3 Best Practices to Roll Out Your Internal Social Network

Discover 3 best practices for using groups to roll out an internal social network. The promise of Talkspirit is to make teams' day-to-day work easier through simpler, faster access to the information they care about, so their projects succeed.

To deliver on this promise, Talkspirit brings together within a single interface the best of two worlds: the social network and chat. The social network as a backbone for sharing information and working within groups, chat for communication that's smooth, real-time and resolutely modern.

In this note, we address the question of how information is distributed through groups. The question of group architecture is indeed one that comes up time and again for organizations rolling out Talkspirit as a backbone for new collaborative practices. Which groups should you create? How should you structure them? How do you successfully roll out your internal social network? In this note, we want to share a few practices to help with this thinking.

Different types of group:

1. Project group: this is a natural group whose purpose is carrying out and/or tracking a project over time, and which brings together the associated team.
2. Group tied to a role / function: this type of group fosters mutual support, monitoring and the sharing of information / knowledge more broadly within a group of people who share the same role in the organization.
3. Group tied to a location: if your organization spans several sites, this type of group will make it easier to distribute information within the associated site.
4. Group tied to a topic: this group will make it easier to share information / knowledge on a subject in which its members share a common interest.
5. Group tied to a product or service being sold: this group brings together, cross-functionally across the organization, the resources involved in selling, producing and supporting a product or service
6. Group tied to your organization's visibility online: this group will help you better track when your organization speaks up, the mentions of your ecosystem, and will make it easier for your members to share content in an ambassador-style approach
7. General group: this group will bring together all the members of the organization and make it easier to distribute content and information that concerns them all

This list isn't exhaustive.

We've rolled out these different types of group at our own company. They gradually replaced information that was previously delivered mainly by email a few years ago.

Below we share a few practices that can help you successfully roll out your internal social network:

1. Start with groups whose exchanged information holds real value for users

For many of our roles, information is the fuel needed to carry out our missions and projects. Being properly informed – quickly, objectively and completely – is an essential prerequisite for informed decision-making and fast execution.

So creating a group is the answer to a simple problem: making it easier to access information that, for the group's members, represents a genuine interest, a real value in carrying out their day-to-day mission. Put another way, at Talkspirit we are committed to delivering a high-performing solution to a problem of accessing and distributing information in every organization.

Asking yourself whether to create a group inevitably brings you back to this trivial but essential question: who are this group's members? what do they need? what problems do they face? how can you help them perform better through better access to information? A project group won't have the same needs as a role-based or topic-based group. The nature of the information sources at play won't be the same either.

Start with groups for which Talkspirit can bring obvious, immediately perceptible value. For example, a group built around a product line may find it valuable to gather, in a single space, business information, roadmap information, information related to operations and after-sales support, … offering all the group's members an unprecedented view of every activity related to the product.

In our own internal case at Talkspirit, developers thereby access commercial information and account managers access customer support activity through the integrations built with the various business applications (Trello, Zendesk, Github, Pipedrive in our case). Where some had no access to information for lack of a license, they now have access through the integrations built. Where teams struggled to communicate about handling a case, they now strike up a conversation easily. The time saved in syncing up, the better understanding of situations, the responsiveness are all direct benefits of this group's activity. Thus « augmented » by these new capabilities for understanding our environment, it now seems utterly inconceivable to us to go back to « ping-pong » email exchanges peppered with « sync » meetings. In this case, Talkspirit didn't just replace email in our practices, it made it obsolete by opening up new capabilities.

So start by focusing on what creates value for the members of your team or of each group before thinking about rolling out groups whose interest will be less easily identifiable.

2. Roll out the internal social network gradually, encourage initiatives within a clear framework

"Rome wasn't built in a day"! When it comes to rolling out a collaborative platform, the same holds true. Roll out each group with the same care and the same pursuit of value toward achieving a clear objective. If you're behind the creation of one or more groups, adopt a « quick win » approach so as to quickly demonstrate the value of this new medium for sharing information, communicating and collaborating. Show, through successes and their spread across the organization, the value of the approach to spark the creation of other groups, as a backbone for new ways of working collectively.

Unlike an intranet, where information was distributed mainly within a controlled layout and space architecture, unlike an inbox, where information is organized solely around the user's personal criteria, the social network must both offer a clear understanding of the available groups while offering a certain flexibility in creation and organization. Give up the idea of wanting to control your social network's entire architecture; instead, see your network as a « living species », one that adapts dynamically to its members' needs through groups that form and evolve continually to best meet end users' needs. This way, your social network will be made up of « stable » landmarks based on well-identified groups that will offer obvious spaces for exchange and sharing for members, and of a large majority of smaller groups, built around members' needs to share very specific information among themselves. The two aren't incompatible; they simply address different problems and objectives.

For example, you might be tempted to create a « Market » group to aggregate information from your market and your competitors, and make it easier to distribute within the group. This group can offer a general information base that can be supplemented by other, more granular groups allowing your marketing team's members to work in greater depth and detail on information that doesn't interest the average member of the organization.

How groups are divided up is an important issue and we too often see organization leaders reproduce the content-distribution layout that was in place on an intranet. Setting up « umbrella » groups dealing with broad issues runs the risk of diluting the value and interest of that group as seen earlier for the users taking part. Faced with a group that distributes more than half of its content of little interest to the user, the latter will be tempted to leave it, at the risk of no longer following activities that might concern and interest them.

Instead, consider how you've organized your content in your inbox. It probably contains dozens of folders or labels that you've refined over time. Over time, the same will be true with your collaborative platform.

Finally, remember to adopt a naming convention so that the order in which groups appear in the navigation menu can be consistent for users.

3. Adopt the right posture, lead by example

I'll end this note with a basic piece of advice that is all too rarely put into practice. Rolling out your internal social network is everyone's business; adopt yourself the practices you recommend to your colleagues. Why would they have the time and the desire to do something you don't do yourself?

Likewise, distributing a piece of information across several channels can be utterly counterproductive to developing collaborative practices. There's an invisible slider for each user and each organization in their migration toward new ways of working that go through better information sharing. Switching from one mode of information sharing / communication to another, more open, more transparent, more collaborative one won't happen overnight, and don't underestimate the effort needed to help some people « change » their practices, leave their comfort zone, move from a logic where information belonged to them (it's my inbox) to a logic where information belongs to the groups created as a backbone for carrying out the projects they serve.

Some may have believed for a moment that simply rolling out a tool was enough to let the « magic » happen. « IF the tool is useful, it will be used and it will roll out by itself » I used to hear a few years ago. Nothing could be further from the truth! Rolling out an internal social network isn't just about giving access to the platform; you have to support members during the launch. The paradigm shift we're experiencing today in transforming our ways of working requires energy, rigor, perseverance and exemplarity at every moment. Then, gradually, the magic happens: just as the fax replaced the letter or email replaced the fax before it, collaboration platforms, augmented by the new capabilities offered by built-in automation, will end up gradually replacing the tools that came before them.