Partner Article
Social business: myth and reality
Upwards of 85% of companies now have a presence on social media sites and increasingly businesses are looking into implementing a social network inside the company. Chances are that during 2012 you read several articles describing the benefits of social business applications. Yet in the first half of 2013, the tide seems to have turned, with some commentators asking if social business is “dead”, or at least “failing to live up to its promise”. Any social business advocate of a nervous disposition might be inclined to be a little concerned by this. Don’t be. This is a natural part of the lifecycle of new technologies.
The initial excitement surrounding the social business seems to be making way to disillusionment, but we shouldn’t dismiss the technologies yet. Social business networks and applications are here to stay and rightly so. The best way to reap the benefits is to dispel the hype and the disillusionment. Here are four common social business myths, and the corresponding reality.
Myth: Every company will benefit from enterprise social networking
Reality: Your mileage will vary.
Employee social networks tend to be most successful in knowledge-centric companies with a geographically-distributed workforce who are striving for greater openness and transparency in the way they work. It is certainly possible to reap the benefits of social networking in companies that only have one or two of these three characteristics, but it is harder. If the entire workforce is based in the same office, they are far more likely to talk to each other than interact online.
Myth: Enterprise social networks will replace business email
Reality: Partially true, but maybe not in the way you expect.
For too many social business advocates, email is “the great evil that must be destroyed”, so it is not unusual for doubters to point out the irony that most social networks generate a large number of email notifications. But this is missing the point. The aim is to move large group discussions (for which email is very poorly-suited) and anything that forms part of the company’s collective knowledge out of individuals’ inboxes and into social networks where they are more accessible to the rest of the organisation. Email then becomes more of a notification mechanism, and less of a knowledge repository – the actual number of emails sent or received isn’t particularly relevant.
Myth: It’s Facebook for business
Reality: No it’s not, and nor should it be.
The “Facebook for business” label was lazy, dangerous and enough to put any senior manager off the concept of social in the workplace. If you miss that latest cat photo or motivational banner graphic on Facebook, you’ll probably survive; if you miss an important instruction from your manager about a deadline, you might not. So the entire way in which relationships are architected between members of an enterprise social network, and the way content is discovered needs to be very different.
Myth: It’s viral
Reality: Maybe, but not for long
A stubbornly persistent misconception is that social business practices start with a small group and expand to a much wider network membership who magically become more productive. It is true that there are some success stories from this model, but they are few and far between and most fizzle out. In order for initiatives to deliver the promised productivity benefits for “real work” it is far better to start with a clear management-approved strategy for applying social technology to business objectives.
This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Richard Hughes .
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