Latest Social Business News & Articles

Social and visual workspace provider, LiveHive, Inc has announced its LiveHive solution, a cloud-based enterprise collaboration platform.

February has come and gone — March is here and that means it's time for another Tweet Jam. This month we have a great group of people lined up to discuss a challenge facing many organizations today: Employee Engagement. 

Perhaps the most welcome business innovation in the 21st century is the realization that the 1990’s CEO pablum, “People are our greatest asset” is actually true. 

Executives facing the Digital Disruption are like contestants in reality TV shows: for many of them, there’s a big gap between their self-perceived readiness to perform and reality. That’s the key takeaway in a new report from Forrester Research about getting ready for the Disruption. 

In the Avengers, when Steve Rogers said to Tony Stark: "Big man in a suit of armour. Take that off, what are you?" Tony Stark replied: "Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist." After seeing back to back keynotes from Leap Motion and Elon Musk, I feel like I was 20 yards away from the armored avenger himself (minus the alcoholism and the raging ego).

"Imitation as Innovation: Lessons from the Shanzhai" was the most intellectually challenging topic from my first day at SXSW. This talk from Lyn Jeffery, Research Director at Institute for the Future and Kris Gale, VP of Engineering at Yammer had so many paradoxes fly about the room, it took a good minute after the presentation was completed before the audience could absorb the messages deeply enough to ask any questions.

What are the biggest challenges facing your company today? Are they the financial collapse, global recession, reshaping the existing business model and strategic priorities, or changing technology paradigms covering mobile, social and cloud? Or is it something much more fundamental than any of those?

Gamification in the Enterprise
Designed and implemented properly,  there are a number of ways gamification can boost employee engagement. According to Gartner though, 80% of gamification implementations will fail by 2014.

Why Does SharePoint Flounder?
The reason for most SharePoint failures? Improper planning. That's why creating a realistic SharePoint roadmap is key.

Defining Real Social Engagement
Likes and clicks are not "engagement". When it comes to social, real connections and authenticity are the big challenge for brands.

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Featured Events (all events | post your event

• Mar 14 — Customer Success Summit
• Mar 20 — Content Strategies Summit
• Mar 20 — SharePoint Conference for Business Users
• Apr 18 — Forrester's Forum for Marketing Leadership Professionals Los Angeles
• Apr 29 — Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit San Diego

Featured Jobs (all jobs | post your job)

• Vice President - Service Cloud in UK at Salesforce.com
• Web Content Manager in Washington DC at VeriSign
• Content Publishing Manager in Dublin at Betfair
• Senior UX Designer in London at Yammer
• Data Quality Specialist in San Francisco at Klout

There appears to be as many ways to tackle employee engagement as there are organizations, but I think there is one point that we can agree on: without acknowledging the humans at the center, it doesn't really matter.

Box is going to very busy over the next year or so as it prepares for its IPO. In the meantime it needs to keep users happy — after all, happy users generally means happy investors. Last October Box launched Box for Windows 8. This week it is tweaking that and adding some more.

Maybe Yahoo doesn't want its people working from home, but plenty of other companies do. It saves employees commute time, keeps them out of ridiculously long meetings and allows them to focus on their work versus office politics.

When there's a disconnect between actions and words, how can we expect our organizations to change?

Despite the hype around the social intranet, mobile access and enterprise collaboration, according to the latest data from the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC), intranets aren't any more collaborative, interactive or mobile than they were three or four years ago.

Sometime soon, if not already, there's a very good chance that you're going to be thinking about putting SharePoint 2013 into your organization. In what is the fifth major iteration of Microsoft's ubiquitous collaboration platform, there are a ton of juicy features in SharePoint 2013 that you and your business users are going to want to get your hands on.

This month we explore the connection between employee engagement and gamification. It's a partnership that many companies have been wrestling with for a few years now. The idea that incorporating simple, but meaningful "games" into workflows can somehow enhance an employee's productivity, while providing some healthy competition isn't so far-fetched. But like anything designed to disrupt the traditional nature of work, the success of gamifying the workplace comes down to people and process.

There is a lot of talk from technology vendors about creating employee engagement. The message seems to be, “buy technology and you can create employee engagement.” It’s a nice thought but not one that is likely to pay off.

Recommendation systems have been popular for years in social networks, online booksellers and other sites. Now, Toronto-based Panorama Software has unveiled a new version of its Necto business intelligence (BI) solution that incorporates a recommendation engine to help drive discovery.

Cloud-based social enterprise solutions provider Saba Software is enhancing the platform supporting its flagship People Cloud application. The platform upgrades will provide new People Cloud features in areas such as mobile applications and Big Data.

Real quick — if you asked your colleagues sitting next to you (virtually or not) “What’s our company’s business strategy?” How many, including you, would be able to answer successfully, without trepidation?

This month at CMSWire, we are diving into the strategies and tools for employee engagement. With that in mind, our first mobile app of the week for March is SuMo sustainability employee engagement app from CloudApps.