Social computing has thrived over the past several years within the consumer space on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. These sites have expanded the growth of peer groups beyond geographical and demographical boundaries and increased access to the breadth of collective intelligence on the Web.
The adoption of social computing within an enterprise however, has been slower to take shape. As the social aspects of Web 2.0 have proved successful, companies are now looking for ways to leverage similar tools behind the firewall to:
Enhance communication and collaboration.
Increase productivity in day-to-day activities and projects.
Improve business efficiency.
Enable employees to find and leverage resources and colleagues quickly.
Foster creativity and knowledge sharing.
Organizations have a distinct set of needs and challenges that must be considered for a deployment of social applications to be successful. The following points define some of the basics for a successful enterprise social computing strategy:
Content needs to be relevant in order to attract users. It must be easily accessible and searchable in order to drive users to your platform, again and again. Develop a
content strategy and plan to seed content within wikis and blogs and promote it!
Search needs to be a key component of your
enterprise social computing strategy to surface knowledge embedded throughout your organization. When done correctly, large amounts of asynchronous, decentralized and ad hoc information and content will surface and provide tacit knowledge for organization repurposing and use.
A large part of the growth and success of social networking and
collaboration solutions is due to their ease of use and self conforming nature. Similarly, in the enterprise, using these tools must be a no-brainer for users in order for them to catch on and grow in usage.
By taking the above concepts into consideration when initially developing your enterprise social computing strategy you'll be better positioned for successful adoption, usage and business impact from such tools and technologies within your organization.
