Build it and they will come?

Continuing the Conversation from the Social Media round table I chaired in Slovenia….

One of the business communicators at our discussion was working with a company who had developed and implemented an internal social network for their research and development teams to innovate new products through facilitating sharing of ideas and communications between the individuals and teams. But not many of these staff were using this tool. My colleague wanted to know how to increase staff take-up of the tool.

The Kevin Costner movie, Field of Dreams, brought us the visionary saying: “if you build it, they will come”. That may have worked in the movie and it may work for some business ventures. In most cases, we all have to be somewhat more pragmatic in adding a few more steps into the process after we present the world with our exciting new baseball pitch or mall or product - or social media tool. And one of those crucial steps is communicating with the people who are ultimately going to use or benefit from that product or tool

So in our discussion, we explored what processes the company had used to encourage the teams to integrate this social network tool into their research and development work. What were they already doing to share ideas and communicate with each other? What activities (eg team and individual meetings, face to face workshops etc) where they involved in as part of their innovation of new products? How were aware were they of the benefits of the tool and how it could increase their communication efficiency?

My colleague came away from this session with a concrete plan to implement training sessions for the relevant teams at her client company so that they could learn the benefits of the tool and how to use it in their work.

A key message here, I think, is to view social media tools as just that: tools. And as with any tools, people need to be trained to use them and also, understand how they can help improve or facilitate the relevant processes.

Photo: thanks to soundtrackcollector.com

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