My (anti)Fortune Cookie

It has been WAY too long since I have written here.  There are three main excuses:

1. A week on the Oregon coast – It doesn’t get much better than that!
2. A week camping with the Boy Scouts: Canoeing, white water rafting, hiking into and from a lake (3400′ increase in elevation in 10.5 miles one way – ohhhh my blistered feet!), mountain biking and rock climbing.  Phew!
3. Launching our company’s external social network.

It is this last one that has kept me in the office way later than I would have liked for far too many nights, but it was worth it!

After a year and a half after conception, we have launched a social network to our customers.  Last December we launched one internally and it has been a huge success.  Going externally was the next step.  It has been an uphill battle but one that has been a lot of fun – and the fun is not even close to being over.

Not all social networks can fall under the Social Learning banner, but some can.  In fact, most company’s social networks are failing.  For the large majority, it is because their focus and goals are in the wrong place.  Most of the failing ones are not focused on learning and sharing.  They are focused around a product or a brand.  These types are very difficult to maintain in a social networking world.  Not impossible, but more difficult.  As that blog post puts it:

Looking at all this, the answer seems pretty obvious: many of the companies in the study did not provide a compelling incentive for customers to get involved with their communities. Many of these communities are set up with the idea that people want to come hang out in a community just to chat about a brand.

For me, when I am involved I am learning.  It doesn’t matter what I am doing – even if I am teaching.  We all want to learn.  Get others engaged and personalize it for them and you will have a group who is learning and sharing – a Social Learning Network.

At the beginning stages of this project I held a kickoff meeting to explain what we were going to do.  It turned into the most venemous, toxic meeting I have ever been in.  The backlash was astonishing.  I thought this might happen, so before hand I met with each member, gave them an overview and elicited their support – of which I received from each of them.  It didn’t help.

A day after the meeting, the director of IT (who was in the meeting and went over the top), brought to me a fotune cookie.  It reads: “In great attempts it is glorious to fail.”  Basically he was saying that it was a worthy goal, but ‘good try.’  This had the opposite effect on me as I believe he would have liked at the time.  Instead, it made me work harder for this. I became more focused.

Fast forward to the day before the launch of our external site.  I pulled in essentially the same people – those who were the heavy players in creating it.  I wasn’t expecting the same because we had all come so far, but I was expecting some push back: “That page doesn’t work for me,” or “This process won’t work,” or “I don’t like the layout, ” or “We don’t have enough content,” or something.  Instead, there was talk about how we could help other companies do the same thing we had created.  I fully expected (and almost wanted) some discord.  But it wasn’t there.  Everyone understood the value and was 100% behind it!  What a contrast from a year and a half ago!

I have been asked many times, “Are you excited that you are launching?”  Yes and no.  ‘YES’ because we have come this far and this is a great milestone.  ‘NO’ because it is only a milestone.  The goal is much further down the road.  And we have a lot more to do to make this successful.

Because the company wanted to keep costs down, we did everything in-house.  They didn’t give me any official resources, but I was able to pull some cycles from a number of different departments.  What they couldn’t provide I had to do myself.  I created the layout, structure, stole the colors (since I am color blind – thankfully colors can be translated to numbers!), used other’s icons (legally), set up backend processes, changed an internal culture (most importantly), educated the employees on social networks, and adjusted as necessary.  Having done all that, I wish I was a better web designer.  There are a number of things I would like to do differently with that, but I am not sure I can put my finger on it.  Oh well…

We still have to implement a number of features that will engage the customer even more.  For example, we have strucutred it so that we will have at least 1500 self-registered members by the beginning of September, guaranteed.  But for a start I am very happy with the result.  This has been the most rewarding ‘work’ project I have lead.  I put ‘work’ in quotes because although it is for pay, it has felt like play – it has been a lot of fun as well.

And still, I have the fortune cookie as a reminder…

Tagged as: coast, community portal, fortune cookie, meeting