How to Succeed at Social Business

But what makes these businesses successful when so many others have failed?

To start, HBR says businesses must have the following:

• Robust and widespread participation by all employees at every level;
• Integration into daily workflow, and
• An environment of openness, information sharing and trust.

Consequently, those are the three areas that most businesses struggle with most.

TD Bank CIO Glenda Crisp attributes its enterprise collaboration implementation in part to participation from employees at all levels. “We had strong senior executive sponsorship,” she says. “This was a project driven from the top.”

Chris Hyams Hart, vice president of IT at publishing company Random House, thwarted the mindset of social media as something wasteful from the start. When Random House embarked on its social implementation, he purposely rolled it out to groups where improved communication around critical projects was a business priority. “Tools in the enterprise are only well-adopted if the person using them gets value out of them,” he says.

Trust was a big factor in software company SAS’s collaboration project. “[Employees] know they’re trusted by execs and managers and know they have a voice here,” says Karen Lee, SAS’s senior director of internal communications. “If there was no culture of trust, they wouldn’t feel as good about using it.”

Of course, there are more factors to a successful social project than just participation, integration and trust. What was integral in your business’s success? Let me know in the comments below.