Len Devanna offers over 24 years of digital innovation experience at Fortune 500 brands. He helps companies with all aspects of their digital ecosystem, including online strategy, engagement marketing, and social brand management.
Never a dull moment...
This past week witnessed the launch of EMC ONE (Our Online Network of EMCers). This foundational platform was created to enable - in a formal and supported manner - internal information sharing community style. The initiative went at light speed thanks in part to strong executive support but also due to the nature of the beast - Community'ish offerings have been popping up everywhere inside the firewall. While I'm all for grass root projects, long term sustainability requires a common platform that provides the basics (blogs, discussion and wikis) and promotes community best-practices.
It's been fascinating to watch the behavior since we launched on Monday. We didn't announce EMC ONE in a formal way. Rather, just sort of 'went live'. By Wednesday, people were coming out of the woodwork, there were hundreds of interesting discussions taking place and I couldn't make it to the cafe and back without someone asking how they could come and play. Most importantly, people seem to get it. Requests haven't been to create a space where everyone can go post pics of their kids or complain about the winter weather in New England, but rather people want to leverage it to discuss / debate / collaborate on some really beefy issues... Very, very cool.
The corporate world is in the midst of a major transition and it's thrilling to be a part of it. Social media is forcing us to ask ourselves some really interesting questions and will fundamentally change the way we communicate across audiences. Within days of launching our site, the fun discussions are already bubbling up - In a community driven world, how we classify our information (open versus closed)? How do we engage in discussions with new audiences through new channels? To what extent is community managed versus organic and self maintaining? How do we deploy social media to help our customers and partners conduct business with us? etc, etc;. Good stuff.
And I knew you way back when...oh wait, that was just months ago. Great to read about this roll out...sounds exciting.
sean
Posted by: Sean ODriscoll | September 30, 2007 at 09:22 PM
Congrats Len - exciting to see it take off. I like the approach to launch quietly and let the back office buzz circulate around it. I think that keeps it very focused on what it's intent is as a community tool, rather than formally setting expectations to the organization what it is there for. Nice work.
Posted by: Adam Cohen | October 01, 2007 at 06:36 AM