Social Media: The Enterprise is Becoming More Social

Worldwide enterprise social software revenue reached $664.4m in 2011, a 14.9% increase over 2009, and is expected to increase by 15.7% in 2011.  That’s the estimate of Gartner research.  Enterprise social software includes software restricted to use in the enterprise but which resembles familiar consumer software applications like Twitter and Facebook.  Enterprises are opting for closed versions of the consumer internet tools because, unlike Facebook or Twitter,  it allows them more control over who has access to the data which is created.  Social media tools also include blogs, content tagging and rating, social bookmarks, expertise location, discussion forums and syndicated content feeds.  Used in the enterprise, social media can help to promote staff interaction, brainstorming and collaboration.

Tom Eid, research vice president at Gartner, said that “the social software market is evolving in response to the demand for flexible environments in which participants can connect, create, share, and find people and information relevant to their work.  Social software improves the connectedness of workers, promotes collaboration and helps capture informal knowledge. Social software excels in business contexts that leave room for individuals to interact informally, brainstorm, explore ideas, and encourage or challenge peers. Specific business value can be derived through customer intimacy, product/service excellence, operational effectiveness and creating innovation.”

Social media is also creeping into tools that employees have long used as new features.  E-mail and enterprise software applications like ERP are gradually adding features which have a social media flavor to them.  The new features are making the older and familiar tools more flexible and offering employees informal ways to interact and share information with others who are also using those applications.

Enterprise social media and cloud computing are two technologies that are synergistically helping each other to grow rapidly.   Gartner is currently tracking 80 different vendors that offer social media software for the enterprise, and more than 50 of those companies offer their software to enterprises as a cloud service.  Interestingly, the enterprise budgets that are financing these services aren’t primarily coming from IT, rather it tends to be the marketing, R&D and HR budgets which are being used.