Social Networking / Web 2.0 in a Corporate Environment: Best Practice

A very useful report on...
BT's adoption of Web 2.0

• Made sure all employees can access social media sites.
• Use of these tools was covered by existing policies already.
• Agreed that all tools that allowed user-generated content would be behind our single-sign-on application to prevent any anonymous publishing.
• The ethos we would engender was one of allowing BT people to say anything they want, in the knowledge that they would be held accountable for what they say.
• All this functionality through a single ‘portal’ was incredibly powerful and sent adoption rates through the roof.
• There will always be a degree of friction between the need for robust IT processes to safeguard customer and business data and to effectively manage IT spending in a global corporation like BT, with the need for technical agility and to support the concept of the perpetual beta in which you try out quickly and cheaply often competing technologies and let users iterate and adopt as they see fit – ultimately, letting the users write the business case for adopting a particular option.
• The impact has been significant in some areas, subtle in others and in some cases has had no impact at all.
• Communications is becoming a ‘conversation’ rather than a managed activity which requires a different type of engagement by those traditionally responsible for communications activity.
• More and more content is produced and owned collaboratively.
• With no clear ownership, who manages a piece of community-owned content through its lifecycle and ensures it is deleted or archived appropriately?
• With increasing amounts of unstructured user-generated content appearing in disparate channels on the intranet, the challenge for users in finding and extracting value from that content increases exponentially.
• To help users find and keep up to date with new content, we are using a combination of ‘tagging’, where publishers and users attach key words to content which are then searchable by others, and Really Simple Syndication (RSS), where content is published into appropriate feeds to which users can subscribe for updates via a feed reader client on their PC or via an RSS server. Without RSS, the value of social media content would be very limited indeed. However, this does require both publishers, whose target audience may never actually visit their site but read content in their feed readers, and users, who are used to viewing structured content on the sites upon which it is published, to behave in very different ways.
• Contrary to popular opinion, these channels are being used in a constructive and positive way. To date, BT people have responded responsibly.
• A key lesson is to focus on the value social media tools can deliver rather than the risks.  There are risks, but the potential benefits are huge.
• Better to start small with simple and cheap tools with limited functionality.
• Let users dictate the direction and speed of adoption.
• Let users play with new tools as soon as possible, warts and all. We positioned all our social media tools are ‘beta’ applications when they were first released to set the right user expectations.
• Engage the policy makers as early as possible. Emphasise that these tools represent an evolution rather than a revolution in the use of the web.