Social Networking: Without a Champion, Enterprise Social Tools Sputter

FaceBook and Twitter have proved that Social Media can be a powerful force, but applying those same technologies to improve collaboration within enterprises has proved to be more challenging that expected.  In fact, a recent survey by InformationWeek finds that only 13 percent of organizations that have attempted to use Social Enterprise tools view their implementations as being a “great success”.  We’re not talking about public social networking — in fact, on the whole, many companies have had great success using public social media tools like FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn as low cost and effective ways to interact with their customers, partners and vendors.

But attempts to use social networking internally among employees has fared differently.  While as many as 87 percent of organizations have deployed some sort of internal social collaboration tool, a major problem with the deployments have been that organizations introduce social tools without first coming up with a comprehensive strategy or policy for how social tools should be used.   Emails, phone calls and meetings are often the preferred existing tools of communication within a company.  What’s happening is that people are being expected to continue to support their existing collaboration tools in addition to the new ones.

Social tools are most likely to be accepted in organizations where the existing use of collaboration tools are weak.  Organizations with large numbers of remote workers, for example, may be included to have fewer meetings, and in those cases, social media can fill a communication gap.  But more often than not, workers are simply finding social tools to be more of a burden than a help.  The upkeep and use of social tools require considerable time that many workers just don’t have to give.

Michael Healey, author of  the InformationWeek report, concludes that the solution isn’t to give up on enterprise social tools.  Rather, he suggests that social tools need to be better woven into the fabric of business processes.  To a certain extent this is increasingly happening as social extensions are being added to existing enterprise software products.  But a major component of success is executive backing and sponsorship.  Success is most likely when executives and leaders within the organization become adopters of the new tools and set an example for others.