Why Are So Few Internal Social Networks Deemed A Success? Despite internal social networks gaining in popularity, few of them can be regarded as successes.
That is at least the finding of a new report by Information Week. The report, called Rebooting the Antisocial Network found that just 13% of IT professionals believe their internal social networks have been a success. The research reveals that whilst many companies employ social networking tools internally, the majority of users still seem to prefer using public tools such as Facebook and LinkedIn than their corporate network. Of course the positive side of this is that at least users are using social tools, and thus training themselves in the methods and philosophies of social sharing.
“We have tried for over four years to push social networking in the enterprise,” says the senior IT director for a large technology company. The report names user adoption as the single biggest management challenge in terms of social business. How Yammer is killing enterprise social networking. 10 Enterprise Social Networking Obstacles - Social Business - Social. Why wouldn't every organization flock to the vision of an agile, transparent, people-centered, and collaborative team?
Let's count the reasons. I enjoy telling enterprise 2.0 success stories, and I've told a lot of them over the past year. Success stories are seductive because they are much easier to obtain than stories about social business failures. Vendors serve up success stories on a silver platter, whenever they can convince a customer to serve as a reference. I believe the success stories of enterprise social networking are out there, but it's also clear that they aren't as common or as easy to achieve as you might expect. Some of the material below comes from a close reading of the social business predictions for 2012 from Dion Hinchcliffe, executive vice president of strategy at Dachis Group, and the articles he links to. . [ Need help managing your company's image on Facebook? Sadly, there are a few reasons. 1. 2. Facebook has other connotations, however. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Build a private social network that employees will actually use. By Todd R.
Weiss July 30, 2012 06:00 AM ET Computerworld - NASA could land humans on the moon and put exploratory rovers on Mars, but in the last three years, the agency just couldn't find a way to build an internal social network that would encourage its employees to collaborate. Initially launched in early 2009, "SpaceBook" was supposed to be a place where NASA workers could go online anytime to get feedback, learn from others' experiences, collaborate on projects and get to know each other better. But NASA ultimately squashed the effort this June, taking it offline for good. The problem, says Kevin Jones, a consulting social and organizational strategist with NASA's Marshall and Goddard Spaceflight Centers, was that no one sufficiently explained to users what they could do with SpaceBook to move their collaboration forward.
That kind of crash-and-burn experience happens in enterprise IT when plans are established without understanding what users want or need. 5 Reasons Why Corporate Social Tools Fail. The spring has sprung – 5 ways to freshen up your Enterprise Social Network for spring. “Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush.”
Doug Larson. 3 Ways to Mess Up Enterprise Social. Enterprise social networking may still be in early infancy when it comes to adoption, but its popularity couldn’t be larger.
Question: What happens when you have a lot of inexperienced people rushing to use enterprise social networking tools? Answer: A hot mess. So what usually goes wrong? Well, Jessica Stillman from GigaOm wrote a nice piece to help us navigate the difficulties of adopting and implementing social enterprise technology. Product Dump FAIL Once place where companies usually mess up is during product implementation. People don’t like change Ever gone to the grocery store to buy your favorite cereal, only to realize it’s sold out? Hold off on Nuking Old Technology “The idea is to improve productivity, not hinder it” says Lavenda and he’s right.
Less is Best More may be better when it comes to vacation days, desserts, and money (unless you’re Notorious BIG – high five for those caught that). Related. 3 Common Enterprise Social Network Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them) CIO — According to research firm Gartner, 80 percent of social business efforts will fail through 2015— a disconcerting statistic for the 50 percent of all large businesses expected to deploy social networks in the next three years.
A few of the reasons for the failures, according to Gartner Research Director Larry Cannell: adoption and ROI expectations and a lack of executive support, he says. 6 Selfies You Should Not Use on an Enterprise Social Network. Why enterprise social networking fails! There are certainly a lot of new social media tools out there now for enterprise social networking and collaboration, it would seem just about everyone is using the tools for social networking in general with widespread successes and failures.
But why is it that we seem to have so much trouble collaborating internally? I mean, the water cooler conversations, network lunching and the old noticeboard around the office has been around for such a very long a time – why is it that when we add a social media network into the mix so many fail in this space. Of course there are a plethora of tools out there these days for enterprise social networking and probably Yammer is among the most popular, but we really have the internal thing to overcome first. You see one of the first hurdles that really hits staff is the internal policy which is: Do not touch this thing – EVER! There must be clear measurable goals and a purpose to the enterprise networking activities. Do your user research.