Enterprise 2.0 Files: Punk Rock at Pfizer

[Brad Kenney]

A recent recap article on this year's Enterprise 2.0 conference talked up what project lead Simon Revell called Pfizer's "punk rock" attitude towards pushing 2.0 technologies such as wikis and blogs into all areas of this pharma giant.

What I took away from the presentation was some common-sense cultural considerations for tchange management around new tools at a large firm. For instance, they used a phased pilot model with small projects targeting limited groups of key users, and used some sleight-of-hand to pass new tools off in old ways ("We didn't refer to the blogs as blogs," Revell said, because after talking to management, they discovered that the term connoted something un-businesslike and frivolous. Having talked about these tools myself with numerous executives, lets just say that I would name all these frivolous-sounding tools something nice and boring if given the chance.

Revell also made his team stock the sites themselves, doing much of the early posting, commenting, and even allowing for anonymous postings at first to get the ball rolling. The first two I fully approve of -- in the last 4-5 years that I've been watching these tools grow in and out of the corporate sphere, I still haven't seen a successful social network, a bustling blog, or a working wiki that didn't have a champion (or, better yet, team of champions) putting the up front time in to stock it with content. It's simple behavioral psychology, and it works if you work it. (This is also why I recommend getting your marcomm team heavily involved in these efforts, especially at first -- there is less resistance to the idea of publishing their writing, and they're already more familiar with expressing the type of corporate voice in discourse that sets the right cultural tone.)

The third tactic -- allowing for anonymous blog postings or comments -- is a risk, even for the initial stocking's sake. After all, until the type of social moderation that shepherds successful communities spins up, you're relying on people's good judgment to shape the tone on your site, which (as the hatespeech otherwise known as YouTube comments aptly demonstrate) is very hard to achieve with the veil of anonymity intact.

Despite any misgivings I might have about this particular tactic, Revell's team has undeniably made a great go of pushing the 2.0 envelope, and supposedly they've got Pfizer executives happily blogging away, on the right topics, to the right communities. In fact, even the normally hyper-cautious regulatory affairs group got sold on the idea of the value of openness and emergent behavior, using the corporate wiki to generate ideas and collaborate on projects.

One last point: to promote their reinvigoration of Pfizer's collaboration culture both internally and externally, Revell and his team used the oldest change management trick in the book: a mascot. Pfizer created a fictional character named "Charlie" to display how 2.0 tech can enable enterprise business and built a presentation around it that is actually useful and informative -- and as a bonus, is not actually that goofy (well, relatively speaking -- this is, after all, the corporate intranet).

You can find it at Slideshare here.

For more background on how these types of tools are being used in leading manufacturers, here's a feature-length piece I wrote early last year on the subject that's still relevant (things aren't changing that fast...yet!)