A new wave of collaborative applications, social software platforms are entering the enterprise under the catchy name of “Enterprise 2.0″. They build upon Web community software  to integrate blogs, wikis, forums, chat rooms and document sharing functionality for a group of employees, and are gaining ground as a remedy to many organizational illnesses. In the same way that social sites help bring people together on the Internet, the bet is that Enterprise 2.0 software will bring down the walls inside the enterprise, flatten organizations and eventually speed up innovation and time to market. In this world, employees are informed in real time about their business, get involved in productive team work and share knowledge with colleagues they don’t even know to help the company succeed as a whole.  Yet who ever tried to implement an Enterprise 2.0 community knows that it does not just happen over night by deploying the tools. The challenge is to get employees to use it, and if possible, to use it in a way that serves the company goals.

While I don’t think that there is a magic recipe to succeed in implementing an enterprise social software platform, I’ve seen four common mistakes that always lead to failure:

1. Assuming that employees starve to share information

One frequent mistake is to assume that once the tools are available, all employees will naturally come to use them. True, grass-root communities are popping up on the Internet every day. But passion is the cement of grass-root communities.  A common, and mostly personal, interest is what hold them together. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), most people are getting less passionate when it comes to sharing about their work.

Work is also about competition. A competitive spirit is generally good for the enterprise, but when competition becomes too much internal, employees start sharing less information to keep the lead… and the job! Underestimating employees’ reluctance to share their most valuable knowledge causes many communities to fail. They end up like a dusty library, full of unanswered questions.

2. Assuming that trusted leaders will emerge from the crowd

Efficient community leaders set the tone, share a large volume of valuable information, are pro-active in forums and more importantly, are given natural authority in their area of expertise. Unfortunately for enterprise communities, these “leaders” are often too busy applying their knowledge on the job to spend time sharing it. On the Internet also, consultants are responsible for most of the business content available on blogs and social networks. Only few professionals and operational managers bother to share some experience on their blog after a long day of work!

Getting the involvement of the most recognized experts in the company is a strong incentive for users to participate in a business community. Without their active participation, valuable users won’t follow and leaders with no credibility may take over, turning the community into a social club for losers. The kind of club you did not want to join when you were a college student.  Give trusted leaders some good reasons, and ideally some time, to participate!

3. Over engineering the processes and tools

Because successful communities are communities where users feel free to share and are empowered to do so, it is important NOT to set up too many rules and procedures for them to participate. Defining too many rules, too many controls, and marching everyone through a multi-step publishing process is likely to push back the most valuable users: those who are willing to share, but not at the cost of being monitored by power admins.

4. Underestimating the competition

I’m not speaking about competitors, but other internal systems that are competing to get their share of user attention. Users login to a system primarily to GET information, not to give. And they are unlikely to login to multiple systems on a regular basis. Many communities die before being live because users simply don’t see what they can get from it at their first login, and keep using older systems that might be less “sociable”, but are filled with useful information. Launching a brand new social software platform without preexisting content is likely to fail. You’re just calling on visitors to fill an empty shell, ignoring that their primary need is to retrieve the meat from it.

Beyond the technology, the greatest challenge of any social software platform project is to encourage use, right from the start. Disappointed first-time users won’t come back before long.  Whether it is with a “top-down” approach, a grass-root approach, or more likely a mix of both, focusing on THE REASON WHY employees may participate in your business community is, in my view, the key to success. But I’m just a marketer. You’d better trust a consultant or a scientist!

Worth reading on this topic:
> Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges by Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management