Social Media With David Christopher
October 10, 2011
David Christopher is the Social Media Business Leader for EMEA at Oracle Corporation where he heads up the Social Networking and Business Collaboration (SNBC) program. His role is to develop and deploy social media strategies that will greatly enhance communication and collaboration with customers, partners and employees, thereby creating a more socially connected Oracle.
David's worked at Oracle for 14 years. I recently had the opportunity to chat with David about his work at Oracle.
David explained that with the recent mergers and acquisitions this has brought a lot of fresh ideas and opportunities to connect employees via social networking. He is developing and driving initiatives to spread adoption in an effort to break down silos and encourage communication and work between different business units across the enterprise.
A lot of David's work is to encourage more crowdsourcing, as a result of his team's efforts; a lot of behavioural changes have occurred that has seen more people engaged from different parts of the business.
One of the initiatives is to encourage more Open Collaboration through a dedicated social platform encouraging employees to contribute from across the company. People can either actively participate (request to be part of the project team), or passively participate (contribute from the sidelines). With 100’s of projects available there is a wide range for employees to engage with, based on what interests them. One of the most popular ones right now is the creation of an Email Charter.
Another initiative David is working on is an effort to identify and educate Social Adoption Champions in every business unit in Oracle. Part of the reason for this effort is to build a culture at Oracle where the various generations (X,Y,Z) can communicate and collaborate more effectively.
The result of David's work with individual business units has seen less reliance on email and more dependency on social technologies. Part of the effort is as simple as giving people new ways of working. For example, instead of sending a presentation to everyone on a team to review by email, simply depositing the presentation in an online workspace and making it accessible by the team reduces email significantly.
Social Chat – The Modern Day Water Cooler Conversation is another initiative encouraging more crowdsourcing opportunities leading to innovation. This initiative uses the OraTweet tool (an internal Twitter style tool) to encourage employees to submit ideas for discussion and to vote for their favourite. The topic with the most votes is the chosen discussion topic for that week.
You can read more about David’s work at Oracle, and with other companies, via his StopThinkSocial.com blog or follow him on Twitter @davidchris