Social Collaboration For Dummies

Appendix

Case Studies: Learn from Others

Success in social collaboration is often earned by having a good story to tell, which encourages adoption and gives more employees an opportunity to create their own success stories. In other words, “anecdotal evidence” can still be powerful if it is convincing and success stories tend to snowball. While you’re waiting for your own success stories to materialize, take advantage of the ones in this appendix to see what others have done that you might be able to apply to your own organization.

Most of these stories are adapted from my work for InformationWeek and from the companies I talked with while judging the E2 Social Business Leaders recognition program (which recognized Red Robin Gourmet Burgers as #1 in 2012 and State Street Corp. as top leader for 2013).

SAS Institute: Connecting Experts Worldwide

By the time SAS Institute fielded its internal social network, known as The Hub, SAS already had plenty of other internal collaboration tools in place, including SharePoint, as well as internal blogs and wikis. Yet Rick Wicklin, one of the firm’s experts on statistical software development, says that SAS’s introduction of a network based on Socialcast caught his attention in a way none of those other tools had.

“I guess the difference between The Hub and all those others is that I use The Hub, and I didn’t really use the others,” Wicklin says. The Hub did a better job of connecting him with the serendipitous moment of finding something ...