We had a substantial innovation – budget, so I was going to ensure that innovate “thought-leaders” were going to be rewarded for their ideas..Sadly the company didn’t have the foresight to see the merit in pushing money into the “blog” which they thought was far too social to be of value in the corporate environment..

That archaic view of the business model has ensured that company has one of the highest turn – overs in staff in the research industry. ..

serves the buggers right !!

Thank you for being frank about those “enthusiasts” some of whom I think belong on the starship enterprise because only there would they be able to implement their hair brained schemes for marketing & I’m assuming world domination.

In my limited experience one has to ‘launch’ the site with a small community that can spread the word and grow the network virally and organically throughout the business, as would happen in the Web space. Secondly it helps to reward social participation. On all our platforms CONSTRUCTIVE participation is rewarded through a simple points system that the user can see and share in. It’s not a guaranteed way to ensure adoption but it does help.

As a pilot it worked really well, it inspired everyone to interact and to shift their focus from facebook to the internal social network. Nevertheless when we launched it nationally, it was incredible how poor the up take was. The average age of the employee was thirty plus, predominantly married and most senior players were with child. The idea that I pitched to them didn’t even closely resemble their current usage of the internet, nor did they have time to really investigate how relevant the application might be to their core business entity.

We had a few witty contributors, some great innovations as a result but it never really caught on as a social network. My big question then can an internal online social network be successfully integrated into a business when hierarchies are cast in stone, competition results in high-turn-overs and innovations are closely guarded as they’re your ticket to success?

Tell me your secrets, yoda.