These are just some of the issues to be addressed in tomorrow's Putting Social Media to work in your Intranet Strategy (February 26th, 2009, 12PM EST – it's free to attend but you need to reserve your spot now).

The real value of social media on the intranet are the relationships and connections that are built and enhanced for unlocking tacit knowledge and unleashing creativity and future potential. Consider the research findings of MIT¹:

• 40% of creative teams productivity is directly explained by the amount of communication they have with others to discover, gather, and internalise information.

• Employees with the most extensive digital networks are 7% more productive than their colleagues.

And yet while most social media represent simple technology (and some like discussion forums and instant messaging have been around for more than 10 years), it is new enough that most employees have little experience using it (particularly older generations) or struggle with understanding the value it represents to the business. This cultural shift or barrier is also explicit in the findings of the Intranet 2.0 Global Study (430+ organizations worldwide) where most organizations have implemented or are planning to implement social media, but few really know or understand how to make it work (or are able to convince senior management or employees of the value):

• 41% have implemented blogs, but only 11% at the enterprise level

  • Those that don't have blogs, only 11% don't plan to use them; the remainder have plans or are considering their implementation

• 46% have implemented wikis, but only 15% at the enterprise level

  • Those that don't have wikis, only 10% don't plan to use them; the remainder have plans or are considering their implementation

• 47% have implemented discussion forums, but only 20% at the enterprise level

  • Those that don't have discussion forums, only 9% don't plan to use them; the remainder have plans or are considering their implementation

Amongst the biggest barriers to implementing social media on the intranet:

• Lack of executive support (33%)

• Lack of a business case (31%)

• IT supprt (31%)

• Addressing internal policy concerns (29%)

If your executives don't understand or see the value in social media, older generation employees certainly won't flock to adopt. However, the pressure to adopt and innovate comes from the younger generation, particularly those under 40. Here in Canada, more than 90% of those under 40-years-old are on Facebook. You can imagine how eager those same employees might be to use “employee networking” and other social media tools on the corporate intranet if they were educated as to how it works, and why it's of value to them.

Leading me to the potential cost of failing to adopt social media into your intranet strategy: 39% of 18 to 24 year-old employees would consider leaving their employer if they were not allowed to access sites like Facebook and YouTube; a further 21% indicated that they would feel ‘annoyed’ by such a ban (Telindus study of 1,000 European employees).

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ATTEND THE WEBINAR: Putting Social Media to work in your Intranet Strategy (February 26th, 2009, 12PM EST – it's free to attend but you need to reserve your spot now).

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The problem however is not a technology market problem, it's a change management and cultural problem. When I ask an audience (and I nearly always ask this question of my speaking audiences) how many have gone to My Yahoo! or iGoogle and customized a home page, approximately 10% of those people raise their hands. Additionally, I can tell you that of those 10 people in a hundred, only 1 or 2 actually use those sites with regularity. The numbers for personalized intranet portals are similar, though the use rate of those that have personalized a home page is higher (additionally, the adoption rate by IT and techies is very high... but the average employee is far from a techie).

The reason for the low adoption rate is because the average user does not see any value in taking the time to learn the technology. And frankly, the usual response is, “It's too technical for me.”

“Some readers have said that "RSS" is too technical and won't be adopted by people until we call it something else,” says Kilpatrick. “As a person with no technical background, I don't buy that.”

You can forgive Kilpatrick for his naivete as he doesn't do the user and employee research that we do at Prescient Digital Media (don't get me wrong, I have no problems with writers and in fact he's a fine one. However, he doesn't have access and hands-on experience to the dozens of intranet clients and other organizations that we have access to). It is though a mixed “technical” and “cultural” barrier; though technically not hard to personalize a home page, it does require some learning and experimenting that people won't do if they 1- don't have the time, and 2- don't see the value in it because they don't understand it.

“(RSS) is interesting in that it does call out a dark truth - enterprise adoption of feed syndication tools has been lacking,” writes Mike Gotta in his blog entry Ten Reasons Why "Enterprise RSS" Has Failed To Become Mainstream. Mike underlines a number of key reasons why RSS has failed so far, not the least of which are:

• Employees may not know about feed readers and feed syndication (an awareness, education and training issue)

• Employees may be unwilling to change their behaviors to take advantage of feed readers (if they have been rolled out)

• Intranet web site owners have not made their sites "RSS friendly"

So while IT deparments are not providing the infrastructure and content owners are not making their sites RSS friendly, neither will do so until employees see and understand the value of RSS. Unfortunately, if you ask an audience of 100 communications, HR and marketing people to define RSS, maybe 3 or 4 can provide a salient answer. If management doesn't get it, employees won't get it.

There is however a silver lining: employees do understand Facebook, and other social media platforms. Once they realize that you can apply the same technology that drives Facebook “feeds” inside the organization, they'll start to see the value (approximately 90% of those under 40 in North America are now Facebook members; and its XML / RSS that is the technology that makes Facebook so outrageoulsy popular and successful).

“I think it will take about two years before we see it (RSS become mainstream) unfortunately,” says Gotta. “That said, I have always felt that feed syndication platforms constitute the backbone for social software/Enterprise 2.0 tools. This space remains one of the most critical architectural areas for enterprise strategists - it touches on everything organizations are doing with blogs, wikis, tagging and social bookmarking systems, and social networking.”

RELATED READING:

RSS the intranet

Selecting a wiki

Alternatives to intranet personalization

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