When we think about social networks, the big 3 come to mind: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These sites were built or mostly evolved as consumer platforms. The audience is everyone in the world and the revenue model is commerce – through advertising or sales of products/services. Consumer social media (or social commerce) is all about the power of the network and “word-of -mouth” marketing.
More and more organizations want to emulate these consumer social networks inside their network of employees, suppliers, partners, and customers — creating a “Facebook for the Enterprise”. More and more organizations also want the same mobility and convenience of consumer social technology on any device. However, what many of these corporations don’t realize is that there’s a difference between external social media and corporate social business. As the below diagram shows, the former is more public outside the firewall while the latter is of course inside the firewall.
Social business (some still refer to it as Enterprise 2.0) involves ideas, knowledge, conversations, business activities, documents, profiles, rich media, and more. While this same type of content may also be part of the consumer social web, the big difference with social business content is that much of it requires certain legal, risk, or compliance policies that only exist within the enterprise. Security is also another concern when considering social technology. Do users have access to what they should have access to? Are social events security trimmed so that only users who have access to document see the associated activities and conversations shared into the stream? Aside from the security or compliance concerns, there are also technology infrastructure and integration challenges to consider. Furthermore, inside any organization you have limited budgets, projects, and resources and the need to balance those against managing the cultural change that social technology can enable. At the end of the day, social within the enterprise has a total cost of ownership to consider. It’s the nature of the corporation and simply part of doing business in many industries today. There’s just no getting around these corporate hurdles. The important thing is that you understand these considerations when selecting a social business application as you embark on your journey in becoming a “social enterprise”.
