Confessions of an eBiz Junkie

Helping our Community... Let me count the ways

Sometimes we forget just how fortunate we are. I'm lucky in that I have a roof to sleep under tonight, a warm meal will be on the table, and I'll be surrounded by wonderful and loving family. Damn I'm lucky.

Many can't say the same. It's so important to not lose cite of that.

I do my best to give back to the community, but can NEVER do enough. Whenever possible, I spend time volunteering at a wonderful place called 'Tony La Russa'a Animal Rescue Foundation' here in the Bay Area. These folks are the best of the best - taking dogs and cats scheduled to be euthanized and keeping them until they find permanent homes.

Yesterday during a discussion with global Marketing employees, EMC CMO Jeremy Burton issued the challenge to his global team - How can we help? How can you individually make a difference - and what can we do if we came together as a team with a more orchestrated effort?

Visited EMC's Communities, Lately?

Did you know that EMC has a wealth of online communities under the umbrella of our EMC Community Network, or the 'ECN'?

With about 90k active members, the ECN is constantly abuzz with activity. Conversations are taking place around the clock, and on a global scale. EMC'ers are collaborating with customers and partners alike, discussing current products, co-innovating on futures, so much more.

Tips for Deploying Community in the Enterprise

I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at KMWorld 2009 before the holiday. It was an older blog post around the evolution of our corporate Intranet that first put me in touch with the KMWorld management team.

I spoke a bit about the transformation of the enterprise, highlighting our journey in both traditional and social channels. Putting together the story helped me reflect a bit on our journey and recall some of the key decisions that have helped us progress on our path. Some of these things I now take for granted, but based on discussions with other attendees, I realize many have yet to begin traveling this path. To that end, I wanted to share a few of the key takeaways...

An Interview with EnterpriseLeadership.org

I'll be sure to tag this one with #ShamelessSelfPromotion ;)

The nice folks over at EnterpriseLeadership.org reached out some time ago and wanted to understand a bit more about our journey into the social realm - with focus on the internal side of the house. We ended up doing a brief video interview that I wanted to share.

A few bits from the discussion:

• Brands who do not embrace internal social / collaborative tools now will face a significant challenge (not to mention security risks) as employees flock to freely available and easily deployed external tools.
• We discuss our inside - out approach to SM, and how developing internal proficiencies has dramatically improved out evolution beyond the confines of our firewall.
• Be wary of the ROI game. Productivity gains, breakdown of organizational silos, employee affinity, enabling global collaboration, etc; - These are soft benefits, but will transform your business. Don't underestimate them.

What Do Your Customers Think of You?

Ahhhh, nice to be back... Happy New Year to all - Hope you managed to get some time to unwind. I managed to completely unplug for a week and a half to clear my head and prepare for the exciting year ahead. To help make the most of the break, we opted for a road trip down to San Diego to check out the sights.

How's Lens road trip to SD relevant to your customers, you may ask? It's rather easy. Let me share some of the logistics of the trip.

The Air That I Breathe

EMC|ONE has become a hub for internal collaboration & communications. The community has leveraged it in ways that I'd have never imagined, and it's truly helping to drive proficiency with 2.0 tools and techniques across the global workforce.

Last week, we successfully upgraded to the latest version of our community platform. Not without it's bumps, the next gen platform offers some nifty bells and whistles that will undoubtedly be embraced by the community. For much more info, Jamie provides some play-by-play of the upgrade and shares the good and the bad from her POV.

Unfortunately, as I type this entry, I sit on a concall with our IT gang and our platform vendor dealing with a site outage. We've been down since 7AM EST (going on seven hours now) and do not have a definitive answer as to when it will be available again to the community.

I'll spare you the details...  The technical cause of the outage is not relevant here... What is relevant is the impact that it's having on the community. Folks have come to rely very heavily on EMC|ONE to collaborate, to communicate - to work.

Six or so months ago, such an outage would have been irritating. Today, it's absolutely devastating. It impacts virtually *everyone*.

The biggest challenge following this event will be assuring the community that it's OK to come back... That their information is safe... Their conversations and comments still intact... That actions will be taken to avoid another outage... And that they indeed can rely on a healthy and stable community offering.

So, my advice for those who are still in the early phases of community development... Know that your community will likely become the equivalent of air to your organization. It will become so engrained in your daily lives that living without it will seem like an impossibility. Consider this early and often - and do whatever you can to mitigate the situation we're currently in.

The system outage itself will be dealt with... It's the damage to the confidence of the community that's a larger concern to me.

Need ideas to save $$$? Ask the community.

Last week, Joe sent out a memo providing perspective on the current global economic situation. In it, he talked about EMC's strong position and sighted how the company has weathered such tough times in the past - only to emerge stronger. What was most interesting was what happened after this was sent out...

It all started in our 'Virtual Water Cooler'... A place where anything goes... Any employee can start a discussion or blog about any topic they'd like.

Michelle started a discussion called 'Constructive Ideas to Save Money'. As of this morning, this thread has had over 11.5k views and almost 200 folks have provided suggestions. Ideas are all over the board - from enabling employees to spend some of their vacation time contributing to a charitable organization (while helping take some time off the books) to revamping our current PC / laptop program to replacing our current shuttle fleet with hybrid vehicles. Given the diversity of the EMC ONE community, ideas cover a wide variety of topics.

As impressive has been the tone of the conversation. Folks understand what's going on in the world... They understand the challenges ahead - and know that some of the ideas put out there may make their lives a tad tougher...

But, they're all in it together. They feel a sense of pride, a sense of ownership, a sense of community.

It's been very interesting to watch and the discussion seems to be building momentum as each hour passes.

Who Owns The Community?

It's a question I get almost every time I chat with others around our internal community offering, EMC ONE. I'm always surprised at the need to assign ownership to an individual or a group... Perhaps the desire for accountability is @ the core of the question.

So, asked this morning for the umpteenth time, I thought I'd post a brief thought on the topic.

At least in my world... The Community owns the community.

Now, that's simplifying a bit. We do have a team of folks (well, two actually - one of whom is here) who are responsible for the overall health of EMC ONE. But, that's not an ownership thing... Rather they represent the collective voices from the community itself.

When it comes to creating new spaces for conversation and collaboration, the proposal is put out for the community to comment on and ultimately decide if it's the right thing to do. No formal governance team... No supreme ruler.

While the primary team manages vendor and IT relationships, it's the collective voice of the community that ultimately decides which direction we take the overall platform.

When it comes to policing and moderating content (which, btw, we've never actually had a need for), it's the community who ultimately decides the threshold of acceptable behavior. Despite strong desires by some early on to moderate *everything*, we've yet to have an instance that made us rethink our approach.

And so on...

Internal communities are still somewhat new. Unlike traditional web properties, ownership means something very different. Command and control just doesn't work any longer. It's a healthy step in online evolution, IMO.

If you try to force fit traditional ownership and governance models as you deploy your social offering, you'll likely lose the exact thing you're trying to accomplish.. The very sense of community.

And Now a Word from the Community

Every once in awhile something happens that you just didn't see coming. One such a thing recently happened on EMC ONE... It was completely organized, produced and delivered by the global community.

It started with a simple notion by one of our community superstars - Candi. Candi posted a thread about a photo event for EMC'ers across the globe... Post a photo of a day in the life of EMC.

Neat idea, eh? This thing got traction like a monster truck on sandpaper. 150 employees submitted pics, and the thread saw just about 30k unique views. The photos were awesome and inspiring... As noted before, there's just no shortage of talent in this place.

Right before my eyes, folks from across the globe were connecting with one another in a way that they could not have just a few short months ago. They were relating to one another through photos, learning about respective cultures, building new relationships... It was fantastic.

Inspired by all of this, Paula went through all of the photos and picked some beauties, and Glenn put it into a neat little video montage. It's a cool look into something inspired, designed and created by the collaboration of our little community. Good stuff.

Happy Birthday EMC ONE

EMC ONE (Our internal community) is one year old this week... It sure as heck doesn't seem like it's been a whole year.

The milestone prompted me to take a look @ the current user stats. We're just shy of 8k active participants and are growing at a clip of about 150 new folks per week. During an average month, EMC ONE sees over 19k unique visitors.  I'll be conservative and say we've managed to get about 25% adoption across the global workforce. Good stuff indeed.

While I couldn't be happier with the progress to date, it somewhat feels like this journey has just begun.

Getting folks to stick a toe in the pond is the first step... And it's a big one. But we will not fully realize the power of Social Media until we embrace 2.0 behaviors and establish a high degree of proficiency across the enterprise.

Sam Lawrence over @ Jive provided his thoughts on the evolution earlier this week. I'd like to think we @ EMC are somewhere between the digitizing phase and the behavioral change phase. We've come a long way - but still have some work ahead.

When our core behaviors change - when we're able to take traditional meetings online, when we stop putting so much valuable knowledge into email repositories only to be lost forever, when we begin to co-innovate in real time using the digital tools at hand, when we finally realize the POWER of the collective social computer - that's when we'll start to see the true value of SM in the workplace.

I hope this doesn't come across as a negative. I've spoken with enough peers and at enough industry events to know we've made some amazing progress in this space. Rather, I'm humbled by - and excited by - the next phase of this journey... And look forward to being a part of the evolution.