As Harrison and his IT group prepared to build the social network for Universal McCann, he began holding focus groups to ask people what they would want out of a corporate social network, and many of them were keen on the idea.

"The state of affairs was such that people were doing great work and reading good content, but didn't have ways to share it," he says. "We wanted this [social network] to help with that."

Ensuring adoption

Because Universal McCann already had SharePoint, and NewsGator built Social Sites to integrate specifically with SharePoint, Harrison's group was able to seamlessly add its new social network, which would essentially become the new starting off point for the corporate intranet.

For Harrison, the key was to make sure people started using it so it wouldn't become another statistic amidst the wasteland of failed corporate social networks. To ensure adoption, Harrison did two things. First, he found allies, primarily managers of divisions and departments, to champion its use in the company. "We wanted to develop super users," he says. "We chose people who understood the technology and who realized why it had value."

Secondly, he set Limo — the Universal McCann corporate intranet containing Social Sites — as the default site on all employees' browsers. "It sounds kind of like a hokey thing to do, but it does really work. When the browser pops open, there it is," he says.

Since the Social Sites implementation only went live in March, Harrison is still monitoring usage levels to see what parts of the site people have gravitated to and which have been less popular.

"We'll do an activity audit person-by-person," he says. "We want to hold people accountable for using the tools every day, and valuing content sharing and knowledge sharing."