Adoption Strategy for Social Software in the Enterprise

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"Experience has shown that simply installing a wiki or blog (referred to collectively as ‘social software’) and making it available to users is not enough to encourage widespread adoption. Instead, active steps need to be taken to both foster use amongst key members of the community and to provide easily accessible support."

Following a link from one of my favorite sources for news on all things collaboration, Virtual Projects, I came across the latest news from Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText, on the use of SocialText as the enterprise wiki platform at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) to replace their intranet platform.

Specific use cases such as managing meetings, brainstorming and publishing and creating presentations collaboratively are explored in depth.

"We had to move away from a static, dead intranet," says Myrto Lazopoulou. "The wiki has allowed us to improve collaboration, communication and publication. We can cross time zones, improve the way teams works, reduce email and increase transparency."

A case study on DrKW is available in PDF here.

At the bottom of the case study is a link to a great article by Ross Mayfield, entitled "An Adoption Strategy for Social Software in the Enterprise" which is a great analysis of the business drivers for making the jump from static intranet to a more dynamic user environment.

Christian Buckley

Christian is a Microsoft Regional Director and M365 Apps & Services MVP, and an award-winning product marketer and technology evangelist, based in Silicon Slopes (Lehi), Utah. He is a startup advisor and investor, and an independent consultant providing fractional marketing and channel development services for Microsoft partners. He hosts the weekly #CollabTalk Podcast, weekly #ProjectFailureFiles series, monthly Guardians of M365 Governance (#GoM365gov) series, and the Microsoft 365 Ask-Me-Anything (#M365AMA) series.