Social Networking in the Enterprise

Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter, Social Media per se....we are reading about these almost on a daily basis and looking at the stats for Facebook alone (around 860 by 20/06, reference ) many of the readers of this blog will be familiar with one of the many public Social Networks available.

The key question for many organisations however currently is
1.) should I invest time and money into building and using these types of social technologies internally as well (think enterprise 2.0) and
2.) what benefits can I realise when deploying and embedding such technologies in a company culture.


Basically speaking, in regards to the use of Social Networks, we are talking here about a major cultural shift in our society in terms of how people interact with each other and how customers expect to deal with companies. This shift started in the consumer environment but does not stop there - this shift is carried into the organisations by new, young employees who are deeply familiar with these technologies. These employees will drive a demand into organisations to provide them with similar tools to what they are used to in their private lifes. Organisations will differentiate themselves in terms of coolness, agility and social competence from each other with the traditional brick & mortar companies risking being left out alone.

Looking at a Forrester report (Trends impacting businesses in 2013) - more than 63% of respondents believe that Social Media / Web 2.0 will have some or a strong impact on their organisations (see diagram)

Source: Forrester

The other question though is if I invest what can I expect in terms of benefits - why should I bother developing an internal social network?
There are many benefits associated with the use of an internal social network. The most prominent being the increase of reuse of corporate knowledge and better identification of real experts in the organisation. McKinsey has conducted research into what benefits companies, who are already using a number of enterprise 2.0 technologies internally, have realised. This quite comprehensive list can be seen in the diagram below.

Source: McKinsey Quarterly