Driving Adoption in Social Business: Resistance is Futile!

By Kevin Conroy (@seattlerooster) Feb 1, 2012

As part of CMSWire’s "Back to Basics" theme for the month of February, I thought it’d be worthwhile to take a fresh look at something that is both obvious in its importance and yet challenging for all of us in the social business space: Driving adoption.

While much is rightly written and discussed here about best practices for site development, the pros and cons of underlying technologies like SharePoint and so forth, none of it really matters if we lose focus on the basic importance of driving user adoption. As I mentioned in a previous post, UX still matters — and when it comes to driving adoption, it matters more than ever.

Here are some perspectives and suggested best practices from the front lines, having watched companies succeed and fail in varied areas of adoption:

Remember: Your Technology Isn’t Really All That Cool

What?! Don’t come to the party with preconceived notions that you have a great technology package that’ll instantly create a grand social business site fostering open communication, increasing productivity and bringing collaboration to record levels. Ideal as that all sounds, the hard truth is that each company is unique (more about this below) and that if anyone tells you that they have a great one-size-fits-all solution, you should be skeptical, at best.

Don’t get me wrong: technology can be extremely cool and is critical to what all of us do. The important nuance lies in layering the technology with a highly personalized interface that is easy, comfortable and even familiar for everyone who uses it, from a CEO to the entry-level employee. Expect widely varying opinions from these different camps about what this means, so your solution should also allow for a unique experience based on what the user wants to see and use.

Make it Intuitive. No, Really

While the word "intuitive" has almost become a throwaway phrase in technology circles, those of us in the social business space need to take it very seriously in all that we do. Simply put, if an employee or user within the enterprise has an easy and positive experience that enables them to be more productive, she or he will be much more inclined to return and encourage their peers to do the same. There should be little to no learning curve and the interface should be welcoming and familiar, not intimidating or seeming like an obligation. Speaking of which:

Take the Training Test

How much employee training does your social business site really require? If it’s more than a few minutes, you’ve essentially "failed" the training test. The ideal social business solution will be intuitive enough that it requires little-to-zero training by those you’re hoping will use it. After all, does Facebook require an in-depth training session? Did buying your plane ticket for vacation require a help-desk call (let’s hope not)? These are the rules that should guide you.

If you find yourself setting up an entire user training regimen for your social business site, you’re probably making the site too difficult to use — and adoption will suffer. Basic training is great, but if you need much more than this, you should be wary.

Keep the interface nice and simple, even though building the site can indeed be a very complex process. Don’t try and boil the ocean on initial launch — instead, get those features out that are must-haves and then add features every month or quarter as the requests arrive. No matter how well your site development seems to be going, make structured plans to periodically take the "training test" to ensure you’re remaining on-course. This is for the sake of adoption but also to the overall well-being of what you’re trying to establish.