Much of the current press fodder on Social Networking in the enterprise focuses on how companies are leveraging Facebook, or "white-label Facebook-like" platforms, to make it easier for their employees to network, communicate and collaborate in the 2.0 world.
Serena Software, uses Facebook to help its employees get to know one another on a more personal level so that they'll work better together. As Serena grew and became more distributed, its employees began to "...feel disconnected from one another...(and) social networking tools, like Facebook...(helped) us get to know each other as people...understand our business and products, and...serve our customers—on demand," according to CEO Jeremy Burton.
But, to look at Serena's use of its "Facebook Fridays" events as communal, end-of-week-twitterestorama's belies the real innovation at play. In a conversation with Rene Bonvanie, Serena's head Marketing veep, Bill Ives shed light on how they're using Facebook on top of a simple, content management system to connect employees & customers with content & expertise through trusted relationships. Social network software, in this case, facilitates relationship connections to accelerate access to information and expertise, at the time of need.
Bill Roberts writes how Dow Chemical uses social networking tools for similar benefit in meeting its talent management & recruiting needs. Opting for a "white-label" social software suite from SelectMinds, Dow launched its own social network in late-December, with "...the idea of an alumni network (as) the original vision," according to Julie Sasone Holder, Dow's corporate VP for HR, marketing and public affairs. After 30 days -- 3,000 of its 22,000 US employees had already posted profiles, started network referrals and helped Dow recoup its investment with scant internal promotion.
While companies like Serena and Dow are launching specific initiatives to capitalize on social enterprise networking benefits -- through public and private social software platforms -- some of the larger enterprise vendors have finally gotten religion and are directly embedding social networking capability within their existing applications.
Last week for example, OpenText announced the addition of social networking capabilities as a native part of its "LiveLink" enterprise content management (ECM) solution. Collaborative and community-oriented tools are now packaged to co-exist with content and encourage people to work together, while capturing critical project information in an underlying ECM framework.
Oracle has also jumped into the fray. Phil Wainright wrote yesterday about how they're "skinning their latest CRM offering with social networking capability". Jim Finkle also covered Oracle's new social computing capabilities highlighting features which "...alert workers when colleagues have ties to a sales prospect, or help them identify experts who might be able to help close a deal."
IBM has even upped the anty by adding a set of professional services to its own existing "white-label" social software suite.
It's natural that the larger software vendors are finally taking cues from their younger "white-label" siblings and adding social-networking arrows to their application quiver. And, we can expect to see more of this in the month's ahead, as we paddle forward in this nascent evolution of "social enterprise network" capability.
But the real adoption for social software in the enterprise will begin when the "two sides of the social enterprise network coin" become one and we see a convergence of platforms and tools for specific business needs embedded "directly within the application's business process".
When it is just as natural to expect our CRM systems to notify us who in the company was a recent hire from a competitor in an SFA deal we're working on...as it is for a software marketeer to verify product claims from the actual developer writing the code (in real-time) -- the social network train will have truly left the station for a city near you.
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