Connecting Organizational Silos: Taking Knowledge Flow Management to the Next Level with Social Media

MOBILIZE YOUR EVANGELIZERS

The first followers are just as important as your leaders. There is a really great video from TED, an initiative that invites those with innovative ideas to give a short presentation, where Derek Sivers presents how movements really get started.4 In the video, Sivers shows some footage of a person starting to dance wildly, only to end up being surrounded by thousands joining him in the dancing. The key point Sivers makes is that the leader is not the key to making it a movement—the first follower is at least as important, if not more so, to really make it work. Another lesson learned from the video is that the leader needs to embrace the first followers as equals, giving them attention and gratuity instead of getting stuck in their own importance as a leader. Sivers calls it the “underestimated form of leadership of the first follower.” This is one of the keys for how you should look at your evangelizers and turn to them for helping you get your ESN off the ground.

One idea to get others involved is to organize them in a group (CoP) on the platform to give them a chance to provide input and actively influence what is happening with the ESN. As those evangelizers are usually social-media-savvy, they could use existing channels to push the new platform. If, for example, some of them are already among your key internal bloggers, their blogs might be an ideal tool to reach a wide number of potential adopters.

Another method to get the message across using ...