Mediaboss Marketing

Facebook, Google+ and Twitter it's not hard to realise that social networking is an important part of today's environment.

Recently, there has been a push to expand the instant, always-on, real-time nature of social communication and collaboration directly into the enterprise so workers and team members can get a sense of what others are working on, what resources are available, who has expertise in what areas and so on.

If you're a CIO considering a social networking platform for your business, or you are on the committee tasked with finding good platforms to deploy, this article is for you.

It takes a look at what place social networking has in the enterprise and what features and requirements social platforms must have to be effective.

One caveat: Any discussion of enterprise social networking should be split into a couple different types of social awareness and engagement. There's "internal" social publication, where colleagues and team members can find each other, intersect and discuss relevant details of their business and work.

There's also "external" social engagement, where members of your sales, marketing and public relations teams come together to create conversations and interact with customers, prospects, vendors and others.

This article will discuss internal networking. There are a whole other sets of tools to cover the latter.

There is value in connecting people within your own company, especially as you have disparate locations and hundreds, if not thousands, of employees. Imagine needing to solve a problem, say, analysing a spreadsheet.

You don't know how a number was generated or where it came from. Head over to the intranet, type in the phrase "COGS for the Widget division" and instantly see the right people working on that number. Connect, and off you go. No travel expenses, no shared introductions just walls being knocked down.

Microsoft, for one, thought such a capability was so important that it bought an entire company for its product. The giant acquired Yammer, a 4-year-old social networking company, simply because it felt it was falling behind well-integrated social platforms such as Salesforce.com Chatter.

Read the original post:
5 Keys to Enterprise Social Networking Success