TechWag

: Image by Sailing “Footprints: Real to Reel” (Ronn ashore) via Flickr

My project involves designing a social system for learning at my current job, and the platform went live on Friday. This is a good thing, but the next big step in building out a social networking system for any company, college, or group is letting them know it exists and what it can do for them.

There is nothing worse than having a company spend money on a system, and then no one use it. One of the biggest things you need to do when building out a new social system is socialize it with the group of people that need to use it. Much like you would do with any other project, the socialization of the social system you are building, letting people know it exists and the things you can do with it are part of the process. What makes this ironic is that sometimes you have to socialize your system the old fashion way, meetings, power points, town hall style meetings, and brown bag lunches to get the word out.

That means pulling people off the systems they have been using, like Ning, Sampa, private web servers, and other systems so that they will start using the system you just built.

That means you have to show compelling value, how this new system works better than Ning, Sampa, or private web servers.

One of the biggest selling points to your own system is with the domain structure, when you keep everything branded under the same domain on the internet. When building out your social networking system, using a sub domain like social.domain.com helps the world know that this particular web site is affiliated with the parent site domain.com. For people who are concerned about the “authoritativeness” of the web sites they interact with this can be a good thing, because that is something they are going to be looking at, ensuring that they are in the right place doing the right thing, at the right time.

I cannot state the importance of the sub domain if this is going to be an official system. Blogs.something.com, technology.something.com or whatever your eventual structure is going to look like, making sure that your social system remains within the domain structure that you are using for your company is very important. When you have people who are used to doing their own thing, using external systems, you need to bring them back into the company. That is where socializing your system comes into place.

The more you bring your early adopters into the company system, the more use, and the more ability they will have to show off what they are doing to their friends, co-workers, and users. While there is an envy factor here, the envy that people have often drives others to adopt the systems. The more the internal users learn to use the system you are providing them you are also providing an internal support group and local experts in each department for the system you just built and rolled out. Those local experts will be able to take some of the support requests off the owners/technical support for the system as others begin to adopt the new system.

That is why socialization of your new social networking system is important. You are building your own support infrastructure within the company for people who need immediate answers, if they have a local expert in the system as an early adopter your support costs are transferred to the local expert and not to your overworked help desk.

You can make a simple PowerPoint slide show, but to show off your new social networking abilities, why not do just one brown bag lunch, and make a video of the event, along with a podcast, along with a handy step by step guide on how to do this. Your time will only be used once to make the video, and you get not only company cred with your new toy, but you also show that social networking can be used for company training along the way. Make sure your training is complete enough that someone can come along and following your steps have immediate success with what they are doing. This also cuts down on some calls to your help desk or support staff for the project. Your local guru can also point off to the training video for new people to cut down on the level of randomization that they will get with local business or social units asking them for support.

The ways to use your new social networking platform can be endless, but you do need to provide support for it. That means you get to make training videos, and otherwise perform some support for your new system to be adopted. You have to socialize your social network to help people adopt and overcome their own fears that they cannot do what they need to do to use it. The more you socialize and support your system, the better the adoption curve, the more people who will use it, the better chance you have of success for the system to be used.