As I’m sure you’ve already read somewhere else today, Yahoo is banning working from home. This move has been met with derision as such a backwards step, but also with agreement from some former Yahoo employees. The quote that stood out most to me was this:

 A lot of people hid. There were all these employees [working remotely] and nobody knew they were still at Yahoo.

What struck me was how difficult it would be for an employee of a company with an established enterprise social network to hide in this way. Their absence would be noted both anecdotally (“Richard doesn’t seem to be in my activity stream much this week”) and statistically in usage reports.

I work from home all the time, but remain one of the most active contributors to BroadVision’s own internal Clearvaleenterprise social network. I’m not the most active any more, but almost everyone who has overtaken me also works from home all the time. Indeed, we consistently see much higher activity from home-workers than office-workers. On an enterprise social network you can...  Read the article

This post originally appeared on theBroadVision blog. While it makes a few references to Clearvale features, it is applicable to any internal-facing social networking adoption project.

With so many companies exploring the idea of implementing a social network within their organisation to connect their employees better, it’s perhaps surprising to find that many of them fail to measure the success of the adoption scientifically. Instead, they rely on subjective measures like “is it working?” and “do we feel better connected?”. These emotional measures are useful and interesting, but they need to be backed up with hard numbers if you are to measure success accurately.

One of the main reasons people don’t measure adoption in this way is because they aren’t sure what the most meaningful measurements are, and what...

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Working in the technology industry means I am constantly subjected to a barrage of assaults on the English language. But few make me shudder as much as “gamification”. 

“That’s not a real word!”, I hear you protest. And I’m with you on that (and so is my spell-checker). Unfortunately, many leading lights of the social networking scene don’t agree. 

Wikipedia describes gamification as the use of game design technique and mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences. Typically gamification applies to non-game applications and processes, in order to ...

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Many years ago, I was in a bookshop waiting to pay for something (a book, I suppose). The people ahead of me in the queue were asking the assistant to search for a book, and she was failing to do it “because the system is down”. Nothing particularly strange about that – I can usually guarantee that any time I contact a call centre I will get some sort of apology for the system being down, or running slowly.

But what was particularly memorable about the bookshop incident was the way the shop assistant assumed that the customer would accept this as a valid reason for...

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Well, OK, maybe yours isn’t. But it has become very clear to me that many of the success stories you read about social projects in companies use the word “success” very generously.

I’ve come across two examples of this recently. I won’t name names because it wouldn’t be fair, and because I don’t believe that this phenomena is limited to these two examples.

Example 1:

A 6,000 user network which apparently reflects the 90/9/1 “Participation Inequality” effect described by Jakob Nielsen.

If 90% of the contribution to your network comes from ...

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