Guy huy is the professor at Insead who talks about why corporate social media systems are failing. He says that corporate social network implementations need to be looked at from an emotional capital perspective and companies need to do away from looking at deploying such networks purely from a technological perspective.
Dr. Huy has working on emotional capital and suggests four pillars that organizations need to keep in mind during social network implementations within the organization. According to another research from the Altimeter group, only about half of the enterprise collaboration tools get attention from the whole organization.
The question is obvious. Why adoption and usage of social networks in organizations fail? The answers probably lie in looking at the systems implementation from a concept called emotional capital. From my perspective, emotional capital is similar to social capital in terms of its understanding and how it works our professional lives. It is the invisible bond that binds employees to together as a team but also with the organization as a whole (with its processes and systems) to its employees.
According to Dr Guy Huy, these are the four pillars of authenticity, pride, attachment, and fun. That is why it is often said that to make social networks successful and to realize Enterprise social network benefits it is important that employees crack a joke with each other and share a laugh on the social network. It builds emotional capital.
Traditionally, systems implementation follows the rule based hierarchical flow for software requirements gathering. Seldom does it take care of the emotional capital nor social capital to make social network implementation in companies a success. It goes without saying is that companies need to understand how their teams work and behave collaboratively before they start implementing the systems. Particularly, there is not going to be much of an impact during the software development phase. It is only during the adoption and usage stage that there is a big challenge facing the organization.