I’ve been blogging about how people give technology purpose and that all good social collaboration starts with a focus on PEOPLE not technology. Now let's actually talk about the people in your organization. Unless you are a Silicon Valley/Alley start-up or cloud juggernaut, your talent demographics probably look more like my desktop - complex. You've got Gen X, Y, boomers. etc. So how do you get ALL of those people to go social and collaborate? What do you do with a complex enterprise with varied talent demographics?

Understanding your talent makeup before you go social will save you money, time and will increase collaboration and innovation across your enterprise in the long run. Here are 3 tips to help you get started.

Tip #1 Baseline your talent to gauge how social you are.

Get a deeper understanding of how social your people are by benchmarking departments, regions, titles, and age groups for more effective usage of money and time. For example, you may find that many IT department employees are not Gen Y, and thus see less value in social collaboration or in how it will impact them. This insight allows you to target your internal campaigns and programs with specific focuses to this demographic' s WIFM (What's in it for me), and could possibly warrant more allocation in 1-on-1 coaching. In addition, you now have a baseline so when you do implement, you can show impact.

Tip #2 Focus on the WIFM (What's in it for me)

Find out what makes them tick -- then market this to them. Use this insight to craft your project prioritization and deliver the most high-value features up front. In the old world, project deployments paid lip service to the end user -- be it the customer or the business. But real adoption of social tools and knowledge sharing starts with emotions, and knowing that their ideas and needs are addressed. 

Tip #3 Add the "lust" factor to drive adoption.

Long emails with links to "How-to" spreadsheets tend to fall victim to the "I'll get to it later" email black hole. So when you are planning on #GoingSocial, get marketing or change management experts involved. They can help you craft relevant, consistent messages and innovate with new forms of communication. With attention spans waning, providing a mix of education tools (be it videos, SlideRockets, Prezi, or other 2- to 5-minute programs) helps your collaborators get the info they need in short, bite-sized chunks. This really adds to the "lust" factor of your program and can propel its adoption. Don't aim for 100% adoption at the gate -- iterate.

Now this is by no means a complete list of rules for getting your people social. It’s just a beginning. You need to start by knowing your people -- from which you can build a strategy tailored directly to them. Want to add? Have ideas? Leave a comment.

Related Blog Posts: What Kindergarten Didn't Teach Us About Social Collaboration, Gamifying Social Collaboration: Big Wins For #GoingSocial