Enterprise social networks raise employee engagement levels to new heights, claim their advocates – making them a powerful internal marketing tool. Andy Sivell reports
Common sense and best practice dictate that effective brand-building and rebrands should accurately reflect attitudes within the whole organisation. But we all know that isn’t always the case. The recent rise and rise of social media, however, has brought with it a new dimension to internal engagement. Enterprise social networks actively encourage a free-flow of ideas – and communication – across all levels of an organisation. When that happens it’s difficult to simply impose an arbitrary set of brand values. People will talk.
Enterprise social what?
First of all, what are enterprise social media platforms? Imagine Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn rolled into one, with document and application sharing facilities, and you just about have it. The key difference here is that where traditional intranets and other enterprise software tend to impose structure prior to use, enterprise networks tend to encourage use prior to providing structure. They allow users within the same or linked organisations to collaborate with one another in a very intuitive manner, by swapping files, creating groups, monitoring information streams, and generally making it easy to cut through the clutter to focus only on what is of immediate interest to them.
Most of the current crop of software providers share the usual preoccupation with onomatopoeia and one-word product names, like Yammer, Chatter and Huddle. Many share similar features. However all are engaged in a frenzied land-grab, as early adopters are already being elbowed aside by mainstream users.
Yammer, Tibbr and Salesforce’s Chatter are the three leading platforms, but there are over a dozen more, including Huddle, which was chosen by the Financial Times in 2010 as being among its top 10 most promising British start-ups. Yammer already claims it’s being used by more than 80 per cent of Fortune 500 companies. That’s more than three million users.
Creativity and brand buy-in
Actively encouraging a free-flow of information, while providing users with the means to filter what they see, breaks down barriers and helps foster creativity. Chatter’s homepage features a video of DMGT chairman Lord Rothermere in which he states that in the first three months of using the platform, “I’ve had more innovative ideas from people in the company than I’ve had in the last 12.”
Yammer’s general manager EMEA, Georg Ell, cites the example of a junior employee at the then recently-merged Deutsche Post DHL who used Yammer to post ideas on how the two sides of the business might better share information. It quickly caught the eye of the group chief executive, who promptly flew him to Bonn to present his ideas to the board.
Set in that context it’s perhaps easy to see why social enterprise platforms are as popular from the top down as they are from the ground up. Key to that success though, is voluntary adoption.
“An enterprise social network needs to be something that staff choose to use,” says Ell. “They can all too easily choose to move away and you’ll never hear about it. They won’t complain. They’ll just stop.”
Simon O’Kane, vice president enterprise at Huddle, concurs. “If a task is going to be harder [using Huddle] than sending an email, they’ll probably send an email.”
What’s clear is that if employees feel comfortable enough to freely exchange ideas, they’ll also feel comfortable enough to openly discuss brand values – which is an open invitation to gain buy-in. Giam Swiegers, CEO of Deloitte Australia, recounts how a presentation that he gave on Yammer was challenged by an employee based in their Melbourne office. The junior analyst disagreed with Swiegers’ view and politely told him so. A public debate followed online.
“The next morning quite a few people chatted with me about how remarkable it was that Yammer had flattened the organisation,” says Swiegers. “This was a first-year analyst. It’s what we want. I’d much rather have him debate with me than go to the pub and tell his mates that he doesn’t agree.”
Return on investment
Ell is quick to point out that enterprise social media networks bring measurable benefit to organisations, citing a total economic impact (TEI) survey conducted by Forrester Consulting in 2011. It concluded that Yammer yielded a risk-adjusted ROI of 365 per cent, with a payback period of 4.3 months.
According to Forrester, the next big opportunities for enterprise are innovation, collective decision-making, and better access to information and expertise across geographic and organisational boundaries. Ell compares the findings to another survey, Gallup’s ‘2011 Employee Engagement Index’, which received widespread press coverage across the Atlantic when it revealed that 71 per cent of American workers were currently either ‘not engaged’ or ‘actively disengaged’ from their jobs.
The future
Unsurprisingly, the simplicity of enterprise social networks is married to sophisticated software, and pace of development is rapid. Yammer alone claims to have introduced over 80 product innovations in just three years.
The challenge they all face is to combine an easy-to-use interface with access to all of the tools, documents formats and applications that a typical employee will use in a day – regardless of their provenance. Sriram Chakravarthy, senior director products and engineering at Tibco – the company behind social enterprise network Tibbr – provides an insight into the scale of the problem.
“They say the average Fortune 500 employee touches about nine different applications to get their work done. So we said, ‘How do we get the relevant bits of information from all of these apps to come to you, so that you can consume them in the same way that you consume your Facebook stream?’”
Tibco was already in the business of providing infrastructure software for large companies when it launched Tibbr in January 2011. Tibbr can be accessed via smartphone and tablet devices, and newly launched Tibbr GEO, a geo-location data service enables users to access relevant information based on where they are.
“Employees don’t necessarily want to check-in and broadcast where they are,” says Chakravarthy. “What they’re interested in is (any) interesting bits of information around them. Now, instead of you checking-in and announcing where you are, your location checks in to you and gives you information that’s relevant to you.” He uses as an example an airport or warehouse manager who is able to see information on their phone about each gate or isle as they walk past.
Huddle has been equally busy, recently launching an Unlimited Enterprise Edition. It includes a ‘light user’ concept that allows organisations to add internal or external collaborators to a group for free, so that they may view documents. Another provider, Socialtext, has a dashboard featuring a cross between a pie chart and a Venn diagram that categorises all experts around you. It’s called Socialtext 360.
Big price tag?
So are enterprise social networks the sole preserve of big brands with deep pockets?
Prices start from being free – as in the case of Yammer’s freemium option (with reduced functionality). Prices for paid-for versions range from little over £3 to £30 per user per month, but will more than likely come down in the future.
While most providers are inevitably focussed on signing-up multinationals with thousands of employees, among the early-adopters are several smaller companies with interesting stories.
The key to successful deployment, says Ell, is to ignore the technology. “Know thyself. Be very clear (about) how you do business today. What would you like to do? How would you like to be, absent of constraints of cost or technology? People need to feel encouraged to ask and answer questions. What you really want is the network effect. That enables the discovery of more value throughout the organisation.” Or, as O’Kane’s says, “It’s about doing work rather than talking about work.”
Top tips
1. Make sure it’s easy to use. Avoid platforms that require even half day of training. It needs to be intuitive and familiar to users otherwise they will revert to email.
2. Give everyone access. Adopt it across the company at all levels and every location. Avoid silos. Make sure it’s available via PC, Mac, smartphone or tablet.
3. Have a flexible plan. Users are constantly finding new ways of using social networks and discovering unexpected benefits.
4. Ensure compatibility. Simply sharing files is not the same as collaborating, it’s just sophisticated email. Ensure that your chosen platform extends, and never hinders, the way your staff work by sharing compatibility with favoured apps and file formats (see point 1).
5. Ensure security, scalability and uptime. Choose a platform that is secure, manageable, reliable, and that can grow with your organisation.
