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Business social networking done right
There’s a lot of talk about the value of adding social networking to the communications strategy, in countless organizations who see the benefits but fear the downsides.
While there’s little doubt getting employees communicating with each other will help bring teamwork to a whole new level, allowing everybody the opportunity to contribute the organization’s success through blogs, wikis and such might generate some initial confusion.
The following five (5) best practices tips will help you ensure your business social networking project gets done right.
- Test the waters
- People in the business world are asking themselves why they can’t have their very own Blogger, Wikipedia and Facebook, internally.
- If a company doesn’t take it upon itself to offer such tools, employees will find a way to do it themselves, through open source solutions or otherwise.
- Companies can try social networking with a low cost (or no cost) pilot, namely using open source scripts which are widely available. Hosted applications can also help.
- Set modest expectations
- To get a project off the ground, don’t try to oversell it. Don’t promise executives that enterprise social networking will unleash, ignite or synergize anything.
- Pitch the project as a pilot. That’s very important. Insist on the option to walk away after a few quarters if it doesn’t work as expected.
- Describe one or two business improvements you think are achievable.
- Make sure to set reasonable goals in regards to user adoption and increase your odds for success by seeding an initial deployment among the teams who appear most eager to use these tools.
- Try to find a way to measure business value.
- Hard numbers might not be expected from a pilot -but- management will want to know the payback, down the line.
- Don’t let fear stangle growth
- Some businesses are wary about letting their employees voice out, out of fear that they’ll say improper things. There’s also a fear that the “social” part will spin out of control.
- Even if you’re tempted to vigorously police employee-generaed content, resist that urge! It would have a chilling effect on participation and could tank the entire project.
- First and foremost, it’s a human thing. Employees need time to grow comfortable with speaking up, sharing ideas and participating in company-wide conversations.
- A social networking project will likely wither before it even has a chance of growing if people fear the throught police (don’t make “1984″, all over again).
- Resist exclusivity
- Gated communities are what they are, gated. Don’t let that happen within your social network. That approach defeats the purpose of social networking.
- It’s a natural reflex to want all the named groups to be locked down but that will kill teamwork, team spirit and the social aspect of it all.
- Exposing discussions to a broader community has —a lot— of value. Never underestimate this.
- Don’t forget about search
- Search underpins the value of social networking platforms. Poor searching (or indexing) tools make social networking less useful.
- As you look for social networking solutions, ask the vendors about their search capabilities. At first, it’s not very important but as content builds up, it becomes essential.
- Make sure the search feature allows for user-generated feedback such as tags and content-rating systems (it sometimes comes through the addition of plug-ins, and thats ok).
- A good search feature helps prevent your social networking platform from becoming another silo, so if possible, consider federated search. As such, your internal search engine should be able to index content in other systems, query 3rd party search engines and pull results from other information repositories.
Regarding search, you could also allow for external engines to query your internal indexes and content but given that we’re dealing with business social networks, that might only be a good idea for a few companies.
Business social networks are all about offering the state of the art in online networking inside the company so employees don’t have to venture outside for such features as blogging and wikis.
Furthermore, many companies are still clueless on how to transfer knowledge between more experienced workers and those who will (some day) replace them. Social networks can help with this by creating easily accessible archives of work-related content which, in time, might prove quite valuable.
Many businesses also use social networking for recruitment purposes. Internal promotion can be simplified and external recruitment of fresh talent can surely benefit from internal referrals. Human resources people usually have good words for internal social networks because, among other things, it empowers them with a powerful communications tool that all employees are likely to use.
It’s pretty clear that your own deployment will be customized to fit your own needs but overall, setting up a business social network will never let management indifferent.
So, go ahead and fire up your own enterprise social network. You’ll quickly see just how wise “your crowd” really is.
Tags: business social networking, social networks, socially, employees, employers, companies, enterprises, social nets, blogger, facebook, linkedin, twitter, wikipedia, blogs, wikis, archives, information archives, user adoption, networking, community, search engine
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[...] to setup their own, internally. Once a business social network is up and running, if it’s done right, employees and managers can connect among themselves with [...]