Corporate Social Networking Stalls?
Yes, another challenge for those of us that work in the IT department! Just what we wanted, right? We're spending all this time reworking the corporate Intranet so everyone can collaborate better. What happens when we're done and no one shows up?
It could be tempting to conclude that because your employees enjoy keeping a personal blog or spending time with contacts on social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, that they would want to participate in an internal corporate version of those sites. But don't be so sure.
A new study has found that the phenomenon of social networking and collaboration does not yet have a natural extension behind the enterprise firewall.
Can't we just get a break?
Seriously though, I'm curious how your office Intranet is doing? Have you recently added collaboration and social networking tools to your server? If so, how well is the improved server working for you? What recommendations do you have for others to follow? Inquiring minds want to know!
About this CMS Enthusiast
Bryan Ruby is the owner and editor for CMS Report. He founded CMSReport.com in 2006 on the belief that information technologists, website owners, and web developers desired visiting sites where they could learn about content management systems without the sales pitch.
Outside of his late night blogging hours, he is the Information Technology Officer for a field office in the federal government. Away from the computer he enjoys his family, bicycling, camping, and the outdoors.
Comments
#1 Name of the study
Hi Bryan, I am currently doing research on the use of social software for the internal, employee audience on an enterprise wide level. Do you know of any companies doing anything like this? Looking for best practices, case studies, etc. You reference an article above and was also interested in finding out the name of it.
Many thanks!
#2 Social Networking Reference
Perhaps, you missed the link where I referenced the excerpt..."no one shows up" which is http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,1397,2239092,00.asp .
I think a lot of people doing research on the enterprise intranet, including myself, run into the same problem you are. Because most of the software on the intranet is behind the firewall...we rarely get to see it in action. I'll take a look at my own content and see if I can help you out. Until then, you might have better luck at two other blogs that deal with collaboration/social networking software at the enterprise level:
If anybody has some good examples of social networking software being used on the Intranet, please feel free to comment here!
#3 Re: Social Networking Reference
Bryan, the Users are currently digesting upcoming new concepts of social software. The experts are banging their heads to push the social software technologies into the Enterprises. Enterprise (buyers, adopters, evaluators, implementers and decision makers)are busy in finding the 'perceived value" of social software and technologies. "Collaboration" is door to get into enterprises. Most of the innovations are taking place in collaboration area.
The early starters like cyn.in ( http://cyn.in ) will have added advantage here. cyn.in is an enterprise collaboration software. cyn.in has Wiki, Blog, File Sharing & Repository, Version Control, Search, Workflows, Event Calender and Shared WorkSpaces, as core Collaboration application, and on top of these applications, cyn.in facilitates Contextual Threaded Discussions on any content type, User's Personal Interface(like in FaceBook), Media Repositories (like Flickr and YouTube), Link Directory (like Delicious), Micro-Blogging (like Twitter), User Profile (like LinkedIn) and a polished cyn.in Desktop (Adobe AIR) app ( http://cyn.in/explore/cynin-desktop-client ) to facilitate instant collaboration. software like cyn.in are the ones where enterprises are finding value. The perceived value from such software is "Collaborative Organizational Knowledge". Enterprises have burn their fingers by investing in the traditional complex knowledge management, document management and content management line of software and not being able to drive adoption at user level for a number of reasons. The main reason (apart from the lower cost)that enterprises are inclined towards social software and investing their time in finding value in it, is that they think and know (to some extent) that the adoption of enterprise social software will drive automatically because of the improved, easy to use interface and users familiarity with other (public) social software and the lower cost.