Sabre Social Networking

There is lot being written about the work Sabre is doing around social networking. And, there is a lot from what i am reading. There is a blog about the cubeless platform, and there is this case study in employee social networking ... and it seems quite interesting, what they have developed.

Seems like an application which could be quite a good platform for social networking within the organization. there are two things which quite catch the eye ... Firstly, there is the relevance engine. What they say ...

On Sabre Town, users can post a question to the entire organization, and the site's inference or relevance engine will automatically send the question to the 15 most relevant employees (based on what they've entered in their profile, blog postings and other Q&As that have been previously posted).

This seems to be the part which is quite interesting. What this implies is that the system, by itself, is able to discover what people are doing, based on their activities, and can identify who are the right people for a particular kind of thing. This, of course, would not be as adequate as people can do this, but this can be a reasonably nice starting point to build up some form of discovery in the organization. Having said this, we would also need to make sure this is supplemented with more adoption efforts.

Which is the second point ... the idea that this is designed for adoption. This is something i feel is the most important aspect of social networking, or indeed, for KM, as i have written before. What seems interesting is the kind of incentive it can give to people to adopt the platform. First, the number of questions you have answered, or asked, something they call Karma (i am assuming its something to do with helping other people out when they want some information) ... The important point to understand here is that there has to be some kind of initiative of this nature, whether on or off the platform, which works to encourage people to adopt the platform, and since this is about the platform, maybe this should be linked to the platform itself?