As social media has been adopted by the general public, it has also been adopted by enterprises for internal use. In this context, social media creates a community of information sharing and allows for collaboration across the organization. Enterprise social media can involve wikis, tags, and links grouping users and content. For example, a group of software engineers in a company can tag an important research report, looked at by a vice president, and a conversation begins around the article. The major goal of Enterprise social media is to provide rapid and agile collaboration. Enterprise social media expands upon the capabilities of collaboration and community management software by creating a more informal network that can allow people from different departments to exchange ideas.
Community management refers to a collection of people who share a common interest and often collaborate with one another for some stated business purpose. Organized communities provide the means for stimulating innovation, sharing insights, nurturing new ideas, and strengthening social connections. A variety of technologies are used to support Communities, such as collaboration environments, enterprise social networks, content management systems, and learning management systems.
Facilitating the development of communities requires a common vision and mission, strong trust-based relationships between the leaders, defining the optimal organization and governance structures, and formalizing the processes for collecting, storing, and sharing the knowledge generated by the community.
The value of enterprise social media comes from the speed of ideas being shared. Innovation and creative problem solving come from open exchanges between people, and enterprise social media creates networks in which an enterprise can help employees to focus on these tasks as goals and part of company culture. Enterprise social media can also be used to disperse knowledge throughout a company and speed the transfer and adoption of best practices or new protocol.
Iknow has deep experience in managing social technology projects from gathering initial requirements, to creation of authoring tools, to design of interactive web content, to connection with various social networking sites, to design of user interface, to ensuring a smooth rollout and a to customization and deployment of software. Social technology software can be combined with tools such as enterprise content management, customer relations management, social media monitoring, and enterprise capture.
Iknow has completed a number of projects in both public and enterprise social media, from helping an organization roll out a new social networking strategy for understanding problems with their products, to using wikis in a company to gather requirements for creating taxonomy, and continuing the discussion as it was being built.