Today, I joined my fellow cohorts (or "meine Liebe Kolleginnen und Kollegen," as we often say at the office) in my fourth, company-related social network.
Three are on Linked-In and another is on Facebook -- where, with my membership this morning, we now stand arm-in-arm 4,385 strong. (My company also offers, I should say, a great social networking platform visa vis our own intranet -- but I'll save discussion on portals, collaboration and social networks for another post.)
I'm sure there are many other work-related, social networks I don't even know about yet -- but will soon discover courtesy of the friendly invitations that saunter in fairly regularly now. With all of the invites we receive and press to be read, it makes you wonder...just what does a good "social network for the enterprise" look like anyway? To be honest, I'm not sure we really know the answer yet. A few folks, though, are pointing us in the right direction.
Dennis McDonald gives a good framework for ensuring that our social network strategy is structured to support business need. And, Jeremiah Owyang, with Forrester, builds upon Dennis' work with sound recommendations for how social networks should be managed. Joel Postman also chimes in on the intrinsic value social networks, within the enterprise, can deliver in our day-to-day.
And we can see the benefit Joel describes in practice with the work Leverage Software and Jive Software are doing to help SalesForce and RedHat become more accessible to their customers. Accessibility "when we need it" to others with information or expertise we "need but don't have" really is what we selfishly want from our social networks, when dealing with the 11th hour Gordian Knots we've all faced in the wee hours.
But I think Bill Taylor hints at the real intrinsic benefit social networks offer (and that would be be adopted) within the enterprise, in his example of how Umpqua Bank empowers its customers -- we are the "centers of our worlds," after all.
Social networks that not only make insight accessible -- in the form of our access to peer relationships -- but guide and encourage connections based on specific business needs (in real-time) are the networks that will find business adoption.
This nascent concept is getting more traction among the many white-label, social networking firms trying to carve-out their niche offerings. And the technology that will power this "semantic web capability" is being written about more and more.
Companies that decide to begin integrating software solutions to support networking amongst their employees often begin with internal "communal hubs" with "Facebook-like functionality" (i.e., employee profiles, calendaring, blog or chat capability, forums or message boards and a method for group identification). And this "1st stage" is a great place for most organizations to start when introducing the concept of a community enabling social-networking inside the company.
Some firms even take this a step further by bundling this activity around a specific purpose relevant to the firm -- such as employee retention or recruitment. These initiatives are usually mandated and managed at the "corporate-level" with little capability by individuals and/or teams to organically manage their own communal-hubs.
Companies that begin to enable, and support, individuals and teams to organically organize and maintain project-specific, communal hubs have transitioned to the 2nd-stage in their social-network lifecycle.
Most white-label, social-networking firms are servicing in the market today are servicing corporate customers either entering the 1st stage or experimenting with the 2nd.
The 3rd stage, that has yet to materialize, of social-networking in the enterprise will arrive when firms not only support communal-hubs at the organization, team and individual level -- but also build social-networking capability directly into "every" software solution supporting a business process.
To realize this, however, more enterprise software vendors will have to catch religion and begin architecting their solutions with this capability.
The enterprise market is definitely in its early stage. While we're still sketching the shape that "social enterprise networks" will take later this year...it's hard to not get excited by the vision for what they could eventually become.
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