Enterprise Social Networking: How Do I Start?

February 23, 2009 by Doug Mitchell

Using my “buzz monitoring” mega portal (ie google reader) I found a great piece this morning done by David Gearhart at the Enterprise Software Executive blog called, “Enterprise Social Networking: A Great Place to Start”. David does a great job of breaking down what Social Networking in the Enterprise looks like, the steps involved, and the results he’s seen.

The most power part of the piece for me was his discussion on community. create WOW media works with companies to help them assemble the tools and strategies to be great community builders and participants. David described the POWER of community in building a company very well. In fact, pay attention the last sentence of this quote (emphasis mine).

The community was leveraged for product ideas/features, product roadmap feedback (ranking ideas/voting), submitting ideas/code/extensions, and quality assurance testing of the product during development. In many cases, the community became so dedicated to their mission that they even helped debug and fix areas of the product for the founders. The community forum quickly grew from a source of information and sharing between the founders and developers into a larger community that supported a variety of purposes ranging from consultants for hire/career/jobs to client – to – client discussions sharing the best practices for implementation and customization of the software. Over time, the community became equally important to software company and resulted in the founders becoming another peer in the community rather than driving the community. Each release was driven by the product ideas, product feedback, and assistance from the overall community. However, there is no stated Enterprise Social Networking strategy at the company, rather it is a critical part of the company culture. It is hard to quantify the value of the community because without the community, there really is no company.

That’s a powerful testimony don’t you think?

Remember that building a community INSIDE your organization is at least equally as important to building one outside. So when your building your strategy online/offline marketing plans, don’t forget this critical piece of the puzzle.