WHITE PAPER
Social Networking:
The Next Enterprise Killer App?
Companies that resist and limit access to social networks risk losing the
ability to compete in a new marketplace where customers, prospects,
partners and competitors are already exchanging information
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The burgeoning adoption of social networking for business has placed
new demands on enterprise IT and business leaders. According to analysts,
social networking will be the biggest Enterprise 2.0 priority by 2013. Social
networks are spreading further in the workplace—and at times extending
outside the organization—taking collaboration to new levels and creating
new, more flexible knowledge management resources.
Business leaders will need to incorporate enterprise social networking into
their overall Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) strategy, while
ensuring workers understand the differences between the personal and
the professional in these new media. This white paper is intended to help
executives navigate the new world of Enterprise 2.0 and social networking for
business success.
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WHITE PAPER Social Networking: The Next Enterprise Killer App?
Introduction
dent on the Internet, businesses are finding that appropriately
The VP of sales is at his wit’s end; he’s just finally realizing
Communities govern themselves, ensuring that the highest
the promise of enterprise CRM, but now some sales reps
quality information rises to the top and that wasteful informa-
and customers say they don’t want to deal with email.
tion or activity is discarded.
guided communities of professionals use the tools responsibly.
Some want text messages; others want to communicate via
LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. Meanwhile, your call center is
being offshored and your operations chief is upset because
the CEO last year overturned his recommendation to invest in
COLLABORATION: Democratizing
of
Data for Business Performance
a wiki to capture and share that group’s knowledge. Oh, and
Providing workers with the advanced collaboration and
your chairman just called to say his daughter got a tweet with
decision-making capabilities of enterprise social networking
a link to a YouTube video that shows snippets of a corporate
technologies is proving invaluable to business. These tools cre-
presentation that, taken out of context, seems to show the
ate a deeper and more profound understanding of the company
company encouraging questionable practices. He wants to
and its customers, accelerating response times and forging
know when you’re posting the company video response.
greater alignment across the organization.
Welcome to the world of Web 2.0, now going viral within the
One only need look at the explosion in content and capabilities
enterprise. Hopefully you won’t have to deal with all of those sce-
offered by consumer-oriented social networks and tools such
narios at any one time, but they are all variations of real-life situ-
as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to understand what all the
ations. Businesses want to take the best, and filter out the worst,
fuss is about.
of Web 2.0 with a new class of enterprise social networking tools.
Some call this Enterprise 2.0—which one industry group defines
as, “a system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and
agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise.”
“Whether you call it Web 2.0, the social Web or any other
neologism, the new network economy is about communities,
collaboration, peer production and user-generated content,”
observed Joshua-Michele Ross, a vice president with O’Reilly
Radar, part of the organization that popularized the Web 2.0
Companies increasingly want to take advantage of collaborative
concept by organizing the Web 2.0 Summit. “It is a place where
tools that foster sharing among knowledge workers and with
business reputations are defined by customer opinions and
customers and partners. But many are still wary of bringing
ratings, where press is delivered by independent bloggers, and
some of the excesses—ranging from “flaming” other partici-
product development and insight is driven by customers.”
pants to inappropriately sharing proprietary data to opening a
corporate gateway to malware—that have characterized popular consumer social media networks into the organization.
This process has been referred to by many as a democratization of the Web, or a democratization of data. In a sense, the
community judges what is important or shuns what it finds
These collaborative tools are a key foundation of what many
irrelevant. It is this community impact that generates the viral
have come to label Enterprise 2.0. As CIO magazine explained
marketing phenomena that has proven to be immensely valu-
it, “Instead of a one-way conversation—your company talking
able on the external Web.
to the site visitor—Enterprise 2.0 lets you implement a multiparty
conversation to share information and manage knowledge
inside and outside the organization using blogs and wikis, social
networking and tagging, rating systems and the like.”
In the U.S. presidential election of 2008, for example, then Democratic Party nominee Barack Obama’s campaign was notable for
the aggressive use of social networking tools. As Fast Company
expert blogger Rich Brooks wrote as the new president was
It may be challenging to justify investments in these new tools,
about to be sworn in: “What Obama did so successfully is that he
particularly in a tough economic environment. But business
went to where his customer base was. He could no longer afford
executives are increasingly aware that cost-cutting can take a
to meet with everyone at their kitchen tables, but he could friend
business only so far in meeting performance goals. Ultimately,
them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter … Further, he used
competitive challenges and the relentless need for innovation
sites like Flickr and YouTube to distribute his ‘message of hope.’
require that organizations foster greater collaboration to gener-
He encouraged supporters to create their own content and that
ate better business processes and new ideas.
idea, and those images and videos, went viral.”
Despite early concerns that enterprise social networking tools
Such unrestricted freedom and lack of structure, though, run
would bring into the organization some of the wild abandon evi-
counter to the preconceived notions that many IT groups and
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WHITE PAPER Social Networking: The Next Enterprise Killer App?
corporate managers hold regarding how best to structure
“In the enterprise world, social networking is really all about
knowledge management. Not only can social networking pro-
collaboration, and simultaneously it’s about information sharing
vide outsiders with great influence over a company’s brand, but
and innovation,” observed Renu Chipalkatti, executive direc-
it can also provide insiders with the ability to communicate eas-
tor of Emerging Technologies and Business Development for
ily with everybody in the company, irrespective of hierarchy or
Information Technology at Verizon. “You can give everyone
business group. Wikis, discussion groups and other enterprise
a voice, rather than just bringing a few people into a meeting
social networking tools can strip away traditional management
for brainstorming. Information transparency in an organization
boundaries and allow any employee to talk to any participating
leads to greater enterprise agility.”
manager. These tools can also empower individual employees
to create groups/networks of which they become the virtual
manager—in essence, establishing their own hierarchy.
For many years now, organizations have struggled with different methods, policies and technologies to help ensure that
knowledge is not locked away on individual PCs and to improve
Will People Collaborate if You Don’t
Trust Them To?
workflow so that information sharing is more dynamic. With so-
In a groundbreaking research study on collaboration in organi-
document sharing and revision management.
zations, “Meetings Around the World,” Frost & Sullivan, together
with Verizon Business and Microsoft, found that “a culture of
openness … is the most important determinant of collaboration
quality. A culture of openness is defined according to how easy
it is to talk to anyone within the organization, the regularity of
cooperation between units within the organization, and the
accessibility of persons to those in other departments. A culture of openness is an asset that is difficult for competitors to
cial media, changes are immediately available to all members of
the group versus the point-to-point flow that typifies traditional
Clearly the pace of adoption is picking up. Chipalkatti said that
discussions with customers indicate that about 25 percent are
already engaged in enterprise social media and that 50 percent
or more are looking to engage. “Social media really changed the
landscape in the consumer world. Based on that, enterprises
are constantly looking at consumer trends to see what consumer tools may merge with the business environment.”
detect or imitate, which makes it a strategic advantage
Some companies have figured out how to utilize that consumer
over organizations that are not open.”
enthusiasm to their advantage, tapping into a phenomenon
The Frost & Sullivan study concluded that, as the work environment becomes increasingly complex, collaboration is a key
driver of company performance, impacting profitability, profit
growth and sales growth.
Many organizations are built on increasingly dispersed teams
whose members are joined across time zones and geographies.
To help ensure these teams can be most effective—and generate
greater value to the enterprise—organizations are turning to a
powerful convergence of technology known as Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C). Unified Communications such
as presence-enabled (or location-based) applications make it possible to find people in virtually any location, on almost any device.
These technologies combine with collaborative tools such as
online whiteboarding, shared applications and team workspaces,
to enable dispersed employees to work together more effectively.
Teams gravitate to the specific tools that best suit their needs.
What’s in it for Organizations?
In the business world, the imperative is on competitive advan-
known as crowdsourcing. The concept was popularized by Jeff
Howe, first in a Wired magazine article and subsequently in a
book: “… distributed labor networks are using the Internet to
exploit the spare processing power of millions of human brains
... The labor isn’t always free, but it costs a lot less than paying
traditional employees. It’s not outsourcing; it’s crowdsourcing.”
Crowdsourcing, USA Today reported in early 2010, “is being used
on everything from a Super Bowl ad for Doritos to improvements
in movie recommendations on Netflix.” It can be as complex as
product development, or as simple as social bookmarking—a
process by which individual Web users tag or bookmark content
to be shared with others.
Other popular social networking tools include:
BLOGS The (relatively speaking) granddaddy of social media,
and essentially an online diary or compilation of interesting
content a writer or group has found on the Web.
MICROBLOGS Short postings using the 140-character limit
SMS format, as popularized by Twitter.
tage—either getting it or ensuring your rival doesn’t have it.
WIKIS Collaborative websites whereby users can generate and
Enterprise social networking technology is at the forefront of
edit content, such as the public Wikipedia. Businesses have
today’s race for competitive advantage. Can you tie competitive
latched on to wikis as easy-to-create knowledge warehouses
advantage to improving performance and/or increasing agility?
and collaboration tools.
WHITE PAPER Social Networking: The Next Enterprise Killer App?
DISCUSSION FORUMS Often using wikis, or similar types
Another factor is the increasing workforce ratio of younger,
of forums, these online town halls provide opportunities for
so-called Gen-X and Gen-Y workers who not only thrive with
4
marketers, product developers and executive management to
social networking tools, but look to their companies to take a
engage in open forum discussions on products, strategies and
leadership role in using these newer technologies. In a March
other matters.
2010 interview with Computerworld, Andrew McAfee, author
PODCASTS Audio or video content that can be downloaded to
user devices for playback at their convenience.
of a heralded article on Enterprise 2.0 , offered the following
observation: “People throughout the organization are clamoring
for easier-to-use tools. They’re frustrated by the fact that tools
VIDEO-SHARING Popularized by YouTube and other sites,
outside the firewall are easier to use than the tools in their own
video-sharing enables companies to share dynamic presenta-
enterprise. A lot of times [employees] do an end run and use
tions externally, or internally for a multitude of uses, including
some cloud utilities to get their work done. “
lowering the cost of training.
Regardless of age and adaptability, however, many companies
“Companies tend to start very small initially with pilots and
have security concerns that must be alleviated before they’ll
that’s absolutely the right way to do it and that’s how we did it
consider adoption of enterprise social networking tools. A
ourselves,” said Chipalkatti. “You start small and see if it works
survey conducted by CSO, CIO and PriceWaterhouseCoopers
and where it works and then go and invest in it.” These days,
in 2009 found that “every IT leader surveyed admitted they fear
most companies are Web-enabled and have the ability to start
social-engineering-based attacks … Nevertheless, for many
these small pilots with very little overhead, other than providing
company executives, blocking social networking is out of the
staffing for “community managers” who can jump-start partici-
question because of its potential business benefits. Companies
pation and discussions. Enterprise social networking tools, like
now clamor to get their messages out through these sites, so
consumer Web 2.0 counterparts, tend to be very easy to dive
the challenge for CSOs is to find the right balance between
into and start using, with users relying on the community for
security and usability.”
guidance and encouragement.
POST-HIERARCHY: Opening
to Community
In part, the visibility of information in enterprise social network-
the Doors
ing drives much of the security concern. But that visibility also
provides transparency for the community using the tools, as
well as managers and security staff. As with any electronic
Notwithstanding the perceived benefits, in many companies
tool, it is incumbent on the organization to properly deploy
there has been ingrained resistance to emulating consumer-
and manage the technology to minimize any risk, and to train
oriented Web 2.0 technologies that provide users with so much
employees in how to use it.
freedom. As Dion Hinchcliffe noted in his Enterprise Web 2.0
blog, IT systems “are still too structured, rigid, and make too
many upfront assumptions to enable effective levels of innovation, viral adoption, and increases in productivity. ”
Conclusion
A massive increase in real-time information is transforming
business, society, education and every facet of our daily lives.
But letting go of such structure may not be easy. In part that’s
Enterprise social networks serve to expand an organization’s
because IT and corporate management in general are more
ability to filter, funnel, and analyze the growing amounts of
accustomed to rigid hierarchical lines of management, whereas
available information, to better determine what is useful to the
social networking thrives on community governance.
execution of the business. Not only do these tools make the
“One huge concern I hear is, ‘What if people start posting
inappropriate content?’” said Chipalkatti. “But there really is
no difference than with what people can do in an email today.
In the two to three years of observing people who have
adopted enterprise social networking, we don’t see that
behavior because professional behavior governs usage.”
organization smarter, but they accelerate the decision-making
process. Those companies that resist and limit access to social
networks are limiting the potential of their employees and
risking their ability to compete in a new marketplace where
customers, prospects, partners and competitors are already
exchanging information.
To find out more visit our website at
verizonbusiness.com/thinkforward.
© 2010 Verizon. All Rights Reserved. WP14453 4/10
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