by NewsGator Daily Blog, Jan. 12, 2009
http://blogs.newsgator.com

The concept of reciprocity was driven home to me last week when using TripAdvisor. This is one of my favorite travel sites as it employs a large and active community of fellow travelers who write reviews and share information. I use the site every time I travel to check out the real scoop on my intended destination and have been doing so for years. I was finally inspired to “give back” and be a good Web 2.0 citizen by writing a review of the Park Central New York hotel in Manhattan. This desire was purely intrinsic and I got to wondering what inspires reciprocity for enterprise social computing initiatives.
Certainly, that same spirit of giving back can and does exist in the workplace. This spirit may be inspired by the culture and it is this type of cultural influence that will greatly enhance opportunities for successful adoption and greater business value. But, what about more extrinsic factors? Rewards? Recognition? Compensation? They all matter and it is the wise organization that addresses these issues head-on when deploying social computing technologies within the enterprise. Of course, to enact any such program, metrics will be requested and perhaps even required. This is a far from trivial task. Andrew McAfee has written an excellent post proposing a model for Enterprise 2.0 Ratings, but there are many more qualitative criteria that could apply and should be used. Some examples might include:
• Decreased time to get an answer to a question
• Number of new connections made amongst people who haven’t worked together in the past
• Decrease in email volume specifically related to collaboration or content sharing
• Increase in expertise or knowledge discovery – “Are you more knowledgeable in subject matter X as a result of using social computing?”
• Increase in end user “satisfaction” – are end users seeing real value and how do they define that value?
Without reciprocity, enterprise social computing efforts can become dominated by a handful of more vocal and active participants which misses the point. It is the nature of emergent knowledge that is the key to realizing the profound benefits offered by blogs, wikis, communities, tagging and bookmarking.