A Practical Guide to Enterprise 2.0 (#e2conf) – 10 Principles for Success

We’re at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week, and we’ve released a new guide to help organizations in the public and private sector make sense of social networking for the enterprise. Enterprise 2.0, despite the term, really encompasses all of the social networking and other Web 2.0 technology as it applies within the workplace.

If you happen to be at the show – we’d love to see you – stop by at booth #404.

Over the next few days we’ll be sharing the content of the guide. The idea behind this guide is to provide organizations with tangible principles they can apply to their Enterprise 2.0 projects. Today, we’ll look at two principles of the 10 outlined in the guide.

Principle #1: 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 a key part of 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 enterprise 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 #2 – 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.

More principles to come in the next couple days. In the meantime, you can check out the whole guide here.