The Benefits of Social Software Platforms for Businesses

Many businesses of different sizes and in all kinds of sectors have come to realize the potential of new forms of collaboration and have started to utilize Social Software Platforms for various purposes. Having described Social Software Platforms in my last post, I now want to try and summarize their main benefits for businesses along the two key words of this blog’s title: Connect and Collaborate.

1. CONNECT … with people and information

Social Software Platforms enable their members to find and access relevant people and information, that would otherwise remain hidden to them. Experts for a specific question, task, or project both within and outside of the organisation become visible and accessible.

In other words, people not only get the chance to better connect with their colleagues around them, they also have the possibility to make valuable connections to more distant members of the organisation and even to external people. Moreover, these platforms offer access to the ‘wisdom of the crowds’, the collective knowledge pool of employees, customers, partners, communities, etc. 

On these platforms people can post questions openly and receive answers from any knowledgeable contributor. Alternatively, these platforms allow people to effectively search for information or relevant people on a specific topic. Since all members of a social software platform can generate content on it in form of blog entries, wiki contributions, status or profile updates, etc., they all effectively share their knowledge and experience in a way that is easily consultable for the other members.

The possibility to connect with a variety of relevant people and information in this way can have strong learning effects for the organisation. People can benefit from existing experiences and don’t have to ‘reinvent the wheel’ each time they are facing a task. Further, they can collect immediate feedback and support on their work from a variety of sources such as colleagues, customers, or partners.

Such learning improves overall productivity, but it also improves innovation capabilities of the business. Companies can discover truly novel ideas for products and processes by connecting with distant and external sources of knowledge. Such an open innovation approach has proven very successful for many companies as more distant employees, customers, communities or business partners hold different knowledge and different perspectives. They are not restricted by past experiences, established routines and localized knowledge. Therefore, they can provide really innovative ideas and are often happy to do so.

2. COLLABORATE … with others effectively

In essence, this means that once the most relevant people for a task have connected, they can effectively work together on social software platforms. Through co-authoring they can combine ideas and knowledge directly to produce collaborative documents, presentations, concepts, etc. This can put an effective end to individual work in isolation without feedback or help; an end to documents that are sent around as email attachments and edited by multiple people separately, causing problems of simultaneous editing and version control.

Even if many tasks are still performed individually, members of a social software platform can stay up-to-date about what others are doing. This allows them to better understand and synchronize their individual efforts, working in unison instead of uncoordinated isolation. Clearly this becomes an even larger benefit if people are locally dispersed by buildings, cities, or even countries within an organisation or beyond.

A final benefit has to do with communication. Social Software Platforms allow businesses to move from single channel communication to an open dialogue. On the one hand this makes communication more efficient: messages such as tasks, strategies or visions can be spread broader but at the same time more directly, thereby avoiding misunderstandings and unintended implementation. On the other hand they give a voice to multiple stakeholders: employees but also customers and other external partners can provide direct feedback to new information and actively engage in a dialogue. It is now generally accepted that giving these stakeholders a voice (the possibility to contribute and comment on business affairs) strongly enhances their motivation, productivity, and general perceptions towards the organisation. In fact, such a dialogue is usually already happening in various online communities, blogs, and news-sites on the web. In many cases, these are already the places where products are rated, brands are hyped or smashed, and the most innovative ideas are discussed. Any company would be well advised to actively participate in these dialogues, to benefit from them and try to influence them in their favour.

The benefits for businesses in short:

• Finding relevant people and information for tasks
• Learning effects and enhanced productivity
• Improved innovation capabilities
• Effectively working together
• Synchronizing individual efforts
• Improved communication in form of an open dialogue

These benefits can materialize both internally, among employees, teams, functions or divisions of an organization, and externally, in collaboration with customers, business partners, communities and others. In both these spheres, I focus on three business areas, in which social software platforms can have a great impact:

1. Day-to-day work
2. Innovation 
3. Marketing & Customer Relations

 

I am planning to write more on the internal/external spheres of collaboration, the three business areas, and the benefits that can be achieved. I do think these can help to structure our thoughts when discussing these topics.