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...The enterprise social space is exploding -- but the implications of unbridled collaboration have not yet been felt
We will reinvent productivity for people who are swimming in a growing sea of devices, apps, data and social networks...As more and more organizations begin to focus on social interactions and Big Data assets, this rate of growth will only increase
The "Enterprise Social Network"...And it's true, there are huge benefits to be gained by large organisations investing in social collaboration technologies, as I outlined in my report What is social collaboration?
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
7 Comments - To me, "Social" is becoming hackneyed like "cloud" and "engaged"...At our place, the folks using the social community are dedicated to complaining, sharing and helping each other
It's a topic of conversation for most organisations - how to get a handle on how they are performing in the "social sphere"; to what extent they are addressing their customers' needs via social media, and how public social media platforms should play in the context of their overall marketing or customer service strategy