Social – To The Point

I am delighted to be invited to speak at the Yammer user group in London.

The Yammer user group is an open community that gathers every month to share information and knowledge around Yammer and Enterprise social in general.

On 16th October my presentation is “The rise of enterprise social”

Social networks are embedded in our daily live. More than 1.5 billion accounts exist in one site or another. Businesses are trying to catch up with this rise and trying to benefit from social networks to increase business value. This session we will discuss ideas on how business can adopt enterprise social, benefit from it and obstacles against the adoption.

The event is free and open to anyone to attend. Please register on Eventbrite

I attended yesterday the SMiLE (Social Media in Large Enterprise) London event; this is my second time. It is one of my favourite events in London.

The event is organised by simply-communicate, and its focus is sharing success stories from many enterprise that has been through building a social platform. What I love in this event that it is technology agnostic; the focus is not the technology, but the journey, hurdles, challenges, and lastly how technology helped.

I am sharing here my notes from the event.

Simply-communicate has conducted a survey on some its clients on who is using internal social media

80% replied Yes

13% replied No

7% replied thinking about

Gartner believes 80% of social media initiative are failing because of Lack of leadership support and too much emphasis on technology (according to @silviacambie).

Organisation started to move away from discussing adoption issues, to finding business solution and uses cases to illustrate success stories to drive social solutions.

Dave Shepherd from Barclays shared his experience in developing My Zone a social mobile phone app for the frontline staff.

Why an app? Frontline staff didn’t have emails; the app was their only voice in the business.

News is news; it is boring! Barclays app didn’t pick up when it was focusing on news.

Barclays app picked up when they shared the new uniform and asked staff to provide feedback.

Barclays encouraged staff to publish videos they shoot themselves.

#internalcomms changing to be “Pull from peers rather than push from central comms team”.

There is general bad perception in the room that IT is slowing innovation and source of problems and excuses to stop new initiatives.

Grant Thornton

Doing too much at once doesn’t work.

Senior leaders who are active on social media externally embraced it internally.

Grant Thornton used its social platform to broadcast what is happening in the yearly conference to the rest of employees. People were sitting at home can interact with the leadership team in the conference.

Enterprises need to move beyond digital coffee maker, focus on business use for enterprise social network.

Intranet became thinner and thinner.

Social intranet grows organically

Tools (the technology) are converging, and the problem is the culture and what the users can do with the technology, not the technology itself.

You need advocates and champions for your social platform to support and evangelise it.

Check tweets from the event on #SMiLELondon and #SMiLELondon and beAppy 2014 · Storify