In this podcast, Len Devanna, Director of Web Strategy for EMC Corporation, gives CIOs a series of key takeaways about deploying social media both inside and outside a company’s firewall.
Devanna has spent the past ten years helping build out EMC’s online ecosystem, with responsibility for the global deployment of EMC’s intranet, extranet, and internet offerings. He also provides general web consulting across the $13+ billion enterprise, and guides selection and deployment of emerging Web 2.0 technologies for the company. Most recently, Devanna oversaw development of EMC ONE, an internal community designed to connect EMC’s global workforce and promote enterprise 2.0 techniques.
EMC ONE grew out of a 2007 effort to find ways social media could help a global workforce of 40,000 employees work more efficiently and become more closely engaged both in their own jobs and with the company as a whole. Devanna says EMC created EMC ONE “from the inside, because it was clear that we’d be better off first understanding how social media worked internally, and how we should participate in a Web 2.0 world. That prepared us to thrive in Web 2.0 outside EMC, because after all, our employees are the voice of our brand.”
Launched in October 2007, EMC ONE today has more than 12,000 active users, and about 10,000 lurkers who follow the conversations. The site includes 8,000 blogs, 10,000 wikis, and 6,000 discussions across 180 communities, as well as individual people pages. The discussions range from competitive intelligence to product marketing strategies to deep technical brainstorming. The site’s virtual water cooler provides a place where employees can speak about anything. EMC ONE generates about five million pages each month.
Devanna says that if he had to develop the site over again, he wouldn’t change a thing. He urges CIOs to start deploying social media inside the firewall. “Social tools are extremely easy to deploy,” says Devanna. “If IT organizations aren’t out in front of this, their user communities will take matters into their own hands, out of necessity. You’ll wind up with hundreds of inconsistent unstructured offerings with no ability to connect and realize the true value.”
EMC’s internal social media policy is relatively straight-forward. Devanna says, “Before we launched the site, we discussed how closely we should moderate the conversations and user content. We decided, instead, to let the community police itself. To date, we haven’t had one single incident of improper conduct.”
Devanna says that metrics for Web site usage, such as number of page accessed, don’t demonstrate the true value of social media. Metrics such as a decrease in travel or a reduction in e-mail traffic provide a more tangible indication of social media’s payoff, but quantifying the real value of social media precisely is difficult to do. According to Devanna, “I can fire up EMC ONE any time of the day and see hundreds of real-time conversations occurring on a global scale. People are coming together to exchange ideas and concepts across geographies, divisions and organizations. The real benefits are more qualitative than quantitative – and they’re preparing us to thrive in an E2.0 world.”
Interested in learning more about Len? Catch him at his blog http://len.devanna.com or Twitter at http://twitter.com/lendevanna
Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
Audio Editing by Doug Marcis
