Seeding. As you plan your approach for designing your social system, take into account that you'll have to invest to grow your effort into a healthy ecosystem that can produce data, insights or even new ideas. People will be required in order to do this.

Feeding. Whether it's a community, Wiki or internal collaboration solution you've put in place, it will have to be fed with a steady stream of content. Some of this can be automated and some of it can come from your participants--but there has to be some editorial judgment made for every piece of content and functionality. People are required for that.

Weeding. A productive social business design will require efforts to prune and weed out material that can inhibit its growth (just like a garden). In some cases, automated moderation services can do this--but in others people will be required to ensure that interactions are productive. Weeding can also include creating a separate environment--for example, Nokia's "blog hub" encourages employees to vent freely internally (using anonymous aliases).You can bet that someone is looking at the data and analyzing it. If not, they should be.

"Intranet internal communications is radically different from print internal communications. The intranet internal communicator facilitates rather than dictates. They help people find. They guide rather than lead. They support the completion of a task such as checking up a procedure or a job vacancy. They focus on creating clear menus and links... This is a call to arms. You young ambitious communicators, get involved in making search work better, focus relentlessly on the quality of menus and links, simplify the steps and words used in software applications, make policies easier to understand and forms easier to complete. There is so much to do, so many areas where you can make your organization more productive, efficient and effective."

"The world we work and live in is becoming more information-based. What that means is that we complete more and more of the tasks of our lives as a result of accessing information. This information is active, driven, purposeful, and measured. How is it measured? By whether it has helped people complete the tasks that they have used this information to help them complete."

"Web designers always have to strike a balance between usability and visual appeal when designing a website. Without this balance, a website might be nice to look at or difficult to navigate. Or, it might be easy to navigate, but not easy on the eyes. With this in mind, balancing attractive navigation with usability does not need to be overly difficult. To help you generate new ideas and inspiration for user navigation, here are 30 great examples of attractive and usable navigation."

"A good site structure makes users happy. They can easily find, understand and use the information on your site. For the business, this makes all the difference. In this article I’ll go through principles behind good site structures and describe a methodology for creating site structures."

"Folksonomies have emerged as a means to create order in a rapidly expanding information environment whose existing means to organize content have been strained. This paper examines folksonomies from an evolutionary perspective, viewing the changing conditions of the information environment as having given rise to organization adaptations in order to ensure information “survival” — remaining findable. This essay traces historical information organization mechanisms, the conditions that gave rise to folksonomies, and the scholarly response, review, and recommendations for the future of folksonomies."

"Someone might notice an obscure blog post on Twitter, where it starts spreading, then it moves to FriendFeed and Facebook and desktop stream readers such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic desktop and before you know it, a hundred thousand people are reading that article. The stream creates a different form of syndication which cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled."

As far as I can see, this is the real differentiator between CS and most other content work: Unlike traditional editorial work, content strategy isn’t steeped in grand narratives so much as in bits, in data. “CS big” isn’t custom publishing (although there are definitely narrative and brand strategies one wants to be aware of). And “CS little” isn’t just those deliverables: content without context, from the container to the brand, is all essential if you want to sell in the Googlesphere.

"The most notable structural problem is when designers treat a site like one big swamp with no organizing principle for individual items. Yes, users can fish the swamp using search or by following links from current promotions or outside sites. But whatever they dredge up is it. No opportunities for understanding the site's other offerings or locating related items."