Social Networking: Bend It Right For The Enterprise

Social networking is a phenomenon that was born in your personal life, and then spread itself out to encompass the other avatar - professional. What this means is that the all too familiar social networking lingo - ‘Like’, ‘Friend request’, ‘Fans’, ‘Profiles’, ‘Connect’, ‘Share’, ‘What’s on Your mind’ - is now making in-roads into enterprises, as they finally start accepting social media as an enterprise phenomena. But even as CIOs take a leap of faith and usher in the social media revolution, there is no doubt that enterprises will need to go through a whole new ’learning’, or rather, ‘un-learning’ experience.

Enterprise Relevance

Anantha Sayana, Head - Corporate IT, L&T, CN Ram, Group CIO, Essar Investments, and Viral Gandhi, CIO, Cox & Kings are unanimous in their opinion that social media will play a critical role in increasing business efficiency for enterprises.

According to Sayana, social networking sites can act as a platform for free expression of latent thoughts, ideas, which otherwise couldn’t have been captured. “These sites are not just space for trivial conversations, but can be leveraged by organisations as well,” he adds.

L&T is currently experimenting with the concept of social networking. In fact, the infrastructure behemoth with an approximate employee count of 38,000 has created its own channel on YouTube.

Citing an example, he explains how the company recently posted a three minute video of the employees accepting a citation at an award ceremony and the response was tremendous. The award post got somewhere between one to two thousand ’likes’ on the community channel. “The whole idea looks very plain vanilla per se. However it drove a lot of attention among the company employees in terms of commenting and liking the video,” Sayana explains.

Ram takes it to a different level as he observes that social networking platforms can be a great tool to increase interactivity between employees and the top management. “It can bring clarity among employees of all class, departments about the vision of the promoters, and where do they see the company in the next 5-10 years,” he adds.

More consumer centric companies like retail, banking and those from the services sector can work towards how they can get leads from inside their social networking campaigns.

However, this inclination towards social media among the enterprise community hasn’t come that easily. “Social networking was considered as a threat by enterprises during its initial days. The hesitance stemmed from the fear that competitors can sabotage the company’s interests using the same platform. However, the scenario has now changed,” Gandhi explains.

Considering the acceptance of social networking for the enterprises, tech vendors are also jumping in with relevant and very specific offerings to rake in the opportunity. There are packaged products being made available by these vendors. “SAP is now offering packaged solutions which can integrate social networking platforms and other IT solutions. The company has partnered with other vendors to extend the scope of its offerings,” informs Simon Dale, Senior Vice President, Solutions, SAP Asia Pacific Japan.

The next wave will be extension of the enterprise social media phenomenon on to the mobile device. And, with enterprise mobility and social media crossing paths, there is the whole new chasm of inherent roadblocks including security concerns for enterprises to cross.

Meanwhile, what’s most critical for now is for CIOs to figure out the right social media flavour to suit the enterprise taste and tailor-make the former to the latter’s needs.