How to Avoid The Big Failure of Enterprise 2.0 Social Business
Thanks to Zite (my favorite iPad magazine), last week I read one of the best blog entries that I've read in a while. Judging by the number of retweets and comments, it looks like a lot of people felt the same way. It was written by a social business practitioner who I met about 2 years ago: Laurie Buczek. Laurie called her post: "The Big Failure of Enteprirse 2.0 Social Business".
Laurie highlights the biggest challenge that most enterprises run into as they go into a path to become a social business: end-user adoption. This is something that I say almost every day with all types of organizations. As companies look to become a social business it's clear that choosing one vendor over another won't necessarily guarantee their success, rather it's about how the company is going to drive end-user adoption. After all, it's social software and without any users its hard to derive value.
Laurie summarizes the big failure of Enterprise 2.0 Social Business as:
The big failure of social business is a lack of integration of social tools into the collaborative workflow.
Ever since I started becoming more and more involved with social media for the enterprise, I've been promoting integration as the key to become a successful social business. At work I, of course, use our own social media platform. One of the things that's been key to drive my engagement and participation in that platform is all the integration points it makes available.
Laurie states in her blog "the biggest failure is the lack of workflow integration to drive culture change" and that's why I believe a social everywhere strategy is necessary as that is the easiest way to drive culture change. One of the examples that Laurie uses is adoption of Google+. While a lot of people seemed enamored with Google+, I still don't feel engaged in that social network. Perhaps it's because I don't use the web interface for GMail (I read my gmail on my iPhone or using Mac's Mail application) or any of the other services from Google such as Google Docs. I do use Google Search but I'm only in the google.com domain for 5-10 seconds as I wait for the search results to come back.
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