Lessons from a social experiment
In my new role as the first CKO of a law firm, the focus of my Knowledge strategy hovered over a couple of large initiatives - social KM, the first forms library, improved Search and the redesign of the Intranet. Of these the social KM initiative was what most peers said couldn’t succeed, that only made it even more attractive as a challenge. Here are the highlights of my advice to anyone embarking on a similar program.
Vendor Selection
For any new KM tool that is being considered, review demos of various vendors. Outside of the demos, conduct research about the performance of the vendors through discussion with their former and current clients. In some cases, you might be their first major client and if that is the case, ask questions like, ‘What is your process for building a roadmap?’, ‘How large is your development team and what level of custom modifications can it provide?’, ‘What is the turnaround speed of troubleshooting after the system is piloted or deployed and bugs discovered?’.
Ensure both parties have clarity around the SLAs before signing the contract.
Plan a launch campaign
A strong campaign should be planned as part of the roll out and if a new program is branded, with a visual and text identifier it should be heavily used to create both brand recognition and future recall with the user base. Employees are usually dealing with electronic fatigue, and another tool in the toolbox has to stand out enough to grab and keep their attention. The Marketing Rule of 7 states that a prospect needs to ‘hear’ the advertiser’s message at least 7 times before they’ll take action to buy that product or service. This same rule should be applied to the adoption strategy for new programs.
The launch campaign should include a range of training materials - one page cheat sheets and multi-page instructions to cater to different kinds of learners, as well as a short training video (created on Captivate or another similar training tool) for the audio visual learners. Ideally the launch message should go out company wide from someone in leadership to give it the weight it deserves.
Secure Leadership Engagement
Your first evangelists for the program are the leaders of your organization. Define the business problem you are trying to solve. Generate a considerable amount of curiosity and interest in the new tool but respect the intelligence, time and attention of Leadership and have ready talking points to explain how this new tool would benefit their day to day work and improve efficiencies for their group.
Train till ... (you exhaust all excuses for not using the new tool)
The training sessions can and should be offered in various ways from in person group sessions to webinars and even one-on-one coaching. If the user base is a group that is technology resistant, factor in a longer adoption cycle. However the principle of ‘social proof’ (as explained by Robert Cialdini, author of ‘The Power of Persuasion’) is a strong enabler in faster adoption. When people are uncertain of what they should do, they look around to their peers and let that influence their action.
Use examples
Using the ‘social proof’ principle, show people how social KM helps connect people and helps connect the dots. It is messy and the opposite of the classic KM approaches like formally capturing after-action reviews or best practices for knowledge transfer or building a methodology for process efficiencies. However it is virtually impossible that every bit of information that employees could possibly need has been neatly captured and cataloged for easy retrieval. Social KM has its place for seeking and finding timely nuggets of internal information that are tacit among the employees of the organization.
Ask for feedback
Actively ask for feedback and don’t get defensive of your enabling technology. Critical and complimentary feedback help you customize the tool, the training materials and your talking points. A formal survey would be ideal but run it by a few friendly users first. There is plenty of proof that researchers often create surveys that make perfect sense to them, but fall short of covering every kind of interpretation at the respondent’s end.
Monitor usage and report back
It’s easier to let the numbers do the talking if anecdotes of success fail to make the point with the program sponsors, senior stakeholders and even users in the company. Monthly reports of usage can start to reveal patterns and answer questions about changing and desired behaviors - Are the employees changing the way they seek and find information? Do they feel more connected with everyone else in the company? Do they feel more engaged as employees? Do they feel more productive? Do they feel more relieved about knowing where to go for certain information?
The picture above is of the lovely komorebi effect. Knowledge is like light, and like light it can filter through in many ways - scattered like komorebi, or blinding like a floodlight or focused like a laser pointer. Social KM looks more like the komorebi.












