How to drive smarter use of enterprise social platforms (from the peer assist)
At Social Now 2019 we had a “peer assist”-inspired session to offer Cablinc a list of recommendations to roll out a successful intranet. In 2022, Social Now staged a similar session: this time the purpose was to help Cablinc define the steps to drive smarter use of its internal collaboration and communication platforms.
To assist Cablinc, Anne McLear, Cablinc’s Head of Marketing and Internal Comms, recruited the help of two peers:
- Ingo Johansson, who has been working for 25 years at the Danish company NNE, designing and supporting several of the company’s internal digital platforms – like its intranet; and
- John Schultz, a senior user experience designer who works on the enterprise intranet team at Mayo Clinic.
The peer assist was conducted by Ana Neves, partner and senior consultant at Knowman and organiser of Social Now. Question after question, she fleshed out interesting recommendations for Cablinc, giving the conference participants many practical tips and a taste of the value a peer assist can offer.
At the end, participants were invited to work together at their tables identifying one thing Cablinc should do and one thing Cablinc should avoid to get more teams to use its social platform in a smarter way.
Here is the compiled list of those things.
Do
- Invest a lot in discovery of needs and challenges of employees and utilize engagement techniques to ensure ongoing and long-term success
- Define a focus group and call for volunteers
- Listen (be there) to users
- Involve users early
- Create personas
- Look at and understand the organisation’s social network
- Acknowledge contributions
- Go to the jungle
- Make it fun (gamification)
Don’t do
- Stop in discovery, instead follow up on success of changes after your launched solutions
- Judge
- Make them think
- Focus on vanity metrics
- Do it yourself
- Get to know people before working on the strategy and coming up with the / a solution
- Ask people what they want
- Don’t go to the zoo!
Note: The jungle and the zoo is a reference to Marcel Kampman’s talk which has happened before the peer assist session. In his talk, Marcel highlighted the importance of observing and talking people in their real “habitat”.





