Enterprise Social Networking: Placing Faces on Knowledge

A year ago colleagues Victoria Axelrod, Bill Anderson and I convened a Facebook Groups in Business Investigation. Posts here have chronicled the evolution from issuing an invitation to participate through assembling 10 volunteer Groups and their owners to regularly gather activity data to reporting the first findings to the University of Warwick's Knowledge Innovation Network and an Intuit Quickbase hosted webinar at TheAppGap blog.

The first article reporting our lessons learned for social networking in enterprises has just published in Inside Knowledge Magazine.  The title "Placing Faces on Knowledge" extracts the essence as we saw it and builds on our assumptions about how work is done and value created in organizations:

Value is created through interactions

                         and

Work is social. Relationships drive business.

Based on learning from our study, literature research and conversations-- including with Serena Software's Kyle Arteaga regarding his company's pioneering effort in making a Facebook Group their intranet-- we extracted the following lessons for successfully implementing social networking tools in enterprises:

1. Clear purpose tied to a business objective
2. You have to work it
3. Content is essential
4. Events drive participation
5. Measure, monitor and act
6. Pay attention to your tools ecosystem
7. Evolve and adapt

How does our list compare to your experience?

Your insights around our article, posted here, are invited and welcomed.

~ Jenny Ambrozek