Guest poster Kayleigh O’Keefe works with communications executives for our sister program the Communications Executive Council. This week she examines how to optimize internal social media collaboration across an organization.

As we’ve charted developments in the internal social media and collaboration space, we’ve seen many over-invest in the latest and greatest technology platforms. These efforts, such as implementing internal Facebook or Twitter-esque applications, met initial enthusiasm only then to see early adoption rates plummet and to struggle justifying value created for the business.

For the most part, these efforts failed because the platforms were non-intuitive and without an obvious purpose or benefit. Many companies wasted time and effort on employee sharing solutions that simply couldn’t compete with employees’ personal options. Before you begin experimenting with new social media options for employees, here’s what you need to beware of:

• With significant investment and application of the right principles, companies can create tremendous value from tools that allow employees to connect with and learn from one another. (see how one pharmaceutical company launched a wiki-style site to facilitate easy consumption of organizational knowledge)
• Companies should beware of efforts that require significant investment but feel unnatural for employees to use; these efforts will disappoint.
• Consider leveraging existing live and virtual employee interactions to redirect energy towards strategies that encourage peer learning. (for example, Research at Texas Instruments and Sabre Holdings have used this technology to identify expert opinions and tacit information) Read More »

MREB is running a very quick card sorting exercise to make improvements to our Web site.  To participate in this 5-minute exercise, click here.

Making sure that information and insights are easily accessible is a big part of a research team’s job, and we here at the MREB are focusing on that now more than ever.  We recently published work on embedding knowledge into the organization, and some of our most popular work remains are profiles of Research portals.

For example, one of our more popular portal profiles is of Adobe’s market research portal, Goldmine.  To make access to information as user-friendly as possible, the Information Resources Group developed a business- and technology-based taxonomy of 13 supertopics and relevant subtopics.  Grouped with email alerts, save searches, a personalizable area of the site, and a blog, the team was able to create a dynamic and proactive research tool for the entire organization.

We too have a taxonomy of topic centers on our Web site to try to make our information as accessible as possible.    To make sure that parts of our taxonomy are user friendly and make sense, I am fielding a very quick (5-minute) card sorting exercise to understand how researchers think about projects.  Please click on the link to provide your thoughts and help make our content more accessible. 

Thanks so much for your help!

My colleague at the Marketing Leadership Council Patrick Spenner recently wrote on Forbes.com warning CMOs about the big data hype: In MLC’s recent survey of CMOs across the globe, Big Data ranked as one of the top 3 issues on their minds. 

And our own study revealed that 60% of business partners feel that they do NOT have the support and tools needed to be customer focused.  And yet this is just the support decision makers need more than ever as they wrestle with the prospect of Big Data.  Indeed, the MLC work found that close to two-thirds of the marketing team is likely to experience “analysis-paralysis” in the face of the data deluge.

We found that research’s role is changing as information proliferates, and that functions are now evolving from insight consultants to knowledge inculcators.  This means that researchers must work harder than ever to ensure business partners are using insights to inform their decisions.

We recently asked leading organizations how to drive business partner engagement with knowledge, and they tackle the problem with two strategies:

1. Use existing information flows-partner with the Communications team and business partners themselves to make sure that your insights will resonate throughout the organization
2. Correct overconfidence and misperceptions-tap business partners’ emotions to create internal dissonance that demonstrates the value of new information

These two strategies will make information more memorable, ensuring that your insights (from Big Data or not) will truly become Big Insights that impact your company’s actions. 

MREB members, log on to see how companies like GM, Intuit, Heinz, and Telecom NZ drive engagement with knowledge.

We all know that the business questions are best answered when we examine multiple data sources.  As researchers, we have always worked to improve our knowledge management so that we can use existing information to help inform strategic decisions.  Over the years, we accumulate more and more information, making our existing knowledge more and more valuable to our companies, if only we had a systematic way of truly knowing what we have already learned.

To capitalize on your existing knowledge, you need to capture it and dedicate specific resources to synthesize it:

• Capture Existing Knowledge-you must acquire access to and organize information available throughout the organization (not just the information that Research manages) so that it can be integrated with research sources as these are applied to business needs.
• Synthesize Data-unlock the latent potential of past studies and organizational knowledge by implementing a formal synthesis process and integrating synthesis into researcher responsibilities.

For additional information on the synthesis process, take a look at these resources:

• Don’t Be Right, Be Interesting
• Knowing What we Know: 4 Steps to Begin a Synthesis Project
• Connecting the Dots—Using Kindergarten Tools to Build Narrative Synthesis
• 4 Steps to Selling Synthesis Insights

And tune back in soon for more information on communicating and embedding your knowledge throughout the organization.