Comments on: Piloting Social Media Creates More Risk Than It Mitigates

By: Harold Jarche » Pilots or Beta?

Harold Jarche » Pilots or Beta? — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:18:26 +0000

[...] the other hand, Gartner’s Anthony Bradley says that piloting does not make sense for social media projects: This practice is not prudent for [...]

By: Simon Bostock

Simon Bostock — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:28:36 +0000

Very late to this one, which is a shame.

Piloting social media is weird. You ‘test’ it out in an organisation with everything ‘just as it will be’ after the pilot’s finished. Except the scale. As you say, it’s a critical success factor NOT a feature.

Perhaps the idea of ‘pilot’ doesn’t need to be abandoned but reframed. Pilots shouldn’t be about feasibility but about ‘pathfinders’ – history shows that the early adopters leave a lasting impression on any medium.

Community Managers would benefit from leaving their social media launches slightly half-baked: we’re settled on this, this and this – but we need the pilot to decide on these norms and these mores and these conventions.

By: Excellent advice on Piloting Social Media « Sapientia et Doctrina

Excellent advice on Piloting Social Media « Sapientia et Doctrina — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:41:09 +0000

[...] More at: http://blogs.gartner.com/anthony_bradley/2009/11/03/piloting-social-media-creates-more-risk-than-it-... [...]

By: Anthony Bradley

Anthony Bradley — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 06:15:20 +0000

Isaac, great point! I talk about a tipping point plan that has a seeding phase where the enterprise prepopulates the environment with content and courts early participants. I take a page from Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” and talk about courting mavens (subject matter experts) and connectors (people with large networks) to get them involved early in the seeding phase prior to a blitz marketing campaign.

By: Andrea Di Maio

Andrea Di Maio — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:44:07 +0000

A slightly different view, as I do believe government is different: http://bit.ly/4mfS40

By: Government Must Pilot Somebody Else’s Community Before Building Its Own

Government Must Pilot Somebody Else’s Community Before Building Its Own — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:38:32 +0000

[...] colleague Anthony Bradley has recently posted about “Piloting Social Media Creates More Risks Than It Mitigates”, where he rightly points out that: You may only get one shot at catalyzing community [...]

By: Isaac Hazard

Isaac Hazard — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:05:45 +0000

Very nice post and good points overall. I agree in principle that traditional thinking around software piloting cannot be applied to social media efforts, and largely for the reasons stated. However, i believe a different sort of piloting is essential for any online community effort.

A ‘Community Barn-Raising’ (term coined by Heather Strout, friend and former colleague) is something I recommend to all of my social media clients. The Barn-Raising starts with inviting 10-50 of your most promising potential members to an online event introducing the community platform and asking for their help in populating the site with real UGC. It then continues for 1-3 weeks to give a chance for that UGC to build organically. The Barn-Raising should always happen on a fully-baked set of tools and have a short and well defined time frame.

The principle is that when you do your general launch, you’re more likely to get solid adoption when people can see real conversations in place and are not greeted by either blank pages or obviously canned seed content.

By: uberVU - social comments

uberVU - social comments — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:06:43 +0000

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Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:19:08 +0000

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