Social Business, Social Enterprise News, Analysis

For Christmas, I ordered some LEGO Star Wars from an online retailer for my son -- absolutely for my seven-year old, not for me in the slightest, you understand. Now, a couple of times a week I get the usual "Recommended for you" email, but plastered with LEGO. This personal snapshot defines recommendations as still a marketing technique practically in diapers, but helps point to where they should be going.

The term Social Business has been badly abused by technology vendors, end user associations and even well-meaning employees seeking to align specific technologies with business improvements. Based on public-facing information, one could think that this term is a form of social networking, the next generation of unified communications, a data-driven middleware solution, or simply the day-to-day interactions that we already pursue with our fellow co-workers.

Sometimes a headline just makes you wonder. What part of it is "real" news? What part of it is true? What part of it might be easily misconstrued?

If you want to succeed in business today, your organization must embrace social technologies -- not just for your customers but also for your employees. But where do you start? Start with building the foundation.

For those who already think they have it under control, check out these two articles:

• The Digital Workplace: How Sociable is Your Intranet?
• 5 Signs Your Company Doesn't Get Social Business

We are gearing up for our February 22nd Tweet Jam on Social Business (#SocBizChat). If you are interested in participating or have a question you want answered, drop us a line.

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Editor's Picks

• Choosing an Enterprise CMS: Ovum Names EMC, IBM, OpenText Market Leaders
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• Social Business 101: Building the Foundation

Around the Web

• Modeling Enterprise Social Business Processes
• RIP: the social media influencer
• Content Marketing Tactics Now Critical to All Businesses [INFOGRAPHIC]
• Collaboration? You Must be Joking!
• Unexpected Actions Can Transform a Customer Experience

Featured Events (all events | post your event)

• Feb 28, 2012 – (Webinar) How to Build Great Mobile Websites
• Mar 06, 2012 -- Get Social with Microsoft & Telligent in Dallas
• Mar 12, 2012 -- Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit Orlando
• Mar 20, 2012 -- Adobe Digital Marketing Summit in Salt Lake City
• Mar 20, 2012 -- AIIM Conference San Francisco

Featured Jobs (all jobs | post your job)

• Director of Customer Success Management in Nova Scotia at Radian6
• Software Engineer -- Media Solutions in Bucharest at Adobe
• Principal Business Consultant in Paris at Saba
• Web Content Manager in Newport Beach at Orange County Museum of Art
• Senior Business Analyst in London at Microsoft

With the imminent arrival of Social Media Week and speculation on how many will join the ranks of millionaires (or billionaires) in light of Facebook’s IPO, Social has been on a lot of people’s minds.

Our experts brought us back to school this week and offered some practical advice on how to capture the power of social software to create more agile, responsive and collaborative organizations. Some commonly held myths about Drupal were dispelled, we remembered the customer and got some practical, strategic advice on information architecture tools and things to remember when shopping for an Enterprise CMS.

School’s in session!

A recent HP Labs study examines how to predict the popularity of an article prior to publishing it online or promoting via social media. The researchers were able to estimate ranges of popularity with an overall accuracy of 84% by considering only article content features.

It took a minute, but, at last, most of us have mastered the art of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and maybe even Google+ if you really care. The next step then is to supervise these various platforms and put them to good uses (other than poking people and crafting snarky captions on photos). There are many ways of exploiting networks, and predictions over the coming year suggest that management marks the latest stage in the evolution of social media. If cleverly employed, it looks like we, the great wide public, are the Internet’s contemporary innovators. 

Dassault Systèmes has acquired Netvibes, one of the earliest tools that allowed brands to create unified social dashboards to track their social media identity. Netvibes is well known in enterprise circles, but does the purchase make sense for the French software giant primarily known for its 3D computer aided design and project lifecycle management software?

As new forms of social media proliferate and enterprises scramble to keep pace with their customers, social business is a force that cannot be ignored.

Socialtext has been adding and adding to its enterprise social platform since it launched v5.0 in September. This year it looks set to maintain that momentum and has already announced a partnership with NetDocuments.

Google has launched a Google+ developers’ page, perhaps signaling that full-featured API access is in the near future for the rapidly growing social network.

The language we use defines our national identity and culture. In the UK most of the people living in Wales can speak English but under the 1993 Welsh Language Act all public-sector websites that contain information relevant to Wales have to be in English and Welsh. Certainly English is a very useful default language, and it is fairly easy to work with around 850 words. The other 1 million are just there to confuse everyone, including many native speakers.

In its plan to connect every single person in the world, Facebook drew attention last September when the network announced it would upgrade to a new and improved timeline structure, and subsequently release a series of “frictionless apps,” to enhance overall sharing experience for its club of 800 million. These specialized apps are hybrid tools created specifically for your profile page, enabling unique ways of exposing even more about yourself. From what you eat, where you travel, what you listen to, and where you shop, Facebook has invented an efficient way to broadcast everything to your personal globe, so that at any given moment, you can be tracked. Now that the company maintains no privacy, apparently the rest of us must follow suit.

Following up on my last two posts, here are predictions five and six for what 2012 holds for collaboration in the enterprise:

Armed with its Optimization Technology, powered by applied mathematics and language analytics, along with the belief that language, not demographics or "influencer status," is the best predictor of social outcomes, SocialFlow announced it's moving from beta clients to to public availability of its Optimized Publisher.