The Harvard Business Review recently featured a post from Bill George, a Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School, where he states, “Social networking is the most significant business development of 2010, topping the resurgence of the U.S. automobile industry.” As Bill points out, social networking took a transcendent leap forward in 2010 as it morphed from a "personal communications tool for young people into a new vehicle that business leaders are using to transform communications with their employees and customers". Social networking is also flattening organizations by distributing access to key information
The problem, though, is when you begin to introduce social platforms into the mix
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The "Enterprise Social Network". It sounds like a big company solution, doesn't it?
There are a couple of key use cases where social collaboration and HR have particular synergies - firstly around employee onboarding or induction, and secondly around social learning
Using enterprise wiki, social media and other already existing tools might be an effective way to win over employees and build a reliable knowledge management environment. However, there are problems with using popular social networking and collaboration tools, be it TypePad, Twitter, YouTube, Zimbra or another “general purpose / general audience” software in a corporate environment
While we have thankfully largely moved beyond the days when business execs believed that they could change their businesses on a shoestring budget through the introduction and viral adoption of free or very low-cost social collaboration tools, many still underestimate the level of investment required to get the benefits they are expecting. The cost of the software or service itself is one thing: if you want to deploy social collaboration tools at an enterprise-wide level with the associated expectations about the security, reliability and level of administrative control, you are going to need to invest in more than a low-end, freemium solution, and it will not be a small bill that you have to pay
When you're putting together your business case for social collaboration, your focus must categorically be on how implementing this type of technology - and the enabling the cultural change that must accompany it - will bring benefits to your particular organisation
Since the emergence and subsequent incredible growth of public social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter, we've seen use of the word "social" increase in profile to the point where it has generally spiralled out of control in the business world. There's no doubting the impact that "social" technologies and (perhaps more importantly) concepts have had/are having on our approach to business and IT, but we are perhaps now finally starting to see the gloss coming off the term, with software vendors starting to shy away from defining themselves as enabling "social" business
7 Comments - At our place, the folks using the social community are dedicated to complaining, sharing and helping each other...I think we are seeing an end to the word 'Social' because it scares off executives and employees who don't get it
It's no secret these days that achieving widespread adoption of social collaboration technologies in an organisation is not easy: you can't trust viral adoption to get there by itself , and too often I come across stories where initial enthusiasm for an organisation's new social initiative just petered out after six months or so
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