MIT Sloan Management Review

Marketers know social media should be a powerful way to generate positive word-of-mouth. If marketers can select the right platform, design the right message and engage the right users to spread that message, their campaign should succeed. One successful campaign — which marketers can look to as an example — took place at Hokey Pokey Ice Cream Creations, an upscale ice-cream retailer in India. By following a seven-step process, Hokey Pokey substantially improved its social media marketing.

Social web platforms don’t thrive by magic. They can succeed only if they attract the right individuals, motivate them to act in the right ways and empower them to know and trust others in the network. That’s where online reputation systems come in.

What it means when people who grew up with technology in their hands become the heart of a work force — and what it means if managers don’t understand them.

A user’s guide to the building blocks of collective intelligence: By recombining CI “genes” according to the work required, managers can design the powerful system they need.

In a Spring 2006 MIT Sloan Management Review article, “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration,” Andrew McAfee first started to popularize the term “Enterprise 2.0” to describe the use of Web 2.0 collaboration technologies such as wikis and blogs within organizations.

When it comes to knowledge sharing among R&D employees, professional reputations matter — but the chances of successfully garnering information from a colleague increase if the information is important.

Social networks provide greater access to information, which improves people’s judgment and decision making, right? Not always, according to some recent research.

C.K. Prahalad thinks we are entering a period where a key challenge is managing volatility and discontinuities.

An article in the new Spring 2009 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review examines Daniel Halgin’s research into the role that professional social networks play in the career moves of college basketball coaches.

Information markets, wikis and other applications that tap into the collective intelligence of groups have recently generated tremendous interest. But what”s the reality behind the hype?

Informal decision networks – both within teams and throughout organizations – can systematically bias the way decisions are framed and carried out. Here”s how to build your networks right.

Looking for business lessons from the presidential election? Here's a key one: Effective use of Web 2.0 technologies can give an organization an important competitive advantage.

Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso had a lot in common. They each had a distinctive style of painting that has become immediately identifiable. Think of “The Starry Night” or “Three Musicians.&

No sooner have businesses started to really grasp the potential benefits of Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking sites...then someone identifies a new, potentially negative application for them.

Young consumers have been notoriously difficult for advertisers to reach. Mobile marketing might provide the answer, but only if companies understand some basic principles.

An interesting cover story in the June 2008 issue of Inc. magazine names a T-shirt company called Threadless "the most innovative small company in America."

It can be hard for fledgling technology entrepreneurs to get a chance to connect with potential investors — and fellow entepreneurs. To address that, a new network called the OpenCoffee Club encourages locals to organize drop-in meetings for those involved in the start-up scene in their city.

People are connecting with one another in increasing numbers, thanks to blogs, social networking sites like MySpace and countless communities across the Web. Some companies are learning to turn this growing groundswell to their advantage.

Do we finally have the right technologies for knowledge work? Wikis, blogs, group-messaging software and the like can make a corporate intranet into a constantly changing structure built by distributed, autonomous peers — a collaborative platform that reflects the way work really gets done.

To manage research and development projects, companies need to ensure that informal social networks are reinforced — and not thwarted — by formal organizational structures.