Companies are ramping up social network services in their organizations. Many managers are asking how to increase content contribution from employees and how to measure the success of enterprise social network.

I suggest that they should start thinking about the human motivation and behavior factor.

After the dotcom bubble burst in early 2000, many companies took advantage of the lessons learned in consumer space experimentation. The frequent key words I heard when we were speaking among managers about ROI are:

“Trust”, “Authoritative Content”, “Employee & Customer Self service” “Sticky Solution”

We are in a period of rapidly changing our computing paradigm from application model to social model. Computers and mobile devices are now the social machinery allowing us to collaborate with large group of people in a distributed network.

We believe in amazon book review ratings and buy a book if it’s 5 stars. We believe in Google search result and will take the first page search results as the de facto best documents out there in the WWW. These are examples of social computing models long before facebook and myspace come along. The science behind it is an equation of connectivity and social behavior.

One big challenge that I believe management faces is in building the TRUST factor in corporate social network services. Take care of this first and you will reap better content or business intelligence. Two emerging areas particularly important to support the trust model are:

• Behavioral modeling that allows management for experimenting, scenario planning, and deep understanding of behavior, patterns, and potential outcomes.
• Cognitive modeling that allows management to understand the human factors and address the challenges of increased growth, productivity, and innovation.

Web 2.0 is about gathering Collective Intelligence.
I was looking at Fortune companies use of blogging and if they encourage their employees to blog.
Below are my picks (based on frequency of posts, page rank and content) – not listed by preference:

• Tibco: http://tibcoblogs.com
• GE Global Research: From Edison’s Desk
• Sun Microsystems: blogs.sun.com
• IBM: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/
• Oracle:  http://blogs.oracle.com/
• Google: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ 
• HP:  The Digital Mindset
• Cisco: The Platform: The Official Cisco Blog
• Microsoft: Microsoft Live Labs, Microsoft Community Blogs

Interesting that I can’t find Apple’s official technology blog site.  Perhaps the users’ podcasts are keeping them busy?

I did look into Financial services, Life Sciences and Management Consulting companies. But I can’t find any interesting and official corporate blogs.  Please comment to this post if you find anything that I’m missing. 

A week ago, I attended a round-table on the Future of Technology with well-known speakers: Esther Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Bernie Meyerson and Ken Perlin.

The discussion quickly focused around the phenomena of Web 2.0, with endless ramblings of the new found popularity with facebook, myspace, secondlife and blogging.  The echoes of concern around the table sound familiar as early as the dawn of information age – privacy and control of personal information, accessibility of the new medium of communication, communities, power of media and publicity, or in many cases instant fame by virtually anyone in the world.

As we are coming out of 2007, undoubtedly the most influential technical word this year is “2.0″.  Anything that has the numerical link to it –*2.0 –seems to work magic and have enormous media coverage. Gen Y is taking the center stage, leading the way for new ways of community sharing, often personal information and thoughts.

Will this trend continue? Will Dec 2008 round-table be another excited chant of Web technologies 3.0 and beyond.  I think that it’s Yes.

Web 2.0 is not about technologies, but rather using the Internet as a collaborative communication medium. Funny that it took us one generation to figure these out.