From Chatter Apathy to Chatter Fan in 30 Days

Meet Joe Onisick, a self-proclaimed “IT professional specializing in data center technologies with a focus on virtualization and private cloud architecture.” (I haven’t had the heart to tell Joe that there is no such thing as a private cloud – that it’s a myth, like unicorns and leprechauns – but perhaps we’ll broach that twitter conversation on a later date :-)

I jumped into a conversation with Joe when he spoke disparagingly of Chatter:

So here we have a well-educated, intelligent fellow, who finds real value in “public social media”. From reading his Twitter stream, I see that Joe expertly wields Twitter to find other business professionals, networks with them to get answers and solve problems. So how is it that he couldn’t see a similar benefit with Chatter?

Could it be that the Chatter deployment at his company did not have appropriate C-level executive sponsorship? Securing your C-level executive sponsor is critical in any organization-wide application. Someone “at the top” has to recognize that this corporate social media stuff has value, convince their peers that it will be helpful to the company, and provide the oversight to ensure that it is rolled out properly.

Perhaps there had been no training for the user community at Joe’s company. Let’s be honest – a good number of our friends, relatives and work colleagues simply don’t understand the power and impact of social media – or even what it’s good for. A corporate executive, whom I get to work with from time to time, refers to Facebook as “Wastebook”. He perceives it as a tool for idle minds and wants no part of it in the workplace. An organization cannot simply turn on a tool like Chatter and hope that employees will “get it”. Training, monitoring, and re-training must be part of your Chatter roll-out strategy.

Perhaps the deployment did not have appropriate attention by community moderators. Social media is only useful when there is wide participation. In public social media tools, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, there is an enormous community of active participants. But when you close the tool to a smaller community, it very often requires a moderator to monitor the micro-blogging stream, create and steer conversations to the appropriate discussion groups, and nurture the community until it is able to thrive on its own. Many corporate social media experiments fail, simply because there is no one there to lead the conversation and get everyone out of their SocMed shells.

I made a note to check back with Joe one month later. I wanted to see if there had been any change to his position on corporate social media. There had been:

From Chatter Apathy to Chatter Fan in 30 Days. Go get him, Robin Daniels, there’s a successful user story in there somewhere!