Social networking has become an integral part of office life. These commercial tools - Facebook, Twitter, etc. - are being used by more than half of employees, according to one study. But some companies have taken a reactive stance against these tools due to privacy or transparency concerns, and the number of companies selling tools specifically for enterprise continues to increase.
On top of this, the downward shift in the economy has forced companies to make do with less. Employees have had to learn to maximize their time and productivity and social networking collaboration tools for enterprise have allowed for the streamlining of information within a company. "Social networks make it easy for participants to share unstructured and ad hoc information that can decrease the time it takes to find information to solve problems. Social networks also encourage employees to help each other," wrote Caroline Dangson, a research analyst at IDC. These enterprise collaboration tools continue to gain traction, with Cisco chief technology officer Padmasree Warrior recently predicting that the collaboration market could swell to be a $34 billion business.
"These products have to be more than a Facebook for business," said Dangson. "So, we've seen some of the smaller players try and differentiate themselves." Dangson sees a bright future for these tools, and an IDC report from August of this year sees large growth potential despite an entrenched reluctance from corporate culture to adopt to the rapidly-changing need for a more transparent environment.
"Corporate culture has everything to do with the current state of adoption of online community software. Online community software requires a community management model where leadership is distributed, all participants have voice, and employees feel they can initiate change. This model challenges, if not disrupts, the hierarchical management model of so many organizations today," said the report, "U.S. Online Community Software Forecast 2009-2013." The report predicts a $1.5-billion market by 2013.
"The return on investment is a big question," said Dangson. "The phrase that kept coming up in my interviews with vendors was 'connecting the dots.' There's a strong physical network within a company, and the social network extends this to weak ties within the company or externally. There's still a lot of skepticism, as they need to know exactly the ROI."
With this in mind, we thought it would be good to provide an overview of a few of the key players in the social networking enterprise collaboration market.
SocialcastSocialcast bills its product as "enterprise microblogging" and it's hard to be more concise than that. True Ventures funded $1-million for the company to further develop the tool that helps employees communicate in real time, using a Facebook-derivative interface to share new information, organize people and contacts, view questions from other employees, create a Socialbast e-mail, and find experts. The company has also tradmarked something called "Social Business Intelligence," analytics used to track information flow, usage trends, community growth and participation patterns within a Socialcast community.
Jive
Mzinga
Yammer
Dekks
Salesforce Chatter
MindTouch Enterprise
WebEx
Sharepoint
Lotus Sametime
Wave