Governments are looking for ways to leverage Web 2.0 communities and social networking within their organizations, many looking to do so based on their commitment and interest in Microsoft SharePoint.  Based on nine years of experience working in this field, there are a number of principles organizations can apply to successfully deploy communities in social networking.  In this three part series, I will outline 11 principles for social networking on the SharePoint platform, or more generally.

This week, I’m going to tackle the final three principles for government 2.0 –  the importance of design, status updates and follow the data  

Principle #9 – Design Can Make a Big Difference

While in theory, this principle may seem like a no-brainer, it is important when it comes to government 2.0 to keep in mind that small design changes can make a big difference.  Taking the time to understand the positioning of the community, along with how exactly people use different features, is key to the success or failure of a government 2.0 strategy.  For example, a community deployment within the US military made a number of fairly minor design changes, and they were able to dramatically increase the number of views, visits, comments, blogs, bookmarks and question replies with very little growth in the total number of community members.   A small change to the commenting feature resulted in a more than 350% increase in the number of comments being made within the community.

Principle #10 – Status Updates 

Consumer social networking has driven the status update phenomenon, with most services including function so we can see what our friends, family, coworkers and other associates are up to.  While it may seem that the status update is too frivolous or fun for the enterprise, it offers a powerful tool to engage users within communities. 

Within a social learning community, setting the status update to what are you learning provides a relatively simple, yet robust way to communicate with and engage others in the community.  Status updates are particularly interesting as they have proven very effective within consumer social networking sites and now users are comfortable with communicating in this manner.  They provide an easy way to engage users that may be hesitant to participate as the approach closely mirrors something they are likely doing on a personal level.  As these users visit the site to do status updates they are apt to become engaged in other activities over time.

Principle #11 – Follow the Data

In the enterprise there are multiple technology products and solutions to support a wide variety of essential business process needs.  Government 2.0 applications are not intended to replace these approaches but to take their data and make them relevant to a broader audience and contextualize them with the wisdom of the crowds.  One example is at the Defense Acquisition University in the United States where they produce guidance for military acquisitions.  In this context, producing documents are highly structured and require multiple levels of sign-off before the document is complete.  In this case they use SharePoint for document routing.  However, at inflection points in the process and at the end, this document needs to be disseminated and used by a broad community in a Web 2.0 style context.  The key is to make it easy for data in these workflow driven systems like SharePoint to become visible and usable by a broad enterprise audience.

Government 2.0 offers organizations a new and tangible way to drive business results using proven technologies and approaches from social networking.   Applying the above principles can enable organizations across the public and private sector to make Government 2.0 and communities a success.

Governments are looking for ways to leverage Web 2.0 communities and social networking within their organizations, many looking to do so based on their commitment and interest in Microsoft SharePoint.  Based on nine years of experience working in this field, there are a number of principles organizations can apply to successfully deploy communities in social networking.  In this three part series, I will outline 11 principles for social networking on the SharePoint platform, or more generally.

This week, I’m going to tackle the four more principles for government 2.0 –  the importance of design, status updates and follow the data  

Principle #5: Nurture Content Addiction

Successful sites are those active enough to maintain the attention of even the busiest people.  Novelty and change are one big reason for people to keep coming back.   The ongoing success of FaceBook and Twitter illustrate how “content addiction” creates a reason for visitors to continually engage with the site.

From an enterprise perspective, this “content addiction” can be achieved by applying the practice of content aggregation across the social learning community.  Aggregating content across all topics and areas provides pulse on the project, or even the entire organization.  Social filters are key to making this information meaningful to users.   A good public example of this Digg.com. 

Personalized aggregation, which continues to grow in popularity, is another important strategy where users collect all the feeds from topics or colleagues to see in one location.  This Facebook or Twitter style aggregation when applied within the government provides a broad view introducing users to new information, while the personalized view trims down the information.  An important piece of content production is revealing both implicit content [content as revealed user activity such as ‘Ted marked document X as helpful’] and explicit content [content that is added by typing].  

Principle #6 – Use Play and Gaming

Enterprise learning professionals are increasingly relying on play and gaming as a key element of corporate training and development programs.   They are doing so with good reason, as play and gaming are engaging in a very deep way.  For those people who are into gaming, their games and communities are very consuming, and keep them coming back.  A good example of this is the popularity of online gaming communities such as World of Warcraft or the interactive components of gaming consoles like Xbox Live.

These same principles can be applied to social learning applications.  Taking the principles of gaming and applying them to a training scenario offers a very compelling and engaging way for enterprises to keep users active within a community. 

For example, the Army relies heavily on play and learning in its MilSpace community in helping members develop critical decision making skills.  Users watch a real-life scenario on video and are asked what they would do in a similar situation.  When respondents answer, they can then see others’ responses as well as how the real-life person decided and what happened in the end.

Principle #7 – Keep Users Connected

Social and web 2.0 approaches rely on continual participation.  Continual personalized hooks and calls to action keep people coming back and keep people addicted.  The trick is to let the application do the work.  Think of the emails that you may receive from Linked In (Someone has added you to their LinkedIn Network) or FaceBook (Bob has sent you a new message on FaceBook). 

Traditionally, within the community setting, a newsletter or similar tool was used to engage users on a weekly, biweekly or monthly basis.  Applying the successful approach from social networking of continual updates throughout each day encourages ongoing interaction with the community, which keeps users both connected and engaged.

Principle #8 – It’s a Service

A major difference of intranet communities versus social media or social networking sites is that users come to the communities because they want something.  Users are likely looking for information or need a solution to a specific problem. As such, the organization needs to keep in mind that the community is a service and the community’s goal is to provide the best possible service to users.  For example, if you include questions and answers as part of your community, you need to ensure that people are successful by treating it as a true service.  Mechanisms need to be in place to ensure that unanswered questions are addressed, questions are routed to the right people, and new answerers are enlisted.  That many questions get answers, how many are “good” answers, and how long it takes for users to find answers.

Watch this video by Andrew Chambers on how service is important for communities at the Federal Reserve Bank and Northern Lights.

Check back next week for the final three principles for communities and social networking  as part of Government 2.0.

Governments are looking for ways to leverage Web 2.0 communities and social networking within their organizations, many looking to do so based on their commitment and interest in Microsoft SharePoint.  Based on nine years of experience working in this field, there are a number of principles organizations can apply to successfully deploy communities in social networking.  In this three part series, I will outline 11 principles for social networking on the SharePoint platform, or more generally.

This week, I’m going to examine four principles for government 2.0 – simplicity, crowdsource relevance, appropriate calls to action and measurement matters.

Principle #1 – Simplicity

Call this the Google lesson.  The popularity of sites like Google and Twitter are based on the simplicity of their interfaces, and a clear path for participation.  Even new users can quickly and easily comprehend the steps they need to take.   To increase adoption of government 2.0, organizations need to ensure that they practice simplicity and not make things overly complicated.  A clean user interface, with a specific path for participation from the first visit engages users instead of intimidating them. Furthermore, it is important to understand that much of simplicity is about layering; you can achieve the same outcome in terms of activity or desired activities by just not showing everything up front.

Principle #2 – Crowdsource Relevance

Most social networking sites and communities have so much content, that it can be overwhelming to  users.   These sites, to varying degrees, make use of crowdsourcing, where users essentially do the work of “classifying” the information.  For enterprises, crowdsourcing is a powerful tool that enables the organization to take mountains of information and connect users with only the best and most relevant content. 

Just a few examples of crowdsourcing in action include when users bookmark information (which is an implicit endorsement), users mark something as helpful, users visit something (implies popularity), users tag or classify something (when you upload the content) which provides important meta-data.  Crowdsourcing, when used in conjunction with social filtering, becomes a powerful tool for government 2.0 initiatives as the information is classified and aggregated for users, enabling them to get the most valuable information fast, sorting information by what their peers find most valuable.

Principle #3 – Appropriate Calls to Action

The unique value of government 2.0 is engaging the voice of community members, but in the beginning it can be difficult to get people talking within a community.  There may be a lot of lurkers, but not a whole lot of people participating. Often, new users aren’t clear on what actions they could be taking – whether it be uploading a video or making a comment on a piece of content — so they end up doing nothing.  To get users participating from the inception of the community, and new users engaged from the day they join, there needs to be appropriate calls to action throughout the community.

A strong example of appropriate calls to action are found within FaceBook.  With each user`s status updates, there is the opportunity for their friends to indicate that they like the item, or to comment on that item.  It is clear to users what steps they can take with that content to participate, and this principle offers an immense amount of value to enterprises as they work to build thriving communities.

Principle #4 – Measurement Matters

To truly ensure the success of your government 2.0 initiatives, metrics need to be clearly defined and measured on an ongoing basis. Metrics are central to being able to plan and strategize efforts and activities in a project. This enables users and community managers to have tangible metrics so they can know what is working/what is not, who is participating/who is not,  and setting targets for growth of the project.  

Social networking sites are driven by metrics, numbers of friends, followers and so on.  Enterprises need to take these metrics much deeper to identify short, medium and long term goals, manage and nurture top contributors and determine what is most successful within the community.   A project without substantiated ROI is not a project for long, so measuring items like page information and overall community information can make a critical difference in the adoption and success of the community.

Watch this video by Andrew Chambers of Northern Lights (and formerly of the US Federal Reserve Bank) on how measurement matters in communities.

Next week I’ll tackle four more principles for communities and social networking  as part of Government 2.0.