RSSVisibility drives contribution, or does it?
By external author | In EN, team blog | 1 reactie.
According to the position paper by Brzozowski and Yardi from the HP Social Computing Lab, visibility of the author is a key reason why people contribute content in corporate social software. I found this interesting, yet also surprising. My expectation is that people contribute mainly because they know that of one of their contacts (not just some random co-worker) needs the answer.
I actually question whether increasing your visibility, within the firewall, is something many people strive for. More inside visibility certainly increases the amount of questions you receive (thus more e-mail, more distractions), while outside visibility as an expert may be more interesting.
Obviously, it is motivating to contribute something if you know that their actually is an audience for your contribution. Hoewever, I notice that some of the contributions I make (like sharing a relevant link in delicious), I also do for selfish reasons: I need to be able to find that link again in the future and by sharing and tagging it, I benefit as well.
Anyway, I am curious about your personal experiences: why do you contribute to social software that runs behind the firewall?
Tags: collective intelligence, enterprise social software, knowledge sharing, web2.0
Yep, the study by HP is interesting and somewhat surprising. I don’t primarily blog to be visible in the organization. When blogs start in organizations, not many people are reading them anyway. What it helps me do is fill in gaps. I use email and the more formal reporting systems we have. But there’s lots of interesting stuff that doesn’t fit into email and/or a formal report. That’s where blogging comes into place for me. I like to call it ‘public email’ or ‘micro reporting’.