3. So how did social get started?
• Innovation Sabbatical
• Social Business Team (SBT)
– Cross functional/volunteer
– More formal sponsors today
• Worked together on challenges, not
on technology
3
5. The General Mills’ Business Case
“We have a strong
hallway culture.
How do we scale that
“ I just wish there were around the world?”
one easy way to tap into
all the knowledge that
the General Mills
community has” “ If only General Mills
knew what
General Mills knows!”
5
6. How does Connect fit with other tools?
• E-mail? Really?
• Instant Messaging?
• Live Meeting?
• SharePoint 2010?
• People ask us “why” much less one year later because of
unmet needs for collaboration, knowledge
retention, social learning, virtual work, and idea
generation.
6
7. Launch Plan
• In Beta first, beginning in November, 2010
– Platform co-ownership in HR, IS, and ITQ
• Why Beta?
– An agile way to iterate through opportunities and
challenges with people, process, and technology
– Evaluate platform and gather success stories and tips for
individual and community users
– Balancing usability, retention, security, governance.
• February 1, 2011
– Global availability, soft launch, telling the story
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8. Stats Summary
April 15 June 15 August 15 October 15 January 15
Active users 1697 2141 2,885 3,455 3,640
Unique 59,615 93,170 99,307 118,241 110,572
visitors
Communities 220 277 338 400 489
Totals
Micro blogs 17,673 (avg. 1,470/month)
Comments 15,553 (avg. 1,300/month
Answers 6,694 (avg. 570/month)
Documents 5,267 (avg. 440/month)
Link to stats...
10. Bright Spots – Communities
• 48-hour meetings with leaders
– Sales Division
– Global Finance
• Chocolate across boundaries
• One Global Packaging combination
• Windows 7 deployment
• Social Learning
10
11. A Community about development
• Idea from Accenture’s “30-day challenge”
– A girl, a blog, and 30 days to business impact
• Our own social experiment
– What if great manager’s were social?
– Daily blogger about individual development planning
11
12. General Mills Institute
• Ask questions about pre-work, share learning
– Six different learning communities integrated with
SharePoint 2010 – everything in one place!
– Even have a pre-work tracker so you can check your
progress against peers
• Getting Things Done® from David Allen, Co.
– 656 members, #3 most popular community
– Facilitate discussions, get support from peers, share tips
and best practices
12
14. Roadmap
• We are working on the long range plan for with a
focus on four key areas:
– Evaluating impact of the social learning and the
connections created across the platform
– Encouraging adoption by enabling new features and
enhancing usability
– Evolving our community model and supporting/engaging
community managers
– Expanding access to include external partners
14
15. Study of Impact
• Knowledge Advisors study
– Periodic evaluation through pop-up survey and micro-poll
web part that feeds into central database
– Combined analysis of survey and hit/usage data and
development of dashboard with key metrics
– Social network analysis to determine trends and
connections across Connect
• McKinsey study on social impact: link to study
15
16. Perpetual beta
• New release 2.0 with many improvements:
– Private messaging, character count, share, follow-
up, Open contributions
• New modules we’re excited about
– Spotlight, News stream, Idea Center, Video stream
• Promotion ideas:
– Profile week, Community week, Contribute week…
17. Enterprise needs
• Community Management
– Automated approval/creation and e-learning
– Training/adoption needs shifting from new to existing
– Different models/templates for project
management, community of practice, leadership, ideas, etc.
• Integration with other tools?
– Existing SharePoint sites, new video platform, corporate
directory, etc.
• Contractor access
18. What’s next?
• Cultural change
– Technology isn’t magic
– Building adoption
– Social learning
– Iterate the platform
– Change the way we work
18
Editor's Notes
Research done by SBT, we even had some video from one of our employees
DonSmith’s innovation sabbatical led to the formation of a Social Business Team. We worked for a year to define our business case for enterprise 2.0 and here it what it boiled down to
Xtranormal video
I saw a presentation from Accenture that I really liked. A woman started blogging daily about great people management tips – some really simple and some profound. She issued a 30-day challenge for other accenture people managers to follow and forward her blog and dedicate more time and thought to managing people. That’s probably more socially acceptable and from their experiment quite impactful as well…Here’s our experiment, using our new internal social collaboration tool to have managers teach each other…
There is an aspect of cultural change here – we are a globally company, we have more employees outside the U.S. than inside, we need to better leverage the knowledge and ideas of our own employees so we can innovate faster and be more agile…Working differently, use e-mail less, use interactive media more, similar to our brands
