We’ve lived with the words ‘like’ and its hateful neologism ‘unlike’ since Facebook introduced it almost five years ago. It’s become a staple of social media sites. We’ve all-grown used to seeing — and using — the like button to express delight in a post, but what does it really mean? We’ll explore the use of ‘like’ – Jon hopes he’ll convinced you to remove it, while Luke tries to defend it.

Back in September we discussed Gamification – an awful word – and concluded that, if used well, it could be a way to tap into the psychology of motivation and reward and make some tasks more engaging, interesting and participative.

But playing psychological tricks with your employees is a dangerous game.  People’s minds are complex things, and a ‘one size fits all’ approach is likely to annoy as many people as it delights.  Recent research by Gartner suggests that as many as 80% of all enterprise gamification will fail due to poor design. So before we fall for the hype, we should ask: will a gamified intranet really help, or would your resources be better spent on more mundane work, like improving the “recognising your employees” section of the HR site?

A lot of companies are still in their phase for experimenting with what is called enterprise 2.0 or social business. For some this means to establish web 2.0 inspired tools such as blogs, wikis or unified communication solutions. For the others the approach leads to the roll-out of social software solutions that mimick popular internet services such as Twitter and Facebook. In this guest blog for Intranetizen, Philipp Rosenthal argues organisations that ignore the eminent change in business IT frequently face the reality that employees start “outsourcing” their work environment to public cloud services – simply following the basic principle of “if there’s a will, there will be a way”.

If you want something to work properly in an organisation, you give someone responsibility for it. You don’t leave it to chance and simply hope that it gets done. Companies would never dream of not having someone in charge of legal, or communications, or widget production, so why is it that so many organisations are leaving enterprise collaboration inappropriately managed?

As the use of social tools in the enterprise has exploded over recent years, the role of community management is being talked about more and more. Yet confusion remains about exactly what it is, and whether it’s really needed. Social media purists argue authentic online communities should be as completely self-organised and un-managed as possible. Others take a more pragmatic approach, suggesting effective facilitation and management helps the community to develop so that it meets its intended purpose.

In this special guest post for Intranetizen, Sam Woods, Community Manager for a global financial company’s social intranet sets out what makes community management work.

Gamification – applying game design thinking to non-game applications – has certainly been the buzzword of 2012, with some analysts predicting that by 2013 half of all business initiatives will have gamified processes. But the response from digital workplace specialists has been more muted, with many of our blog commenters finding real-life implentations underwhelming at best.

As the Enterprise Gamification Forum kicks off this week over in San Diego, we’re taking a closer look at gamification and asking if it really has a place on your intranet.