Thoughts, Ideas, Opinions ... » The 3Ps of successful Corporate Social Networks

Great discussion Monday at the Enterprise Social Media Forum, where I had the chance to talk about “Maximizing Employee Engagement” in Corporate Social Networks. One of the issues at stake is to what extent learnings from B2C networks can be applied to internal corporate networks where behaviours are likely to be at least slightly different, especially in large companies with an established culture.

While somewhat limiting if you take them at face value, simple frameworks always help to kick-start a debate and I would argue that it always help to start with what I would call the 3Ps of corporate social networks, ie People, Passion and Purpose. One of the interesting challenges in building a corporate network is to decide to what extent key consumer behaviors should be emulated within a company.

• People : where everything starts of course, with profiles giving a sense of belonging to a community, and an easy way to connect to other people in an authentic way, without an agenda by default. This is where and how Facebook or linkedin started and still excel at doing, this where companies need to go beyond the dull profile of static intranet pages to let people express themselves on their pages or other people walls.
• Passion : the trigger to start many discussions, especially with people you may not know well, is the urge to share either your opinion on topics that you feel strongly about or simple observations that think your community will be interested in. That is the main fuel behind the blogging phenomenon, whereas micro-blogging sites such as Twitter have cleverly fused this with your profile. For some people “my activity is my identity” now, and these are usually the early adopters that will set new trends. Letting people start simple discussions that can at some point be transformed into fully-fledge working groups is crucial.
• Purpose : the key to lasting contributions that serve defined objectives. Whether on groups on Facebook or Linkedin, or simple DIY social networks that you can build on Ning or Webjam free or premium offerings, Purpose provides the glue that will keep a group of people aligned toward achieving anything, from running the local charity ... to discussing product innovation. And by definition, you usually deliver very well on any objective if they are served by Passionate People.While the Purpose of the company social network should be clear, especially, at the beginning, it should have in its DNA the ability for employees to have it evolve based on their actual needs and what they feel is most relevant to their life in the company.

Great networks will look at finding the optimum combination between these 3Ps, first making sure that they fit with both the company overall business objectives, ie what is the goal, and the companies values, ie how do we want to interact together to get there.
Interestingly this is often an iterative process as corporate social networks are by themselves “change agents” that will help crystallise the company culture. The ultimate success indicator is often that passionate employees start by themselves new discussions helping the company to move forward as an organisation, both in terms of projects and atmosphere; but it usually helps to start and then nurture some “top-down triggers” to kick start-discussions and activity. While depending on the overall purpose of the network, these initiatives need to be in any case both relevant and useful to employees’ interests that should be identified upstream; such interests are likely to blend anything ranging from sharing team-building pictures to discussing what the competition is doing or working on a specific project.

Stay tuned as we talk soon about measuring engagement...