Twitter at Humana?

Situation: You think social networking might work within your business.

I recently spoke with Chris Hall, a Project Manager and a key player in Humana's Social Media Chamber of Commerce - exploring new ways that the company's employees can interact productively with each other and the outside world.  If you want to find out more about Chris, I hear he's absolutely Halllcious on Twitter.



Q.  You’ve recently started a group within Humana, exploring the use of Social Networking tools in the workplace. Could you give us some specifics about the effort? (lines of business involved, how it started, how many people at what level, executive support, etc.)

A.  Definitely.  The idea behind Humana’s Social Media Chamber of Commerce came about because we are trying to understand what social media means for our 26,000 person company. The prevailing thought right now is that no one organization will own "Social Media" for all of Humana.  We really don’t want to create a bottleneck for any kind of communication approval process because social technologies online are real-time in nature.

We’ve realized that our company is made up of individual departments with separate customers/demographics, individual social media needs, and budgets and we want to use the Chamber of Commerce as an extension of the Web 2.0 world that we all live in today.

The Chamber is made up of Directors from around the company and the paradigm shift we’re trying to create is: the need to share and exchange best practices will replace the need to control.  It’s a lofty ideal, but one worth striving for nonetheless.  After sitting through the first two meetings, I think that we're on the right track. There has been a genuine exchange of ideas.  Viewpoints are clarified and understood with the high points going out on Twitter. People actually smile. It’s great!



Q.  Regarding the use of Twitter as a tool to take and disseminate meeting notes, you talk about less being more. Could you expand on that?

A.  Sure thing. Over the past eight years I learned how to take very detailed meeting minutes.  Some things definitely need to be flushed out in detail, but I feel that in most meetings, you really only have one to three big things that everyone needs to understand and focus on…

Using a micro-blogging service, like Twitter or Yammer, to take down notes during a meeting really forces a person to get down to the gist of the message, and that serves as a filtration process.  When everyone in the room is able to do this, and the information all rolls up into one place, then you can start to see keyword trends from the meeting.

So the idea is that everyone is taking notes, in the form of 140 character thoughts, that everyone else can see and then at the end of the meeting everyone’s notes are pumped into something like Wordle and a word cloud is generated so that everyone can visualize the keywords that were mentioned the most in the meeting.

I’m still experimenting with this concept, but I think it’s a cool new way to look at a boring topic like meeting notes. ?



Q. What has the reaction to your group’s efforts been inside the organization?

A.  Bewildered enthusiasm.  I work in Humana’s Innovation Center and we’re just kind of doing these things, and figuring it out as we go… which is exciting. There’s some element of “danger” associated with business and the social web that has an allure to it for most people.

We just had a web and new media conference where everybody in the company who has a web presence got in a big room to talk about what they’d been doing, and our group is definitely on the cutting edge, mainly because we’re all on Twitter. 

What I think is really cool though is the fact that we have people outside of our company who have become fans of what we’re doing.  We created the hashtag #hcoc, which stands for Humana’s Chamber of Commerce and serves as the public location of all the information we’re sharing from these meetings. The fact that people from outside our company walls are there encouraging us to keep moving forward with it is really awesome. 

Humana is just another evil health insurance company in a lot of people’s minds. We would like to change that perception and show that we want to be part of a solution to our country’s health crisis. Opening up and sharing seems to be a catalyst for that type of change.



Q. What are the biggest challenges to starting a group like this? Who is opposed and why?

A.  I think that we’ve been very fortunate to have leaders in the company who accept the importance of social technologies, and challenge us to find ways to integrate them into our daily work lives. If you don’t have buy-in from the top in your organization, then you’re just spitting into the wind.

The tough part at my level is figuring out what’s out there and then figuring out the so what about it.  Understanding the how does this make my life or the consumer’s life easier, better faster, more motivated, and then moving forward with something that could easily blow up in my face is a constant challenge.



Q.  What sort of person typically wants to be involved in this group? What sort of person doesn’t?

A.  I would say that you have to like the internet in general, while being open to new experiences.  It’s a definite mind-set, but that doesn’t mean that it’s exclusive.  Anybody who wants to learn and share can be in…



Q. Do you publicize the group within Humana? Are you trying to expand it in any way, or is it just a close knit group of like minded folks?

A.  We are in the process of developing requirements for a digital “Commons” area that everyone in the company will have access to learn and share. It’s looking like Microsoft SharePoint will more than likely be the tool of choice for our internal needs in that department.



Q.  What’s the most important thing you’ve learned so far?

A.  I think that the most important take-away so far, is that people care. It’s refreshing to be involved with a group of people who are all enthusiastic about the mountain that we have to climb together. That’s not hyperbole, either. It’s also exciting that some people from outside our company have chosen to come along for the ride. 

The momentum that we are building will help us through the challenges that we are up against. And let me tell you, we have a lot of challenges ahead… Access and transparency isn’t a “do it over a weekend” kind of challenge.  We have a long road ahead. 



Q.  What’s next after Twitter? How do you prioritize the tools you are exploring and why do you do it that way?

A.  We did the meeting tweeting sort of on a whim… We think that the results were interesting and that it was cool that other people are into it. Whether it remains our tool of preference is yet to be determined. We have internal access issues with Twitter (our firewall forces us to use our cell phones to tweet) so it may not be our final solution in the end. However, the concept of micro-blogging is catching on…

I’m really interested in feeds.  The thought of building the reporting into the work is something that I can get fired up about. I personally loathe having to make and manage a project plan and then make summary slides in PowerPoint. Its double work and totally unnecessary.

I think that RSS is the answer but have to wrap my head around how everything fits together with our requirements. That being said, there isn’t really a prioritization process around finding the individual tools we can use. We’re looking holistically at the business of conducting business better using social technologies. It’s good times. ?