As Socialtext deployments grow within organizations, here are some reflections on enterprise social software deployment patterns, based on observation of usage patterns of weblogs and wikis at scale on the public internet.
There are three main tiers of social networks in an organization, as Ross Mayfield describes. These map to different usage patterns of social software.
- Project teams are creative networks, groups that work closely together. These teams use shared workspaces to communicate and collaborate intensively, and maintain a continuous, shared understanding of project status. Schedule and presence capabilities will make it easier for these groups to co-ordinate.
- Communities of practice are social networks. Knowledge workers want to be able to scan, discover, and meet other in their disciplines across the organization. On the public internet, there are communities of bloggers in technology, law, teaching, and other fields using this model today. There are established wiki communities in technical areas, like Apache and non-technical areas, like, for instance, Kayaking, RSS subscriptions provide an excellent method for members of communities of practice to discover and follow relevant projects and conversations. Blog search engines, including Technorati and Blogstreet, that are used to discover network relationships among blog communities.
- The enterprise as a whole is a political network. Weblogs can be used by executives to communicate in an individual voice across the organization. On the public internet, the relevant model is popular bloggers such as Joi Ito in Japan and Doc Searls in the US. The link structure enables the discovery and tracking of popular ideas, with blog search engines such as Daypop and Blogdex.
| Network | Size | Application | Distribution |
| Political Network | ~1000s | Publishing | Power-law (scale-free) |
| Social Network | ~150 | Communication | Bell-curve (random) |
| Creative Network | ~12 | Collaboration | Dense (equal) |
- Each creative network creates its own core of strong ties among users who can act upon information.
- Social networks provide a source of new ideas.
- Political networks assure the rapid distribution of fit memes that benefit from social filtering.
As on the public internet, there are valuable emergent properties of the social software network that are greater than the sum of the parts.
- Within and across creative and social networks, managers gain visibility into multiple projects and disciplines
- Users can more efficiently manage attention by choosing their own subscriptions and notification frequency, instead of being flooded by email.
- Once critical information flows are made visible with a rich link structure, the organization can analyze and improve the information flow by monitoring social dynamics, identifying key hubs and structural gaps.
The adoption of social software starts by benefiting the workgroup with tools for rapid and convenient collaboration, fostering participation. Over time, the aggregation of content, and the emergence of link structures and social network patterns provides value to the organization overall.
