Jakob Nielsen recently released a report on the progress and impact of social networking tools on corporate intranets. Social networking isn’t a passing fad or a trend that can be ignored. As the pervasiveness of social networking tools grows, more people expect to be able to communicate with their friends, co-workers, companies, and customers in this way. For organizations, it means letting go of controlling every communication (which they really don’t anyway) and moving to Enterprise 2.0. For those that do, there are some benefits, including:
· Breaking down communication barriers
· Allowing workers to more easily collaborate to solve business problems
· Engage workers who expect innovation and to share ideas at work
· Capture and preserve information which is exchanged informally between co-workers (informal learning, anyone?)
· Self policing communities
Most companies aren’t very far along with Enterprise 2.0. Efforts are largely being driven by grassroots efforts of front-line employees. Senior management, often as not, is a barrier since the perception is that these are “tools that teenagers use.” When considering Enterprise 2.0 tools, there are some best practices to keep in mind:
· Choose tools that have capabilities to help solve specific business problems (rather than integrating whatever is “hot” on the web)
· Integrate social tools into the main intranet to avoid double work and having the same content in two places
· Know and allow the participation inequality that is part of most online communities. The lurkers will benefit from the content as much as those posting it.
· Ban anonymity
· Take a thoughtful and staged approach, consulting with employees when needed
You can read Nielsen’s full summary here and also access a link to purchase the complete case study. Where is your company on the Enterprise 2.0 scale?
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