Social Business, Social Enterprise News, Analysis

Facebook has just made its phenomenal initial public offering at NASDAQ, and industry observers are talking of how big the impact of the social network's IPO will be, outside of newly-minted millionaires and billionaires of the Internet age. But, apart from Facebook's new found influence and clout in the financial scene, there is also one additional driver of growth for what can be considered the de facto social network for most of the world's online citizens: Asia.

Forrester Research refers to social activities streams which connect enterprise social tools to adjacent collaboration, content, portal, and productivity applications in the environment as a “bridge” to “socially enabled” enterprise applications. Evaluating leading vendors in the current activities stream marketplace, Forrester has placed Yammer, Salesforce and Tibco at the head of the list, with VMware (Socialcast) and Neudesic cited as “strong performers".

It’s the eve of Facebook’s IPO and everyone, and I mean everyone, is talking about it.

Startups are quite adept at turning brands into verbs, or even ordinary verbs into brands. You can now "google" things you want to search for or "tweet" short updates online. Brace yourself for another potential verb that's about to become very popular in the social media scene: buffer. 

The Intranet is dead! Long live the Intranet! ...so the refrain goes.

The promise of the Intranet was that it was going to liberate content and spread the wealth locked inside information repositories, closed networks, siloed file systems and even physical file cabinets. In many ways Intranets -- when done well -- have improved life behind the firewall.

However, we are far from the holy grail.

A Forrester Research survey found that just 43% of enterprise employees access an intranet every day. Worse, 35% don’t even use their intranet on a monthly basis.

The fact is that Intranet promises have not been fully realized, and this is exactly where the power of social comes in.

Social Intranets - The Promise

Social Business technology supplies the essential functionality missing from conventional intranets and turns them into the dynamic collaborative environments known as social intranets.

The promise of Social Intranets is to build on the successes of the original Intranet vision, but add these benefits:

• Open up content creation and curation to the full enterprise, leveraging the wisdom of the crowd
• Break down the walls between people, groups and departments via tools as simple as the @joesmith reference.
• Utilize internal social graph intelligence to enhance the relevancy of the intranet experience, improve search results and reduce the time to task completion
• Efficiently capture ideas and harness the innate innovation found in your workforce, leading to a more robust and streamlined ideation process

To learn more about how these benefits are being realized in practice, you can join the upcoming social intranet panel discussion on May 30th (live and online).

Infographic -- The Benefits of a Social Intranet

Join the Social Intranet Best Practices Panel Discusion

On May 30th you can join in for a live, online panel discussion focused on current trends and best practices for designing, implementing and succeeding with a Social Intranet.

Panel members include:

• Dion Hinchcliffe of the Dachis Group will discuss at a high level, the latest industry research and trends on how leading companies are revamping dusty, soul-sucking intranets, and giving employees a social, collaborative, engaging experience that drives productivity, fosters innovation, and yields staggering results.
• Tyson Cornell of PricewaterhouseCoopers will dig a level deeper, into the strategies and processes that global enterprises are using to deploy Social Business Software -- both to drive business transformation, and to add value to existing communication and information infrastructures.
• Tiffany LaBanca and Kristen Ritter of News Corporation will round out the panel, sharing a case study of how their company is becoming a social-powered organization. News Corporation's OurNews Social Business Network is changing the way the company communicates, collaborates, and innovates -- connecting more than 50 businesses and 15,000 employees on a unified global platform.

If social intranet success is your curiosity or mandate, sign-up for the online panel discussion here. 

This article was sponsored by Jive Software.

Although many businesses agree that enterprise social networking platforms improve knowledge sharing and collaboration, many do not properly track benefits of social to overall business impact and value.

When I cracked open the e-pages of Steve Nicholls' new book, Social Media in Business, I was immediately hooked, especially when I read this:

"Organizational problems are really cleverly disguised people issues. Social media is a people issue; the technology is the enabler. The attitudes and beliefs of people will be more important than the technical issues."

Those words, in a book targeted at those in the enterprise, are the first CIOs, CTOs, CEOs and others in the C-suite will read (provided the read the preface). It’s refreshing as well as revolutionary. And that’s the point.

Polycom has announced updates to its RealPresence video content management system, offering secure access to video content for smartphone and tablet users, as well as real-time transcoding for compatibility across various mobile and Web platforms.

While mobile, cloud, BYOD and other trends are racing into the enterprise, there is a lot written about what these technologies are improving in the enterprise, and how IT has to adjust to deal with these changes. But very few people are writing about how these changes in communication are affecting organizational structures.

Like many voices at a party, the many kinds of social media conversations all compete for attention. To help deal with what it describes as the “anarchy” of social media marketing in many agencies, social enterprise software provider Buddy Media is announcing major enhancements to its social marketing suite.

Yammer and Badgeville have announced an integration that will allow organizations to leverage gamification to drive desirable employee behavior and showcase performance in Yammer’s real-time activity stream.

You don’t have to spend a fortune to have a great intranet.

The writing is on the wall and it has been read.

The importance of mobile devices, and by association mobile apps, is well established for businesses today.
 

Let's play a game! I'll talk about three current trends that span business and technology and you try to guess what is at the heart of all of them. The first one who guesses wins a pat on the back and a deeper level of insight into how our litigious society is stifling both innovation and growth along with spurring a whole new industry.

Despite CEO chaos, Yahoo is taking advantage of its interclick purchase to leverage big data for advertisers. Yahoo's Genome advertising solution should be available in July 2012.