Cultivate Participation of All Kinds
Allowing users to blog and podcast is no good unless other users can rate, tag and comment on the content, Finn says.
"A video site without comments and ratings is like a ghost town," says Finn. "You want a site to feel like a living place with lots of people present."
Also, you want to get C-level executives participating in social media to build trust and integrity.
"You might not start with the execs," says Finn. "Within Microsoft, social networking had value because it benefited one user peer-to-peer to another user, but once our podcasting network got larger, people like Ballmer and [CIO] Tony Scott realized that's a good way to reach people."
Shane O'Neill is a senior writer at CIO.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/smoneill. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter at twitter.com/CIOonline.
Read more about web 2.0 in CIO's Web 2.0 Drilldown.
