A Community of Advocates

Our journey in Social Media has been a fascinating learning experience. We'd taken an inside-out approach, starting inside the firewall - learning about SM in the enterprise - and are now in the midst of deploying a myriad of external offerings.

By now, you're likely familiar with our internal community offering - EMC ONE. Launched in September'ish, we'd opted to let adoption happen in a viral fashion. No widespread communications, no campaigns to drive users to the community... rather - build it and see if they come.

They did... In droves.

I checked at one point last week and we were well over 4k community members (not lurkers, mind you - but active participants). If you've been following previous posts, you know that the conversations taking place have been amazing.... That the community is a warm and welcoming group of uber passionate people.

Two things happened this week that helped me realize we'd turned a corner in our journey:

First off, we've 'formalized' the community. No more word of mouth... It's official. As part of an Intranet redesign project, the team created an XML pull of the four most recent conversations on EMC ONE and have given them very prominent real-estate on our corporate Intranets main page. Many employees set the Intranet as their homepage... Now 39k EMC'ers can't miss a real time feed of the latest discussions. It's but the first step of tighter alignment between the Intranet and EMC ONE.

I've posted a screenshot below of the feed. I didn't want to give a snap of the entire home page as there's just too much content to post publicly... Rather, this is about 50% of the entire page just to give you a sense of the presentation of discussions. Adoption of new users to EMC ONE has been clipping at about 200 people per week. The day we launched the new Intranet design, we saw over 100 new users (this was a holiday, mind you).

The second thing that helped me realize we turned a major corner - The community itself is now our best advocate. Someone out there in EMC land started a discussion thread. She wanted to share the presentation she'd put together to help get the word out and demonstrate the value of the community. It was *excellent*. Real world use cases - easy to digest analogies - among the best I've seen.

While that in itself was exciting, it was the overwhelming response that made my day... "Great pitch - Can I use it in my team?" or "Love it - here's the version I've been using". Remember, these folks aren't on the project team - they have no direct responsibility for the platform... They're just PASSIONATE employees who SEE THE VALUE of Social media to EMC and are helping get the word out.

Somewhat minor in the grand scheme of things - but the activities of the week are significant components of our evolution of Social Media in the enterprise. Good stuff and it's only Wednesday.

There's no shortage of great ideas to help spread the word around your community offering. Last last week, I came across the "Don't Pee in the Pool" campaign than another Jive customer is using to spread the word. Give it a read - it's brilliant.

What have you seen other companies doing to promote community? Better yet, what are YOU doing?