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Promote Externally for Adoption Internally

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You should have seen the look on my boss's face when I told him that I wanted to develop an external marketing/awareness campaign for our internal Enterprise 2.0 community, hello.bah.com. 

"Why Steve, would you want to talk about something that the public can't see or use out in the media?  Wouldn't our time be better spent internally - improving stability, adding new features, communicating via our internal channels?"  

At this point, I had grown accustomed to receiving quizzical responses from my bosses :), so I was prepared to justify the time and resources that would be needed to promote hello externally.

Here’s what I said:

“What do you do with the mass emails that you get from corporate communications? How often do you read them?"

"What about the last time you looked at that poster in the kitchen?"

"When was the last time you read your intranet homepage?”

"Now, when was the last time you checked the front page of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal?"

By this point, he started to realize where I was going with this. He understood that I wasn’t recommending that we go out to the media to reach the public as a target audience, but as another means to reach our internal audience. Instead, building external awareness could actually result in tangible internal benefits.

When we went to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference back in 2009 to talk about what we did with hello, our goal was two-fold.  One was to market the booz allen brand, but more importantly, we wanted to ensure that everyone in the firm knew that hello had officially "arrived" and was here to stay.  This wasn't some internal pilot - it was something that was going to be around for the long haul. 

Despite all of the mass emails, newsletter articles, briefings, and flyers, you might be surprised to find out how much our traffic spiked after the conference, the ReadWriteWeb article, and the FastForward blog postings were published.  People started coming in to work saying, "wow - did you know we had this hello thing here? Have you checked it out yet?"  We were building buzz simply by going outside the normal, official channels that often go ignored within the Enterprise.

These are the eight benefits that we have realized by promoting hello externally:

1. Lends more credibility to the initiative
2. Increases awareness among geographically disbursed employees
3. Generates interest among external partners, clients, customers
4. Instills a sense of pride among employees
5. Demonstrates that you can “walk the walk” and “talk the talk”
6. Provides top cover
7. Ensures accountability for ongoing results
8. Demonstrates commitment to the community

How can your community become the next Hello.bah.com, Intellipedia, or Spacebook?

Start by:

• Writing abstracts to present at conferences like Enterprise 2.0
• Commenting on Enterprise 2.0 blogs
• Author guest posts for those Enterprise 2.0 blogs
• Do a twitter search to find out who is talking about #e20 and engage with them

Have you realized internal benefits to promoting externally?

Comments

Submitted by John Brunswick June 07, 2010 - 12:40 PM

Steve - definitely an innovative, thoughtful post! Out of all of the items that you highlighted here, the benefit of "Demonstrate[ing] commitment to the community" is often overlooked by organizations. If people demonstrate conviction around their work, it goes a long way in helping others to engage with it. Unfortunately some intranets exists because they fulfilled a CIO's need to check a box on an "enterprise tools to have list" and most likely contain limited value for end users. Conversely, if an intranet does provide real value, promotion is an important tool for adoption and your post is a good guide to getting things moving.

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Submitted by Steve Radick June 17, 2010 - 10:38 PM

Yes - actively and visibly demonstrating that commitment is an important success factor to any Enterprise 2.0 effort. Who wants to join and commit to something that's not going to be around in six months?

BTW - sorry for the late response - didn't have my notifications set up right here :)

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Submitted by Bert Sandie June 20, 2010 - 11:15 PM

Hey Steve,

We have taken a similar approach at EA (www.ea.com) in that both internal and external marketing and advertizing adds to the credibility of the solution. For example, last year we were very fortunate to be awarded by Microsoft as SharePoint customer of the quarter which went along way internally with folks in them understanding that we have a leading solution.

I also agree that trying to write white papers or talk at conference (local, national or international) is an excellent avenue to promote your solution internally and to learn lots from your peers at these types of events.

Great thoughts!

Bert

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This post and comment(s) reflect the personal perspectives of community members, and not necessarily those of their employers or of AIIM International