“The magic innovation occurs when companies go outside their four walls for ideas, help, and advocacy. The Social Business AGENDA enables you to do just that.”

Sandy Carter

“You can’t steal second base with your foot still on first.”

Ricky Henderson, NY Yankees

Case Study: IBM Global Focus on Internal Processes

Align organizational goals & culture: Many of the IBM human resource initiatives, such as work from home and a matrix reporting system, drive new sets of collaboration requirements. With a dispersed workforce in different time zones spread over 170 different countries, and 86 acquisitions in 6 years, IBM needed a new model of retaining knowledge and changing the culture for driving innovation. IBM could no longer just rely solely on a handful of research centers to keep its competitive advantage. Reducing operating costs while growing its leadership as the largest IT company required IBM to bring to bear the “collective intelligence” across different projects and people. Collaboration and technology could not get in the way of that mission.

IBM’s senior leadership saw the potential of social technology as the collaboration driver to bridge people and information. In 2007, IBM took a bold step and consolidated some social networking tools being used in research to deploy and support an enterprise social networking solution. With funding and support from the senior leadership, the technology was deployed within months. The majority of the funding was not for the software, hardware, support, or infrastructure costs. Instead, the funding went toward events and programs aimed at a cultural shift to embrace open and public knowledge sharing as the preferred method of communication. IBM established an adoption program, guidelines, training, reward programs, governance process, councils, and more to ensure this journey to become a Social Business was a success.

Along with Social Computing Guidelines and a mature governance process (which was discussed in Chapter 2, “Align Organizational Goals and Culture”), IBM’s goals and culture are crucial to its success.

Gain social trust: To generate social trust, two of the biggest traditional obstacles to collaboration were siloed ways of thinking and a traditional hierarchical organization. Driving decisions down into the organization was a mandate. For example, a major focus was decision making done at a country level, allowing business to be done a faster pace than before and showcasing IBM’s trust for its employees. Once the organization was flatter, IBMers were able to interact faster at a global level and feel empowered to do business.

Another example of social trust was the removal of moderation processes to contribute knowledge. In early experiments at IBM with social technology, IBM identified some constraints as they moderated creating community sites and content. IBM discovered that users were less likely to contribute content and knowledge if it needed prior approval before publishing. When IBM developed their Social Computing Guidelines in 2005, they opened the door to remove all requirements around moderation. IBM now had in place the appropriate terms of use to hand over authoring rights to all IBM users and trusting them to adhere to the guidelines.

Engage through experiences: The “Social Everyplace” philosophy is to drive the success and adoption of social software by integrating key social services into the existing tools that employees use every day. With this new model, IBM was able to successfully deliver key business initiatives:

• Human relations: BlueThx Awards for empowering employees to provide instant rewards to other employees, a community for World Wide First Line Manager to help employees become better managers.

• Sales: Best Practice Community used for my sales team globally for keeping the sales force up to date on the latest sales plays and best practices.

• Marketing: Access to all key presentations and marketing materials.

• CIO’s office—iPhone community: IBM does not officially support the iPhone when someone calls the 800 support number. So it used the “wisdom of the crowds” to help support the corporate initiative of “open commuting.”

• Onboarding new employees: The Women in Europe community with 23,000 members is a way for new employees to feel connected, especially when a team is probably spread across several different countries.

(Social) network your processes: According to IBM’s Senior Vice President, Steve Mills, internally embedding social into its processes help to”harness our collective intelligence across IBM and ultimately across our eco-system.” This is most prevalent with IBM’s global sales force. With IBM’s sales force alignment around industries, IBM put a plan in place in 2008 to launch IndustrySpace communities, where employees from hardware, software, and services could come together and have an open dialogue on solutions and trends related to that industry.

In 2009, IBM launched a social networking platform in the cloud for sellers to now better communicate and collaborate with their customers. Sending of email attachments has now been replace with secure communities in the cloud where an IBM seller can have private communications—file sharing, web conferencing, instant messaging, and more—through restricted communities. The best part is that IBM sellers can invite their customers to collaborate in the cloud at no additional cost.

Design for reputation and risk management: IBM’s “Corporate Memory” is critical to success and, for a company that just celebrated 100 years, is important for historical measures. In 2010, IBM was preparing for its centennial in June 2011. The charter group was reviewing how to best promote this historic event. They decided that they should leverage the 400,000 plus IBM employees to help spread the news and promote IBM’s brand and accomplishments over the last 100 years. The most effective way to do this was through the use of social media and social networks. As you can imagine, there was some hesitance on turning loose the entire IBM employee population on external social media websites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to become brand advocates. For IBM to protect their employees, company, and brand, it needed to update some processes and ensure proper enablement of these external tools. IBM established a Social Business @ IBM website for employees to learn how to set up accounts and best leverage external social media websites.

IBM also set up a consumer insights tool that allowed people from marketing, communications, and public relations to monitor all social media related to IBM on these external sites. This allowed them to zone in on certain topics or people to promote positive content or get a plan in place to control the distribution of negative content.

Analyze your data: IBM employees generate one million page views of internal wikis and 40–50 million instant messages per day. And there are more than 73,000 internal blogs and wikis. Three out of four employees each morning open the IBM intranet w3.ibm, which has social elements embedded in it. IBM has all the web analytics and social metrics to monitor the usage of their deployment. What sets IBM aside from many others is their deep content analytics to categorize the information in near real time to better understand more advanced insights, including sentiment analytics, usage patterns by geo/division, emerging topics, and most linked pages, and visualize over time how networks of people are forming and information is flowing throughout IBM.

Sample AGENDA: Avery Dennison

Avery Dennison is a diversified manufacturing and consumer products company whose pioneering technologies are an integral part of products found in virtually every major industry around the globe. It has more than 30,000 employees in 60 countries. Avery Dennison began to introduce internal social networking in the fall of 2009, shortly before launching the company’s first employee intranet portal and an expanded set of internal social tools in January 2010.

Align corporate goals and culture: Early in 2010, Avery Dennison announced a new vision for the company: to make every brand more inspiring and the world more intelligent. To make this vision a reality, employees around the world needed better ways to share information and ideas and collaborate more easily across geographic, business, and functional boundaries. This provided a strong business case for investing in the portal and social tools.

Gain social trust: Before launch, a team of social networking advocates developed a set of internal social networking guidelines that connected how to use these tools with the company’s values. The guidelines were written in plain English to make it easy for employees to understand the “rules of the road.” The company was committed to providing guidance and trusting employees to do the right thing.

Avery Dennison continued to build social trust in a couple of ways. First, employees control the content on the social tools themselves with very few restrictions. Any employee can start a community or a blog, comment on content, upload, download, and share information. The employee is in the driver’s seat. Second, the social networking guidelines do not limit employees to work-related activities. This allows them to build more collaborative work relationships by getting to know each other in a more personal way, as long as they follow the guidelines and relevant policies.

For Avery Dennison employees, social isn’t just social anymore; the social tools are becoming part of how people do their jobs. Through the online collaborative tools, they can create virtual workspaces to connect with colleagues and information anytime, anywhere.

Avery Dennison Chief Information Officer Rich Hoffman is a strong proponent: “Employees are talking among themselves. They’re sharing and offering ideas, and debating them across time zones, functions, and business boundaries. When they talk about ‘nonwork’ subjects, it’s mainly about health—which is highly relevant to work.”

Engage through experience: In order to get employees to use these new tools, Avery Dennison focused on building personal experiences for employees related to the work they have to do. At launch, in addition to a series of electronic communications and traditional print methods, a global team of advocates helped introduce the tools to their colleagues in building-specific events. This provided much-needed one-on-one encouragement and support for initial login.

Many employees were intimidated by the new tools and not sure how, why, or when to use them. To combat this initial reluctance, the company offered in-depth training sessions to key user groups (admins, project teams, leaders, etc.) and developed a series of self-help and marketing materials based on real-life use cases and best practices from within the company. Employees continue to share tips, questions, and success stories online, making the transition to these tools even easier for others and providing valuable feedback for improvements to the user experience.

By seeding initial content and providing encouragement and guidance to those people already eager to use the tools, Avery Dennison has seen use of the tools increase steadily.

(Social) network your processes: One key to increasing use of the internal social tools was to ensure that employees would find valuable information and contacts. All internal documentation and processes can now have a social component, allowing for the best and most current information and ideas to be shared, updates to happen when they’re needed, and employees to always have access to the most up-to-date version.

For example, a profile tool goes beyond the employee directory, helping employees find others who have a specific expertise using a tagging feature. Wikis make policy manuals easy to update and easy for employees to search. The Dictionary of Abbreviations and Acronyms wiki takes the mystery out of the company’s “unique language.” One of the most popular communities gives employees a place to share best practices and success stories on LEAN manufacturing and Six Sigma. There, they also ask questions and discuss key topics in a discussion forum.

Design for reputation and risk management: Avery Dennison has a clear set of guidelines in place for using internal social tools, and requires that employees read and acknowledge these guidelines and relevant policies before they can use the tools. Feedback and “inappropriate content” options ensure that employees can flag any issues, and the company has a process in place to manage any issues. At this time, the intranet portal and social tools are restricted to employees only, minimizing risk to the company’s confidential information.

Analyze your data: Because the tools are so new to the organization, a weekly email summarizes the latest news, dramatically increasing readership of key stories after each distribution. Direct user feedback, focus groups, and periodic survey work also contribute to drawing a clear picture of how useful the tools have become to the organization. This analysis directs focus areas for improvement.

In addition, the company looks beyond the basic usage statistics to measure adoption. The social tools themselves offer easy access to what’s on employees’ minds via their blogs, comments, and other public activity; provide insight to trends; help identify internal brand advocates; and help measure communication outcomes.

Results to date: In a very short time, Avery Dennison has transformed how it communicates with employees. In tandem with sharing more consistent and clear messages with employees via the portal, the company is using the social tools to elevate employees’ voices and enable collaboration, excellence, and innovation. Communication has shifted from one- and two-way to fully networked.

Within 12 months, about 90% of employees with PCs had signed on to the portal, and more than two-thirds of users had used one or more of the social tools. Activity continues strong with more than 500 blogs, 850 different communities, and thousands of bookmarked sites, among the most impressive statistics.

Employee feedback has been passionate and strong in support of continued improvements to the tools and minimizing any barriers to their use. According to Avery Dennison Chairman, President, and CEO Dean Scarborough,

“These tools are truly empowering employees. With the combination of the new vision and strategy and these tools, we’re seeing higher levels of employee engagement. We are empowering our employees, unleashing their creativity and supporting their desire to make a difference for our customers.”

Sample AGENDA: BASF Germany

BASF is the world’s leading chemical company. With about 109,000 employees, six Verbund sites, and close to 385 production sites worldwide, they serve customers and partners in almost all countries of the world. In 2010, BASF did over €63 million in sales.

Align corporate goals and culture: BASF goals and culture are focused on achieving value-adding growth. Four strategic goals (see Figure 9.1) are the foundation for their goals:

• We earn a premium on our cost of capital

• We help our customers to be more successful

• We form the best team in the industry

• We ensure sustainable development

Figure 9.1 BASF goals and cultural change

Dr. C.C. Liew and the team (BASF SE) K. Torts & T. DeSchufther (BASF, IT Services), September 10, 2010, Amsterdam.

At BASF they carefully focused on their culture to ensure that these goals were possible in the transformation beginning with their Social Business Governance model (see Figure 9.2).

Figure 9.2 BASF Social Business Governance board

Gain social trust: For BASF to better align with their goals, they needed to build upon their employees’ trust. Trust in each other was going to be a key driver in achieving these goals. BASF was working toward a fully connected company by trying to move away from the traditional hierarchical mode of teams to an ever-growing network of formal and informal communities. In May of 2010, they launched an internal social platform based on IBM technology they called connect.BASF to network employees across units regions.

Engage through experience: To get the employees to engage while increasing knowledge sharing and collaboration, connect.BASF offered a variety of easy-to-use and initiative social capabilities including these:

• Profiles: Employees could present themselves and be visible.

• Communities: Employees could build up and strengthen network ties.

• Tags and Search: Employees could find experts and information.

• Blogs, Bookmarks, Forums: Employees could share knowledge and experiences.

• Files: Employees could work together across units.

• Wikis: Employees could collaborate and gain access to collective knowledge.

(Social) network your processes: For connect.BASF to launch, there was a series of processes that need to be created and updated. The three main processes that had to be reviewed were the legal provisions, workers’ councils, and some existing workflows. BASF had to create a registration process where employees would have to agree to Terms of Usage and then request that a profile be created. A deregistration process was also created for users who wanted to be removed.

Design for reputation and risk management: BASF developed a steering committee prior to the launch made up of members from Marketing, Sales, Communications, Research, IT Implementation, IT Project Management, IT Architecture, and Change Management. Since they went live in May, BASF has an ongoing team to support connect.BASF that they call the Sounding Board. The Sounding Board consists of a global community issue manager, North American community manager, Asia Pacific community manager, South American community manager, governance manager, application owner, and global community content manager.

Analyze your data: Since connect.BASF requires users to register to gain access to the social platform, a good measurement for them was keeping track of the number of users. In the first two months, connect.BASF had more than 8,000 users, of which about 2,000 had already uploaded a photo. After only eight months, there were more than 18,000 registered users. North America has the largest percentage of users at about 30%, followed by Ludwigshafen at about 22%. There have been more than 1,200 total communities created in the first eight months (see Figure 9.3).

Figure 9.3 BASF progress

Results to date: BASF has been conducting interviews and collecting internal case studies to understand the value of connect.BASF to their corporate goals. In one example, a marketing manager had posted a status update on his profile stating, “Evaluating market information on detergents.” An information professional saw the status update and posted a response on his board to a new study. Not only did the marketing manager find it helpful, but one of their colleagues, a key account manager, then discovered it.

Another example of connect.BASF success in connecting people and sharing information was a blog that complemented the communication on BASF’s employee donation campaign for Pakistan flood relief. The blog allowed employees to follow the amount of donations collected. The general manager of BASF Pakistan commented on the blog, which triggered an overwhelming response. As a result, BASF was the second-largest corporate donor to the Central Emergency Response Fund.

Sample AGENDA: Cars.com

Cars.com is a top destination for automotive that delivers a comprehensive suite of tools and information to help buyers form opinions on what to buy, where to buy, and how much to pay for a car, and to help sellers connect with in-market car shoppers. They are a $400 million business and they began their Social Business journey a few years ago.

Align corporate goals and culture: Cars.com developed a set of social media guidelines to free their employees to be brand advocates for the Cars.com brand. Their liberal Social Business policy was designed to encourage employee participation. As a pure-play Internet site for automotive shopping content and classifieds, a Social Business AGENDA seems like second nature at Cars.com and the attitude and culture reflect a belief in its power.

Gain social trust: At Cars.com, they focused on social trust in a few ways. They focused on understanding their clients and fans and learned that buyers wanted someone to advise them on what to buy, both trusted editorial experts and peer opinions. This understanding led to a focus on professional reviews, blogs, reader conversations, and consumer vehicle reviews. Since their goal was to engage in the world of word of mouth, which is one of the top influencers of automotive purchase decisions, their trust strategy is less about promotion and more about enabling consumers to leverage social networks at the same time they’re using Cars.com (see Figure 9.4).

Figure 9.4 Cars.com leveraging social networks and promoting their own site

Engage through experience: Cars.com has a number of interactive engagement techniques. One example that fit with their goals and their social trust focus was to engage dealers. They proposed to allow consumers to review their dealership experiences on the site, an undertaking not without risk since dealers drive a large portion of the site’s ad revenue. While the benefit was clear to car shoppers, Cars.com was able to demonstrate dealer opportunity as well. The interactive dealer review system encourages high engagement with dealer customers who now use the site to manage their online reputation. In addition to helping consumers find dealers, these reviews also help Cars.com dealers address potential problems in their sales processes.

In addition, Cars.com has watched other companies in their space experiment with direct Facebook applications and features, but results so far have been marginal. They have found that community is a limited concept in the mainstream automovtive vspace. In-market car shoppers are not looking for persistent relationships around a shopping process that usually happens once every three years or so. Cars.com’s culture has encouraged experimentation and the capturing of learning.

According to Bill Swislow, Cars.com’s CIO and Senior Vice President of Product, they are still working on their integrated approach to Social Business. Today, Cars.com has a collection of strategies and tactics that are very well-suited for certain purposes and certain audiences, but not for everything and not one size fits all. This is a journey.

(Social) network your processes: Cars.com is leveraging social internally to collaborate for innovation. They have Cars Connections, a platform of blogs, wikis, and communities that facilitates social connection within the company. The most popular of these include communities around business intelligence, agile development, and sales success. Teams rely on these collaboration tools on a daily basis to manage projects and share best practices.

Design for reputation and risk management: Cars.com monitors its reputation and prepares for issues that come up in the blogosphere.

Analyze your data: Cars.com has included social analytics with their existing analytics. This additional source of insight into user interests and behavior brought new tools into their portfolio and leveraged existing platforms that include Omniture, proprietary logging, Net Promoter surveys, online user testing, SEO, and internal search analysis to understand interests, and comprehensive inventory keywords helped to guide Cars.com’s focus.

Results to date: While Cars.com is still in the early phases of social adoption and tracking, the company’s exploratory approach and willingness to embrace social content and collaboration are driving positive results. Internally, employees are empowered to share opinions and build knowledge. Cars Connections is effectively driving knowledge sharing across teams and geographies, and building a culture where all employees have a voice and a platform on which to share knowledge and expertise.

Consumer-generated content in the form of vehicle and dealer reviews is also being embraced. In the case of Dealer Reviews, more than 30% of Cars.com’s dealer base opted-in for the product’s beta period, the site is steadily building its review base, and traffic to consumer-review content is increasing.

The site also has an active social following. With more than 40,000 Facebook fans and more than 10,000 Twitter followers across the company’s handles, the site has the largest social following in its category. Through these channels, the company is effectively driving opinions of key influencers and better engaging automotive enthusiasts and brand advocates.

Sample AGENDA: Celestica

Celestica is a Toronto, Canada–based global electronics manufacturer and end-to-end product life-cycle services provider with over $6.5 billion in revenue and 35,000 employees around the world. It provides design, manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, and after-market services to a wide range of customers in enterprise computing, communications, aerospace and defense, industrial and green technology, communications, and healthcare. Celestica started its Social Business journey in 2009.

When I went to their headquarters in Canada, the first thing I noticed was all the banners around the corporation on going social with their new Social Business Platform.

Align corporate goals and culture: Celestica is highly regarded for its engineering and supply-chain excellence, and its business strategy is to become the undisputed leader in the electronics manufacturing services industry. To achieve its goal, the company must effectively leverage innovation and best practices created at each of its 30-plus locations and share them across a vast global operating network. To do this, Celestica realized that it needed to provide employees with the right collaborative tools to communicate with each other and drive innovation across multiple locations, functions, and businesses.

In support of this goal, Celestica launched Operations Central in 2009, which enables shop-floor employees with self-service capability to exchange ideas and connect with experts to share solutions and ideas. In early 2010, Celestica established a Collaboration Council, with the goal of driving more collaborative behaviors across the organization, realizing that effective collaboration tools need to be supported by processes that also encourage a collaborative culture. Inspired by the success of Operations Central, Celestica then launched Connections in 2011, which links employees across the entire organization to drive collaboration from within.

Sometimes referred to internally as the “Facebook for business,” Connections is a collaboration tool that allows employees to more easily connect with each other across the company’s 30-plus locations in 14 countries. Employees use Connections to collaborate on global projects by using wikis to share requirements and project plans, greatly reducing the need for lengthy conference calls across time zones. Connections is also credited with speeding up development cycles and increasing product release frequencies.

Gain social trust: Celestica recognized that the key to social media momentum in a business setting is to build trust, whether it’s sharing best practices openly within the enterprise or creating communities for people with common interests.

Engage through experience: Operations Central is a repository for engineers and production-line operators worldwide to share best practices and learn from one another. It was quickly embraced by employees, and within a couple of weeks, there were already 100 best practices shared.

For Connections, engagement goes beyond day-to-day business. For example, the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck the northern region of Japan in March 2011 affected Celestica’s operations. A Connections community, called “Lending a Hand to Japan,” was established for employees across Celestica’s global network to leave words of encouragement and support for affected co-workers. Employees from all levels of the organization visited the community often. Ten days after the disaster had struck, a local employee posted a note to the forum: “Today, all employees are able to come to the site. Many thanks for your ongoing wishes of support.” The company’s CEO quickly replied to the posting: “We celebrate today as a new beginning in our journey together.”

(Social) network your processes: Celestica focused first on the process of collaboration across the lines of business and across the globe. This process of ideation, or of idea generation, is the first place that social has been embedded into the workflow of the company.

Design for reputation and risk management: Members of Celestica’s Collaboration Council, as well as the company’s compliance team, regularly monitor the Connections and Operations Central communities globally to ensure that they are being leveraged for business purposes and are within the boundaries of the company’s Business Conduct Governance policies.

Analyze your data: Celestica tracks the most active locations and communities to understand what topics and actions drive the most activity.

Results to date: Celestica has connected a majority of its 20,000-plus production employees since the launch of Operations Central. The Connections tool is also gaining momentum as employees across the organization build their personal profiles and begin sharing ideas and solutions with their colleagues. Between the two collaboration tools, thousands of best practices have been shared and adopted that have resulted in significant cost benefits.

Sample AGENDA: Global Company—IBM India

India is forecasted to have the fourth-largest number of social networking users after China, the U.S., and Brazil by 2014 (source: Datamonitor). Seventy-nine percent of online users were blog readers and 78% had created and managed a social network profile in 2009. In addition, technology products ranked in the top-three products researched and purchased online (source: eMarketer.com). Indian bloggers are the most prolific, posting new material more than five times a week on average, compared to three times a week overall (source: Pulse Group).

Align corporate goals and culture: IBM Software Group, India/South Asia, decided to capitalize on these trends and its access to the local India Software Lab Experts to launch a digital influence program to increase mindshare and conversations about IBM Software. The objective was threefold:

1. To monitor, capture, and analyze relevant conversations taking place in online social media communities to glean actionable insights around Software

2. To make the “Smarter Software for a Smarter Planet” campaign messaging more relevant and impactful for the Indian audience

3. To gather evidence, analysis, and insights about topics, domains, influencers, and events to draw a sustainable digital influence strategy

Engage through experience: Instead of treating this as a one-time tactic, we launched an “always-on” digital listening and influence framework with the following steps:

1. Conducted a 30-day brand audit/listening exercise to understand the brand perception of the IBM software brands among the target audience.

2. Shared the findings of the listening report with the Senior IBM Software Lab Leadership team and identified a set of subject matter experts (SME) from the Lab who would be trained and motivated to participate and contribute in relevant forums/media to increase share of voice for IBM Software and its brands.

3. “Unleashed” the Lab SMEs to serve as brand “ambassadors” and reputation managers. Some of them would ultimately end up as “go-to experts” to interact with media, write articles, and so on.

4. Continuously monitored the brand through follow-up listening exercises and brand audits.

The listening exercise was an eye-opener for us because most conversations were neutral to IBM and were mostly centered around individual software brands, which meant that specific audiences associated with specific brands and not IBM Software overall. A few of these brand conversations primarily related to technical aspects of the products, practice tests or exams, certifications and jobs rather than overall brand benefits, capabilities, and attributes. Two of the largest IBM Software sub-brands surprisingly had hardly any conversations. Further analysis of the quality of influencers and content revealed an absence of posts related to IT managers, CIOs, and senior developers/architects. Finally, there were only a handful of existing technology bloggers with a prominent following in the Indian context.

Engage through experience: We then set out to enable, empower, and engage our digital brand ambassadors through a series of “blogferences.” A blogference is a conference where the participants learn by doing—in this case, learn by blogging! We armed them with specific keywords where we needed them to generate some thought leadership through new blogs and also drove them to specific forums where there were already conversations about their area of expertise. We monitored the frequency of postings and held quarterly recognition for the most active bloggers.

(Social) network your processes: This example in the IBM India plan is about socially enabling the marketing process. The team changed the way they showcased their subject matter expertise, the way they created new leads through leveraging these communities in their local events in the regions, and the way they progressed the marketing leads by leveraging word of mouth to build trust in the IBM product set and its applicability in the Indian market. The next step will be to socially enable their sales process, with a pilot already in place around LinkedIn.

Design for reputation and risk management: Virginia Sharma, the Vice President of Marketing for IBM India, commented, “Recognizing that the clients of India were now my marketing department, I decided to get them ‘on my team’ from day one and include them in my strategy and execution.” Her focus throughout was on IBM’s reputation. The design of the “Unleash” the Lab subject matter experts was to raise IBM’s reputation in the region. These SMEs served as brand ambassadors and reputation managers. The value of this focus on reputation management enabled the team to be the “go-to experts” to interact with media, write articles, and beyond.

In addition, the team had developed a plan ahead of time in case any issues came up that threatened IBM’s reputation. This proactive planning enabled them to be nimble in their response.

Analyze your data: We recruited more than 60 SMEs from the IBM Software Group to participate in social media. They produced more than 200 blog entries in 2010. These SMEs helped IBM India to gain share of voice from 0% to 14% around software conversations in digital social spaces. We set a worldwide best practice for managing these SMEs with team leads and then recognizing and rewarding the SMEs for their contributions:

• From an average of 84 mentions of the brand (or sub-brands) to an average of roughly 2,010 between June and December 2010.

• From IBM being ranked #3 to being ranked #2 in India-specific content created and brand mentioned or discussed in the social space

• From having no communities to having 10 communities that are India-specific across social media channels.

• From having no business members (only IT) to having more than 300!

• From having no C-level executive contacts to having more than 300 C Suite members of communities.

Sample AGENDA: Global Company—Sogeti, France

Sogeti is an IT service provider with more than 20,000 people in 15 countries based in France. They embraced social media in many small steps, with local initiatives going back as far as the late 1990s.

Align corporate goals and culture: In 2007, the Sogeti board of directors initiated a broad initiative to stimulate bottom-up innovation, the exchange of ideas, and increased bonding between employees. For Sogeti as a service provider with many employees spending their days working from clients’ offices, bonding and knowledge exchange are both important and challenging. Responding quickly to clients’ requests is part of Sogeti’s core business.

After starting with strategic discussions, an innovation jam was held—a massive brainstorm where all employees were invited to share their ideas and opinions. Not surprisingly, many of the ideas revolved around applying social media inside Sogeti. The innovation jam kicked off broader discussions about culture, innovation, and the balance between top-down and bottom-up initiatives. Also, a Sogeti internal social collaborative space was launched.

Gain social trust: The whole initiative was one of transparency: all workshops, activities, and progress were made visible and open for discussion. The workspace was called TeamPark.

Once the social collaborative space was made available, the people who were already most active in the public social media space (see Figure 9.5) were invited to become VIP early adopters. They served as the catalysts for change, bringing content, ideas, and, through networking, broader adoption.

Figure 9.5 A sample set of public communities: TeamPark

The corporate social space was one where private topics were explicitly allowed: the content was in no way restricted or steered and anyone has total freedom to create. Besides the business communities, more personal communities were started on topics ranging from “Japanese language” to “diving” and “vacations.”

Engage through experience: There were almost no straightforward training sessions to teach these new tools, but instead there were “life hacking” workshops, where participants were encouraged to look for ways to optimize their workday: how to move activities out of email to a more productive and engaging environment, how to save time by finding the right resource/person quickly, new ways to deliver something to a client. A lot of experimentation was encouraged. The support team highlights initiatives that have good potential and helps to make connections where they aren’t made organically.

(Social) network your processes: People from across the company are finding each other using the network to work on a proposal or find the solution to a problem. More interestingly, peers who are interested in similar innovations also start to connect, first casually, but over time they evolve into true solution development teams, crafting new commercial solutions for the company. The fact that for the first time people from, for example, U.S., France, Netherlands, and Sweden could collaborate in the same space was extremely valuable in itself. After initial hesitation, the functional entities such as HR, Finance, Legal, or even Sales are now starting to find that being connected to their (international) peers makes sense, both for the company and for personal efficiency.

Design for reputation and risk management: The legal team was involved early in the process to think through both the international dimensions of social media (try creating a legal framework for privacy that works across Europe, the U.S., and Asia). Also, the company ethics team was engaged to act as the review board for escalations: Whenever someone reports something that happens in the social space, it is reviewed against the code of conduct. The code of conduct allows for much, but tells people to “act smart.”

Analyze your data: Sogeti is tracking progress on many levels, with critical followers at all levels reviewing progress and continuously questioning every new investment for expected value. Primary measurements are around adoption (number and type of users), activities (what kind of content is created), and trends. On top of that is the qualitative review, tracking examples of success: a new service that was defined, a client request that was quickly addressed, or an expert who could be located quickly when needed. Finally, after more time has passed, the yearly employee survey should show improvement in how employees experience the Sogeti culture: hopefully with increased transparency, employee engagement, and better retention.

Results to date: New services have been defined and created, functional communities have seen a decline in email and improved exchange of information, and blogs are starting to share the hard-to-capture knowledge of the professionals. Without a doubt, the results are positive, though in many discussions it still proves extremely hard to translate this back into dollars: A culture of bottom-up innovation and knowledge exchange? Priceless!