You can see on our last post ‘Employees are Social Media Marketers, too’ that there are some steps to follow in order to get the best of Social Media use from organizations to customers. But reading the Social Computing Journal I found an old post from July 2009 called ‘Enterprise 2.0: Culture is as Culture Does’ by Hutch Carpenter, in which we can find some steps for using Social Media inside a corporation. As we’ve seen in both of the mentioned articles, Social Media tools are supposed to be used just because ‘others use them’ or ‘we have a modern company’. And applying 2.0 philosophy is more than just opening a Twitter account or a Facebook Fan Page, enterprises should get ready from inside out. Achieving strong 2.0 values and a reactive attitude should be part of the new company’s mission. For a successful 2.0 strategy, once the scope have been defined, taking a sample for the start sounds like the right step. Inside a company you should define use case, take a Social Media tool and give it a purpose, something they can’t do using any other tool. Induce them to use it, and by using the tools employees will get to know the benefits of Social Media. The evangelists are a great plan B, As Gia Lyons says, you need find inside your company people already using Social Media tools, early adopters, give them some corporate platform and encourage them to use it and share their knowledge with others. To get a higher visibility having senior management support is the key. Awareness comes by from different strategies if you have internal communication channels available and the deployment can get under the spot quickly. Mailing, the intranet, in few words: internal marketing of the tool. Lead and engage your employees, you have to encourage them to use the tools and also non enthusiastic employees. Mr Carpenter gives us some useful strategies: Removing alternatives, Storytelling, Incentives and Executive reminders. Some tips for recruiting users on experimental trials: have a Model behavior, find New use cases, search for a Senior sponsor. You will probably find some of them more suitable to your corporation, modifying employees customs and habits takes work and time. So be patient, design an strategy and follow it. Remind always to follow the 2.0 philosophy values. The final step is critical. The effectiveness of the development must be measured inside the framework of the use case you defined at the beginning of the implementation. Performance can be quantified by comparing to the tool previously used to solve the same problems or just for the results from the new tool alone. Don’t forget to listen all the employees, the most important part of the development are the users. Whether you achieved or not the expected results you can now react. Use all this new information as an input for fine-tuning the strategy, and it starts all over again.

Lucila.Campos@condiminds.com