On Wednesday Sequel Group sponsored the latest SMiLE, that’s Social Media in Large Enterprise, London event, run by Simply Communicate. A busy day filled with presentations and table discussions, it was great to see such a mix of presenters and so many enthusiastic communicators.
Some of our key thoughts and takeaways from the day
Rolling out an ESN
- Let people tell you what they need – then make it happen. Don’t go with what you think they want.
- Having champions of the platform inside your organisation to help encourage were a common theme for helping with ESN roll out
- Reward people who show the way (your advocates) online and share information.
Getting senior buy-in
- When getting senior buy-in for ESNs, two challenges to be aware of being concerns are worries a) about chattering (i.e. employees wasting time online) and b) abusers.
- Some points to highlight in reply, to help with that senior buy-in, are:
– People are talking anyway
– We can reduce email and allow people to essentially ‘work out loud’, meaning rather than sending one email asking for advice and getting 50 back to sort through, everything will be together in one space
– Employees can collaborate on one document
- Quote from Melanie Wheeler (@tweetwheeler): ‘Better to be punched in the face on Leapfrog [Xchanging’s social platform] rather than stabbed in the back on Glassdoor.’
Different types of content
- Give executives their own corner of the platform – we shouldn’t be the mouthpiece we should be the enablers of the conversations.
- Where possible link the external to the internal to drive engagement.
- There is great value in re-purposing old content, so find ways to push older content back to the top.
- Make sure you content is mixed with community generated stories and top-down content.
- Sally Young, from Financial Ombudsman, found that short bite-sized stories (with inspiration from a Twitter feed) were more engaging for their internal email newsletter On the Go.
- Adapt to your situation – when Financial Ombudsman were moving offices they changed their newsletter’s name from On the Go to On the Move.
Match to your culture
- Introducing a platform is a cultural change, not just putting in a piece of technology.
- Be aware of cultural differences between the ways that people engage and post content if you are a global organisation.
- Always work with your culture – fit the digital platform and plans to culture not the other way around.
Measurement is vital
- Analytics are the key to moving forward.
- You need to centre your analytics on people; the stats should be for the employees, and private and personal to them.
- Sharing an employees’ ranking with them means people get competitive and want to improve their scores, encouraging engagement.
- You should measure:
1) Reaction – the response to what you do online
2) Eminence – how people start to value and what they associate with what you do online.
How can you make more of SMiLE?
1) Bookmark the video to check back on
2) Network in the SMiLE Yammer Group
3) Re-live the memories with photos
4) Look at the available Simply Communicate case studies for the presenters:
5) Consider apps. There were a huge variety of app options shown at SMiLE and one is Sequel’s App:IC – www.app-ic.co.uk – a app framework that takes news from an existing site to a branded app.
