2 critical considerations of Enterprise Social Media
I’ve been amazed by social media and it’s corporate applications since I met with Pete Williams of Deloitte and heard about the impact it had on staff turnover. So I asked Jason Eldridge, a man on a mission and founder of Corporate Communication Strategies, to put together a blog post about the most important considerations for Enterprise Social Media.
Enter Jase.
**********
With all the noise around the Enterprise Social Media hyper-sphere it begs the question:
WHERE …
IS…
IT …
ALL…
GOING..?
Like Lemmings, many companies are hopping on board with no clear objective and purpose front of mind and as a result are quick to judge a ‘lack of performance and return on their investment’. Few people truly understand the POWER behind these new technologies and how to best utilize them for their own needs.
Personally I believe we are witnessing various new channels and methodologies of communication that will open up a world of opportunity – one of never-seen-before proportions. Excuses for poor communication internally, employees being un-reachable and not having direct access to pertinent information in a timely manner, should and will be, for those companies who utilize these new tools correctly, a thing of the past!
TWO POINTS I WOULD LIKE YOU TO CONSIDER – BEFORE MANY OF YOU TAKE THE PLUNGE!
1 – What are you measuring by implementing these new technologies…What metrics will you be using and how will you know when you are achieving your desired goals?
It is paramount that you are able to articulate the above as there are ENDLESS benefits for your consideration. To help you get started I have summarised below the various uses, examples and vendors (sellers), of the more popular Enterprise Social Software for your consideration.
2- Those of you who might be considered more MAVERICK than most… Encourage your own customers to participate in your discussions. You may need to drive some of the topics and areas of focus initially and then step back, let them be in the driving seat and respond in a calculated and supportive manner.
You will be staggered at what you will learn and what people say – both complimentary and constructively. How you manage your own reactions and more importantly filter and FIND LEVERAGE from this new information will be up to you. I wish you every success!
Applications of enterprise social software
- Search: allowing users to search for other users or content
- Links: grouping similar users or content together
- Authoring: including blogs and wikis
- Tags: allowing users to tag content
- Extensions: recommendations of users; or content based on profile
- Signals: allowing people to subscribe to users or content with RSS feeds
- Freeform function: no barriers to authorship (meaning free from a learning curve or from restrictions)
- Network-oriented function, requiring web-addressable content in all cases
- Social function: stressing transparency (to access), diversity (in content and community members) and openness (to structure)
- Emergence function: requiring the provision of approaches that detect and leverage the collective wisdom of the community
Software examples
Specific social software tools which programmers have adapted for enterprise use include:
- hypertext and unstructured search tools
- wikis
- Microblogging
- Blogs/Weblogs for storytelling and sharing personal knowledge and experiences
- enterprise social bookmarking for tagging and building organizational knowledge
- RSS and Activity Streams for signalling
- collaborative planning software for peer-based project planning and management
- ideas banks for ideation (idea generation)
- social networking tools
- mashups for visualization
- prediction markets for forecasting and identifying risks.
Enterprise social software vendors
Enterprise social software vendors fall into several categories, including platform vendors:
- Atlassian
- Cisco Quad
- Clarizen Work Management Solutions
- Google Sites
- IBM Lotus Connections and IBM Lotus Quickr
- Microsoft SharePoint
- MindTouch open source
- Oracle Beehive
- Oracle WebCenter
- Yammer
