Social Networking Services: A Case Study in the Failure to Facilitate Knowledge Sharing in Organizations : A Case Study of Enterprise 2.0 Taolin Platform

Sammanfattning: Social networking services are relatively new phenomena and they have attracted so much attention around themselves. These services have been seen by many organizations as a po-tential tool to facilitate knowledge sharing. However, very few have successfully adopted such services. Many problems which lead to failures arise when it comes to developing and implementing social networking services with the goal to facilitate knowledge sharing.The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the failure of one social networking service to satisfy the knowledge sharing needs of the organization that has developed and implement-ed it in-house.Interviews with three employees of the company were arranged. The interviews were done with time intervals in between. This gave us the opportunity to rearrange the questions that were going to be asked to the next interviewee. The interviews were really helpful and gave us a good insight of the problem with the development and implementation of the social networking service that the organization was facing. After the interviews were conducted, a questionnaire was elaborated and sent out to the employees in the organization.The results we came up with were really interesting. A table with failure factors for the so-cial networking service used in the organization was made and a model suggesting the steps an organization should follow for the successful development and implementation of a so-cial networking service that facilitates knowledge sharing internally was developed.We found out that the failure was not in the social networking service itself but in the way it was presented, positioned and communicated to the employees of the company. They never took the service seriously for its intended purpose which was knowledge sharing within the organization and that led to the cancelation of the project.