• Just telling someone what they should not do doesn’t automatically help them understand what they should do. In cut and dry situations – the ones we’ve all been through a dozen times before – it is easy to infer that if the sign says “stay off the grass” it means we should use the paved path instead (although I do remember how that slogan was co-opted during my college years to mean something else). With social media, inferring the positive action that is desired from the negative action that is forbidden is not always so easy. Will every employee know how they can avoid violating applicable copyright laws and statutory requirements? Can they list the five signs that indicate when they are not appropriately safeguarding company assets?
• Another reason a policy written with more don’ts than do’s is problematic is the knee jerk reaction it elicits from most people. It causes the rebellious teenager in all of us to emerge, the one that screams “you just try and stop me . . . ” If you doubt this, just take your policy home, have your teenager read it and wait for the heavy sigh and eye rolling.
• Lastly, legalese confounds interpretation. It’s similar to how some people respond to math problems. Throw some some “heretofore” “affected party” and “aforementioned” statements into a document and otherwise literate people’s eyes glaze over. The language used in the social media policy needs to be precise but not stilted. Remember, in most sizable organizations, English will not be everyone’s primary language.

So what should a well-written policy look like? Here are a few tips:

If you are writing or revising your social media policy, here is a database with examples you may find useful. I hope it saves you some work.

When you are done, let me know what you come up with.

Here are a few of my observations from the case studies:

• Executive sponsorship is still a CSF. This is not news to anyone who’s ever been involved in any tech deployment that changed how people do their work (and one could argue that if the technology does not create or enable process improvement, then why are you bothering with it?). Social is bound to change who people interact with  to get their work done, so it’s essential to have a committed executive sponsor involved early on – one who has the clout to remove the organizational barriers that hamper changing calcified work practices. With social initiatives, a team of sponsors is even better. A team should be able to work process change issues in parallel instead of serially.
• Anyone can originate a social project – IT, LoB leader, team leader, project leader or senior exec. It doesn’t really matter who gets the inspiration and sets off to figure how how social tools can help people perform their work differently. What matters is having the desire to fix some collaborative work practice that people know could be done another way that is better than they are doing it today. Any person in any part of the organization can have that spark. They do, however, need to have the ability to convince others of the merit of their idea.
• Some faith is still required. As one speaker commented, “believe in the value, not the problem.” More people are familiar with social media paradigms than a year ago, or two years ago. But some aspects of social are still unfamiliar to many workers. And that smelly red herring about age being an adoption factor still persists. The speakers reinforced the point that if the “new” thing was better than the “old” thing, adoption would follow. I appreciated the distinction one speaker mentioned about the drive to deploy vs the drive to gain adoption of a new social software tool. This is not just an issue of semantics. The critical measureof success is not how many employees have “it” but how many employees use it. So if there is clarity on the positive work outcome to be achieved with social tools, then give it a go, see what happens and advertise the results.

There is much more to be said about the opportunities, as well as the risks of social media, but I’ll have to save those comments for another post. Or you could plan to come see my talk at the Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit in March. I will be presenting a new piece of research titled “Social Media Risk: It’s Not What You Think It Is.” I hope to see or hear from you then.

Also, if you would like a more detailed look at Lotusphere, check out Bill Ives’ blogs.

I’m not known for engaging in definitions debates. While it is important to be clear and accurate in one’s communication, I derive little joy from discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. What is important is not what term is used (as my friends in the mid-west say, “it don’t make no never mind”) – but clearly defining the value you expect to get from the initiative. The critical questions that need to be answered are “what do you want to achieve?” and “how will this make your target constituency’s life easier?” Both of these questions must be answered with a very high degree of specificity if the initiative will be successful. (Gartner clients may want to read my research note describing a process for doing this.)

In most cases when I talk with clients about KM, collaboration or social media, what they want to gain is similar: they want to get more benefit from the information assets inside or outside their organizations. The complication is that as the problems they are hoping to solve by applying these knowledge assets increase in complexity, so does the likelihood that the knowledge needed to solve them cannot be neatly codified.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should mention that I’ve been a member of the Boston KM Forum for more years than I care to think about. The KM Forum is ably guided by Lynda Moulton and Larry Chait. Periodically we will discuss whether a name change for the group is required. After all, KM has certainly changed a lot over the past decade. But somehow we just haven’t come up with a better term and so we stick with what we have (and then of course there would be the expense of changing all the fancy stationery (grin)). And we acknowledge that topics that fit under the KM banner include content management, learning, innovation and collaboration.

So don’t worry too much about what you call that project that aims to get more value from information assets. Instead, spend the time looking for ways to get people better connected and allow them to filter out the useful knowledge from wealth of information that surrounds them.

Question: How would you characterize your organization’s social media initiatives? 142 people answered this question.

19% – We’re trying to figure out what to do, but haven’t implemented anything yet.

23% – We’re experimenting with social media internally.

28% – We’re experimenting with social media externally.

23% – We’re well underway with a number of initiatives.

7% – We’re old pros with social media.

Question: What is the top reason your organization is investing in social media? 155 people answered this question.

36% – Strengthen customer relationships

30% – Enhance brand awareness

6% – Share information with business partners

25% – Help people find and work better with each other

3% – Meet CEO or board objectives

Question: Who is leading your social media initiatives? 168 people answered this question.

27% – Multiple lines of business

10% – Social media steering committee

18% – IT

35% – Marketing

10% – Other support orgs (PR, HR, etc.)

A quick scan of the results reveals that most attendees believe social media has applicability for their organizations and they are testing to see what it is. Initiatives remain in the hands of marketing, although more CEOs or board members are sitting up and taking notice of the strategic potential of social business. For most, social media programs are not yet guided by a steering committee.

I hope some of you will join me in Orlando for Symposium ITxpo to hear more about the impact and potential of social media as Business Gets Social.

To poke a little fun at the topic, we pulled together a top 10 list of our “favorite” statements about social media. Hopefully, you won’t recognize anything your management says about social on the list. But if you do, it’s an indication that maybe they don’t yet quite understand the upside of social. We hope this top 10 list will make you chuckle. But don’t forget that underlying every statement is a perception that needs to be dealt with.

The top 10 signals that your management just doesn’t ‘’get’’ social media are:

10. They start telling you anecdotes about how their children use social media, then start shaking their heads.

9. They get somebody to ghostwrite their blogs.

8. They ban access to social media because people will waste time or “someone might say something bad about us.”

7. They say, “Our customers are over 40, so they aren’t on Facebook or Twitter.”

6. They put a summer intern in charge of the social media ‘‘project’’.

5. They ask, “Why do I need input from social media? All the really smart people already work for us.”

4. They say, “Show me an enterprise that increased its revenue by using social communications.”

3. They don’t define the purpose, but want to try ‘‘something’’ to ‘‘see what happens’’.

2. They insist that every communication be approved before it’s posted on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, or other social networking site.

1. They think that creating a Facebook fan page is a social media strategy.

Let’s hope you don’t hear too many of the above statements in your own company, but if you do, remember that business getting social is inevitable. Educate yourself and the senior leaders in your organization about how social media is being used to enhance interactions with employees, business partners, customers, prospects and the social Web. Search out good ideas, and adapt them to make them work for you.

If you are a client, you can read the full report “Top 10 Signals That Your Management Doesn’t “Get” Social Media and What To Do About It”.

I’ll also be presenting a series of sessions on Business Gets Social at our upcoming Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, October 16-20, in Orlando . Here’s the list of the sessions I’ll be doing.

I hope to see you in Orlando next week.

• Running to catch up with consumer expectations
• Dealing with the belief that the social media cannot be controlled
• Figuring out what they should be doing on social media
• Determining which issues need to be uncovered when developing a strategy

At the end of the discussion, I asked each participant for their best practice for developing a social media strategy. Here are some of their suggestions:

• Create a really strong relationship with a respected senior executive who will carry the social initiative forward. You need someone who can articulate the opportunity of social media and deal with any  lack of understanding of the magnitude of social business.
• Decide what you want to do, then break the social media program down into initiatives that can be prioritized and timescaled. You need a quick win and killer app to build credibility.
• Social is people-centric so indentify the audience clearly. Find the point of pain that social will alleviate. Avoid all the fancy words – get to the value statements “this is how social will improve your situation” expressed as a what’s in it for me (WIIFM)
• Provide lots of support for the rollout. Pay attention to good project practices and organizational change principles.
• Put social governance in place ASAP – who will do what, who owns what channel, who determines how social will be used to support improved work practices.

I hope you find some useful nuggets in these suggests as you plow forward with your efforts. We will continue the discussion in Orlando at Symposium/IT Expo.

A more productive way to think about the disruptive opportunity of social is to explore the places were the network can be brought to bear to improve, enhance and enlighten any business activity. Processes such as customer service, R&D and supply chain can all benefit from the insight and experience of people inside and outside the organization.

The question I suggest leaders of social business initiatives ask themselves is “where can 1000 eyes be brought to bear to make the business activity run better, faster or cheaper?”

Credit: DeMarchi Media

This is the question that will lead to better results than asking whether you need a Facebook page. That decision can come later, after you’ve figured out where the 1000 eyes can best be put to use.

If you would like to discuss this or other topics related to Business Gets Social, join us for the Gartner Twitter Chat. It will take place October 4, at 3 ET on Twitter with Anthony Bradley, Elise Olding and me. Join us on Twitter and follow #GartnerChat, and hosts @BradleyAnthonyJ, @CRozwell, @EliseOlding and @Gartner_inc.

There are some situations in which offering social tools to workers will result in their spontaneous adoption. It’s rare – less than 15% of the implementations we’ve studied – but it can happen.

So the critical question becomes, under what circumstances does this unaided uptake occur? The short answer is: when it worked the last time. The organizations that have a track record of successfully letting “1000 flowers grow”with other technologies will likely see a similar response with social.

To add some meat to that bony answer, the implementations were we’ve seen workers more or less spontaneously adopt social tools are characterized by:

1. A high percentage of pioneers who are naturally curious about how new technologies can help them work better (however they specifically define better)
2. A self-directed workforce that is empowered to set goals and act on them
3. A network-centric leadership style where employees are involved in decision making
4. A management team that not just endorses the concept of collaboration but demonstrates their belief in it with their actions.

So back to scenario planning. One possible eventuality I explored in the scenario is a world in which resources are allocated to work based community interests and workers decide to participate in projects when they capture their imagination. Leaders who believe this world is a viable outcome should compare their organization to the four criteria mentioned above. Where they are lacking, they need to take action to close the gap. In most cases this will require a significant re-education of the management team and a rethinking of critical work activities.

I hope you will be able to join me at Symposium/ITxpo 2011 in Orlando to hear the rest of the scenario.

The seduction of social often plays out in the context of a social, collaboration or knowledge management program like this: some senior person says, “we need to install social app X. It will (insert your benefits statement here) for example, “we need to buy social app X because it will make use more collaborative.” The social initiative program manager buys social app X and installs it. Of course, there is no need to provide training because “nobody ever needed Facebook training.” After the initial flurry of excitement, usage gradually declines. In 9 – 12 months, no one but the hardiest tech pioneers use social app X.

It’s fascinating to see some variation of this scenario play out over and over again. The details are a little different from case to case – it may be social app Y that is deployed rather than social app X – but the results are the same.

If you’ve read my blogs or research, you know that the “provide and pray” approach does not work. Social must be focused on solving a thorny business problem and the worker at whom it’s targeted must see personal value in what the technology is offering them. So there is a big risk of failure when social is deployed for social’s sake.

But there is another dangerous risk to be reckoned with.

In many organizations, social is being championed by people who see the value in de-leveling some of the traditional corporate structure and allowing anyone to talk with anyone. But this meritocratic view also scares a management team that is classically trained and steeped in Taylor-esque approaches to work.

The big risk is that if these well-intentioned but poorly supported social experiments go forward and fail, it’s too easy for those managers to say, “see, I told you so.” Their view that social is just a waste of time is reinforced and the possibility to attempt another social experiment anytime soon is greatly reduced. In fact, experience shows that the next most will again approve a social project is two years hence, “because we all know what happened last time . . . ”

So if you are contemplating a social project, plan it well. If you have a social project that is languishing, get it back on track.

Question: How do we justify an investment in social media?

Answer: when social media initiatives are properly scoped and focused on solving real business problems, they will provide value to the organization. The key is to uncover the opportunities for social media and identify the purposes in sufficient detail so that their relationship to a Key Performance Indicator is evident. So to say it another way, we are looking for the impact of social on a business activity or work process and measuring that improvement. For example, do sales people close deals faster when they use LinkedIn as a prospecting tool? Do our engineers get product to market faster when they use a collaborative social software environment? Clients can check out the research report A Seven Step Approach for Defining the Value of Collaborative Interactions for some tips on how to do this.

Question: are there tools to monitoring social media activity?

Answer: There are many categories of tools that can be used to monitor and extract insight from social media activities. When social media is implemented internally, many of the social software vendors provide analytics on activities (such as blog posts or active discussions), adoption, participation and trends. There are also a variety of tools available to monitor and analyze what’s happening on the social web. You can get a simple, low-cost read from a search engine alert. For a more systematic analysis, vendors offer social media monitoring tools many of which analyze comments to derive sentiment. Some of the vendors that come to mind are Attensity, BuzzLogic, Radian6 (now part of salesforce.com) and Visible Technologies.

Question: How can organizations prepare for the changes social media will bring about?

Answer: In our research, we’ve stated that social business will be a disruptive force that no organization can ignore. To that end, we are doing research for the Business Gets Social Key Initiative that explores the impact and provides advice about how to respond to this change. By the end of the month, Gartner clients using the Gartner Business Wizard will be able to subscribe to get updates on this topic. In the meantime, clients may want to check out the following report: You Need an Enterprise Strategy for Social Business Initiatives.

We hope you enjoyed the webinar. Feel free to comment on it or to offer a suggestion of what we should tackle next time.