Beware the software vendor trying to pitch you a social network for your midsize business. While Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn continue to build their dominance, with a great deal of help from mobile technology, the truth is that enterprise-level social media - social media software for internal employees - is still more buzz than reality.
Let's take a look at Chatter, by enterprise software giant Salesforce.com. No company has better leveraged the influence of new technologies on the middle market ecosystem than Salesforce, but in the social media sphere they are still trying to find their footing. Open up Salesforce at your average company and you are likely to see a big Chatter window with a few stray posts from one or two employees. The average employee has no desire to post public messages to their co-workers.
Why is uptake of social media so slow for enterprises? One factor is that many employees don't feel a strong social attachment to their co-workers. They may be well-adjusted and fantastically productive individuals, but they choose to keep their social life separate from work. Even employees with close friendships among co-workers may not feel the need to share details of their lives.
Another problem is that, in most social media, content consumers greatly outnumber the producers of content. For every person posting on his or her Twitter feed, there is a huge audience reading that post. In the typical enterprise environment, those creators may not exist. Or if they do exist, they may have other priorities than broadcasting to their co-workers.
That being said, there are many examples of social software that have proven to be successful in the enterprise - they just might not resemble the social networks we use in our private lives.
Let's start with chat software, the successor to email for real-time communications. Yammer provides private chat networks for businesses and was acquired by Microsoft in 2013 for $1.2 billion dollars. Since then, Microsoft announced Yammer has reached 8 million users and is being integrated into Outlook and other products. Meanwhile, a competitive offering from TIBCO called Tibbr has reached millions of paid users, offering a platform that supports a wide range of mobile technology and also integrates into different types of software, such as CRM and ERP systems.
Chat services are a natural fit for mid-market businesses because they provide a real-time communication channel outside of email. There is no new behavior required for employees to adopt the technology. In fact, many enterprises don't realize how many of their employees are already using chat clients such as Gtalk or AOL for internal communications, which opens up obvious privacy and security concerns. Watch this category closely; employees are starting to seek out unified messaging across chat, voice, and video. There is a reason Facebook just bought WhatsApp for $19 billion.
Another useful software category is document collaboration. Google Documents is inexpensive and has proven indispensable for many businesses. While lacking the depth of features of Microsoft Office, the social aspect of easy sharing, commenting, and real-time shared communication offers many advantages. One of the most powerful features is enterprise administration through a Google Apps for Business account, with which employees can be added, removed, and given delegated levels of access.
Corporate wikis and websites can also be profoundly social if used properly. While their primary use is generally official communications to employees, they can become social tools if individual employees are given ownership of different sections, maintaining and updating content. Wikis also support social media feed integration for anything from discussions between employees to posting photos of people's pets.
The latest generation of project management software has made huge strides toward social integration, allowing teams to coordinate in real-time and reflecting any changes immediately. For example, Trello provides a visual interface for projects, with easy ways to drag tasks around and view dashboards, including public views that can be shared externally. The social benefit is that every team member can participate and be engaged in the project planning process.
The good news is that your workforce will be looking for ways to leverage social technologies in their roles regardless of whatever software tools you put into place. Your team members are becoming experts at social media in their private lives and are best positioned to guide your decisions. Observe how people are using social technology and ask them what tools they would find useful. Run small internal trials of a few software packages and you will quickly determine what works best for your company.
Matt Gross is an NCMM contributor and principal and founder of Mobile First Software, a focused consultancy that helps companies with mobile strategy, product design, product management, and application development.