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

PULSE

Knowledge flow initiatives need ongoing support, and one of the biggest mistakes a team launching a platform could make is to fire all their ammunition for the launch and forget to push very hard, on a very regular basis, for an ongoing time frame.

I refer to this type of pushing as “adding a pulse,” and I think the analogy holds on several levels. What you really want is for your ESN to become a living entity, but just like every living species, it needs a pulse to survive, and it is not enough to pump a little blood in at the beginning and forget about it. The result will be a fairly quick and certain death.

An ESN rebirth can be just as hard as resuscitating a living organism. In fact, once something is declared dead, getting people to believe it can thrive again is rather hard (i.e., letting go of the pulse is very dangerous).

How should you go about keeping that pulse, though? The best way is a combination of news items, training activities, and special events. Here are a few examples for that last category:

• An Innovation Day, where you encourage all platform members or a specific subset of users to come up with ideas (either within a given framework or just free-form brainstorming).
• Connect the ESN to any possible event that is happening within your organization, be it on a regular basis or as a one-off. Have discussions with special tags for executive briefings or webcasts. Have one or more special evangelizers post live from external or internal events the company ...