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I’ve Installed Connections, Now What?

Susan BullochIBM

What We’ll Cover …

• Why are you here?

• Setting the ground rules

• Engaging your users

• Lead from any chair

• Making it fun

• Wrap-up

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Engaging Your Users

• Now we are talking adoption

� How do you get users to USE the product?

• Embed the product into the company

� If your management wants to be social, do it

• Example: IBM uses BluePages

� It lists business and contact information about employees

� It has been in use for decades

� All searches for people now default to Connections – Profiles

� Data was migrated

� That’s walking the talk!

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Engaging Your Users (cont.)

• Customize the look and feel

� Add your corporate logos

• Add familiar and useful items from your existing intranet

� Then expose the new parts

� Make the components easy to find

• If you customized earlier versions of Connections:

� You’ll be re-creating the customizations

� We’re assuming you haven’t done this before

• Best practices recommendations are provided

� Link provided at the end

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Engaging Your Users (cont.)

• The easiest and fastest way to engage users

� Have your executives go first

• This only works if it is authentic

� Executives are busy; they don’t have time to blog

� Use video blogs

� Easy, fast, and popular

� Use podcasts

� Make it easy for employees to know your executives

� You will get participation

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Engaging Your Users (cont.)

• Executives need to take time to blog

� Employees will respond to executive blog postings

� It may take a while

� Make sure responses aren’t planted

� This has to be real!

� Try it

• Again, walk the talk

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Engaging Your Users (cont.)

• IBM Example

� CEO Ginny Rometty posts videos frequently

� They gets thousands of views

� She gets her message out

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Engaging Your Users (cont.)

• Engage social leaders

� Communities is a great place to build – communities

� What do users get?

� Access to other people who do similar work

� Ideas for working better

� Files or References that provide better customer service

• Hire or assign Social roles

� Consider community managers

� They manage the human side of communities

� Enable everyone to use the system

� That’s what you want, isn’t it?

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Engaging Your Users (cont.)

• Evangelize

� The term sounds dated, but you need internal cheerleaders

� IBM calls it your Brand Army

� How does this work?

� You find the people who want to use the social networks

� Preferably ones who are good at it

� And you reward them

� Employees notice this

� And more of them participate

• Before IBM had Connections, a few of us were out there blogging

� We all got extra points at review time

� No matter what our real job was

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Engaging Your Users (cont.)

• Mobilize

� The more devices you have your system on, the more it will be

used

� Connections offers apps on every mobile platform

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Engaging Your Users (cont.)

• Recapping

� Your users have to trust your system

� Or it will never work

� The executives who sponsor the “Social” campaign have

to play

� Large

� You need cheerleaders

� You can be one of them

� Other people in your company are ready to help

� Make it open, fair, and with rules everyone understands

� And rules that everyone follows

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