De-lurking on Enterprise social tools

Research from the likes of Giermindl (2018) correlates posting on enterprise social tools with overall engagement and well being of staff in the organisation. 

However there is a tendency to an extreme pareto distribution 90-9-1. 90% of staff 'lurk', 9% occasionally contribute, and 1% contribute all the time. This is not to say that 'lurkers' are not working or contributing, in fact Giermindl goes on to say:

"Lurkers will use the information they have gained by lurking in a community and take the knowledge outside the application to exchange it with others in offline settings."

But how do we increase the rate of posting to get more 'engagement' in the organisation? Enter de-lurking. 

I propose that we should look to the work of BJ Fogg and his behaviour model. This suggests that we should make initial interaction as trivial as possible so that more people take the leap of faith and interact with their peers digitally.

In the Invotra Social Intranet we use the consumer style of social media in the Enterprise context by offering a 'thumbs up' button on all posts and comments. However in the organisational (and particularly distributed) environment this takes on a completely different tone. It is not merely a social validation but acts as a professional check mark of acknowledgement.

Particularly in the distributed environment where staff are working flexibly we often lose the traditional means of acknowledging our colleagues with a nod of the head or eye contact. In this setting it is particularly helpful to just 'thumb up' a note or 'for your information' point. This makes sure people feel they are being heard without unnecessarily clogging up the Invotra feed of updates with comments. It stops people feeling isolated, makes people more engaged and moves people one step closer to 'de-lurking'

References

?Fogg, B. (2009). A behavior model for persuasive design. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology - Persuasive '09.

Giermindl, L. (2019). Lost in Digital Transformation? The role of Enterprise Social Networks in facilitating digital collaboration. Ph.D. University of Passau.