Five Tips for Bringing Web 2.0 Into the Enterprise
Your customers are talking about you. Here's how to join their conversation.
CIO — For many, Web 2.0 is the Wild West (especially when trying to bring it into the enterprise), and like any new frontier, the rules are a work in progress. Still, those who have gone before you offer some advice.
Do your homework. The first step is to define who your Web 2.0 customer will be—for example, employees, consumers or advertisers? Find other companies that are targeting the same kind of customers and have similar goals. It may take research to figure out which companies fall into that category, but it's worth it, says Sylvia Marino, executive director of Edmunds' CarSpace.com. "It's great to sit in a room with people facing the same challenges." Web 2.0 tools targeting external customers can have quite different hurdles than those facing internal customers—for example, security settings or methods of generating participation.
Web 2.0 conferences and books that include case studies are also great places to find contacts. Going to support forums of vendors in the space can also yield Web 2.0 contacts, says Marino.
Test the water with smaller projects. Both in terms of getting buy-in and seeing what issues Web 2.0 may bring on, it's important to start small. Alistair Behenna, CIO of Harvey Nash, a global recruitment consultancy and IT outsourcing provider, often sees just the opposite when people do take on Web 2.0, "People start too big. Instead, be intelligent and selective, see what's out there." For example, if you're not comfortable with a wiki, you might have a corporate blog instead.
It was Dell's initial experiences with internal blogs that helped pave the way for IdeaStorm. Last year the company launched the corporate blog, Direct to Dell. "With that we learned the value of being transparent," says Caroline Dietz, Dell spokesperson and manager of IdeaStorm. Regarding feedback, "we honed what we're doing with it, how we're responding, how to publicly address critics, fans, competitors. That experience really helped prepare us for what we were up against [with IdeaStorm]."
Dietz says that launching IdeaStorm was a natural part of internal change and taking Web 2.0 to the next level. Still, internal education was required on just what the purpose of IdeaStorm was, especially for the traditional market research employees. "We knew there were certain pockets where you want to be careful with all this," she says. Education and communication were made priorities early on.
Create clear goals and choose tools accordingly. "Have a very clear mission statement when you go into it," says Marino. Edmunds' CarSpace.com arose from a philosophy that customers should have is a "clean well-lit place" to come together and discuss the ins and outs of car buying, as well as car ownership. Customers can log on to CarSpace and say, I just test drove such and such car, who else did and what did you think? They can talk about how to install a certain part, or even write a how-to guide. Forums, message boards and other tools support various customer needs. "It all goes back to core philosophy and making technology selections that support it," says Marino.
