The IT services and software industry is continuing to prosper. According to Gartner, the industry grew 4.8 percent between 2013, with global revenue pegged at $407.3 billion. This comes as small and medium enterprises have entered the market with independently developed B2B solutions. Aside from that, steady growth within the sector is facing rising demands for software tailored for games development and office management. In this tide of positivity, IT businesses are beginning to put focus on marketing activities, particularly B2B lead generation.
There are two ways to go about encouraging adoption of social software: fostering grassroots behaviours which develop organically from the bottom-up; or via top-down instruction. In general, the former is more desirable, as it will become self-sustaining over time - people become convinced of the tools' usefulness, demonstrate that to colleagues, and help develop usage in an ad hoc, social way in line with their actual needs.
These key users should:
be open to trying new software
be influential amongst their peers, thus able to help promulgate usage
have the support of their managers
Users who are potential evangelists should be identified at every level of management, not just amongst the higher echelons, or amongst the workforce.
3. Convert key users into evangelists
Training in the form of short informal sessions (face-to-face or online) and ongoing on-demand support are the basics for encouraging adoption. Too much training or too formal a setting will put users off, and is usually unnecessary.
2. Identify and understand key users
Once you have identified key user groups, you need to know which users within that group are both influential and likely to be enthusiastic. Then consider how social software fits in to the context of their job, their daily working processes and the wider context of their group's goals.
Management support
As well as supporting bottom-up adoption, it is beneficial for there to be top-down support, but that support has to be based on openness and transparency. Managers and team leaders must trust their staff to use the tools correctly, but they must also be forgiving if mistakes are made. There is always a learning curve associated with any
new software, and some people find social software daunting because they are scared of what they perceive as a high risk of public humiliation.
Managers and team leaders should:
1. Lead by example
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Thursday, Feb. 15, 2007
Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free
By Justin Fox
It might seem very odd to look to a long-dead Russian anarchist for business advice. But Peter Kropotkin's big idea--that there are important human motivations beyond what he called "reckless individualism"--is very relevant these days. That's because one of the most interesting questions in business has become how much work people will do for free.
he proposed in his 1902 book, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, that the survival of animal species and much of human progress depended on the tendency to help others.
Open-source, volunteer-created computer software like the Linux operating system and the Firefox Web browser have also established themselves as significant and lasting economic realities.
That's not true yet in the worlds of science, news and entertainment: we're still figuring out what the role of volunteers will be, but that it will be much bigger than in the past seems obvious.
"The question for the past decade was, Is this real?" says Yale law professor Yochai Benkler. "The question for the next half-decade is, How do you make this damned thing work?" Benkler is a leading prophet of today's gift economy
ut neither does Benkler dream of a world without capitalism. Instead, he has become an unlikely business guru, with a shop at the intersection of Commerce and Cooperation.
Take the case Benkler makes in his 2006 book, The Wealth of Networks (available, free, at www.benkler.org) for the economic benefits of "peer production" of software and other information products
Peer production by people who donate small or large quantities of their time and expertise isn't necessarily great at generating the original and the unique, but it's very good for improving existing products (like software) and bringing together dispersed information (Wikipedia). Often better, in Benkler's telling, than corporations armed with copyright and patent laws.
Clever entrepreneurs and even established companies can profit from this volunteerism--but only if they don't get too greedy. The key, Benkler says, is "managing the marriage of money and nonmoney without making nonmoney feel like a sucker."
In other fields, it's not so clear. In a critique of Benkler's work last summer, business writer Nicholas Carr speculated that Web 2.0 media sites like Digg, Flickr and YouTube are able to rely on volunteer contributions simply because a market has yet to emerge to price this "new kind of labor." He and Benkler then entered into what has come to be widely known in Web circles as the "Carr-Benkler wager": a bet on whether, by 2011, such sites will be driven primarily by volunteers or by professionals.
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