Web 2.0 adoption: Lessons from associations, corporations, project management, and disaster response

Dave it's great to be here. It's a beautiful sunny day here in Alexandria Virginia and I'm looking forward to this!

A couple of months ago i decided to do more face to face networking -- i work so much online i wanted to meet more people around here. there are a lot of groups in the DC area I participate with but I really wanted to start something close to home.

I chatted with Peter Turner, another Alexandria resident, and we started asking a few people to get together on a monthly basis somewhere in Old Town Alexandria -- association people, marketing and communications, technologists, technology vendors -- and we're getting ready for our second meeting.

I was contacted last year by a former co-worker who's in charge of market research for a large professional association about blogging and "web 2.0 strategy." It was about the same time that I was researching applications of social media and networking to professional communications and scholarly publishing. I realized that there's a natural match between what professional associations do about getting people together and what social media and networking can offer.

I had already been doing some consulting and research on corporate adoption of "web 2.0" technologies, and I realized right away that associations share many of the organizational acceptance and adoption issues with other types of organizations. Some people are quick to see the benefits, and some are resistant. It's not about the technology, it's about being able to see how social media and networking can enhance what an association does. So there's an issue about accepting change not just to technology but to how an association manages its basic operations.

Chris, if you know going in that you lack the data, you shouldn't accept the engagement. If you believe the data exists, though, and you later find out it doesn't, then you have to recommend either a change in the project goal -- or the collection or acquisition of the data you need.

I'll answer that with a firm, definite, "maybe."

Seriously, that's too simple an explanation since I don't think many people really agree on what corporate culture means as a concept. I look at it in a more disaggregated fashion. There are many factors related to whether or not an organization adopts new technology. Some are related to finance, some to standards and technical architecture, some to management style, and some to the demographics and expectations of the workforce.

If you mean by "culture" things like hierarchically oriented management, resistance to change, "intensely cylindered" operations, fear of loss of control, etc., etc., then I think you need to address each of these when looking to decide whether to adopt a new approach. My rule of thumb is that when introducing social media and social networking into an organization you have to (a) make a clear connection with the goals of the operation you're trying to impact, and (b) you have to expect that maybe only 25% of your effort on introducing the change has anything to do with technology.

I question the phrase "make them more amenable." Unless you're in the military (or some really rigid, hierarchically structured corporation) you can't "make" people accept changes, especially when these changes may impact longstanding business practices and customer or member relations.

When I was initially researching "web 2.0 acceptance" by corporations in 2006, I realized (and published in my blog) that the reasons why people resist changes related to social media and social networking can have a quite rational basis. True, some of this resistance can be viewed as fear of a loss of control, but there's also a lot of ignorance about how specifically these new approaches can help the organization and the people it serves.

I think there used to be a lot of evangelization going on, people -- including us consultants -- thumping the tub about the benefits of the new technology. My approach right now, and the approach a lot of people are taking that I think is more effective, is to focus head-on to benefits and costs and the relationship to organizational goals.

So while I believe that associations and their members can benefit mightily from more use of social media and networking, the "change agent" really needs to understand how the organization operates and manages change. That may have nothing to do with technology, and it may instead have much more to do with the goals of the members.

To some extent that's true but having seen the data on who actually uses social media and networking tools I think that that's a very narrow and unproductive strategy. Just yesterday I was shown demographics of group members for a major social networking vendor, and I was astonished at the number of people over 40 who are actively engaged, and I'm not just referring to groups that focus on technology.

Think about what a corporate marketer does. Unless you have a product that very narrowly appeals to a particular demographic or market segment, your marketing and sales strategy has to focus on all the segments. That means using different appeals, different communication channels, different packaging, different pricing, and even different distribution to reach these different segments.

It's no different with an organization's adoption of a new technology or business process. You plan for adoption so that the needs of the different segments are taken into account.

Pay attention to what Jeremiah Owyang does and says:

http://web-strategist.com/blog/

He's an "A-lister" friend of mine who really helps people make sense of social media and social networking.

Tools like blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, collaborative workspaces, and group interaction media function as platforms and as communication channels.

My take is that a project manager can use a blog or a wiki to bring together a lot of strands of information about a project, ranging from the sharing of information in real time to integration with formal project management tools related to tasks, progress, resource consumption, and other "hard data" related to project management.

I started researching this question last year and I quickly found out that how you ask project managers the question really impacts their response. If you ask them "have you ever used a blog as a project management tool?" they answer one way. If you ask a more general question about the use of collaboration or social networking tools you get another answer that leads to the fact that an increasing number of project management tools do have collaborative and social features.

I originally got interested in the potential for working on how social media could be used in a disaster response situation when I worked with a contractor that handles disaster response planning related to large scale biological agent attacks. How do you communicate with large groups of people when disaster strikes?

I quickly realized two important points: (1) the authorities need unencumbered communication channels to get critical information out to affected populations, and (2) affected populations are going to use whatever available communication tools are available to make decisions and share information.

Reconciling these two realities is difficult, but I'm not convinced it's impossible. Bridging the gap requires each group to understand the goals and objectives of the other, and that takes time. What we're seeing, of course, based on experience with Katrina and with how the media handled the Virginia Tech massacre, is a growing use of social media and social networking tools being used in real time by affected populations. That's the reality.

Fortunately there are some forward thinking organizations such as the American Red Cross that are making efforts to reconcile these two realities.

Please contact me - I love this stuff!

My email address is:

ddmcd@yahoo.com

You can also follow me on Twitter which I check in on throughout the day:

http://twitter.com/ddmcd