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.