Challenges to Sustaining an Effective Social Network within the Enterprise

Many large corporations have eagerly started to engage in social network strategies for their organizations, with outcomes that are falling short of expectations. Outside of the corporate walls, the popularity of social network tools has been steadily increasing, and this has enabled participants to share, interact and influence each other ever more than in the past. However, transporting this ecosystem successfully into a corporate setting requires more than just providing employees with the social networking tools to enable themselves.

There are three key hurdles that corporations have to overcome in order to build sustainable and effective social communities and they are: 

• Employees’ Willingness to Share: In a corporate setting, employees are less willing to openly share their thoughts.  Additionally, The culture of sharing and engaging with others in the organization maybe absent. This hurdle can be overcome by providing a channel to be anonymous (if employees choose to) and incentivizing employees to contribute.  Additionally, organizations need a clear journey management strategy to inculcate this behavior as part of the organization’s culture. This is key.
• Knowing What to Share and What Not to Share: In most cases, even if employees’ were willing to share information, there is not a clear distinction of what one can/cannot share.  As part of the journey management strategy described above, policies need to be reiterated and employees need clear and easy guides to decide what can and cannot be shared.
• Unstructured Outcomes: Growth patterns and use of social networks are hard to predict.  If the primary intent of the organization is to promote open and effective communication this maybe achieved easier than say if the organization was planning on using the employee generated data (EGD) to evaluate performance.

Related posts:

1. Cisco’s Foray into Enterprise Social Networking