So, What About Enterprise Social Networking?

Last week's post, Wither Web 2.0 Social Networking? and My 2 Cents., offers my perspective on the murky future of web facing personal social networking, as well as a recipe for its survival. The Enterprise Social Networking market, meanwhile, is growing up more steadily in the wake of its Web 2.0 sibling and, despite some commonalities, faces a different value equation, use cases and market forces.

User vs. Group Orientation

I underscored the main issue with respect to the difference between Web and Enterprise social networking in What Web 2.0 and E2.0 Security Means to Me where the principal issue is one of the difference in user orientation and goals in each.

In Web 2.0 networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, I said

"Incentives to participate are driven by the desire to manage your personal network of friends and colleagues over your lifetime"

whereas in the Enterprise, social networks

"Are organized around content and the people that compose that content. Incentives to participate are driven by the desire (and need) to contribute to and interact with communities of practice and project teams."

So, in Web 2.0 networks, a principal activity is building connections and, in the process, opening up your personal details to an ever expanding group of individuals whom you maintain as friends or colleauges. By contrast, in Enterprise 2.0 social networks, individuals are already connected and the principal focus is goal focused group project and community work.

Building Connections vs. Doing Work

As the user focus and orientation is different in Web facing vs. Enterprise social networking, so are the activities.

Connecting as Friends in Facebook is often an end-point in and of itself. Beyond "friending," the principal activity in Facebook is akin to passing notes in the back of a classroom through a micro-blogging style interface. You share tid-bits and pictures in an effort to maintain communication and build interpersonal relationships over time.

Social networking in the enterprise is just a small wedge of "social software," which is about exchanging, enriching and discovering information content.

It's about work, and enabling work.

That's where the value is derived in E2.0 social software (and hence the financial motivation to deploy the software) vs. W2.0 social networking which is necessarily free for users and has to be buttressed by ads or other revenue sources (as discussed in Wither Web 2.0 Social Networking? and My 2 Cents.).

In the enterprise, the social networking part of social software is more about searching content for people and interacting with people through content - rather than than managing connections, as connections are a starting assumption as well as a function of your community and project membership, rather than the initial means to communicating (as is the case in Web 2.0 social networking).

Social Networking's Bull Cites Reason for Caution, Bearish on Following

I had an opportunity in December to spend some time with Forrester's Oliver Young. We were talking, in general, about Enterprise 2.0, the role of blogs and what's happening in social networking.

As we (Traction Software - with Traction TeamPage) were the first to market with Enterprise Blog facilities, he asked me where enterprise blogging is these days. I responded that its in the same place Social Networking will be in a year - practically indistinguishable from related facilities (blog style authoring, collaborative editing, threaded discussion, rating and so on) embedded in work focused Enterprise 2.0 suites like Traction TeamPage.

My key points in the call were that the hallmark feature of web oriented social networking sites, Connecting and Following, are not nearly as relevant in Enterprise oriented Social Networking platforms. Rather, as discussed in the earlier part of this page, in the enterprise everyone is already connected. Users are more likely to "follow" a project or topic, the best way "connect" is to search content for people, and, most importantly, the focus is getting work done - which is usually a content focused activity (which might happen in discussion, blog or wiki type format - where content is authored or improved over time).

In a followup e-mail the next day, I put it this way:

I shouldn't have to tell the system "I follow Oliver," the system should know that based on what I read, where I comment, where I tag, and the text I post. Traction can do these sorts of things. Its the systems that will put content to work (put hypertext to work, as we say in our tag line) that gets people focused on business activity and, thus, able to contribute consistently as part of workflow rather than in a purely "social" kind of fashion. The output, based on the content and person relationships created through content activities is the real gold mine for exploiting social interactions.

...There are, of course, cases where you want to follow someone for good reason, where you care about everything they write. But, generally speaking, in enterprise, people prefer to be careful about what they follow and its generally around subjects (tags/labels) and on going work activity (projects, programs, departments) than it is on people. The last thing you want is an incentive system encouraging people to follow each other for the sake of it. If you follow people, and want to avoid massive info overload, the key is to break down by person and by subject.

A week later, Oliver posted his very similar conclusions on the matter in The Stupidest Feature in Sharepoint (I bolded the last sentence for emphasis on the conclusion):

Forrester is bullish on the idea [of social networking], and cited social networking as one of two Enterprise 2.0 features that will have a significant impact on the enterprise (wikis were the other — see ZDNet for a thorough writeup)...

At the same time though there is reason for caution, and there is no better example why than the “Add to My Colleagues” feature in SharePoint.

Look, this is not Facebook or LinkedIn where I need to tell the network who of the millions of users I know. This is a group of employees within in company and, despite the fact that I haven’t hit the link, everyone is my colleague. We already have a damn good reason to talk to each other: we are working for the same company and towards the same goals! I don’t need to gently approach you by “colleaging” you first, I can just pick up the phone or send an IM or email. Declaring this affiliation over and over again just wastes time and hurts the credibility of social networking in general. Facebook is about collecting friends. LinkedIn is about building a professional network. Social networking in the enterprise is about getting work done and features like this [Connecting and Following] give both users and execs the impression that these apps are about wasting time.

We've come to very similar conclusions here about the focuse for the social networking aspects of social software in the enterprise.

So, What Is Social Networking? and Where is it Going?

I think the question starts with "What is Social Software?" which I refer to as exchanging, enriching and discovering content.

Exchange and enrichment of content is done through the following types of activities:

- A blog entry or wiki page that shows a link back to referring entries

- Editing pages posted by other individuals

- Commenting on an issue raised or question asked by another individual

- Tagging the content of another individual

- Rating the content of another individual

- Reading, navigating and searching through sets of pages

Beyond the activities above which allow for content exchange and enrichment, interfaces can help exploit the value created by those processes:

- Dashboard style Front Page views which roll up "what's happening" and "what's important."

- Label / Tag clouds that show how frequently tags are used in a given time period

- Ranked search results that account for the amount of comments and tags associated to a page.

- Search results that let you see author clouds along and name clouds along with tag clouds (hence, searching content for people)

- Profile pages that show a cross-section of a given user's contributions

- A view into who has read a given page, with links to their profiles

- A view into what are the most read, highest rated, and most commented on pages

It's this inextricable relationship between content, communication and social networking that forces the two to co-exist within a suite that enables individuals in the enterprise to focus on what's important: Work.

That's where we will continue to place our focus as we build social software and keep our eye on our current tag line: "Beyond blogs and wikis, Traction TeamPage puts hypertext to work."