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Announcements

This is now the social layer podcast, re-branded in episode 4 from the Science Layer podcast, to find out why I am re-branding listen to episode 4 for more information.

Coming Soon! : I am writing a quick guide (maybe e-book) to the various social business software options.

Feature Segment: Seven Features of Good Social Business

I think that there are 7 features of a good social business software:

1. It is secure, this brings up the debate of in the cloud vs. on company servers security.
2. It has a company-wide news feed, this is where a feed of every post is streamed and will bring many employees returning to the network.
3. It gives the user the ability to post private messages, some communication should be kept private and a social network should not eliminate that feature of email.
4. It should provide users with a profile page, such as a mini LinkedIn to showcase skills background and brag about expertise
5. It should give the users the Ability to create communities and groups.
   1. Each company can decide to manage communities or just allow employees to create communities spontaneously.
6. It should provide users with project management features such as:
   1. Creating communities around teams
   2. Assigning tasks
   3. Sharing files
   4. Creating a team calendar
   5. Enabling private/ team only/ invite only conversations
7. It has the ability to track Analytics and Insights, Network managers need insight into the conversations happening on the network.. Analytics can tell you:
   1. what are people talking about,
   2. how people are using the network,
   3. how are problems getting resolved
   4. who is influential.

BONUS feature: A great social business network is customizable for specific organizations.

There are at least four types of employee reactions to the prospect of adding social enterprise network at work. There are advocates, users, agnostics and detractors.  Understanding the motivations of your detractors is an important key for successfully rolling out a social network.

Social Layer Segment: Cultural Requirements of an Impactful Social Layer

There are three cultural (company culture) requirements for enjoying an impactful social layer within a company:

1. Collaborative and confident team members, on the contrary insecure and competitive team members cause destructive knowledge silos to increase.
2. Freedom from hyper-political competitiveness, only good management can bring this about. Unfortunately some companies purposely pit employees against one another in hopes to improve performance with their promotion systems.

I find it ironic that a company must minimize internal competitiveness to maximize  external competitiveness in a capitalist economy.

3. There are minimal detractors/ resistors to social, must understand the reason for the detractors before dealing
   1. Reasons people detract, anti social personality, baby (social business collaboration) out with bath water (Facebook narcissism)
   2. Lack of trust: Patrick Lencioni on trust: “there is predictive based trust (friends know/ predict how you will react) vs. vulnerability based trust” (humans can say, “I don’t know the answer”, “I think I made a mistake”, “I am sorry I was out of line”) this creates a powerful bond of trust on a team

• “peer-to-peer accountability is the most powerful motivator” this requires a high level of trust and connectivity. Social business software in your organization can help with this!

What are some other features of a great social business software?