What is enterprise social networking software?

Much has been written about the IT department’s control of social networks like Twitter and Facebook within the workplace. Similarly, many have opined that these networks are useful - perhaps even required - as tools to manage customer relationships.

But enterprise social software is another thing altogether.

From the consumer to the workplace

The strength of consumer tools like Facebook is their ability to allow a single user to share ideas, questions and information quickly to a range of trusted people. In other words, they allow ‘one-to-many relationships’ of sharing. Instead of phoning his friends one by one to get a restaurant recommendation, social networking user Billy McGenericName can log onto Facebook and, with a single status update, can ask all of his 9000 friends (in typical Gen Y fashion, Billy is surprisingly well liked) where he should eat.

Enterprise social software works in a very similar fashion. In the office, if Billy needs to find out where to file a particular report, instead of approaching 10 people directly and asking one by one, he can simply pop onto his company’s social network and send his question to the entire company, easily tapping into the collective knowledge of his workmates. Similarly, if Billy’s manager needs to inform the 15 people working on a particular project that a client has pulled out, or that a milestone has been met, social enterprise tools can make this process simpler.

This one-to-many relationship is particularly useful with a dispersed workforce. If you have employees spread throughout Sydney, Perth, Auckland and Brisbane, they can’t simply poke their head above a divider and yell out a question to their collective workmates, like they could if they all worked out of the same office. In such a situation, enterprise social software can emulate this social environment, by bringing all these disparate employees together and creating a kind of virtual office space where these one-to-many questions can be posed.

Of course, once a question has been asked, or a topic raised, the nature of social networking allows the ‘many’ in this ‘one-to-many’ to converse and collaborate, essentially turning the interaction into a ‘many-to-many’.

That’s enterprise social software at its basic: allowing employees to share information in a one-to-many, or many-to-many, form.

Features

There is quite a bit of feature crossover between consumer and enterprise social software, with obvious examples including user profiles, mobile apps and the aforementioned status updates.

But these tools typically carry several features that consumer tools don’t - though, of course, the exact features included depend on which tool you’re talking about.

Document sharing. Status updates and discussions are all well and good, but they can only do so much when it comes to collaboration. Some tools allow users to attach documents directly to status updates or replies, allowing for easier collaboration, in theory.

Wikis. Some tools (such as Socialtext) allow the creation of wikis: online repositories of information pertinent to your organisation, which may or may not allow users to create content. Useful if your employees keep asking the same damned questions over and over again.

Application integration. Taking it a step further, some tools (like Socialcast) can embed conversations from the social network into productivity applications, like SharePoint, email, CRM, ERP or other various apps. Others - such as Yammer - include calendar integration and can export to iCal, Gcal, Outlook and so on.

Administration, groups and control. Some tools include the concepts of permissions, roles, groups and administration. So, instead of every employee having access to every document or conversation, admins or managers can set up groups of users who can share the knowledge that’s appropriate for them to handle. This is handy when, for example, a group of managers is discussing, via the social software, the firing of a poorly performing employee.

Analytics. A social network is useless if no one uses it. Clearvale enterprise, among others, allows administrators to see just how much the social software is being used, as quantified by several metrics.

Deployment options. Some social software is available only as a cloud-based service, while others allow for on-premises deployment. Each model has its own advantages and disadvantages. Cloud-based will take some administration hassle away from your IT department and allow CAPEX-based pricing; however, the cloud is still risky for some organisations, which will prefer a premises-based deployment.