Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Foursquare, Google+, Pinterest, Youtube, Yammer, …and the list grows, social is everywhere and is growing, it has been largely spontaneous, and not forced, the demand for social tools pulls these new products into existence.

However, within many corporate organizations social tools are looked down upon or considered a marketing tool at best, we cling to email and archaic productivity tools that were great for the 80’s and 90’s but in comparison they are slow and overused. 

Social software tools absolutely can and should be used to collaborate within organizations.  Particularly within organizations where innovation is used for growth. All things being equal, an organization that collaborates and educates itself spontaneously using social media tools will innovate faster than one that looks down upon the same tools.

It is time that social software tools work their way into corporations and into organizations on a large-scale. 

Acceptance by corporate leadership and the corporate masses will not be as easy as has been with the general public.

Some of the reasons:

• Corporate concern about proprietary issues, there is hesitancy to push these more open social tools.
• Social media is a tool to enhance social interactions and few want to be “social” at work on a large-scale so other reasons for use must be placed at the forefront of people’s minds before adoption will be widespread.
• There is not yet a dominant leader for social enterprise software as there is in the public (facebook, twitter, linkedin).

Here are three absolute musts for widespread adoption of social enterprise networks and software into the corporate environment.

1. An absolute assurance of privacy and protection of proprietary information.
2. A spontaneous motivation for the masses other than “leadership says we should be using social tools.” (‘keep up with the Joneses’ attitude can be a motivation even for those in the C-suite.)
3. A clear and obvious advantage for the masses using social tools at work, they must want to use these tools to make their job’s easier.  They must realize its value or they are responding to leadership’s generous incentives.
4. Credit and rewards given for use of social tools, ie… it could be part of the required collaboration and education of peers objectives that most corporations reward employees for.

So what exactly am I talking about here, facebook at work? Not exactly, but I am talking using social software to enable daily instruction and education of peers, I’m talking about having the ability to intentionally share what we are working on, intentional and incentivized collaboration enhanced with social enterprise tools.

taken from wikipedia…Enterprise social networking focuses on the use of online social networks or social relations among people who share business interests and/or activities. Enterprise social networking is often a facility of enterprise social software, which is essentially social software used in “enterprise” (business/ commercial) contexts. It encompasses modifications to corporate intranets and other classic software platforms used by large companies to organize their communication, collaboration and other aspects of their intranets. Enterprise social networking is also generally thought to include the use of a standard external social networking service to generate visibility for an enterprise.

Leadership should realize that social tools will not likely explode as they have in the public domain because reasons for use are different.

So lets discuss exactly why we should set up a social media network within our enterprise:

• Social networking can speed up collaboration like nothing else, self collaborating teams that educate themselves can solve problems, innovate and accomplish MUCH more at a FASTER RATE than teams that are separate and siloed and are not collaborating.
• The competition is increasinly using social enterprise tools and to compete we should use.

Leadership must realize that most employees don’t want to be social to the same level they do with friends and family on facebook so they must incentivized! They must constantly communicate the whys, the business advantages to social collaboration tools. 

Enterprise social networking has not yet exploded like public social networking has (ie. facebook) but it can if we are mindful about why it should and careful to consider how it differs from public social media.

What are some social media networking tools that are good for use within enterprises?