Enterprise Social Computing - Know Your Users

When planning your enterprise social computing effort, it is a good idea to identify several key user types.  The following user types were defined in a 2006 Forrester’s Online Survey of consumer applications, but they are equally relevant for the Enterprise.   

·         Creators – Some examples of this user type include marketing communication specialists, research scientists, product development professionals and technical writers.  But don’t overlook your potential Creators.  With the introduction of blogging tools, wikis and discussion forums, you may find creation of important content coming from sources you wouldn’t have expected.      Well executed creation tools give a voice and venue to individuals who might not have been as likely to create in traditional ways.

·         Critics  - critiquing behavior can manifest as rating content, commenting on blogs and responding to discussion threads.  These actions need to be made as easy as possible to facilitate the volume of use needed to make a difference.

·         Collectors – users may collect and organize content for themselves or for groups to which they belong.  Examples of collecting actions include adding RSS feeds, bookmarking web content and tagging.  Collecting is an action that is critical to greatly enhancing content by taking advantage of the “knowledge of the masses”. 

·         Joiners – Communities or groups encourage joining by their very existence.  Once a user joins a group of people with shared interests, he will begin to connect with the people in the group by taking advantage of social profiles. 

·         Spectators and InActives – Ideally, all of your users will be Spectators and very few if any will stay or degrade to being InActives.   

One barometer of success is to have user types move “up the food chain” as they realize the benefit of the social computing solution.   Here are some strategies:

·         Identify creation behavior being conducted in other mediums and move the activity to the social computing platform.  For instance, move a particularly rich email thread to a discussion forum or encourage people to blog important events such as conference trip reports.

·         Many Creators like recognition.  Make their contributions visible on high visited portal pages.

·         Expose the data produced by critiquing activities in a form that is usable.  For instance, show the most highly rated posts on a prominent portal site or page.

·         Seed groups with interesting content so that Joiners stay engaged and begin to contribute to the overall good of the group by collecting and creating. 

·         Bring relevant content to the right audience as a way to keep users coming back for the latest news and information.  This will increase the attention of Spectators and decrease the risk that they could become inactive over time.