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IBM's Sandy Carter says businesses need to understand the value of internal social media networks -- or get left behind.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Editor's note: Sandy Carter is vice president of social business sales at IBM. Global market intelligence firm IDC recently ranked IBM the #1 enterprise social software vendor worldwide.

(CNN) -- It's a well known fact that the social networking phenomena has had a profound effect on society. Consumer social networks continue to creep into the workplace as many companies are encouraging and allowing the use of Facebook, Twitter and even Pinterest during business hours.

But what's new is that this shift is now causing a ripple effect in the business world.

Socializing the workplace is no longer about conversations at the water cooler, chatting about team deliverables, client leads and pipelines. With the emergence of social networking platforms, socializing the workplace means that an organization has embraced a platform that allows its employees to share ideas and expertise, connect with colleagues, customers and business partners across the globe and gain actionable insight from social data that provides them with the ability to make smarter business decisions faster than ever before.

Forrester Research estimates that the market opportunity for social software is expected to exceed $6 billion by 2016, an increase of 60% annually from 2010. IBM's recent CEO Study reports that only 16 percent of CEOs are using social business platforms to connect with customers today, but that number is poised to spike to 57% within the next three to five years.

If your organization plans to stay competitive, it can't afford to ignore the impact of social on the workplace. Sandy Carter, IBM

How do you quantify the ROI (return on investment) of Social Business?

The ROI of social business is a topic for debate, as many of the benefits extend beyond just a company's bottom line. Enterprise social networking tools are fundamentally changing the processes through which we do business and in the past year, we've progressed from just talking about the idea of a social business to companies reporting real and tangible business outcomes from collaborative practices.

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Opinion: Boost business, let your workers socialize online

Cisco Systems is extending the functionality of its Quad enterprise social networking (ESN) software through integration with Microsoft Office applications and with email clients, including Microsoft Outlook, the company is announcing on Tuesday.

Cisco is also re-branding the ESN software, dropping its Quad name and calling it WebEx Social, as the company seeks to give its social collaboration products a uniform brand using the WebEx name.

"Creating a consistent [collaboration] brand and experience under WebEx is a necessary thing for them to do," said industry analyst Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research.

Cisco is also placing under the WebEx umbrella its Callway cloud-hosted telepresence service, the original WebEx online meeting and Web conferencing service, and the cloud-based Connect IM and presence service. Callway will now be known as WebEx Telepresence, while WebEx will be called WebEx Meetings, and Connect is being renamed WebEx Messenger.

"There's no doubt that Cisco had too many [collaboration] platforms. That's how they grew the business, through acquisitions," Kerravala said.

WebEx Social, like other ESN applications from companies like IBM, Jive Software, Tibbr and Yammer, lets organizations offer their employees Facebook-like and Twitter-like functionality but adapted for a workplace setting so that they can, in theory, communicate and collaborate more effectively.

ESN software is designed to complement traditional workplace communication and collaboration tools, like email, IM and Web conferencing with employee profiles, activity streams, microblogging, discussion forums, wikis, brainstorming software, recommendations, ratings, joint document editing and annotation, tagging and links.

Interest in ESN software has been growing in recent years, and Forrester Research recently forecasted that spending on these products will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 61 percent through 2016, a year in which this market will reach US$6.4 billion, compared with $600 million in 2010.

Kerravala predicts that ESN will be one of the biggest trends in IT over the next five years. "It will change the way people work," he said.

ESN will be used for many communication and collaboration tasks for which email is ineffective. "It will create a much more interactive way of working than what you have now with email," he said.

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Cisco Upgrades Quad Enterprise Social Product, Renames It WebEx Social

Symantec talks social-networking threats and how a new Norton Labs tool called App Advisor will stop them from attacking you.

Norton Labs' App Advisor scans your social networks for these kind of attacks, and blocks them.

SAN FRANCISCO--Symantec detailed some of the dirty secrets of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ threats at its annual reviewers' workshop here today, and revealed a planned project to protect you from social networking manipulators.

The project from Norton Labs, currently called Norton App Advisor, combines Norton's Safe Web data with social network open API data to provide a safety rating for apps. It aims to prevent malicious apps that prey on your social network activity from collecting data on you and your friends, which Symantec representatives said was a major security concern.

"Social networks have a trust model built in, to trust posts from their friends. This trust model gets exploited by attackers, and it's difficult to distinguish between a post from a friend and a post from an attack," said Nishant Doshi, architect for Symantec's security response group that deals with browsers. He explained that the attacks are successful because they go viral, just like your latest favorite Nyan Cat video. They start small and spread fast.

There are basically three major kinds of attacks that show up on your social networking feeds, he told CNET. One is drive-by downloads, which is basically when somebody downloads ostensibly legit software that has malicious consequences for the host computer, or the malicious software download occurs without the person's knowledge.

Another threat would be a prompt to begin a download that looks like a required plug-in, such as QuickTime or Flash, but is actually malware.

The third kind of threat that Doshi discussed is a survey scam. The scam asks you to fill out a survey that looks like a legitimate personal information survey, but in fact takes your data and uses it in ways that you didn't think you were authorizing. "Once they get a [cell phone] number, they place telemarketing calls to you, sign you up for a [premium SMS] subscription service, or just sell the information [to data collection companies.] They're trying everything," he lamented.

It's essentially premium SMS spam that you've been conned into legally agreeing to.

These surveys use "gray" marketing to appear above-board when collecting personal identity data, then flip it to turn you into money, said Gerry Egan, senior director of product management for Norton. "It's a little bit like spam on steroids. If a scammer can figure out how to seed a scam on a social network, then it goes from a trickle to a flood in a very short amount of time," he said.

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How attacks on social networks work

When a homemade bomb went off outside an Indian Peaks home in January -- badly burning a husband and wife -- Lafayette Mayor Pro Tem Steve Kracha received calls from concerned residents wanting to know more about the incident.

Kracha felt there had to be a way of sending targeted dispatches to a small group of people based on their addresses alone.

With the goal of helping neighbors connect and share information online, he searched for a website, a tool or an app that had the communicative power of Facebook but the targeted range of a neighborhood email listserv.

Just a few months earlier, a California-based startup had launched Nextdoor, a private social network that links people together, neighborhood by neighborhood. Kracha went to Nextdoor's website and established a site for his 200-home neighborhood in Indian Peaks.

Now, about half the households in his neighborhood are part of Nextdoor, sharing everything from recommendations for house painters or restaurants to concerns over repeated incidents of vandalism at the swimming pool.

"This is how we are actually communicating today as a homeowners association," Kracha said. "This is something where people build their own community within their city."

Since Kracha's initial efforts this spring, 12 other neighborhoods in Lafayette have joined Nextdoor. The city has more neighborhoods on the network than all other municipalities in Boulder County combined. Boulder has six neighborhoods on Nextdoor, Louisville has two, and Erie has one.

And now the city of Lafayette itself is involved, with plans to issue notifications and community messages to residents through the network. It is the first municipality in Colorado to do so.

"From our standpoint, having neighbors connect with each other makes for a more vibrant city," said Debbie Wilmot, spokeswoman for the city.

She said Nextdoor becomes another communication tool for the city -- joining a recently revamped website, emergency alert system, and Twitter and Facebook pages.

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Social networking goes hyper-local in Lafayette

By Umang Patodia - June 18, 2012 | Tickers: FB, GOOG, MSFT, ORCL | 0 Comments

Umang is a member of The Motley Fool Blog Network -- entries represent the personal opinions of our bloggers and are not formally edited.

First Skype and now Yammer. These are trends showing that theMicrosoft Corp(NASDAQ: MSFT)is looking to giveGoogle Inc(NASDAQ: GOOG)a tough fight on the social networking arena. Just after the rumor(reliable sources) ofthe Yammer acquisitionfor a handsome amount of 1.2 billion dollars, we seeMicrosoftstock rising by2.49% in the last 3 daysandGooglestock going down by2.75% in the last 5 days.

Is it a mere coincidence? Isn't it too early to predict?

First withOrkut then Google+, Googlehas been trying their best to create a dominance in the social networking area with little or no success.The companyhas been always dominant in the search engine (almost creating a monopoly) but by far has not had tasted the success of social networking (apart from the early success of Orkut).

Similarly, Salesforce.com just recently obtained Buddy Media Inc. for 745 million dollars, and Oracle Corp(NASDAQ: ORCL)obtained Collective Intent and Virtue Inc., giving both companies social media-based software.

The leader of the market in social networking is of course Facebook Inc (NASDAQ: FB)whileInternational Business Machines Corporation'sIBM connection controls the enterprise social networking realm. But Yammer has had a great impact already. This can be validated by the controversial statement made byMoskovitz (co founder of Facebook) whotold theNew York Times, Work is not a social network, with serendipitous communications and photo collections. Work is about managing tasks, and responding to things quickly." This was clearly anattempt to slam Yammer.

The acquisition of this social networking site confirms the growing trend among businesses to add social media tools for their employees.These are not the only reason why this acquisition is heading towards a positive direction from the perspective of both the companies. The other reasons why it looks to be a profitable venture are:

1.Technical Acquisition: Talking in laymans terminology, Yammer is possibly the best fit for Microsofts amazing office tools (Office etc.). Imagine the effect of networking on these tools. These products are already so well defined and on top of it the ability to integrate the rest of the world could act as a boon for many techies.

2. Microsofts entry pass to the Social world: Microsoft had two choices, either to set up its social network on its own or acquire a networking company. Well, the reason I would say the second is a better choice is simply because of the lack of expertise in this domain. On top of it if you have the required resources to expand in the domain, then simply put your feet on the pedestal.

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Who Will Dominate Enterprise Social Networking?