider how to improve it.
4. Engage key users.
   Your trial should certainly get the executive to put their mouth where their money is. If they lead others will follow. Your sample group of users — you weren’t going to roll it out to everyone at once were you? — should include different departments so that it’s not seen as anyone else’s “baby” when you finally roll it out.
5. It’s a trial people must follow.
   Using the new tool is not optional. Ideally, they’ll use it instead of something else, so a wiki instead of a file system, blog instead of broadcast email, micro-blog instead of instant messaging. If you think of how CRM software is typically rolled out in a business, you’ll see how important this kind of enforcement is to making adoption of the software a success.

For social media to be effective in your organisation, you can’t expect it just to be taken up by the user base. You have to drive it through. But you do need to be open-minded about what it will achieve. Hopefully, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Some further reading:

• Janetti Chon – Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Survey
• James Robertson – Implementing enterprise 2.0 in the real world
• Shawn Callahan – Collaboration consulting—fostering a collaboration culture
• Dion Hinchcliffe – 12 Rules For Bringing ‘Social’ To Your Business
• Erik Larson – The Future of Work
• Anne Berkowitch – Private Social Networks (podcast)