Anthony Bradley

Installing (or providing) social software will not lead to thriving communities. It will not transform your culture. It most likely won’t lead to anything. Chances are the installed technology will sit their primarily unused. Even worse, activity may emerge that leadership considers a waste of time or even a threat to security, privacy, etc. So am I saying that social software is bad, absolutely not. Am I saying that simply installing the software is bad, absolutely. Installing social software tools to see what happens is a prevalent bad practice. Don’t install social software products, build social applications. A social application is the application of social software technologies to a well defined, community fulfilled business purpose.

The choice of purpose is central to social application success. The decision of what purposes to pursue and the associated target community is primary and far more important than choosing one technology vendor over another. “Seven Key Characteristics of a Good Purpose for Social Software” examines the importance of purpose and how to discriminate between a good or bad one. A good purpose is tightly scoped to first grow community scale. A fundamental effort in building a good social application strategy is establishing a purpose roadmap that maps out how purpose will grow and evolve over time. A purpose roadmap helps plan out gradual progress towards a more highly collaborative culture. “Toolkit: Planning for Social Software Applications Using a Purpose Road Map” is a tool to aid enterprises in establishing a purpose roadmap.

Governance must accompany purpose. A good governance strategy is critical both to social application success and to gaining value from overall enterprise Web participation. Too little governance can lead to rampant undesirable behaviors and too strict governance can stifle participation. In either case, business value is lost. In “Establishing Policies for Social Application Participation” and “Toolkit: Establishing Policy for Social Software Applications” Gartner provides guidance on employing a multi-layered approach to social computing governance.

Building social applications is significantly different than building traditional process oriented applications. They require a different approach to design centered on the architecture of participation where the community is the application and the software simply, but very significantly, facilitates their participation. Gartner has established the PLANT SEEDS framework as a set of design considerations for building social applications. See “How to Apply the PLANT SEEDS Framework for Enhanced Enterprise Web 2.0 Adoption” and “Toolkit Sample Template: PLANT SEEDS Checklists for Planning an Enterprise Web 2.0 Initiative” for details on the framework. PLANT SEEDS is an acronym. The first five, PLANT (purpose, liberty, authorship, nurturing, and tipping point) covers how to define, catalyze, promote, and derive value from a target community. The second five, SEEDS (structure, ease of use, ecosystem, discoverability, and seed), addresses design considerations for building or joining an information systems environment in which the community can thrive.

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Category: social applications     Tags: social applications, social software

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