When it comes to social business, it may seem natural for organizations to focus on social adoption strategies, but there’s another component that can’t be ignored. Integration is critical for making your enterprise social networking efforts a success.
Laurie Buczek, an enterprise marketing manager previously responsible for implementing social collaboration strategies, addresses this point quite clearly in her article “The big failure of enterprise 2.0 social business:”
“Culture will change as a result of pervasive use of social tools. Lack of cultural change is not social business’s biggest failure. The biggest failure is the lack of workflow integration to drive culture change.”
There’s no ignoring the benefits of top-down leadership and social adoption strategies. But, in order for an enterprise social application to succeed across an entire company, it needs to map to the way people work today. And that means it must intelligently incorporate business applications people utilize to execute key processes and tasks–everything from your email application, document repositories and expense management systems to your external social media sites.
Laurie provides a list of what organizations need from internal social networking tools:
- • Bi-directional email support because “Email is not going away;”
- • A platform that integrates all systems and networks;
- • Form factor agnostic, available on any device;
- • One employee, one profile integrated into all your networks;
- • And intranet and social platforms should be one in the same.
In addition to business applications, it helps to integrate with your corporate LDAP (one employee, one profile), have deployment options in the cloud or behind your corporate firewall to meet enterprise security requirements, and have single sign-on compatibility—to minimize the steps in an employee’s workflow.
By nature, social collaboration is voluntary to some extent, but having access to this form of communication right in the flow of your work—allowing you to work faster—is incredibly useful, and adoption can take care of itself.
