Social Media; The Engagement Opportunity

Exciting new opportunites to integrate Social Media technologies into core engagement solutions hold the promise of quickening the pace of innovation... and hint at reducing the cost and improving the impact of deliverying these important offerings to Corporate America.

By leveraging Social Media technologies, we can extend engagement feature sets with little or no development... and also expose proprietary features to program participants in the tools, portals and platforms they prefer.

This blog post will explore some of these opportunites. It's a work in progress, and collaborative input is requested... so your feedback is crucial.

Cheers,

- KeelFish

Social Media; The Engagement Opportunity

Connection

Tools and technologies that contribute to individuals feeling a sense of companionship, sameness or affiliation with a larger community.

Facebook

“Find a Friend”

We've created a Facebook widget that helps people tell their other Facebook friends about Engagement sites that they may not have enrolled to.

Communication

Tools and technologies that individuals use to receive information… their preferred ‘portal’ into their informal communication community.

Facebook

“Engagement Dashboard”

We've created a Facebook widget that helps participants keep track of their Engagement summary information, rather than access that in a portal they rarely visit.

Twitter

“Tweet, Rinse & Retweet”

We've placed Tweet this and Retweet this links on our Engagement sites to encourage program participants (authorized or otherwise) to communicate to their followers regarding the site, or site features which they think are interesting.

“Follow Us”

We provide Follow Us links on our Engagement sites to encourage program participant to become Twitter followers for a Twitter account that informs them of program features and news.
“Follow Me”

We've extended our profile page to allow participant to opt-in to pass on event communications (e.g. Bravo Receipt/Submit, Reward Redemption, etc.) via their own Twitter account and follower community.

HowCast

We've developed easy to use, context-sensitive ‘how to’ guides for site usage (e.g. how to unlock an account) or implement program features (e.g. how to recognize an employee). Leveraging the “picture is worth a thousand words” principle, HowCast makes it easy and fun to learn complex or not-often-used processes.

Google

"Google Friends"

We’re integrating Google Friends widget via Google’s API to provide community building with easy single sign on to ease service access.

Community Insight

Tools and technologies to organize and gain insight into the emotions and stream of consciousness of a given community on topical subject matters. We use of that insight to guide and optimize program features to influence engagement via specific responses.

Twitrratr / Twendz / ScoutLabs

These tools provide instant insight into the sentiment and stream of consciousness associated with Social Media dialog.

UserVoice

Crowdsourcing initiatives to generate innovative ideas for companies to further corporate goals and/or improve site features or usefulness.

Zoomerang

Standard Echo Survey insight to baseline participant attitudes and indentify program responses to treat challenges which impact employee engagement.

The Social Engagement model looks sort of like this:

What are your thoughts? How is your organization using Social Media technologies to extend their Engagement offering?

Build it and they will come!

I've watched the wonderful movie Field of Dreams several times, and admire it's positive messages and redemptive spirit.

I can relate to the "Build it and they will come..." line repeated throughout the movie, not because I play baseball, but rather that it reminds me of a point of view I'd help close earlier in my career:

"If I develop this cool system for [insert audience here], they'll all be amazed and use it regularly."

More that once I missed the mark and found that participation was lower than I'd hoped.

My associate Ben Leonard is doing some work for an advanced degree, and recently tuned me into a model that helps explain system usage factors. It's common sense stuff, but well ground in applied research and resonates well with me.

The "Technology Acceptance Model" follows:
















The basic message is the pay attention to the factors which influence the intent to use. Then, make sure you have system stability in place, so that when they do use the technology... it predicatably works as advertised.

Voila, you've now got a system people will engage with.

What's your experience with usability and build system that have high engagement? What lessons have you learned that you can share?

Cheers,

- KeelFish