Working in technology, I sometimes feel like Jack Donaghy being pitched by Gavin Valore in 30Rock. Valore plans on starting a company that is going to be a huge success. His pitch? “Windpower, Bandwidth, Chinese market.”

Buzzwords—we love them. I was once told that I am, “very buzzword compliant.” I’m in sales, it comes with the territory. Recently I have felt like every conversation I’ve had included the words, “Social, Mobile, Gamification.” Buzzwords, like I said.

But these buzzwords, like buzzwords before them, are innovative and important concepts, particularly related to how companies can transform themselves to adapt to a changing marketplace. As consultants, it is important that we at Bluewolf assist our customers in becoming more social, creating mobile work environments and leveraging game mechanics to encourage certain behaviors. And we do, every day. 

But I believe these important steps along the path of Agile Business Transformation are built upon certain foundational elements that cannot be overlooked. To “go social” without a relevant message or useful content can be detrimental to your brand. To “gamify” an inefficient process can reinforce bad habits in your workforce. To provide a sales team with a mobile workstation is great, but if they are going to unqualified meetings, are they really benefiting?

So what should we do?

Over the coming weeks I’ll discuss the deeper issues behind those buzzwords—social, mobile, and gamification. Here are my thoughts on the first buzzword, "social": The following are three areas that I think are critical to the overall success of a social initiative (and here I speak about internal social campaigns such as team collaboration). These are not “sexy” parts of a project, but if overlooked, they can lead to a failed initiative.

Identify Specific Use Cases. – One of the most common responses I hear from managers in regards to internal social collaboration is, “How can I leverage this to make people more productive?” This is a great question, and needs to be answered before any social initiative is deployed. If you deploy Jive or salesforce.com's Chatter by simply turning it on and give employees no context for its purpose, it could very well become a place to socialize and not do work. But if you deploy a solution with a clear vision and definition of what its successful use looks like, you are halfway there. 

A great example of this is the Executive who hopes to gain efficiencies by breaking down silos. A current customer of mine is hoping to create more efficiency in their customer on-boarding process by increasing communication between sales and customer on-boarding. Today, this process is highly manual, but could be aided by a collaboration tool. With a clear definition of why to use a collaboration tool like Chatter, it becomes more compelling for people to use it, particularly if this definition is coming from your Executive Sponsor.

At the outset of a project, identify what the different use cases for the collaboration tool are and then clearly define how to use your new tool successfully within each of these use cases. By outlining these “foundational” use cases, users will have a better experience using the tool from day one and it will increase their productivity as well.  

Ensure data quality and ongoing management. – I was the best man at a wedding recently and I started the speech by pointing out that since I talk a lot, public speaking isn't usually a problem for me. On the most important day of my friend's life, however, I was speaking about something very important, so I was nervous. My experience at the wedding is a good example of how much context and substance changes communication: speaking is easy, but speaking intelligently and with purpose is not. The same is true with collaboration. A team can collaborate, but if they don't collaborate around valuable activities and correct records, that collaboration is simply a waste of time.  

Large organizations have always dealt with the challenge of managing data, so this is not a revolutionary idea, but it is still critical to a social project’s success. Prior to launching any kind of social campaign, organizations should identify what data they will be collaborating around and ensure its accuracy/value.

The example that comes to mind is the sales organization that wants to leverage a collaboration tool like Chatter. Chatter is a great collaboration tool, particularly for sales teams in an active sales cycle, but if the organization’s Salesforce instance is full of duplicate contacts, accounts and opportunities, how is a rep supposed to know that they are collaborating in the right place? If there are four Bluewolf records, which record do you collaborate around?

Not having high data quality and a data management strategy can quickly kill any enthusiasm for a social initiative; it should be one of the first areas of focus when kicking off a project.

Identify the initiative’s “WIIFMs”—What’s in it for me?! – We are all creatures of habit, and change can be tough, but what’s the best way to get people to change? Tell them how they will benefit from the change. As you are planning a social initiative, make sure you clearly identify how the end users you are targeting will benefit from the initiative. How will their lives become easier by adopting the initiative? What is in it for them?!?! Once you have identified these WIIFMs, make sure you reinforce them constantly.  

Bluewolf is a great example of this. When we first launched our #GoingSocial campaign I may have been one of the biggest skeptics. I didn’t quite understand how I would benefit from going social. Our team understood this skepticism and put together a series of videos that speak directly to why the initiative is important and how I can benefit from it. It made it clear to me and here I am, now writing a blog post.