Confessions of an Online Community Manager Blog by Amber Rae Lambke

I'm passionate about bringing people together for a common purpose. I believe that while online communities can be an incredibly powerful tool for building connections and driving collaboration, they succeed most when one simple rule is followed: people first, technology second. Please join me as I chronicle the good, bad, and ugly of building an online community, driving adoption and awareness, and sustaining momentum. These are my confessions...

Posts: 7 | Created on March 25, 2009 | 1

6 Reasons NOT to Launch a Corporate Social Network

By Amber Rae Lambke in Confessions of an Online Community Manager on Tuesday, May 19, 2009 12:44 AM  
Tags: businessweek corporate social network | Post a Comment

Stephen Baker, a senior writer at BusinessWeek, recently published "Starting a Corporate Social Network? Don't." With the recession affecting spending and budgets, Stephen encourages managers who are thinking about launching a workplace social network to think again.

Instead, Stephen suggests leveraging free social networking tools like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter where a crowd already exists and conversation about your company may already be taking place.

"Don't hire consultants or a tech team. And whatever you do, steer clear of software architects. Most companies that build their own social networking tools end up with failures. The problem goes far beyond clunky design and balky servers. It's simply that social networks are useless until they draw a crowd—and most of the crowds are busy on public sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

So instead of spending a fortune to draw employees, customers, and clients to your site, how about meeting them where they already are for free? Chances are lots of them are among the 200 million on Facebook and the 30 million on LinkedIn. And more of them are Twittering every day."

With that, here are six more reasons NOT to launch a corporate social network:

1. You don't have a clear purpose or plan.
2. Your primary goal is outreach to the masses.
3. You want to "make something viral" (and you're not quite sure what that "something" is).
4. You're not sure how members of the social network will benefit.
5. You're relying on content (rather than relationships) to bring people back.
6. Your people have no reason to talk with each other.

Got others? Shoot me a tweet (@amber_rae) using hashtag #socialnetwork.

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