How And Why Of Enterprise Social Networking

Social Networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) have enabled people to be actively in touch and improve relationships. To understand why and how they could be useful to companies, we should first delve into why Social Networks bring about better networking among people.

Here are three main reasons.

• Social Design: The way the Social Networks work (their design, technically) is based on social web or so-called web 2.0 ideas that have evolved over the last decade. While many elements form part of Social Design, linking people and information in ways that makes people ‘active’ is central to the successful spread of social networks. Heightened participation that encourages sharing is the result of social design.

• Ability to process large volumes of info quickly: Sometimes, Less is More. By way of presentation and new ways of interactions such as commenting, tagging, rating, link sharing and feeds, Social Networks have made it easier for people to process information and act quickly.

• Information pull, not just push: While email is always sent to specific person(s), postings on Social Networks are open to wider audience (people connected to you) who may choose to react and set off a chain. These three reasons give social networks an edge over email in improving communication and information sharing among individuals.

Social Networking At Work

Social networking is important at work too as it can improve individual as well as the group performance. Knowledge capturing and sharing has always been an issue within enterprises (“If only we know what we know”).

Today’s jobs cannot be effectively accomplished with yesterday’s tools. As an example, email is being used as single-most important way of messaging in companies, but the volume of email today makes it less productive. Documents stored in local folders on the PC and as email attachments have created information silos.

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In today’s business environment, information sharing is even more complex and indeterminate with geographically distributed teams, outsourcing and partnering.

Enterprise Social Networking is helping us solve exactly this problem.

While the model of Social Networking and certain messaging and social media tools are useful, new platforms are needed for enterprise use and adoption. Enterprise Social platforms have to address many different needs than popular Social Networks on the web.

Privacy, Security And Compliance

While companies need a good sharing environment, not all things can be open to all within the company. Information privacy and security model should be well designed and easy to adopt. Role-based customisation to cater to different positions of employees is important for many companies to successfully deploy internal social software.

Administration And Customisation

Each company works differently and has its own requirements for customisation including branding. Companies tend to look for ease of administration and customisation with out the additional expense of IT consultants.

Application Integration

Social software in itself should not create another silo within the company. This means software should not only coexist and integrate with other systems already deployed in the company, but also complement them through addition of collaboration capabilities.

Adoption And Community Management

Successful deployment of enterprise social software needs good community management, at least in the early days of rollout. Community setup and management may be accomplished through internal team or using vendor-provided services.

Every company is now looking at enterprise social software to gain the extra edge they require for success in a tough business environment. Trends show that Social Software will indeed be central to the future of the enterprise.

The author is the founder and CEO of Qontext Inc.