Next week I will be flying out to London to join my coworker Sasja Beerendonk to deliver a session at ICONUK 2014 on the trials & tribulations of becoming a successful social business. I’m really looking forward to this session in more then one way:

First of all because it will be my first time presenting together with Sasja whom I’ve know for years as a specialist of social business adoption and who, I’m lucky to say,  decided to join the great team we have at Silverside earlier this year. Secondly because our session will be drawing on the real life experience of quite a number of real life customers who’ve gone through or are right in the middle of the process of becoming a social business.

This experience comes from a project Silverside has worked many hours on this past year in which 32 companies were interviewed to see what really worked and what didn’t work in getting people within their organizations to adopt a different way – and in many ways  – philosophy of working. Not just our own customers but many companies we’ve never done business with and who use all kinds of social tools. Not necessarily even the ones we support. After all, in social business the tooling isn’t necessarily the major stumble point, it often is the adoption or lack thereof that makes or brakes a social business project. These interviews resulted in a wealth of information that is being used to further perfect our methodology of user adoption as well as to create white papers and a book that was written by my coworkers  Mirte Bouwmans, Evelyn van Kelle and Roland Driesen in which the combined experience of these companies was translated into a comprehensible and easy to read novel. The book (sorry it is only available in Dutch for know) was published and launched last May.

With our session Sasja and I will also be drawing upon the knowledge gained from these interviews to explain some of the obvious (and less obvious) pitfalls and we hope to give a bit of insight into the struggles many of you are probably facing right now. So join us this Friday in room 4 at ICONUK for our session:

“Beyond theory: Trials & tribulations in becoming a successful social business

There is lots of theory about how to become a social business but what really does or doesn’t work? We wanted to know and interviewed 32 companies in various stages of their journey to becoming a social business. Not just highlighting the big wins but also talking about the struggles and small successes that really made the difference. Taking the experiences of these 32 companies, the likes of Dutch Railways, DAF, Saxion, Forbo Eurocol and Bavaria, we’ve created a Social Business journey scenario that can help you identify the successes and avoid the pitfalls in becoming a social business.”

ICONUK September 12th 2014, 11:00 Room 4