The forthcoming Facebook IPO, set for May, will be one of the greatest events in recent tech memory. It’s an irrefutable indicator of how far social networking has come and where it’s going. But what does this mean for the workplace? Is enterprise social networking, the so-called Facebook-like model at work, starting to take off as well or is it still in its infancy?
At the recent Cloudforce event in San Francisco, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff declared that the “social enterprise revolution” is now in full swing. However, the enterprise social reality looks very different. In September 2011, Forrester Research reported that, “Despite significant and ongoing investment in enterprise social technologies, their roughly seven-year lifespan within enterprises has yielded a maximum of 12 percent adoption within the overall workforce.”
In a recent Altimeter report of organizations with over 250 employees, only 18 percent of companies showed advanced levels where the majority of the enterprise was connected to the network.
What’s the problem?
To play well in Peoria, the social revolution needs to be more than chatting with folks down the hall (continued…)
