[caption id="attachment_847" align="aligncenter" width="601"] Photo by Lars Plougmann[/caption]
When you think about using social technologies in your business, what springs to mind? The term social business has been used to cover:
- being a business that is aware of its social responsibilities.
- using social media as part of marketing and promotion.
But there's one more aspect of being a social business that may be overlooked – the use of social technologies to revolutionize the way your business operates.
"A social business is much more than a business that uses social media. Social collaboration success is more a cultural and philosophical achievement than technology adoption," says Enterasys Network's CMO Vala Afshar on
Information Week.
A report from
IBM Global Business Services agrees: "We define social business as embedding social tools, media, and practices into the ongoing activities of the organization."
According to the report, using social business tools can help improve the customer experience, boost productivity in the workplace and enhance innovation. All this is achieved by doing what these tools do best – enabling free flowing and interactive communication.
We already know that the world is increasingly multi-screened and
mobile oriented, with a significant number of North Americans connected to each other and the world via social technologies each day. Outside of work time, we post social media updates and share images that show what we are doing now and how we feel about it. So what would this look like within a business? Imagine using a hashtagged microblogging session for brainstorming – or being able to know immediately if a colleague is available for discussion by checking his or her status.
The truth is that social technologies blow old-style communication out of the water. Instead of wading through a jammed email inbox or perusing a lengthy project report, communication can be quick, targeted and actually useful. One example of this is
Yammer, the enterprise social network that allows the kind of spontaneous communication you get on
Twitter, as well as the more focused discussions possible in Facebook groups and
Google+ circles. And it's
not the only one. Many of these tools feature profiles, status updates, social streams, wikis, forums, groups and more, all with the aim of enabling better internal communication.
The IBM report cited earlier shows how businesses have even used gamification (ratings and reviews) as motivational tools for employees. Social tools allow businesses to improve teamwork and collaboration, and share information with employees at all levels, removing the hierarchical top down approach. It's making employees into a community on the inside. And the examples in this Mashable article show how
social collaboration tools have improved not only communication, but productivity and customer service.
A
study by Gartner suggests that by 2015 most businesses will use enterprise social networks for internal communication, but not all of them will do it well. That's because many focus on the technology aspect. That's a mistake, says Gartner, advising that efforts "should focus on identifying how social initiatives will improve work practices for both individual contributors and managers." And even those who are getting it right now should expect things to change. Gartner predicts that the apps of the future will fuse mobile, social and gamification to achieve even more gains in enterprise social communication and collaboration.
