Beyond theory: Trials & tribulations in becoming a successful social business

It is quite common to hear customers or partners speak about their social business adoption strategy. Ranging from advertorials to true inspiring personal anecdotes, however interesting they are, these are always limited to just one point of view or just one's experience.

Then there are the theoretical books, whitepapers and presentations by user adoption or social business gurus. Based on scientific research or developed concepts they provide us with a good base to come up with user adoption strategies that make sense. But what if we do not want to hear just one's experience, or trust theory alone, but want to get insight into what works and what doesn't work for many others?

There seems to be a gap there.

Bridging the gap

What is missing is a good combination of the two: aligning many stories with a solid foundation in research.


Don't believe us, believe them!
Silverside interviewed 32 people from over 22 different organisations about their social business journey. We gathered a lot of insight about new ways of working (together) and knowledge sharing in a social business. Then we took the insights gathered about from these interviews and aligned them with prevalent theoretical concepts, such as Micheal Sampson's User Adoption Strategies, Roger's adoption curve, Simon Sinek's Start with Why, Cialdini's Influence, BJ Fogg's Behaviour Model, Daniel Pink's Drive, Stephen Covey's 7 habits of highy effective people - and the 8th habit, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Insights Discovery and Carl Jung's personality types, and David Allen's Getting Things Done.


Business novel
What do you get when you analyse this pile of interviews and distil the essence of these organisations' experiences? A business novel (Samen schieten op resultaat), based on 2 concepts: A story about a fictional organisation called 'Target BV' in the style of 'The hero's journey' by Joseph Campbell. This makes the theoretical concepts and all the stories a pleasant read. Unfortunately at present the novel is only available in Dutch.


Presenting at IBM ConnectED
But you get a chance to hear about our insights into user adoption strategies!
Femke Goedhart and I are presenting at IBM ConnectED 2015, a session in the
Best Practices track, BP202 Beyond Theory: Trials and Tribulations in Becoming a Successful Social Business. We will present to you a mix of strategies to find the essence of social business adoption. Not just strategies that worked, but also some that didn't work! Because  there is so much to learn from both success and struggles!


You can register for IBM ConnectED 2015, on january 25-28, in Orlando Florida.
http://www.ibm.com/software/collaboration/events/connected/

Find our session and add it to your calendar in the session planner.