The Enterprise Social Goodness
Friday, April 15, 2011 at 11:00AM “Everyone is entitled to my opinion” – this famous tweet from Madonna, and a good definition for what Twitter was really meant for, became timeless just like the performer herself. Ever since the word “social” became a famous consumer token that is overused and overhyped every minute of every day, the business world started wondering about how to build an enterprise social network that had all the right and relevant components. Let’s build an enterprise social network together and let’s highlight at least some areas that would make it a huge success.
Remember High School? I found an awesome infographic (courtesy of Flowtown), which highlights various social ‘heroes’ and assigns yearbook pseudonyms to each. So first, take a look below, and then let’s brainstorm…
My verdict – to build a good enterprise social networking platform we will need ‘Twitter’, ‘Google’, ‘YouTube’, ‘Flicker’, ‘Linkedin’, ‘Quora’ and ‘StumbleUpon’. Let’s take each component and highlight why those specific parts, not the actual products themselves, are all vital components to truly draw people in and make the concept business relevant.
Google – we will need a Google-like component because search is simply the most important tool for the masses. Social networks are meant for the masses and content is overly unstructured, so make sure that search rocks and most of the other components will subordinate. Many technology vendors underestimate search and end up with content that isn’t discoverable. That’s a fail.
Twitter – we will need Twitter-like micro feedback, one-to-many content sharing engines because over 95% of the information is spontaneously created. The easiest way to support this phenomenon is to offer truly frictionless ways to constantly contribute bits of information that amounts to a body of knowledge. After search, this component is truly one of the most important ones.
YouTube – did someone say ‘social learning’? One of the most effective social methods to generate content and to spread it is through video. Enterprise social network without video channels is like a broken TV – you hear “them” but you don’t see “them”, so at the end you don’t really ‘get’ them.
Flicker – experiences are important parts of corporate community. Much of the learning occurs via people’s ability to capture and share experiences. It just so happens that experiences are stories and stories are interesting (for the most part) – this phenomenon makes visual sharing a huge success. Did you draw something on the whiteboard? Don’t write it down! Snap a picture and build a content recognition engine that resolves it into knowledge that’s spread to everyone.
Linkedin – we know more about people we are about to hire than about people who already work for us? That’s in large part because we check them out on Linkedin. The networking platform that was originally meant to connect professionals is now a full-featured applicant sourcing, social job boards and social recruiting engine – the most popular one that exists today.
Quora – ability to ask questions is a skill acquired early by good students. Employees now use this skill to brainstorm ideas and build consensus. Remember this Chinese proverb – “He who asks a question is a fool for 5 minutes. He who doesn’t is a fool forever”. Another important part of quora-like functionality is the ability to follow conversation threads that are centered around experts and thought leaders.
StumbleUpon – James Joyce famously said “I have not told half of what I saw”. If enterprise social networks are meant to fuel social learning and improve productivity and performance, accidental learning (via social discovery and recommendations) becomes a key component of a good platform.
Notice that I omitted Facebook, Yammer, Wordpress and Yelp, among others. This is mainly because I believe that if we added these parts, the functionality would be redundant and potentially more complicated in terms of user experience. Are you ready to brainstorm? What are your thoughts? Thanks for reading.
Reader Comments (8)
I think in your list there are few critical components important to the enterprise world missing:
1. collaborative work planning and tracking component. You need this as part of the platform so it would help teams achieving organization goals and not just "chat" with each other. If to follow your analogies from social web, then something like remember the milk but to help organize work of groups of people. There are good tools for that like Basecamp and many others, but it is very important that this component is tightly integrated with other components of enterprise social networking platform as achieving the organizational goals is always a team work.
2. there is also element in enterprise world, which has no counterpart in social web: work activity stream engine. Something that would automatically aggregate all work related activities in enterprise into easily readable stream with convinient interfaces for different roles to get notified about what's interesting to them. For example, notify team members when new sales was closed, or when new product release was launched. It is something like Facebook news feed, but to keep you updated with work related activities. You can't use "Twitter" component as there is no chance employees would write this type of information manually - so you need kind of crawler to collect this data automatically from different data sources.
i come here first time. Thank you for sharing your admin would get ready a severely beneficial write-up I congratulate.s I very agree with your views from here. ehnnaz ehnnaz - justin bieber supra.
I have been looking for years after a good data system for my 20,000+ pictures and have now found it.
paul smith uk
paul smith wallet
paul smith sale
So fun article is! I know more from it. zqjkkx zqjkkx - North Face Outlets.
pandora uk
pandora jewellery
pandora jewellery uk
pandora
pandora sale
oakley sunglasses
Your website have very interesting article. I got knowledge from here. Besides that, your blog is so popular among the searchers from search engines. It means yours website is very good
hey in reality provde the pre-addressed bring return content label to your relaxation to send return the bought wholesale rings for every person who's unhappy pondering the buy that is certainly best benefit which will charm the shoppers to jewelry bracelet. There's no doubt that you are able to integrate the standard of companies inside your fingertips which produce wholesale bangles.
Suzaku also realized that could not catch this guy, but the Lord God above the rank of demons, no matter if the heaven, so such a powerful demon on the outside looked out the day tribunal or heaven it? "In any case go first to catch up. north face jackets clearance Even if it does not play, at least, have to follow ah" green discount to this sentence is to make you think are more realistic, so everyone will go up quickly any connection. Fortunately, the mobility of these demons to is very slow, although the run than the average person is already a considerable degree of Guards, but the strength came from her consideration, she basically only be regarded as the degree of turtles.