Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Encouraging Your Employees to Collaborate

Enterprise 2.0 is the use of social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers, according to Andrew McAfee, a Harvard Business School professor who coined the term. These software platforms borrow design philosophies, features, and even technology standards from the websites and web software that pervade the Internet.

Every day, more companies install these social software platforms because they want their employees to collaborate, communicate, share, and organize into communities of interest the way they do in their personal lives. There’s no reason why your employees shouldn’t use software built on these consumer-oriented design philosophies, with the collaboration layer built into the core — software like wikis, blogs, discussion forums, and microblogging solutions.

The best way to understand what web tools work for your employees is to ask them about the websites they visit and the web tools that they use in their personal lives. How they use consumer websites can give you hints at how they want to adopt enterprise tools.

The following sections include some recommendations for how you can get your employees to collaborate and socially influence each other in positive ways. These practices are a direct mirror of how you can engage with social influencers, too.

Employees always compete with ...