Pimp My Site

My second blog post and I’ve already used the word Pimp.  My Mom would be so proud.  Just to put this into context, do you remember the MTV show hosted by rapper Xzibit called “Pimp My Ride” where the crew would take an average ride and turn it into a shiny, happy car?  Not only did they shine up the car with a custom paint job and new upholstery but they always added some extra bling inside – I’m talking a chocolate fountain, a baby grand piano, or an aquarium with live fish.

 

Where’s this going, you ask?  Well, believe it or not, this ties into driving Enterprise 2.0 adoption.  I know, you saw this coming.  As we all know, there aren’t many companies out there that have been actively using E2.0 technologies enterprise-wide for more than a year, much less two years.  NewsGator, because we happen to make an E2.0 solution, has been using it for about two years now.  (NewsGator Social Sites is integrated into our SharePoint intranet.)  Like many other organizations we would like to see a higher rate of adoption.  It feels like because we are who we are, everyone in the company should be on our intranet for a certain amount of time every day.  It ends up that’s not the case and we decided to find out why.

 

The first thing I did was survey the employees.  I asked things like how much time they spend on the intranet, what they do there, if they don’t use it very often why not, and the list goes on.  The results were interesting and my biggest lesson was that we are guilty of the classic act of the cobblers children going barefoot.  We spend so much time working with our customers that we haven’t paid much attention to our own internal customers.  One of the biggest pieces of feedback we got was that when new employees start no one gives them any training on our intranet.  By training they didn’t mean where to click and when, what they really wanted was to be shown which resources are there that will help them and tell them why they should care to participate.  So a new training plan was born, including an on-boarding piece for new employees and the above mentioned “Pimp My Site” session.

 

I wanted to attract not only the employees that actively said “I’d like to know more about what I can do” but also those who said “I might use it more if I knew more but I’m not actively going to seek out more info”.  Two motivators drove a large percentage of the company to the inaugural “Pimp My Site” session:  Fun and Beer.  Well, maybe those are one and the same.  Our company culture is very casual so I can get away with serving beer at 4 PM on a Friday just like I can get away with putting something on the calendar with the word pimp in it.  If I were doing this for one of our F500 customers I would probably do it as a lunch and learn (bring in pizza if the budget allows) and call it “Bling My Site”.  Anyway, I was surprised at what a great turnout we had.  Even some of our power users were there to see if they could pick up some extra tips.

 

A quick warning before we move into details - I mentioned before that NewsGator Social Sites runs on the Microsoft SharePoint platform.  That doesn’t mean this concept I’m writing about won’t help you if you’re not using SharePoint, but some of the specifics may be a little fuzzy for you.

 

The My Site in SharePoint is a private personal page.  NewsGator Social Sites enhances this personal page with an activity stream, Microblogging, a profile builder, and some other useful web parts.  My end goal for this session was to make sure everyone understood how they might use the different capabilities in a business context and the benefits they might see.  I also showed them how to remove web parts they didn’t need, how to move things around so that the page is useful to them as individuals, and then came the final and most important piece - how to add the aquarium.  I promised everyone up front I would show them how to add a widget for a world clock, a stock ticker, or even an aquarium with fish swimming around, a la Xzibit.  If that’s what makes their My Site more personal and therefore more visited by them, why not?  I realize not all companies will allow the external content, but if you do it can be a fun way to get people interested in their My Sites and then once they are there they start to see the value and keep coming back.  (For instructions on adding external widgets to SharePoint go to http://www.scribd.com/doc/8456926/Adding-ThirdParty-Widgets-to-Your-Share-Point-2007-Site.  You can find a ton of free widgets at www.widgetbox.com.)

 

My everyday application of this?  Offer a number of lunch and learn “Bling My Site” sessions, keep them fun, and make sure to sell the users on why they care before you start talking about where they should click.

Comments

[Cruz]

So you think your writing skills are dramatic! So, what's the whole point of what you wrote anyway. Gawdbliss Newsgator. Sorry to prick your balloon but everyone's an expert these days and particularly if they can drop a little Eze village and Provence here and there...Jeez!