Connecting Business Collaboration with Social Networking

Chapter 1 Connecting Business Collaboration with Social Networking In This Chapter ▶ Understanding what social collaboration means ▶ Moving beyond the “Facebook inside your company” slogan ▶ Accessing new resources in social collaboration systems ▶ Competing and coexisting with e-mail ▶ Finding practical applications for social collaboration e often talk about having a social life, separate from our work Wlives, recognizing that mingling the two can be hazardous. Social Collaboration For Dummies isn’t a book about being social at work, in the sense of flirting or sharing jokes. By social collaboration, I mean recognizing that business is inherently social, even when social interaction is constrained within the bounds of professionalism. In this chapter, I help you understand what social collaboration is (and what it isn’t), outline some of the benefits of implementing a social collaboration system in your business, and suggest some ways that you can help colleagues shift fromCOPYRIGHTED e-mail to social collaboration tools MATERIAL (and know when to use one over the other). I also give you some real-world examples of how social collaboration can help employees solve specific problems and complete tasks more efficiently. 005_9781118658543-ch01.indd5_9781118658543-ch01.indd 7 99/25/13/25/13 111:401:40 AAMM 8 Part I: Getting Started with Social Collaboration Defining Social Collaboration Social collaboration comprises social networking and social media for the purpose of getting work done in an enterprise setting. The collaboration part is just as important as the social part. In this context, collaboration is about getting work done with teams of people, working together toward a common goal — which is essential to any business. Used properly, social collaboration widens exposure to corporate knowledge, streamlines the flow of ideas, and gets everyone thinking about how to improve processes, products, and services. Social collaboration is also known as enterprise social networking, and the products to support it are often branded enterprise social networks (ESNs). However, you don’t have to be running a huge enterprise to benefit from social collaboration because the same sorts of tools can be used by small businesses and nonprofit groups. That’s one reason I’ll stick to social collaboration as my preferred term — beyond the fact that it’s in the title of this book. I also use the term “collaboration networks,” used as shorthand for private social networks (as opposed to public ones). You’ve probably heard the maxim “people do business with people they know, like, and trust.” My local Chamber of Commerce parrots this endlessly as a reason why salespeople and small business owners should attend its networking breakfasts and other events. And it’s true: Successful salespeople tend to be talented networkers. In the same way, people within organizations who have all the right connections often can accomplish tasks that others cannot — or at least not as quickly. When a company’s standard formal processes break down, the employee with a strong network knows who’s who and what’s what and how to get the job done anyway. Social collaboration is nothing new, in that sense. What is new is the digiti- zation of the social network and the transformation of what used to be dry, impersonal corporate collaboration tools into friendly places filled with smil- ing faces. Online social networking has become famous for reconnecting long- lost lovers and sparking friendships between people who never would have met in the offline world. In a business or enterprise setting, social networking can be just as effective at connecting employees with other employees who share a common interest, or skill, or have the answers to each other’s questions, even though they might be in offices in different states or on opposite sides of the world. So, this is what I mean by “social collaboration.” The collaboration element comes into play when employees use a social network to share their progress on a common project and work together on digital artifacts of that project, such as a sales proposal or a presentation to management. 005_9781118658543-ch01.indd5_9781118658543-ch01.indd 8 99/25/13/25/13 111:401:40 AAMM Chapter 1: Connecting Business Collaboration with Social Networking 9 Social collaboration initiatives have many fathers and mothers. Often, though, the impetus doesn’t come from the IT department but from a par- ticular project team that experiments with the technology and finds it worth- while. Other drivers could be ✓ A CEO wanting a way to unite business units that have come in through acquisition ✓ The head of HR wanting to promote a more collaborative workplace ✓ A sales leader wanting to speed sharing leads, production of proposals, and closing of deals ✓ An early adopter of new technologies anywhere within the company At the energy company Apache Corporation, social collaboration cham- pion Randy Wagner’s official title is “drilling advisor,” and the success stories he tells revolve around the science and engineering of drilling for oil. The specific interests of these different constituencies in social collaboration are discussed in Part V. In this section, I explain social collaboration and the benefits it offers for doing business. I also clarify how social media tools like Facebook are different from social collaboration tools, which connect colleagues so that they can work together to solve problems and complete tasks. Seeing how social collaboration can help your business By definition, an enterprise social network has different aims than a public social network or any consumer website. Some reasons why organizations invest in social collaboration include: ✓ Embrace social everywhere. Mirror the increasingly important role of social media interaction in customer communications, enabling internal collaboration that delivers results for external customers. ✓ Improve sales efficiency. Speed the production of proposals and improve the sharing of tips and leads within sales teams. ✓ Share information. Capture more of the tacit knowledge of the organiza- tion — that is, the knowledge not recorded in any formal document — by encouraging communications that are shared broadly rather than trapped in e-mail or discussed only offline. 005_9781118658543-ch01.indd5_9781118658543-ch01.indd 9 99/25/13/25/13 111:401:40 AAMM 10 Part I: Getting Started with Social Collaboration ✓ Promote agility. Allow employees to make the connections they need to create workarounds when formal processes break down or to react quickly to unanticipated events or opportunities. ✓ Improve the workplace atmosphere. Humanize the workplace and improve morale by encouraging employees to make more varied connections and recognize each other publicly for good work. In Figure 1-1, you see co-workers thanking Celeste, the creator of a helpful sales document. This example is from Jive Software’s social collaboration platform, and the comment I added includes a badge, a graphical symbol of recog- nition, created using Jive’s Props app. ✓ Coordinate activities. Improve coordination of routine work activities, such as gathering information for a proposal or resolving a customer complaint. ✓ Help colleagues connect. Bridge organizational divisions by department, work function, or geography, enabling productive collaboration between employees who otherwise never would have met, even online. Figure 1-1: Social collaboration gives co-workers many ways to thank each other and recognize excellent work. 005_9781118658543-ch01.indd5_9781118658543-ch01.indd 1010 99/25/13/25/13 111:401:40 AAMM Chapter 1: Connecting Business Collaboration with Social Networking 11 A social collaboration environment like Yammer (see Figure 1-2) looks a whole lot like Facebook. Scratch beneath the surface, though, to find tools that promise secure business collaboration. Here, you can see that Yammer is built around a central news feed, a listing of recent messages, links, and documents shared by co-workers that is similar to the listing of updates shared by friends on Facebook, except that here the context is work rather than play. This user interface format for presenting a stream of messages is also known as an activity stream and can be used to represent all sorts of social and application events. Yammer makes a distinction between the news feed, which is limited to updates posted by people, and the activity feed, which includes automated updates. Other environments mix the two, and the terms are often used interchangeably. One of the most important elements of social collaboration is that you can view a customized and personalized activity stream of all the things that are most important to you. You see the updates posted by your closest collabo- rators, answers to questions you have posed, and feedback on documents or links you have shared. You pick the people and groups you want to follow, rather than having their messages broadcast to you whether you find them relevant or not. That also means you can share information with the people and groups most likely to care about it, rather than trying to e-mail everyone you can think of who may care, which often means spamming co-workers who don’t care and missing some who do. Figure 1-2: The Yammer home screen. 005_9781118658543-ch01.indd5_9781118658543-ch01.indd 1111 99/25/13/25/13 111:401:40 AAMM 12 Part I: Getting Started with Social Collaboration The language of social business You may be hearing a lot of talk about “social social networking

Load more