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.

Social Software Platforms

I have mentioned new internet-based collaborative services as powerful enablers of networking in previous posts. Let me now try to summarize what these services are, what they have in common, and how they can boost communication and collaboration.

I like to use the term Social Software Platforms (SSP) to describe the whole body of these services. 

On a Social Software Platform, everyone with access can contribute content, 

which is then visible to everyone else with access.

Such content can be text but also other types of media like pictures, videos, or sounds. Examples of popular SSPs are social communities like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, or content platforms like YouTube, Flickr, or the bookmarking service Delicious. These interactive applications have also been termed Web 2.0 technologies.

Two important features of Social Software Platforms are:

1. Co-authoring: participants jointly create content, everyone can contribute something. In the extreme case, multiple contributors work together on the same pages or documents. Wikipedia is the most successful example of productive co-authoring on SSPs.

2. Tagging: participants jointly categorize content. With the help of tags and links, content of any kind is effectively structured and can easily be searched and found. Even the Google search engine is built on this principle and allows us to effectively search and find websites in the vast content pool of the world wide web. The continuous and combined categorizing efforts of many has proven to be much more effective than any single authority could ever be.

Social Software Platforms (SSPs) allow people to interact on a whole new level. 

There is a fundamental difference to more traditional communication channels, such as telephone, email or Instant Messaging. Communication on SSPs is not private between the sender and receiver(s). Instead, communication is visible and searchable for everyone else with access to the SSP. Blogs and Micro-Blogs like Twitter are other examples of Social Service Platforms. Participants don’t have to guess who would be the best person to call or to send an email to in a specific case. They can just broadcast their message or their question to all other participants. The ones that are interested in this message or have an answer to the question can then respond. This can happen within a project team, within a whole organisation, or within an external user-community, to mention some examples. Of course, there is communication, which should remain private and conducted via traditional channels. But much other communication and collaboration can benefit largely from greater visibility.

For the last decade, especially the younger generations have increasingly integrated these interactive services into their daily lives. They appreciate being better connected with each other and they utilize these services as their primary channels and sources to spread and search information and content of all kind. It is only natural for them to demand similarly effective tools at their workplaces.

The above description is an attempt to capture the most basic features of Social Software Platforms. It is not an exhaustive explanation of all elements and functions but I hope it provides a basic understanding even for those of us not too familiar with the various services mentioned here.

Networking

In my last post I wrote about how important the interaction between people is to share and create knowledge. I want to discuss this interaction in more depth because it is exactly what organisations need to improve in order to achieve superior levels of productivity. Networking is the name of the game, and by that I don’t mean the kind of society small-talk in elite business clubs, which many people associate with this term. I understand networking as the interactive process of people exchanging information and knowledge. In this sense it is a very natural activity that we all engage in … only maybe not enough, or not in the most efficient ways, or not in the right situations, or not with the right people. 

Everyone has networks. They are made up of the connections and relationships we have with relatives, friends and colleagues and in extension with their friends, etc. The networks of organisations consist of the combined networks of the individual people in the organisation and span across teams, functions and divisions. Naturally, they also cross organisational boundaries and include business partners, suppliers, customers, investors, interest groups, communities and any other firms. It’s hard to imagine the sheer size and diversity of the combined extended networks of all individuals in an organisation.

But it is rather obvious that these networks hold huge potentials for organisations. People across these networks hold different pieces of information and knowledge. Bringing the right people together for different tasks and problems should be one of the main concerns for organisations of any type. Looking at it like this makes networking a central method of organising work. I think it sounds pretty reasonable to suggest that the people with the most relevant information and knowledge for a particular task should be the ones working on it together. However, the reality in many organisations looks different. Rigid structures and limited interaction too often result in the allocation of tasks to single individuals who might not be equipped with the necessary knowledge. Without adequate means to find and consult experts with the right kind of information and knowledge, how do you expect these people to do a good job?

Information Technology (IT) provides platforms and channels for individuals do engage in networking. Some IT, like telephones, fax or emails, have been around for a long time and have helped organisations to improve their interactive operations. But it’s the newly-emerged internet-based collaborative services that offer the potential to raise networked productivity to a whole new level. These enable us to connect more people, more directly and more efficiently than ever before. What kind of such services there are and how they can be put to best use in which situations will be the topic of many following posts. Important to point out right away, however, is that no technology causes people to interact with each other automatically. Technology is a powerful enabler, but networking will always have to be done by people. Encouraging and managing the networking activities between individuals is the real challenge. It requires organisations to rethink some of its more traditional structures and principles. It requires the cultivation of a supportive culture within the organisation and a guided learning process. Again, issues that will be discussed in this blog.

I hope I could transmit the idea of a networked organisation along with its benefits of flexibility, agility, adaptability and productivity.

Knowledge

Most, if not all the ideas under the heading connect & collaborate have something to do with knowledge. It is really what this is all about. They say we are in the knowledge economy now, and that knowledge, or better the people who carry it, have become the most valuable resource of modern organisations. I happen to think ‘they’ are absolutely right. So I might as well start this blog by putting down some thoughts on the subject of knowledge. Unfortunately, it is a rather difficult concept to grasp. Numerous scholars have dedicated their careers to studying the nature of knowledge, its creation and possible ways of sharing and transferring it. In this blog I really want to refrain from referencing a lot of academics, no matter how inspiring their writings have been to me. Instead, I will try to be as practical and simple as possible in the discussion of these topics.

Coming back to knowledge, there is an important distinction to make between information and knowledge. Information (aka explicit knowledge) is codified, meaning that it is easy to communicate and to share. You might be able to write it down, store it and send it to someone. 

Knowledge (aka tacit knowledge), on the other hand, resides deep inside of individuals and cannot be easily communicated or explained. Think of it as ‘understanding’ or just ‘knowing’, for example how to ride a bike. If our knowledge is an iceberg, information is only the small tip that becomes visible above the water.

Now of course information is important to us. It’s the stuff that we store in databases and send around via e-mails or virtual networks. But it is our deeper knowledge, which enables us to make sense of this information and to put it to productive use. One doesn’t work without the other, and the way they play together is the really interesting story:

When people interact with each other, a lot of exchange and transformation goes on. Information is exchanged; knowledge can be converted into information and passed on; and using new information in novel ways creates new knowledge. It is through this interactive process that people and, in extension, organizations are learning. This ‘learning’ is what organisations should be really interested in – this is where new knowledge is created to fuel innovation processes and to make work more efficient and productive.

About this Blog

In this blog I want to share my thoughts on one of today’s most fundamental business issues:

How can we connect the people that contribute value to our business and how can we make them collaborate most efficiently?

The biggest potential for value creation and productivity today lies in creating connected networks within and outside of organizations to tap into the vast knowledge pool of employees, customers and business partners. Internet-based tools for collaboration and exchange are now so far developed and widely accepted that organizations can make very productive use of them.

All of this, however, is easier said than done. Many organizations struggle with the implementation of such tools and the corresponding principles. I want to contribute to the understanding of the potential business applications and benefits. I hope to engage interested readers in a dialogue about both the opportunities and the challenges of new forms of collaboration for organizations.