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Shhh, Don’t Tell The Users!

I love this extract from a Web 2.0 workshop about Enterprise social software, as blogged by Denise Howell:

Ross Mayfield (SocialText) and Michael Pusateri (Disney) are discussing using SocialText (and blogs and wikis in general) in business. Michael works for the television/ABC arm of Disney, and they’re using SocialText. He has a great point: how do you get users to accept the new methodologies? Simple. Don’t tell them. Don’t make a big deal about trying some revolutionary new tool. Just train them and let them discover things like why email doesn’t make a great file system, but a weblog is another story. They’re also using Newsgator with Outlook to help people aggregate and survey what’s going on on all the Disney weblogs. Told the users: “We’re going to put some stuff into Outlook so you don’t have to go check the Web pages anymore.” Response: cool! No discussion needed about the joys/promise of RSS, etc.
(emphasis mine)

It’s the same kind of approach that Yahoo! is taking with their new RSS services.

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