Adding a little “social” to your workplace
The social phenomenon is not a homogeneous one. Alot of us tend to focus on “social quick fixes” by extending social footprint into our communications strategies. However, there are giants out there revolutionising their workspaces with social software that vow to innovate with viral adoption techniques, providing communication, portal, content and general collaboration platform offerings. Bundled support for real time messaging and conferencing, document management, workflow and business process modeling/support continue to blur boundaries between social softwares and other workflow technologies.
The most common struggle in improving “connectedness” within organizations is in balancing risk and business value, as well as the empowerment of end-users promised by social environments. However, there are critical benefits including virtual collaborations, cross-border talent identification and expertise lending, informal network support to empower communities of experts and common interests, and accessing relevant knowledge needed to formulate plans.
As a start, here is a list of minimal functionality required when evaluating social softwares:
1.) Multiple-User Management – ability to create, modify, retire user accounts, as well as support for multiple roles including editor, facilitator, community manager etc.
2.) Project/Community Brainstorm Areas- ability to create themed common spaces for like-minded users to get together, and brainstorm virtually
3.) Document storage and sharing – an easy-to-use and automated organization function to upload, store and share files.
4.) Discussion forums – support for a conducive environment to have virtual discussion and the ability for moderation
5.) Blogs – instant publishing functions with comments function
6.) Wikis – Internal linking, word clouds, etc
7.) Ability to support & integrate multimedia from existing platforms such as YouTube etc.
8.) Enabling of social functionality & sharing for content such as social network analysis, social tagging, social bookmarking, social search, etc
9.) Keep a record of all tangible data via generic analytics; the software should ideally be compatible with the Big Boys like Omniture, Google, etc.
10.) Last but not least, the degree to which the vendor is investing in R&D to continue innovation the tool. Creative energy in committing to new browser-based technologies like Ajax and browser-based rich authoring/content recommendations will bring more traction to your investment.
As Jive says, business is now social. Enjoy~