Presentations and Notes from the Workshop

How do we use SNSs to gain knowledge? What are the mechanisms for gaining knowledge?

How do users acheive their goals using SNSs?
What user needs are met on an SNS (maybe not a concrete goal, but emotional/social/etc)

Impact of having moderation controls in a corporate environment
e.g. Inappropriate behavior & policies to control
e.g. Issues of the management hierarchy overlaid on social networking interactions and the potential conflicts

Measuring benefit of SNS use:
- ROI, quantitative, financial benefit (corporate earnings/savings)
- ROI differences between business sectors
- social capital & team health measures

Through SNS administration, organizations can promote difference messages and values
- issues of marketing and persuasion, the editorial roles

Measuring relationships beyond "friending"
- tie strength measurement
- importance of relationship in the org context
- the many different ways of measuring, representing, interpreting

How are SNSs different than older, existing technologies?
How do existing communication theories apply to SNSs?
- We should not re-invent the wheel -- the communications literature has studied these problems before.
- Ways SNSs are different: ubiquity, scale, collision, exposure

Corporate Control of Environment / Datasets
- this creates measurement/research challenges
- need greater access so we can have generalizability of findings

Proliferation of SNS platforms, Integration of existing platforms
- Orgs have to decide whether or not to create a new tool and integrate into other platforms? or use an existing external tool?

Privacy, Visibility, permissions, from the users perspective

Adoption, Strategies for viral adoption

Annual performance ratings, Individual effectiveness measured by SNSs

Adoption Influencers:

1. organization's structure, culture, heirarchy
2. personal benefit from site, personal motivation
3. system used for pultiple purposes, able to be apropriated
4. network effects (e.g. spreading through friending)
5. scale of site (small, med, very large?)
6. evocative tasks to do on the site
7. role of gardeners and evangelists
8. quality content and the need for a critical mass of quality content
9. email & other push technology to draw users
10. feedback loop to users about their own and others' behavior

Measurement ROI

Setting Targets for Success
    - participation rates, adoption rates
    - you can report these numbers
    - they set expectations and benchmarks

Connections
    - hard to determine the value of connections in a reportable way
    - visualization of relationships is interesting to assist in evaluation

Approach: Connect value to other existing corporate initiatives
    - add social networking capabilities via Facebook Connect to an existing tool

Deploy at Moment of Need

25% adoption tipping point may be a turning point in terms of measurement of success. After this level, becomes part of business?

Moderation

Monitoring vs. moderating. Two different approaches one can take.

Unknowns:

What is inappropriate?
    - differs per company and if/how policies are enforced
       (e.g. at IBM an understanding of non-enforcement of some issues)   
    - a possible solution: extreme configuration controls for the admins
      (e.g. SelectMinds solution is to offer these controls and allow for them to turned down as inappropriate behavior does not appear.)

Does having controls help or hurt?
   - perhaps some way to run a study of this?
   - different levels of moderation controls
        e.g. "forbidden word" list

Thresholds of accountablity and awareness haven't been adequately explored
    - what is the impact of your sharing on your job and organization ?
    - who is looking at your content? who ca nsee what?

Maybe only limit the behavior that causes legal problems for the company, and ignoring the possibly "busness inappropriate" behavior.