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Inspired by an upcoming article in Digital Life which my company and I are working on, I’m going to attempt to start a new feature today on debunking common myths.
First up - Myths on using social software in the enterprise!
Myth: If you deploy social networking and other social software tools in an organization, people will spend too much time using them and productivity will fall.
Armchair Theorist: It is perfectly alright for employees to spend a lot of time using social networking tools in the organization, if it helps them be more efficient in finding information and more productive in collaborating with each another. And by most expert and analyst accounts, social software if properly deployed and utilized, can dramatically increase employee collaboration and productivity.
One obvious example is the use of blogging tools to allow individuals to capture and “push” ideas out in a nondisruptive way to a broad audience within the organization. Without blogging tools, it can easily take ten times the effort for an individual to write repetitive e-mails to broadcast out the same information to its intended audience. Another example is the use of social bookmarking tools for creating an information taxonomy based on the organization’s collective wisdom (a “folksonomy“, if you will) for employees to easily search for relevant information. This enables a colleague to do a search, locate experts and “look over their shoulders” at the industry articles, research or blogs those experts found useful—without interrupting them with an e-mail or instant message.
Myth: Corporate users are used to working via e-mail, so there’s no need for these new social software tools.
Armchair Theorist: That was also what people said about e-mail when it was first introduced, and now it is considered pretty much indispensable. Just like progressive companies today are realizing the tangible benefits of using instant messaging as a legitimate way of collaborating in the workplace, the same trend will hold true for social software and other Web 2.0 collaboration tools. I believe users will always welcome new tools which make their life easier. And besides, a good majority of the work force today already regularly use social networking tools outside of work, so they should already have a decent level of comfort and familiarity working with social software.
Myth: It is difficult to manage social software because the content that they generate is too unstructured.
Armchair Theorist: The reason why social software “work” is because of their ability to capture the unstructured ebb and flow of information at the grassroots level, and bring a tangible and usable structure to them. Thru the use of tagging, commenting, feeds and other mechanisms, social software can make this unstructured but useful content available to the entire organization in a seamless and organized way.
Besides leveraging the technology provided by social software in managing the corporate social networking environment, one aspect of social software that is often overlooked is the fact that it is also largely self-regulating. For example, just like on the consumer Internet, bloggers who write nonsense will quickly lose their credibility and their audience. Less and less people will bookmark and tag their blogs, and the inconsequential content will quickly be buried within the knowledge pool in favor of more credible content. The collective wisdom of the organization dictates that the wheat will be separated from the chaff, and only the best and most credible content will reach the widest audience within the organization.
Myth: My company is too small to be able to take advantage of social software.
Armchair Theorist: Although it is true that bigger organizations may benefit from social computing more than smaller organization simply due to the sheer number of participants, there have been cases where social software was being successfully deployed and used in organizations as small as 300 employees.
And tools like blogs, wikis and social bookmarking are generally useful even for small organizations. These tools provide employees a straightforward way to capture their tacit knowledge and expertise, which is useful for the business regardless whether there are five people or a thousand people using the tools.
Myth: Social software is irrelevant in the enterprise and there are no clear benefits for implementing it.
Armchair Theorist: Industry leaders and analysts will disagree that social software is irrelevant to the enterprise. In fact, a recent Forrester report by G. Oliver Young projects that the global enterprise Web 2.0 market will reach $4.6 billion dollars by 2013.
In addition, many social software vendors today help conduct business value assessments for organizations to demonstrate how one can tangibly reduce costs and increase top line revenue for companies by using social software.
Another often overlooked benefit of social software which may not be easily quantified is talent recruitment and employee retention. The fact is that the brightest new talent coming into the work force today have their choice of companies to join, and more often than not they will choose a company which provides them a work environment which they are comfortable and familiar with. This includes providing them with social software and Web 2.0 tools which they are used to using as they have grown up, and have shown proficiency and efficiency in using.
Imagine a new talented employee who is used to getting answers to questions quickly by broadcasting the question to his network of friends on Facebook. Now ask him to get information from people in your company by inefficiently sending email to many people and playing email tag with everyone. All else being equal, wouldn’t the person rather go to your competitor which provides him social software tools which make him more productive?
Finally, as Richard Dennison points out, “Did we measure the ROI of our telephone system or e-mail or were the benefits so blatantly obvious we just deployed them!?”
Myth: Social software poses a security threat to organizations.
Armchair Theorist: If anything, enterprise social software actually make organizations more secure by allowing organizations to set up a secure social computing environment for employees to capture and share confidential and sensitive information. One reason many companies are looking into enterprise-grade social software is because many employees driven by the need to collaborate and share, are either consciously or unconsciously putting confidential company information on public social networks and Web 2.0 destinations such as Facebook, MySpace and Friendster. By providing social networking tools, companies hope that employees can maintain their passion in sharing and collaborating with each other, but within a secured environment in the enterprise.
As an IT system, enterprise social software is generally built using the same technologies as many other business applications today, and therefore is no less secure than any other commonly used business application or collaboration tool such as company e-mail or the company Intranet.
Of course, no matter how secure an IT system is, the humans who use the system also have to be accounted for. Although social software generally provide tools to help manage and moderate content (e.g. “flag this as inappropriate”), a best practice for creating a comprehensive corporate social network policy should involve the users agreeing to a set of predetermined terms of usage or “Business Conduct Guidelines”. This “contract” will remind the employees that they are still expected to act within known company guidelines and ethics when using the social computing tools.




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