Remaining Attendee Questions from Recent eBay Webinar

To follow up on our recent webinar with Ramin Mobasseri of eBay, here are his answers to the remaining questions we were not able to get to during the webinar Q&A session. If you missed it, click here to check out this on-demand webinar!

Q: How has ESN affected the productivity of eBay’s workforce? Has time dedicated to ESN decreased time dedicated to actual work? Have you seen an increase in employee engagement and retention since the solution was implemented?

Ramin: It is too early to determine that but we do have our benchmarks and metrics through the Employee Pulse Survey. Next year we will hopefully do a comparison. There are, of course, other quantitative ways to do this, such as measuring the number of blogs, profile changes, microblog, #tags, etc. The key is to correlate such information to key areas like user adoption, increased productivity, and decreasing attrition rates for instance.

Q: Are you applying standards to community design? Do you enforce/promote standardization?

Ramin: Yes, we have branded the communities the same as the Hub with designated master pages and styles sheets.

Q: How many dedicated resources took part in your project?

Ramin: Seven.

Has NewsGator complicated your migration to SharePoint 2010? Do you see it as a complication going forward?

Ramin: Not at all. We upgraded first and then applied NewsGator to our environment. But remember, we also had NewsGator in our DEV, QA, Sandbox, and Staging environments. I think we practiced enough to know if something was going to go wrong. We also carried out an extensive performance and load test before and after, and all the indications were that NewsGater had not affected the environment negatively.

Q: How has ESN impacted the utilization of email?

Ramin: It's too early to tell.

Q: Where in the organization was this initiative sponsored?

Ramin: Global Corporate Technology and Operational Excellence

Q: If you could offer just three words of advice to other companies just starting to roll out enterprise social computing what would they be?

Ramin: I can give you three phrases instead: start small, test & learn, and focus on user adoption.

Q: Can you provide a few examples of how you encouraged executive sponsorship and user adoption?

Ramin: Executives want to and need to get closer to their groups, and sometimes, simple newsletters are not enough. So suggest building a CIO, CTO, and/or CFO Corner where people can connect to their leaders directly. They can share and learn from all the suggestions and questions they receive.

Use real-life scenarios, for example, a day in the life of a Project Manager, or a day in the life of the Learning & Development Team, HR, Legal, etc.

Also, apply the Find an Expert scenario within various functional groups. Sometimes finding an expert is an extremely costly initiative. So why not find those experts within your own company.

Use the benefits of social to lower costs by reducing travel and emails. Imagine when someone goes on vacation and when they come back, they will need to go through so many emails; however, if there was a community for them, they could simply browse through the community and find out what has been going on.

Enterprise Social Networking Tools to Increase Employee Engagement

The trend in today’s workplace is towards “becoming social”— leveraging the right social tools to increase customer retention and streamline company productivity. Social computing systems are increasing employee engagement, boosting collaboration, and facilitating more widespread recognition of success and ability. However, while research clearly demonstrates that all companies can benefit from enterprise social networking, old ways die hard and there’s reticence to leaving established methods behind and embracing the innovation of the latest social wave. Interestingly, there seems to be a reverse correlation between the degree of need and the level of demand—organizations that need social computing the most, typically the largest and most influential, are slow to embrace larger social adaptations, while social adoption among smaller companies is expanding at a rapid pace.

Big companies need social networking tools
Weighted beneath massive information databases and internationally distributed employee populations, large companies have much to gain by going social. Internally, enterprise social computing solutions let large organizations weed through the clutter in mammoth flows of information, filtering out the noise to hone in on relevant data or efficiently locate a subject matter expert for a given task. Culturally, enterprise social solutions facilitate more widespread engagement through collective ideation and brainstorming, helping to bring more coherence to a very large organization which can often feel disjointed to employees. Externally, social tools such as Twitter and Facebook are bridging the gap between companies and customers, enabling large organizations to stay in tune with changing user demands and perceptions.

Why do large organizations neglect social networking tools?
Despite the real need for social networking tools in large organizations, big business often suffers from social media neglect. While it’s difficult to get hard numbers on internally-facing efforts, their slow-paced adoption of externally facing social media efforts is telling. When it comes to blogging activity, Facebook page management, and Twitter activity, large organizations are falling short; less than a quarter of the nation's top Fortune 500 companies use public-oriented blogs and only 62 percent and 58 percent take advantage of the Twitter-sphere and customer-oriented Facebook pages. Similarly, the most influential global organizations have been cautious about shifting their internal infrastructures towards incorporating social computing tools.

By contrast, smaller corporations - specifically those included in the annual Inc. 500 listing of America’s fastest growing companies - have a strong command of enterprise social networking. In fact, these companies host twice as many blogs as their large enterprise counterparts and a full 71 percent of the Inc. 500-listed fasted growing companies have fully functioning Facebook pages. Unlike enterprise giants, small companies realize they have much to gain from social tools, and a lot to lose by not getting on board as fast as possible. Their willingness to adapt to social allows growing companies to facilitate more open communications with customers and more collaborative work across all ranks of the organization. This means that, as our fastest developing new companies gain momentum and become the “enterprise giants” of the future, the next line of influential companies will be inherently more social. The perception of the modern workforce is changing, and large organizations need to get on board.

How is NewsGator helping to bring social to larger companies?
At NewsGator, we recognize that this social lag in large organizations is a potentially critical problem—that larger enterprises greatly benefit from both external and internal social computing solutions to maximize profit potential and establish a more customer-centric working environment. This understanding shows up clearly in our customer base, which includes global enterprise giants such as Deloitte, Accenture, and General Mills. General Mills, for example, a 33,000 employee strong global company touting well known brands like Betty Crocker, Pillsbury and Cheerios, looked to NewsGator for a social networking approach to internal collaboration that would overcome the challenges of having a large, geographically dispersed employee population. Since integration, NewsGator Social Sites has helped General Mill's employees to better collaborate, streamline innovation and bridge the communication gaps across geographic and functional silos. To learn more about how NewsGator fuels enterprise collaboration at General Mills, check out the following video:

And that’s not an isolated example – it’s something we keep seeing time and time again with new customers. At NewsGator, we’re telling large organizations to stop hesitating—join the social wave and watch your organization transform in both efficiency and client satisfaction.