Column 2

Peter Kim moderated a panel of three people from end-user organizations – Ben Foster of Allstate Life Insurance, Greg Matthews of Humana, and Morgan Johnston of JetBlue – on social media adoption for both external as well as internal use by enterprises.

Allstate recently launched the consumer-facing Good Hands Community, including both a social site and a Twitter presence, for both traditional marketing and sales purposes, but also to maintain a relationship with ex-customers who may have left for financial reasons but still could benefit from Allstate information and potentially become a customer again in the future. It includes tools and calculators, discussion forums and other information.

JetBlue uses social media – specifically Twitter, where they have 730,000 followers as of today – to engage customers, inform customers about what’s happening at JetBlue, and even provide updates on weather and other information that impacts their service delivery.

Humana has a social site run by their consumer innovation center – a sort of center of excellence for enterprise social media – that they are using to try and transform how they interact with their customers and partners; unfortunately, my bandwidth right now won’t allow it to actually load, so I’ll have to take their word for it. This is run separately from their corporate website, and doesn’t include any private customer data.

All of these are intended to engage the consumers, both for informing and for gathering feedback. Social media can be a sort of “canary in a coal mine” about impending problems, and it’s a valuable channel to monitor in order to hear how people are talking about your products or services, potentially heading off PR and customer service disasters before they occur. It’s also a sales lead generation channel, with companies like Dell using Twitter to broadcast deals that aren’t available anywhere else, generating significant revenue from those tweeted deals.

It’s important for multiple departments in an organization to contribute their ideas and needs for consumer-facing social media. It’s not just an IT project, although IT is going to be involved in order to deploy the platform, and there’s a need for rapid prototyping and changes to the site without having to go through an old-fashioned waterfall development approach: this might dictate that the existing corporate IT not be involved, but a new team formed to support this sort of agile approach.

One of the panelists noted that you can see the trends in conferences: social media is now on the agenda at IT conferences, at marketing/PR conferences, at HR conferences and at customer service conferences, indicating that people from multiple areas within organizations that have an interest and a stake in social media.

You have to learn by doing with social media: people have to get in there and start producing content, then see what the consumer feedback is like for that content in order to tune the message and style. That’s a scary thing for most companies, but these three are setting a good example.

The morning started with Andrew McAfee interviewing Shawn Dahlen and Chris Keohane from Lockheed Martin about how they’ve progressed on their internal social network since we heard about it at last year’s conference.

Back in 2004, they approached the CIO to get project seed money for internal blogging, since there was a need for internal communications that wasn’t being met by company newsletters. For a few thousand dollars, they were able to set up a blogging platform that allowed internal affinity groups to communicate, then realized that they needed to lock down some of the information for security purposes and closed down some of the access, particularly to employees outside the US.

The 9/11 commission report noted that the existence silos of people and information – a “need to know” environment – was part of the problem in government and defense industries, providing Lockheed with the motivation to start opening up some of their information across the company, regardless of location. They worked closely with their internal legal department to make sure that they were

They took their SharePoint environment, which was already in use for document collaboration, and added more social networking aspects by upgrading the blog and wiki capability. This allowed them to evolve an existing, familiar platform into something more social, providing an easier migration for Lockheed’s 150,000 employees. The revolutionary part was to make these communities open to all employees by default, rather than defaulting to a closed site, and currently 65% of their thousands of communities are open.

Because they were making SharePoint do things that it didn’t naturally do, there was a lot of customization involved, but what they’ve ended up with is the ability for anyone to create a community. Apparently, HR resisted this, and lobbied for more centralized control of who could create an internal site rather than allowing self-service, but with the number of internal communities, this would have seriously crippled the spread of the tools to support collaboration within the company.

McAfee asked the question about how easily Lockheed’s aging workforce adopted these social solutions; interestingly, some of the 20-something engineers were some of the ones that had problems with the social community, since although they knew how to use the tools, they didn’t have the business experience to make the tools support the Lockheed business processes. Some of their most prolific bloggers are from the over-40’s workforce, probably because they just have more knowledge to contribute. In other words, enterprise social networking isn’t about age, it’s about appropriate tools, motivation and having something worthwhile to share. You need to have the younger and older parts of the workforce work together in order to achieve the best results.

They went through – and are still experiencing – challenges with acceptance by the executives and across the organization, and have learned that social media needs to be grounded in the challenges of your enterprise. You need to create tools that support what people need to do, not just push something in and force people to use it. The result is that they have leaders within the company who blog regularly, but more importantly, who read, comment and act on what they read in blogs: this shows that management is participating, and that they see it as a channel for

They didn’t set rules around what content should or shouldn’t be included on the sites, but it has taken on the form of what would be normal employee behavior, which is pretty much what we heard yesterday from IBM, Deloitte and EMC. They provided two examples of “misuse” that were removed from the sites: one where someone was talking about their new car, and the other where someone was complaining about the employee review process using questionable tone and/or language.

There’s a breakout session this afternoon with the two Lockheed guys, going into more detail about their social networking platform and its adoption.

There’s been a lot of muttering that the Enterprise 2.0 conference is just a vendor love-fest, rather than having a significant attendance from people who are actually doing Enterprise 2.0. Whether it’s because the bloom is off this conference’s rose, or the economy, it’s telling that I was able to pick up a room here at the conference hotel through Priceline for $120/night, considerably down from the near-$300/night rate offered as the “special conference rate”. Last year, there was not a room to be had here several weeks in advance. Incredibly, they’re planning a second Enterprise 2.0 conference later this year in San Francisco; maybe the more relaxed west coast business attitudes are proving more receptive to Enterprise 2.0 in general, and certainly there will be a lot of vendors glad for only having to make the short drive north from the Valley.

Lots of disruption yesterday as flights into Boston were delayed or cancelled due to weather conditions, and the rainy weather here this week will impact attendance at the evening events, if not the conference itself. I arrived yesterday in time for the afternoon workshops, but left after 45 minutes of a not-very-insightful presentation (probably okay for newbies, but not if you’ve read anything about Enterprise 2.0). At least I made it to a couple of good social events in the evening, since this has become a conference where I come to hang out with interesting Enterprise 2.0 people rather than learn any new Enterprise 2.0 content.

I poked my head in to the starting keynotes today, but headed back to the breakfast table when Matthew Fraser started reading the captions on the tedious making-fun-of-management cartoons that he had pasted into his presentation. I’m now back in the conference room, electrical power at my feet but only sporadic wifi, and see a more interesting slate of presentations coming up for the remainder of the day. Up next is the keynote panel discussing an Enterprise 2.0 reality check, looking at what’s working, what’s not and what’s next. This afternoon, I plan to attend a panel on lessons learned from internal communities, Lee Bryant’s presentation on adoption strategies, and Aaron Levie’s (of Box.net) presentation on content-centric social networks. Stay tuned.