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For those of you new to my blog, I have just spent the last three months launching a new social network for enterprise professionals called projectstars. Building a new website or IT application is never an easy endeavor, but at least it’s somewhat predictable - design, develop, test, and launch. But as far as deployment is concerned, well that’s another matter entirely.. You can plan the greatest strategies, prepare for every contingency, and devise every mitigation, but it can all seem so miserably moot when nothing goes as planned. Allow me to explain…

projectstars is a labor of love for so many reasons. The purpose of creating the site was to help colleagues find new work or clients. Collaborative blogging is a lot more effective than blogging alone and it’s a great knowledge sharing venue. Another reason behind the site was for me to personally ‘walk the walk’. You can write recommendations on collaborative strategies and talk about them to your heart’s content, but there’s no substitute for actually executing a collaboration strategy.

The deployment of projectstars, while successful, has been an extraordinary challenge. Whether you’re launching a community or enterprise social network internally, you can’t help but ask the question “will anybody use it?” Change management always plays an important role, because you’re fundamentally asking people to change their behaviour. And human behaviour is often very unpredictable.

Also known as the 80/20 rule, the Pareto principle indicates that 80% of an effect comes from 20% of the causes. We’ve been observing on projectstars more along the lines of 90/10. When starting a social network or enterprise collaboration strategy, keep in mind that 10% of people introduced to your application will join in. 10% of those will actually participate on a regular basis. And 10% of those people will stand out in a prominent way. So if 1,000 people are introduced to your application, expect to see 100 people deciding to visit, 10 people actively participating, and 1 person taking a leadership role.

They always tell you in marketing to communicate the benefits of anything that you’re offering. Make sure you have a “value proposition” and “unique selling proposition”, they say, so that people can make rational decisions on why they should buy into your ideas. Nonsense - it’s becoming clearer, to me anyway, that it’s far more complicated than that.

I’m going to be writing more about the Pareto principle because I think it’s a critical component of a collaboration strategy and adoption of collaborative technology.

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