Six W’s of Enterprise Social Collaboration

WHAT is Enterprise Social Collaboration?

Enterprise Social Collaboration is the process which brings all key business stakeholders including employees, customers, partners, etc on a single platform and enables them to share information, discuss ideas and allow a seamless flow of knowledge across the enterprise.  

Collaboration is one of the top buzz words in the corporate world today and is considered as a basic element for any organization to sustain and grow.  With most enterprises planning to go Digital, Social Collaboration forms one of the key elements in their strategy.

HOW is it different from Social Networking?

Enterprise Social Collaboration is similar to Social Networking Sites like Facebook in a lot of ways, the key distinction being that while Social Networking is Individual focused, Social Collaboration is more Group Focused and aims at improving inter and intra organizational workgroup communication

WHY is it required?

With organizations expanding globally by leaps and bounds, some of the common issues faced within organizations today include Teams working in Silos, Difficulty in locating experts / information, Information not getting shared across functions,  Lack of Innovation, etc. Social Collaboration Solutions are aimed to overcome these issues and improve business productivity.

WHO is supposed to use it?

Social Collaboration tools can be used by all key business stakeholders. Depending on the business requirements, Social Collaboration solutions can be employed organization wide across locations or can be limited to specific functions like HR, Sales, etc.

WHERE can it be employed?

Social Collaboration Platforms can be employed in the following service areas      

• Social Intranet – Platforms for business stakeholders to collaborate and share information
• Social Customer Service Forums – Online forums for customers to raise queries and service requests
• Social Sales and Marketing – Extension of Customer Service Forums for Marketing & Lead Generation

Social Collaboration Solutions have a variety of use cases like Internal Communications, Employee Engagement, Expertise Location, Innovation, etc

WHICH is the best social collaboration tool for your business?

Currently, the most common medium for collaboration within enterprises is Email. However, there are a lot of social business software available the market, both free and paid, which are specifically meant to improve people-to-people collaboration within organizations. They can be categorized as follows -  

• Specialists – Pure play Social Business Software Vendors like Jive
• Horizontal Platforms – Packaged Solutions like Microsoft, Google
• Vertical Platforms – Extensions to existing platform like Salesforce Chatter

Choosing the best fit tool for your business depends on lot of factors like Organization Culture / Structure, Business Imperatives, Cost, Integration Requirements, etc.  There are free trial versions provided by most product vendors which help in evaluation.

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much”  ― Helen Keller