Sunday, February 10, 2013

What’s next with enterprise social networks?


Contribution: Shankar B, Ramco Systems


Enterprise and Social Media have reconciled successfully.  The combination does not sound oxymoronic anymore.  So, what’s next here?  How would organizations really make use of (internal) social media?  It is time to go beyond a ‘feel good’ network of employees.


1) Social media with context:  Standalone enterprise social networks are hard to sustain.  It’s hard to quantify and qualify what a person is doing there and how it contributes to business.  So, social media should be more embedded and social business networks should happen more in the context of a business situation.  

We see this happening a lot in the HCM and CRM space.  In HCM, social recognition and gamification have stared becoming mainstream.

2) Predictive Analytics:  A lot could be deciphered from an active enterprise social network.  Questions such as

§  Will my project run on time? 
§  What is the likelihood of this prospect converting? 
§  Will the new product succeed in the market?

can be answered more easily through the crunching & analysis of all the informal information/ data floating in an enterprise social network.

3) Insight into employees: An enterprise social network can provide great insight about a company's talent:  Who are the key employees?  Who are the leaders? Who are the influencers, high-networked employees?, experts in a particular topic, overall employee sentiment, satisfaction levels are some areas where a social network can provide quick insight (which a typical HCM software will find hard to provide).

Are you using your social network for any of these purposes?  Please share your thoughts.

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