Social Collaboration For Dummies

Chapter 20

Ten Common Themes in Social Collaboration Success Stories

When social collaboration is successful, it makes the organization adopting it more successful. The payoffs come in the form of innovation, efficiency, camaraderie, and engagement.

What distinguishes the successes from the flops? I try to answer that in this chapter, based on common themes in social business success stories I’ve encountered during the research for this book, as well as my work for InformationWeek and the Social Business Leaders program at the E2 conference.

Not every success story exhibits every one of these characteristics, but most could cite several of them.

Executive Sponsorship Makes a Difference

I discuss the CEO’s perspective in Chapter 15. Not every initiative is fortunate enough to have a CEO who starts blogging and commenting and promoting the social collaboration network as soon as it goes live, as UBM’s David Levin did. He seized on the introduction of the platform as a way to encourage better communication and more cohesion within a diverse, multinational company.

More often, the most passionate social collaboration advocates are several levels removed from the top of the company, whipping together a pilot project on a shoestring and trying to demonstrate enough value that senior executives will pay attention.

Seek executive sponsorship at whatever level you can find it. Inspiring a department head to participate on the network and encouraging his people to participate will give ...