1. Driving Adoption of Lotus
Connections
Within Your Organization
Rocky Oliver
Chief Technology Officer
Workflow Studios
rock@workflowstudios.com
Twitter: @LotusGeek
Skype: Lotus.Geek

2. Agenda – Social Networking
● Introduction
● What is Social Networking?
● Why is Social Networking Important?
● Introduction: Lotus Connections
● Agenda – Driving Adoption

3. Introduction
● Began “Lotus Geek” career in 1992 at Lotus
Development – Word Processing Division
● Consultant for large companies, small
companies, and my own company
● Writer (3 books, many articles)
● Speaker (Lotusphere, other conferences in
Europe and US)
● Happily work for Workflow Studios now

4. What is Social Networking?
• What is a Social Network?
• Academic Definition: “A social network is a
social structure made of individuals (or
organizations) called "nodes," which are tied
(connected) by one or more specifc types of
interdependency, such as friendship, kinship,
fnancial exchange, dislike, sexual
relationships, or relationships of beliefs,
knowledge or prestige.” (Wikipedia)
• Then what are Social Network Services?

5. Social Network Services
• What is a Social Network?
• Academic Definition: “A social network service focuses on
building and refecting of social networks or social
relations among people, e.g., who share interests and/or
activities. A social network service essentially consists of a
representation of each user (often a profle), his/her social
links, and a variety of additional services. Most social
network services are web based and provide means for
users to interact over the internet, such as e-mail and
instant messaging. Although online community services
are sometimes considered as a social network service in a
broader sense, social network service usually means an
individual-centered service whereas online community
services are group-centered.” (Wikipedia)

6. There is a world of choices...
● Source: Forrester as reported by:
http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/03/institutional_p.html

7. Most-used Social Media
● Media Marketing Report - March 2009
● Survey Results of 880 Participants - Most Used Social Media Tools

8. Social Networking for the
Lotus Professional
● As a Lotus Professional, you MUST become a part of the
“Yellowverse” - but how?
● Start small - LinkedIn (Business profiles and other stuff)
● Getting braver - Facebook (Social profiling and network)
– Incidentally, also great for “social” side of
networking!
● Feeling frisky - Twitter
– http://www.everythingtwitter.com - search, follow,
share
● (More on this in the appendix...)

9. Social Networking,
Corporate Style
● You have plugged into the YellowVerse
● You realize the power of social networking
● You want to bring that power to your corporation
● But how?
● Lotus Connections, of course!

10. Lotus Connections
● What is Lotus Connections?
● “Lotus Connections is social computing
software for business that empowers you to be
more innovative.” (IBM)
●
● In reality, Lotus Connections 2.5 currently
contains seven features

11. Lotus Connections - Features
● Files
– provides a convenient way to share documents,
spreadsheets, presentations, and other types of files with
people without the need to send large files through e-mail
● Wikis
– allows teams to collaboratively enter, edit, and publish Web
page content
● Communities
– allows individuals with a common interest, responsibility, or
area of expertise to stay in touch, share information,
exchange ideas, and collaborate on projects

12. Lotus Connections - Features
● Home Page
– provides individuals with a consolidated view of their social
data from across all of the Lotus Connections services
● Activities
– allows individuals to create online work areas where they and
their teammates can gather together the e-mails, IM chats,
documents, messages, and other information that they
need to accomplish a business objective

13. Lotus Connections - Features
● Blogs
– allows you to present your ideas, get feedback from others,
and learn from the expertise and experience of others who
blog
● Bookmarks (Dogear)
– permits one to save, organize, and share bookmarks; and
also discover bookmarks that have been qualified by
others

14. Lotus Connections
● Demo #1
– Workflow Studios internal site
– Basic install
● Demo #2
– BleedYellow.com
– Connections 2.0, but customized

15. Driving Adoption
● Biggest thing to keep in mind – every company
is different
● No “one size fits all” strategy
● However, there are standardized techniques for
determining the right strategy for your
organization

16. Agenda – Driving Adoption
● How do I begin?
● Identify specific business goals
● Pilot the feature(s) being deployed
● Define and execute an adoption plan for the
larger community
● Overcome common hurdles
● Adoption “recipes”

17. Beginning Your Project
●
Planning and Documentation
– Understand your users
– What are your goals? More on that in a minute
– Use a blog to document your work
●
Who are your sponsors?
– Legal
– HR
– IT
– Marketing
– C-Level
●
Is this for internal or external - or both?

18. Identify Business Goals
● You need to identify concrete business goals
– Incidentally, this is true for ALL projects
● Must be measurable
– Allows use to demonstrate “before” and “after”
● Must be specific to your business

19. Business Goals - Examples
● Facilitate increased communication across teams,
business units, and geographies to reduce duplication
of effort
● Improve ability to respond more rapidly to customer
needs and inquiries
● Reduce the burden on email for collaboration, which is
not designed to be a many-to-many communication
platform
● Stimulate creativity to generate new ideas for
products, services and go-to-market strategies

20. Business Goals – Examples
● Reduce, rework, and improve quality of people's
deliverables
● Decrease the learning curve for new employees
● Make better decisions, knowing they were vetted by
experts across the organization and reflect past
experience

21. Documentation
● Use a blog to publish your progress
● Consider a wiki to share collaborative
information
● Prepare to measure: daily, weekly, monthly,
quarterly
– Create calendar events to ensure that you
gather metrics accordingly
● Create an Activity and Community for the
project

22. Selling the Services
● End users will not want “another system”
● Sell these services as UPGRADES
● Blog: the new newsletter; the new memo from the
President
● Wiki: the new knowledge base; new team sharing site
● Profiles: the new corporate address book
● Communities: the new are for people to share
common interests that do not relate to work
● Activities: should be attractive to Project Managers

23. Pilot the Deployed Features
● Create a plan to pilot Lotus Connections to
identify challenges and best practices native to
your organization
● Let's talk about this Pilot Group...

24. The Pilot Group
● Chose from various segments of your company
– not just IT
● Chose mostly well-connected people
– 75% well-connected
– 20% mostly-connected
– 5% non-connected
● Idea: choose a smaller pilot group that is
responsible to increase the size of the group

25. The Pilot Group
● Consider groups with a need to create deeper working
relationships and to share knowledge
● Not everyone has to be active
– Analysts have identified a pattern of 90:9:1 where 90%
of users are lurkers/readers, 9% are active
participants, and 1% are early adopters/evangelists
● Locate your EVANGELISTS - the people everyone goes to
when they need to know what's going on
● Show people easy entry points – Profiles, Dogear, etc.
– Evangelsits can help

26. The Pilot Group - Evangelists
● Identify people that can be evangelists in the
organization
● These people tend to already show their value
in consumer sources (Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn, etc.)
– They are usually plugged into the “YellowVerse”
● May also be the “emcee of the water cooler”
● This is a permanent role – and management
needs to plan accordingly

27. The Pilot Group
● Conduct a pre-and-post-assessment – ask the
pilot group “how do you...”
– Find information about people (such as title, reporting structure,
contact information)
– Find people based on skills, background or area of interest
– Find information related to a topic
– Find others with a common interest or practice
– Keep up with a person or topic area
– Develop new relationships with others within the organization
– Improve personal productivity or knowledge
– Share experiences with others

28. The Pilot Group – Intro Class
● This is a requirement
● Some suggested goals/activites for the class
– First pilot class is for the Evangelists
– Pilot Class agenda (not inclusive)
– Walk through the system
– Fill out a profile
– Add people to your network
– Add a bookmark

29. The Pilot Group – Intro Class
● More suggestions
– Create a blog/blog entry
– Tag blogs, people, and bookmarks
– Create a community and join a community
– Share some files
– Create and edit a wiki
– Create and share an activity

30. The Pilot Group
● Ongoing - train and measure
– Conduct a “Train the Evangelists” session so
they can train and mentor others
– Conduct periodic “Lunch and Learn” sessions
throughout pilot
– Have regular checkpoint meetings with
Evangelists
– Measure things such as Connections usage,
changes in enterprise social network, and
progress toward your goals

31. The Pilot Group - Checkpoints
● Follow up is conducted by the Evangelists
– Assigned based on organization, division, geo, etc.
● Follow up is conducted weekly
● Create goals for weekly achievement
● Measure weekly goals

32. The Pilot Group - Checkpoints
● Weekly Evangelist discussion
– Measurement from weekly goals
– Setup goals for next week
– Issues, ideas
– Document in wiki or blog
● These should run until the end of the pilot

33. Adoption Plan for the
Larger Community
● Expand and advertise
– Consider an “open” pilot
– Expand participation in the “supported” pilot
– Schedule Lunch and Learns led by your
Evangelists
– Advertise your new social networking
environment using traditional methods

34. Adoption Plan for the
Larger Community
● Track the usage and value of Lotus
Connections
– Identify areas where teams rely heavily on a
specific component
– Remember to conduct surveys on usage and
how it has aided their work efforts
– Consider integrating with existing collaborative
tools – HR portals, discussion dbs, etc. to
drive value higher

35. Overcome Common Hurdles
● Concerns about the effects on productivity
– Performance concerns are largely unfounded
– Problem individuals can be handled as a performance mgmt. issue
● Concerns by an uninformed legal department
– Educate your legal department about social software
– Help legal craft appropriate guidelines
– Research other companies' guidelines (e.g. IBM Blogging Guidelines)
● Concerns about inappropriateness
– Ensure nothing is anonymous
– Remind users of Conditions of Employment agreements
– Inappropriate content can be easily flagged

36. Adoption Recipes
● Publicize it – create a marketing plan
– Emails, Newsletters, Intranet Announcements,
Paper Flyers, Posters, etc.
● Hold “Population Parties”
– As a part of other meetings
– Use for populating things like Profiles, Dogear; or
for creating or joining Communities, etc.
– Consider setting up a photo booth to capture photos
for profiles
– Give prizes

37. Adoption Recipes
● Help your users out
– Create short videos
– Create “Quick Start” guides
– Keep your Evangelists employed
● Allow your users to have some fun
– Allowing more personal usage will keep them
coming back
– Personal blogs, recipe sharing, etc.
– Encourage internal “tweetups”

38. The “Six Week Plan”
● Week 1: Work with Evangelists; create plan of
attack
● Week 2: Pilot training
● Week 3: Pilot with mentoring by Evangelists
● Week 4: Pilot with mentoring by Evangelists
● Week 5: Pilot with mentoring by Evangelists
● Week 6: Gather metrics; report to management
● Remember – metrics are gathered throughout

39. Base Level of Participation?
● Do you require a base level of Participation?
– Probably a good idea, at least until reaching critical mass
● Each company will need to determine this
● Based on each service: Profiles, Communities, Blogs, Bookmarks, Activities,
Files and Wikis
● All services will probably not be appropriate for all users
● ALL users MUST complete and updated profile
– You must “pay to play”
● Begin with pre-populated fields imported from HR Systems and directory
– This has a direct effect on the initial usefulness of the system
● For non-knowledge workers, encourage communities around common
interests

40. Improving Adoption
● Theme and skin similar to intranet
● MUST integrate into existing well-used apps (email, intranet, etc.)
● Consider evaluation in performance reviews and hiring efforts
● Periodic reward systems may be appropriate
● Use the recipes
– Market with a good name and strong traditional in-house
marketing tools (email, flyers, etc.)
– Create videos, tip sheets, blogs to help end users
● Ideas: IBM’s Beehive, Hall of Fame
– What does it take to be considered a stronger contributor?

41. Improving Adoption
● IBM Beehive
– Beehive is an internal social networking site that gives IBMers a
"rich connection to the people they work with” on both a personal
and a professional level.
– Beehive helps employees make new connections, track current
friends and coworkers, and renew contacts with people they
have worked with in the past.
– When employees join Beehive, they get a profile page. They can
use the status message field and the free-form “About Me”
section on their profile page to let other people at IBM know
where they are, what they are doing, and what they are thinking.
– Beehive also lets them post photos, create lists to share their
thoughts, and organize events.
● http://domino.watson.ibm.com/cambridge/research.nsf/0/8b6d4cd68fc12b52
852573d1005cc0fc?OpenDocument

42. Encourage the use of Profiles
● The value of your social network is not usually in quantity
but QUALITY
● Always include a picture
● Use a sound recorder to create a pronunciation
● Complete your profile and schedule regular updates
– New personal information
– New projects (completed or present)
● Try to provide status updates daily
● Tag yourself and others
● Provide links to other social networking sites

43. Encourage the use of
Communites
● Encourage the creating of communities of common interest
that are not work-related
● For geographically dispersed companies, create
communities based on job roles or similar job functions
● Perhaps include feeds into the community from specific
tags or external blogs
● Evangelists should continue to farm communities
– Plant seeds of discussion
– Feed and water participation
– Harvest value and promote in the market

44. Encourage the use of Blogs
● Ask Executives to begin publishing regular memos or
newsletters in blog format
● Setup blogs for users to “share your story”
● Setup a blog that is connected with a community
● Don’t just focus on the number of blogs
– Encourage participation in the blog
– Comments can be as effective if not more
– Rating posts provides value
● Teach about RSS feeds and automated notifications about
new entries/comments

45. Encourage the use of Bookmarks
● Tagging is key for organization of bookmarks
● Include tools to easily share bookmarks
● Rating of bookmarks helps other users
● Bookmarks also act as pointers to people
● Apply feeds of tags associated with bookmarks into
communities
● Create bookmarks as a personal storage of weblinks
● Integrate “Fresh” content into home pages (websites, intranet,
Connections HP)
● CREATE, TAG, SHARE, SEARCH

46. Encourage the use of Activities
● Have HR create re-usable activities for on-
boarding and off-boarding
● Encourage IT Managers to begin creating
activities relative to their projects
● Create reusable assets for the Sales team
which guide them through the sales process

47. Encourage the use of Files
● Best used for ad-hoc sharing of files
● Larger collections should be in Activities or in
document repositories (such as Quickr)
● Use Files within context of Communities and
Blogs
● Provides an on-line backup of specific files

48. Encourage the use of Wikis
● Convert policy documents into wikis
● Start using wikis to document meeting minutes
● Create “Feature Request” wikis: Suggestion
Box
● Consider wikis as shareable To-Do lists
● Vacation Day wiki
● Can status updates be fed into a wiki? Provide
a space for daily team updates

49. Conclusion
● Social Networking is a paradigm-shifting phenomenon
– and is here to stay
● Saavy technologists realize that you can (and should)
bring the power of social networking into your
organization – and we have the tools to do it
● You must have actively drive the adoption of social
networking in your organization
● Lotus Connections is the platform, YOU (and your
plan) are the catalyst

50. Thank You!
● Questions?
● Email: rock@workflowstudios.com
● Twitter: @lotusgeek
● Google Profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/rocky.oliver
● Facebook Profile: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=500049490
● LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lotusgeek
● Become a Fan of WorkFlow Studios on Facebook:
– http://www.facebook.com/WorkFlowStudios
● Follow WorkFlow Studios on Twitter:
– http://twitter.com/workflowstudios

51. Appendix
● All of the slides past this one are extras
● They provide some insight into social
networking for the Lotus Professional
● These are the technologies and sites you
should use, today, to be a part of the
“YellowVerse”
● Once again, contact me if you have any
questions!

52. What is Twitter, Anyway?
● Twitter is a company, offering a microblogging service
● Twitter allows you to connect with your friends, coworkers,
colleagues, and clients directly on their cell phone or computer in a
non-obtrusive way
● Twitter lets you post short text updates (140 characters maximum)
from a computer or handheld device that repeatedly answer the
question, "What are you doing?"
● Your updates are listed chronologically on a personal page that can
read like a Red Bull-fueled day-planner (most use a reader, though).
● Others can sign up to follow your "Tweets," as they're called, and you
can follow theirs
● An aside - You can set up a keyword, such as a company's name,
and see how it is being used in the “Twittersphere”.

53. What about Blogging?
● Two ways to participate in the “blogosphere”
– Reader and commenter
– Blogger
● Should I create a blog?
– Only if you’re committed
– Only if you’re thick-skinned
– Only if you have “something to say”
● But you should READ the Lotus blogs!
● How do you keep up?

54. RSS/Feed Reader
●
Google Reader - or another free reader client like FeedDemon
– http://www.google.com/reader

55. IBM Blog Feeds of Interest
● http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/community/rss.html

56. One More Feed of Interest
● http://feeds.feedburner.com/LotusSupport

57. Planet Lotus
● Blog “aggregator” created by Yancy Lent
● Any Lotus blog worth reading is there
● Replaced RSS feed for me
● http://www.planetlotus.org

58. Sametime Community
● The folks at Lotus911 (now Group) have
created:
– http://www.bleedyellow.com
● Free (FREE!) SAMETIME COMMUNITY
● http://im.bleedyellow.com (sametime server)
● Add “YellowBleeders”
group for everyone!