I recently finished a call with a company that chose a competitor over my company’s solution in order to solicit their feedback. I try to proactively reach out to clients and prospective clients when we don’t earn their business.
In this case, we did very well but ultimately lost on a couple of factors. Yet what most interested me was not so much the reason why we lost, but the difficulty she had in selling the concept of Social Business internally. Now I’ve long advocated the removal of “social” from business in any discussion with upper management, but she really brought it home for us.
According to her, the early discussions around bringing a Social Business tool into the corporation was met with fierce resistance from the C-Suite. In fact, the CIO is already chaffed from all of the Facebook usage around the organization. The rest of the executive team is weary of employee blogging and commenting. It doesn’t fit their command and control center mentality.
So how was she able to bring an Enterprise 2.0 tool into the company? By turning off all of the social features and beach heading the solution in one division. She believes it will catch on and the executives will see the benefit of the solution and request full functionality. 
Interestingly, she believes the company will be at a competitive disadvantage in the near future if it doesn’t offer a Web 2.0 work experience for new employees (especially the younger generation). She expects lower retention and difficulties in hiring if the solution is not rolled out entirely and retained as the company intranet.
Her struggles with bringing Enterprise 2.0 philosophy and tools into her company are not unlike most of the stories we continue to hear. Yet slowly but surely, corporate champions are finding innovative ways of breaching the corporate fire wall to introduce E2.0 support columns in anticipation of adding the foundation later. They build success story after success story after initial launch. They focus on the people using the solution and use the boost from their early achievements to create momentum.
Questions: Do you have a similar situation? What has your experience been?
(Cross-posted @ Seek Omega)
If social advocates can show those stubborn executives how to actually make money with social media, these problems will all go away.
Want E2.0/SM to be adopted in your enterprise? Build a business case – with real money (not bullsh*t ‘metrics’ like ‘engagement’ and ‘buzz’).
It’s really that simple. Unfortunately, thus far the Social Media industry has done a particularly lousy job of this. That needs to change.
In order to get executives, who are typically numbers focused people, to even consider social technologies, we need to first identify major pain points, and then show how social solutions will help to not only remedy them, but turn them into revenue drivers. For instance, if customer service is horrible and people are talking very badly about your company on Twitter or Facebook, you need people monitoring those conversations and offering solutions. Internally, if employees are being asked to do more with less (i.e. people have been fired and everyone remaining has to make up for it in additional work, or “efficency”) then they need tools that help them get to the information they need faster, and then share that information with their coworkers.
If you can’t make the business case, you can’t sell the solution.
Chris and Robert, I agree with you both. The lack of use cases is troubling. The Adoption 2.0 council is starting to create a library of Enterprise 2.0 success stories, but we need more of them.