Social software in your organisation, some initial thoughts

How can you effectively implement social software within your company?

Please consider the following thoughts first:

1. There will probably be several communities within your company, based on role, interest and other topics. The composition and structure of your communities will probably change in time. Your co-workers will also be linked to extenal communities as well.


2. No one is going to use fixed of mandatory tools that you provide them, they all have different tools and inspire eachother to use their personal favorite tools


3. Forbidding access to the internet will not make your social initiatives flourish


4. Using social software requires a "culture of sharing"

So, you need some means to let your co-workers share knowlegde and communication, within and in between communities, in and outside your organisation, using their own tooling and (depending on the size of your organisation) even using different platforms.

In my opinion, a combination of social tooling, a powerfull enterprise search engine, some means to rate content (recommendation engine) and a syndication engine to easily re-distribute content should do the trick.

Well, that is, only the technology part... there should be a "culture of sharing" as well. Please see my post [http://webloghansr.blogspot.com/2009/07/e-collaboration-when-does-it-work.html].