Corporate Social Networks Take Advantage of Their Captive Audience

Organizations often tend to ignore the market sample most easily accessible to them: their own employees. When expanded to include the entire business 'ecosystem' - suppliers, lenders, investors, customers, et al - they have a rich segment with which to experiment and from which to draw insights.

Internal social networks are becoming an increasingly fertile source of new ideas and improved performance, as the following article explains. The 'historical' antecedent was knowledge networks, way back 10 to 15 years ago. The problem was that the systems for sharing and for capturing whatever might be learned were kludgy. There was also some hesitancy about the benefits of exposing too much of one's 'own' information, especially in the absence of financial and organizational incentives to do so and sometimes, in the face of unintended but explicit disincentives. 

Much of that has now changed. The familiarity and ease of use with which most employees address social networks externally (and voluntarily) can be transferred in-house. Gamification can be introduced using reputation points or even financial rewards to encourage desired behaviors.

The dangers are that employees are a skewed and biased sample; in many companies their education and socio-economic level may be considerably different from that of their target customers. In addition, the flip side of gamification is that people know they are being gamed - and that they are being watched, recorded and analyzed. All of this can render the information gathered suspect - if it is treated as broadly representative of the wider world. But if the intelligence gathered and the performance engendered is regarded, appropriately, as one more data point in an on-going effort to learn and grow, there is value, as the Greek philosophers put it, in 'knowing thyself.' JL

Hannah Kuechler reports in the Financial Times:

From taste tests on a new burger to making the sprawling arms of the European Commission work together, organisations are using internal social networks to boost productivity, flatten management structures and monitor who makes the real decisions.

San Francisco-based companies such as Yammer, acquired by Microsoft for $1.2bn last year, and Jive, as well as Salesforce.com’s Chatter service, are connecting up employees around the world while allowing managers to watch who is talking to whom and what the conversations are about.The McKinsey Global Institute estimated that companies could save $900bn to $1.3tn each year by using social technologies. Up to 80 per cent of the value of social media may not have yet been captured as people focus on targeted marketing on consumer networks such as Facebook and Twitter, rather than the transformative data that can be gleaned from employees using networks at work, according to Deloitte.

Adam Pisoni, co-founder and chief technology officer at Yammer, said corporate social networks would lead to a “fundamental rewiring of companies” to look more like networks.

“The world has formed a giant network and companies are struggling to keep up because they have remained rigid hierarchies,” he said. “While the way we share and interact has been revolutionised in our personal lives, companies have not changed since we designed them a hundred years ago for an industrial revolution.”
Red Robin, the US fast-food chain, used to take 18 months to create a burger, waiting for sales figures to come in from small trials, he said. But by putting the servers in a Yammer group with the people who developed the burger, they could quickly share customer responses in the restaurant, cutting the gestation period to four weeks.
Mike Grafham, head of customer success at Yammer, said even the European Commission, the “ultimate bureaucratic institution”, had embraced internal social networking. “Something like 100 people need to be involved in a conversation on fish farming or the common agricultural policy. This is a fantastic mechanism to finding people that have the knowledge.”
Maria Podlasek-Ziegler, the commission’s directorate general for education and culture, was so excited about building networks across the 38,000-strong organisation, she wrote a blog post comparing using Yammer to falling in love.

Westfield, the shopping centre company, uses Yammer to plan its annual X Factor live tour around Australia, making employees watch in real time how the centre planned the event and challenged them to improve it at their site. During the London 2012 Olympics, Gatwick airport introduced Yammer to make sure everyone from the chief executive to the security staff knew how the airport was operating in real time.

Nathan Rawlins, vice-president of productivity at Jive, said companies see an average of a 15 per cent increase in productivity when using his service.
“A group in the UK may be trying to solve the same problem as a group in Mexico – bringing the conversation into a social network means it can be shared and discovered and people are less likely to reinvent the wheel,” he said, adding problems could get solved in other time zones while staff were sleeping. Some of the most useful interactions can be tapping the knowledge from people’s past jobs, he said.
While executives get excited about having a bird’s-eye view of the company, some employees are reluctant to join such services, preferring email or even talking face-to-face – and worrying about the lack of privacy.
To encourage them on to the network, Jive gives out ‘reputation points’.
“There is very, very deep gamification which can give people the incentives for very specific activities you want them to perform,” he said. “It is amazing how people are driven by this capability.”
Salesforce.com estimates use of its Chatter service has reduced email volume by a third, as it integrates everything from approval buttons to machines on the factory floor into the social network.

Peter Coffee, vice-president of platform research at Chatter, said General Electric was using the service to cut the time spent responding to machine errors. “A machine doesn’t need to turn on a red light, it just updates the right conversation,” he said.

“This takes it from a one week response time in a case surrounding a jet engine to bringing it down to single minutes as Chatter could swarm the appropriate expertise immediately,” he said.

Once enough employees are communicating on the platform, it can become a rich data set for managers to spot how the most effective individuals and teams operate, which will eventually become a deep history of communication in the company.

DataSift, which has focused on analysing data from social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, sees corporate social networks as the next big opportunity. After raising another $40m this week, Nick Halstead, founder, said he believed DataSift could become a $1bn company by analysing enterprise data.

“We have a huge number of customers desperate for us not only to process and understand customers on social media but to integrate data from their business,” he said. “Internal forums, instant messaging networks, wherever there is discussion going on . . . we can analyse it.”