Saw an interesting post from a UK social media practitioner, Simon Wakeman, on social media relations for local government. He defines what social media is, why public sector organisations would bother with it, and then the possible benefits.

He highlights the two way engagement that is the great leap for many organisations to make. I’d suggest that the additional challenge is the speed of the interaction. Larger enterprises, particularly those with high regulatory or public accountability structures, generally don’t move that fast. Communication is controlled for very valid reasons. Not the least of which is the time commitment and cost of resources dedicated to multiple conversations.

Taking on social media just because it is there is a bit like signing up for the gym because everyone else goes. Someone told you it was good for you and an essential part of a carefully balanced life, but you would really rather be doing something else, and quite frankly, you’re not convinced that the benefits are really there, or that you can’t get the benefits from doing something you enjoy more. It’s an effort to get to the gym because it is a complete change to your routine, and… you get the picture.

The questions are the same: why should I do this, what do I want out of it, how will I know it is worthwhile, will I enjoy it enough to continue?

And so the fundamental question for an organisation is: who do we need to engage with and why would we want to engage with them?

Over a decade ago we used question and answer forums on a corporate intranet, to take the temperature of the organisation in relation to some really thorny issues. We had the view that it was better to have the questions out in the open, and properly answered, than hurtling along the grapevine and potentially doing damage. I recall using the words to some senior executives more than once: ‘Don’t ask for questions unless you are really prepared to answer them.’

So a simple blueprint for an organisation eyeing off all the ‘promises’ of social media might be:

1. Education: Understand the levels of engagement and interaction that social media provides,
2. Assessment: Understand the engagement model you have with your customers/stakeholders etc, and the one you aspire to and why,
3. Commitment: Understand where the benefits of increased engagement will come from, and what it will take from your organisation to commit to that.

If you didn’t manage to get to the KM Australia conference, held in Sydney in August, Nicky Hayward-Wright has written a great review, complete with links, of the sessions. You’ll find it on the NSW KM Forum site.

The latest McKinsey Global Survey Results (June 2009) surveyed 1,700 executives globally about the value their organisations are gaining from using web 2.0.

The interesting thing about the report is that more executives are acknowledging that they are seeing measurable benefits (my emphasis). This is significant progress. Business people like measurable benefits. That’s the language and outcome that gets a hearing.

The benefits tracked are across various usages – internally in organisations, externally with customers and with business supplier and partners.

Externally, they benefit relationships – bringing the organisation closer to customers and suppliers and in some instances allowing them to innovate together. A number of companies reported lower communication and travel costs.

Some companies reported have been able to track revenue increases from improved customer interactions.  You may have read about the CBA mortgage approval where a blunt tweet from a potential customer hit the radar of the head of customer service. While the tool provides almost instant notification, the organisational will must be there to track the conversations, and act to respond to or resolve problems.

The most heavily used technologies are blogs, wikis and podcasts, and this preference goes across both organisations and consumers. That’s not surprising, for not only are those technologies incredibly easy to use, but it doesn’t take much to create a useful information asset in them. By that I mean that they take shape quickly provided the contribution is there. Tools like Yammer (the enterprise Twitter equivalent), which is essentially speedy information exchange, can sometimes be harder to embed.

A key point in relation to the use of the tools internally was that they needed to be tightly integrated into the workflows of employees. That sounds a bit self-evident, but too often we train people on how to use new tools, but not on why. The ‘why’ got asked and answered in the business case, and becomes a hulking great assumption from then on. Asking ‘why would I use this’, ‘in what circumstance would I use this’ and importantly ‘what can this replace’ are critical to take-up. The importance of this in a knowledge management context was highlighted in a CSC paper some years ago – The Fusion of Process and Knowledge Management.

We distilled these concepts into some KM guiding prnciples, but they easily relate to web 2.0 tools as well:

• Make the use of the tools part of the way people work.
• Embed the use of the tools in your key business processes.
• Target business processes that deliver real benefits to teams: save time, cut costs, prevent errors, simplify activities.

The benefits to organisations were greater ability to share ideas, improved access to experts, and better employee satisfaction.

And that’s where wikis, blogs and podcasts have a great ROI. Every information asset in those toolsets (a blog post or a wiki entry) has a person’s name attached to it.  So depending on where you are using them, an organisation can create an expert register at the same time it is capturing knowledge and sharing information.

I met with the members of the Knowledge Management Roundtable in NSW yesterday to discuss Enterprise 2.0 and the opportunities for business it provides within the firewall.

Marie O’Brien is the very capable and entertaining facilitator, and the sessions I attended were all strongly practical.

A couple of the questions asked reflected the very real issues that organisations are wrestling with, either in just opening up social sites to employees at work, or in working out how to leverage social networking in an organisation. I thought they were worthy of noting:

If you provide access to social sites, will people spend their time surfing?

This issue isn’t going to go away anytime soon. Will you see productivity plunge if you allow employees access? I first heard this concern over 10 years ago, when as part of a global intranet roll-out we provided internet access to all our employees. And the talented director I reported to, when asked by me for an official response, commented ‘that is entirely an issue for management’. The mechanisms for time-wasting have always been available, some just more or less visible than others.

Blanket bans may well be counter-productive. The benefit ‘back then’ was that we wanted web savvy employees, people who understood the internet and how it might assist business. I would like to suggest that is still applicable. How can you come to grips with social networking, either within your organisation or for partners and customers, if you don’t understand it yourselves?

The interesting thing about internet access all those years ago was that we saw a spike on the first day we rolled it out to each group of employees. By about day 3 access levels were back down to acceptable levels.

If you provide blogs within an organisation, how do you select the topics and the contributors?

This made me stop and think. On my last project we certainly seeded our first blogs. By that I don’t mean we chucked the technology at a likely suspect and hoped for the best. We worked out a cross-section of influencers, from the leaders to the workers, talked to them about why a conversation might be a good idea, and got the ball rolling. But within a very short time the requests started flowing. And the interesting thing was that everyone who contacted me wanted to start talking. They had people they wanted to connect with, and stories or business information they wanted to share. The technology came second. Sure the technology was a bit interesting and fun, and a whole lot more flexible than an email newsletter, and it might have even inspired a few people to ramp up the communication again, but people wanted to share.

So a mix of understanding the conversations, understanding the corporate dynamic so we knew which conversations carried what impact, some marketing 101, and then visibility and word of mouth, meant that we didn’t have to drag people to the altar!

A manager who worked for me mentioned one week that he needed to come into work on the weekend. We worked for a company that did more than pay lip service to work/life balance, and so I quizzed the manager on the reasons for the extra hours.

‘Swamped with email’ was the response. So I asked the manager to carry out a quick task. I asked him to check how many of the emails in the ‘overload’ were in direct response to an email the manager had sent out.

Not surprisingly, the answer was up around 90%. And not surprisingly, a number of those emails were to members of our own team.

What we found was that email wasn’t helping us make decisions and solve problems on some issues. It was just extending the interaction, or delaying it. A bit like playing tennis. When the ball is on the other side of the court it is someone else’s turn!

So much interaction on email is kept between two people. It’s not visible, and it can sometimes be easy to add to the problem, not resolve it. Not much beats face to face interaction, or a phone conversation of course. But there are tools which, because of their openness, transparency and immediacy, make the process of discussing, agreeing and actioning more efficient.

Email is linear. Point to point. So it’s direct. That’s good. In business, that’s useful.

Think about usual email interactions. One person to one person. Or, if the conversation is within a team or project, one to many.

But if the results of that conversation need to be communicated more widely, it can become many individual ‘ones’ back to many. And it can spool off into many more ‘one to ones’. And at that stage readers are often wondering whether they are still needed in the conversation.

At that point, the original point of the email might be so far back in the thread that you can’t recall it, or completely lost if you have come to the conversation late.

If it is a long running or complex issue, bringing a latecomer up to speed with the ebb and flow of the conversation can be almost impossible.

So email has a role within organisations. No argument, but its ubiquitous nature means it is often the default tool. And there are better tools available for a lot of the interaction organisations need.

In many organisations there will be real value in taking specific conversations or interactions, which currently run through or are fuelled by email, into Enterprise 2.0 tools. Yammer (an inhouse Twitter) or other instant messaging tools can connect all people on a project or in a team much more quickly and fluidly than email. Quick exchanges can complement the work people are doing without a massive personal overhead.

Blogs can be an alternative to newsletters and email updates. They are more transparent, open to all, and because they capture the thread of the conversation in one place are very inclusive for new members or stakeholders.

And if there is a problem to be solved, wikis encourage group contribution and visibility more effectively than email will. They capture the collaborative output and knowledge for subsequent use.

Organisations should consider leveraging any skill and capability that employees bring in using social tools – the willingness to connect and share, the transparency. While there will always be people wedded to email, there might be people you can actively encourage not to become wedded to email!

At the conference presentation last week, a slide that resonated with a number of people I spoke with was one on guiding principles for knowledge management.

I’m a big believer in guiding principles (you can define them many ways: rules, beliefs, philosophy, basis of reasoning or action). I like the way they force you to articulate, and agree on, what you are striving for. They are a great way to start an initiative, and as you always need input and sign off from a number of stakeholders, they get the project rolling. And I’ve found that if you are working with teams who have been around the block a few times, they are an essential tool to re-focus energies and direction.

Depending on your project, they might actually be a critical step that you bypass at your peril. I’ve used them in business and IT strategy development, corporate communication and investor relations, and IT development projects. On a major IT sourcing strategy project, we used them to turn lessons learned from the original outsourcing deal into guidelines for the next.

This Harvard Business Review article, Transforming  Corner-Office Strategy into Frontline Action, remains one of the most interesting things I’ve read on strategic principles and how they can guide and transform business.

So in developing guiding principles for knowledge management, I have my business hat firmly in place. If someone was trying to sell a new round of knowledge management initiatives to me, what would I want to hear?

Here are five guiding principles for KM that might provide some food for thought:

1. Make knowledge tasks and activities part of the way people work.
2. Embed knowledge management in your key business processes.
3. Target business processes that deliver real benefits to teams: save time, cut costs, prevent errors, simplify activities.
4. Market your achievements and benefits to existing and new customers as if it were a product you were selling on the open market.
5. Don’t make people switch between too many toolsets. Leverage your intranet, and turn it into an internet scale knowledge system.

I presented at the ARK Group’s KM Australia conference in Sydney last week. The title of my presentation was ‘Enterprise 2.0 – Breathing new life into KM’. A bold claim? Probably, but the whole point is to initiate some debate.

I firmly believe all the tools, connectivity and behaviours associated with what we call Web 2.0, or Enterprise 2.0 within an organization, have the power to turn many of our knowledge or information management efforts on their head. For the better. Over the next few posts I’ll elaborate on some of the thinking behind the presentation.

So my presentation followed the journey I took with Annalie Killian and the excellent folks at AMP, where we implemented a collaboration platform, which included wikis, blogs and the like, to address knowledge management challenges.

Without playing the generation card too heavily, the very real risk for many organizations today is the opportunity they might be losing. We have new generations walking in the corporate door with all the skill and will to connect. They do it every day – it is part of their lives. And yet we often hand over little more than an email account and access to a share drive. Some organizations don’t allow access to Facebook and other social networking sites. In short, we switch them off.

And when knowledge management often struggles with switching people on, it seems like a wasted opportunity.

A real strength of enterprise 2.0 tools is how they connect people. They link people to other people and to information and knowledge assets, in a less formal, but no less effective way than more structured knowledge tools. Why wouldn’t you leverage behaviours that are likely to bring business benefit?

So what does your organisation do with corporate email archives when a person leaves?

In the past two days we’ve had online conversations with two people, both of whom have mentioned efforts they’ve taken to set boundaries around the time spent on email.

We think these kinds of initiatives recognise how pervasive a tool email is. We actually use it to get work done. So as we discussed in our last post, email boxes become quite a repository of information, knowledge and practical know-how.

You might argue that when a person leaves an organisation, much organisational learning goes with them. But there is probably a lot left behind in, you guessed it, emails.

We haven’t heard of too many organisations that do much more than hang onto the archive for a while (depending on their information retention policy) and then finally offload it. But we suspect there is a lot of useful information that is lost when that happens.

So what’s the answer? Trawl through email boxes to sift out the useful information? No one has the time or the resources to do that. Implement a compliance program to manage and review what is contained in email? That can be tackled as part of a document management program but it’s a big job.

I watched with interest a couple of years back as Luis Suaraz over at elsua.net (a knowledge management blog) undertook to reduce his daily use of email by using social networking tools. He summarised how he did that recently on cio.com.

He may work in a different role to many of those in your organisation, but the principles apply no matter what your industry.

‘I’m drowning in email!’ you often hear, and ‘we know email is a real issue for us’. And yet email is such a ubiquitous tool that trying to encourage alternative ways of communicating is sometimes like holding back the ocean. In an organisation trying to manage information and knowledge, there are strong reasons to increase the information management activities happening outside corporate email.

The daily interaction of email between employees reveals a rich and varied use. Questions, answers, advice, process, procedure, updates, discussions. Much of that information is knowledge – about what is happening, about how to do an activity, about how to approach an issue. And on the less formal side it is often used just to connect people.

So while formal knowledge management activities often struggle with the behaviours needed to make it happen, informal knowledge sharing and communication is happening. And it’s being captured. It’s just hidden.

If employees are usually quite willing to impart knowledge, opinions and advice in email, why? The tool is easy to use, useful in many ways because of its simplicity, highly visible on the desktop, and it helps people carry out an activity. The ‘what’s in it for me’ factor is high.

But it stands to reason that most email archives slowly become a rich knowledge base of process, procedure and know-how. Rarely is that information available to more people than the author and those they connect with. Over time, even the owner of an email box packed with useful information will find it increasingly difficult to access the high-value information and reuse it.

There are a number of social tools that provide agile and practical alternatives to email. They hit the ‘what’s in it for me’ factor and score points for ease of use. Stay tuned for more details of what they are and how your organisation might use them.