Social Computing Best Practices - A Spirit of Receptivity

A key factor when rolling out social computing features in your enterprise is a willingness to be “open”.     An intrinsic value of social collaboration is the collective knowledge and information gained explicitly and implicitly from your user community.  While this sounds great and you may believe it will happen naturally, don’t be surprised if you find that some members of your community are resistant and uncomfortable with this concept.   Knowledge Management 1.0 focused largely on hierarchy and control.  Old habits will be hard to break, but you will be pleased with the end result.

So, what do we mean specifically?  As an experiment, implement a group or community that is 100% un-moderated and see what happens.  You will probably wish to start with lower risk subject matter, but don’t err on the side of choosing a topic that is without value or would be considered “fluff”.  Let your users have full control to tag, create discussions, and share news and information.    You will learn a lot about the solution you have implemented as well as user behavior.    And, you will better understand what, if any, controls improve the process.  A healthy example may be the use of tag auto-completion or normalization.     A less desirable example could be discussion moderation as this is much more likely to squelch participation due to the delay in real time interaction.