Some people who are considering enterprise social networking for their organizations are concerned about the risks that may be created. “Won’t people be able to post anything?” they ask. “Aren’t out-of-policy or controversial posts a significant risk?”

It is important to remember that organizations have faced similar risks for some time — first with the advent of e-mail, then with easy and universal access to the Internet and all the misinformation that can be spread throughout the workplace.

In fact, while email is legally “discoverable” in the case of court actions, it is not very easily governed on a day-to-day basis. Peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, on the other hand, can potentially be governed in three ways:

1. By restricting contribution rights to a defined subset of users. Contributors can be more easily vetted and trained. And by limiting participation to a much smaller group, you will have exponentially greater power to identify and address abuses.
2. By taking advantage of the powers of community self-governance. When knowledge is publicly discoverable by a large community of users, that community can effectively identify and address problems and inaccuracies. This is one of the fundamentals of the concept of Web 2.0 collective intelligence that one finds in the case of Wikipedia, eBay, Craigslist, and other similar sites. If a community understands your policies, you will have as many “monitors” as users. Note that it must be easy for users to indicate “flag this content for review” to catch the attention of the site administrator.
3. By taking advantage of self-interest. If I post inaccurate information and I see my content is being rated as 2 stars out of 5 in helpfulness and relevance, I’m likely to delete the post to save face. The community benefits by having an inaccurate post disappear.

Finally, consider that there are already many risks inherent in the unsanctioned corporate collaboration that often goes on today in companies where an enterprise-wide social networking initiative is absent. John Seely Brown, former chief scientist at Xerox PARC warns, “A lot of corporations are using (collaborative tools) without top management even knowing it.” Here are several ways you may already be at risk:

• Your clients or even your competition could stumble upon a public blog. Blogs are often high on search engine lists because content changes often.
• Employees may share trademarked, copyrighted, or confidential materials on a semi-secure site.
• Sales teams may discuss confidential pricing over an easily hacked public blog.

Tags: culture, enterprise social networking, informal learning, risk, social learning