As social media adoption is beginning to gain ground, "the" requests are starting to trickle in. "I want to start blogging/wiki/forum internally or externally....but I only want a certain group to have access to the blog/wiki/forum." The enterprise and marketing social mediaites have done our due diligence and attempted to find solutions to meet the business needs, but it typically means advising them that social media may not be the right fit. Then, I read today that a company called Mixx (Digg equivalent) is adding private email and group message boards to its offerings. Whoa! Stop the presses. I am challenged by what appears to me to be counter intuitive. Stepping back and looking into the enterprise I ask, "Can social productivity really be social productivity with velvet ropes?"
I have always been of the mindset that in order for community to be built, innovation to be fostered and collaboration to be achieved, that everything needed to be public. If you started to form "silos" of private groups, private messages, private forums, private blogs then your ability to leverage the power of the community would be lost. As Steve Bell in Social Networking - Bookmarks - Social Productivity and Sam Lawrence have referenced in previous posts "Social productivity...is about getting work done outside the team of like-minded people you work with everyday....an idea is introduced and all sorts of people get to chime in...your idea has developed openly by all sorts of people who bring their own valuable perspective." Sam cites Wikipedia as a prime example of nontraditional collaboration at it's finest. Intel started internal blogs & forums in 2004; built Intelpedia, our first internal wiki, back in 2005; and subsequently launched the internal IT Innovation Zone, collaboration & sharing site, in 2006. These are open to the entire company and we have had strong success with these tools. So is IT now getting requests to go smaller, go private because these tools aren't meeting business needs or because we as a company haven't fully embraced the culture shift to social productivity? With the Mixx announcement I am giving deeper thought to what social media looks like within the enterprise; the desired results of social productivity and whether private subcommunities are necessary for optimal collaboration and communication. I still say "no". I beleve that velvet ropes and social productivity are like oil and water. They don't mix. Am I wrong?
Laurie,
Your thoughts are insightful and I think this is an important concept to consider before choosing social productivity.
At first glance, some important concepts are at work in social productivity tools. First, the value of the network effect. See wiki. This is your basic point, that every network node (individual, data source or other resource) adds value and increases the total value of each additional network node. In essence, we are more productive or valuable together than alone. For instance, if you had the only telephone in the world it would not be very valuable, but once all of your friends have telephones they are all more valuable. Second, there may be limits to the capacity of any network, be it digital or social. See article. A computer network is limited by bandwidth, and similarly there is a lot of research that suggests people have practical limits on the number of people they can interact with, or how many friends they can maintain at a time. People may not be able to effectively work in a group once it gets to an unwieldy size.
Third, social networks benefit from and perhaps are limited by the low barrier to entry. Anybody can contribute, and this allows for very low level of contributors and very high level contributors. There may be come value in market segmentation through barriers to entry or other types of discrimination to separate the contributors.
This is a fascinating topic and I will enjoy thinking about it more. Thanks for prompting a great discussion!
Bryan