{"id":3697,"date":"2013-04-19T07:00:58","date_gmt":"2013-04-19T15:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.formtek.com\/blog\/?p=3697"},"modified":"2013-04-19T07:00:58","modified_gmt":"2013-04-19T15:00:58","slug":"enterprise-social-without-a-purpose-on-line-communities-wither","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/enterprise-social-without-a-purpose-on-line-communities-wither\/","title":{"rendered":"Enterprise Social: Without a Purpose, on-line Communities Wither"},"content":{"rendered":"

While nearly 70 percent of organizations have adopted some sort of Enterprise social technology, Gartner <\/a>finds that only about 10 percent of those projects can actually be called successful. \u00a0The reason for the high failure rate is that businesses aren’t creating social media with a ‘purpose’. \u00a0 Without a well-defined purpose, it’s hard for a community to form around the initiative — people see no clear reason to invest their time and knowledge.<\/p>\n

Anthony Bradley<\/a>, group vice president at Gartner, said <\/a>that\u00a0“Without a well-crafted and compelling purpose, most social media initiatives will fail to deliver business value. \u00a0This provide and pray approach provides access to a social collaboration technology and prays something comes good of it, like a community forming and participants’ interactions naturally delivering business value… \u00a0A well-defined purpose identifies who the participants are, what specific issue they are collaborating around, what value they will gain for themselves, and what value will be provided to the organisation.”<\/p>\n

Gartner suggests five steps for creating enterprise social communities that have purpose:<\/p>\n

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  1. The purpose of the community must be something that can peak people’s interest and motivate them to want to contribute.<\/li>\n
  2. The purpose most resonate with community members and motivate them to want to contribute.<\/li>\n
  3. The purpose needs to have organizational value that can be measured and those results need to be shared with the community as a feedback loop for further motivating participation.<\/li>\n
  4. The purpose needs to be something that can evolve over time — a community that can be built on.<\/li>\n
  5. Gartner says that it’s best to initially create communities that have low risk, and Gartner identifies the following types of risks:<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n