Shoud you pilot social learning?

A STRATEGIC APPROACH TO SOCIAL LEARNING
Should you pilot social learning?

Implementations normally start with formal pilots to test out systems and new practices.

Chris McGrath at the ThoughtFarmer Blog (16 August 2009) provides 8 tips for a successful social intranet project as follows:

Pilot around a specific event or project
Choose the right group
Include an influential senior person
Set up a basic navigation structure
Populate some initial content
Set up email notifications
Assign specific tasks to pilot group
Promote, launch and follow up

But this may not be the best approach to take with the implementation of social learning, as Michael Idinopoulos explains at his posting Enterprise 2.0: Skip the pilot, on the SocialText blog. His main concern is about the size of pilots:

"Size matters. By constraining the size of your pilot, you significantly alter the way your company can and will use the tools."

But in fact, there is still the issue of "direction" and "enforcement" which is often counter-productive to pilots, and in fact a number of organisations are now using a "lead by example" approach", as these two examples show:

"Samuel said that part of his role is looking for opportunities for taking Web 2.0 social media inside the organization. They have tried a number of formal pilot programs. Some succeeded and others were dropped. He decided with micro-messaging that he would not try a pilot program but simply start and lead by example." Implementing enterprise micro-messaging at Oce, Bill Ives, the app gap, 12 August 209

"The director of social media at Nationwide, Shawn Morton, tried Yammer and initially thought it wouldn�t be useful because it was too similar to Twitter and Facebook. Then, several senior leaders, including the president and chief technology officer tried it, which set off a chain reaction within the company. �We went quickly from a dozen users to thousands of users over the course of the next few months,� Morton says. �It�s growing all by word of mouth.� At Nationwide, Yammer links rank-and-file with the C-suite, Ragan.com, 23 November 2009

The important point to make here is that social learning implementations require a different approach than traditional software implementations.