The Rise of Internal Social Media
So I’m finally getting round to it: my prediction for 2010 is that this is going to be the year when social media becomes a mainstream means of communicating, and, as such, is integrated into the operations of businesses.
I’m sure all of us, in our working lives, have had moments – which drag on into hours or even days – when we can’t proceed with our work becaues we are trying to get to the person who has the last piece of information we need. If you could find that person straight away, that bottleneck would not have happened.
Another example: you are working on a project with people in a number of different departments, on different floors, in different buildings, in different cities or even on the other side of the globe. Defining the spec of the project is taking for ever, as each change has to be checked by each member of the team.
These are two examples of where a good implementation, with full training and buy-in from top to bottom of the corporation, of social media platforms within the corporation could greatly facilitate transparency, information flow, and, as a result, the ease of getting the job done.
Let’s take the first example first. Finding the right person, and getting the information you need from them, can be a very difficult task in a large organisation. Firstly, there may not be a central directory of email addresses or phone numbers; even if there is, it is unlikely to say who the right person for your search is, as it will probably be based on current job title. Using a set of profiles with a search function as your company directory would enable employees to search for particular keywords, and then approach the right person. A product like yammer – a twitter-like system, where you can only talk to people with the same domain name in their registration email, making it secure for confidential discussions – would enable this.
Why is 2010 the year that yammer and similar services will take off? Because a critical mass of people, individuals and companies are using twitter, and the operation of yammer is very close to twitter. I also think that the development of other social tools, such as Google Wave, will help to drive the implementation of yammer.
For the second example (and this was really the inspiration for writing this post), there are a number of collaboration tools around which make the sharing of documents simpler, but I have recently been impressed by the potential of Google Wave. Along with two colleagues, I am working on a very early stage start up idea, and we have so far met twice to discuss it. All planning, apart from those two meetings, has been done in Wave, and this has helped us refine our ideas.
Given the open source and federated nature of the Google Wave system, companies can install the system as part of their intranet – thus removing all concerns about security – and can make use of this fantastic collaborative environment.
Google wave is probably going to be in some form of beta for a long time, but my feeling is that it has great potential for assisting the co-authoring of documents and group planning. As the first users become settled and happy using the Wave in the next few months, I believe that they will drag a large number of additional users on, and the platform will take off.
I believe that the combination of these two systems will rival the introduction of the telephone in the change they effect on the organisation and speed of business operations, and that 2010 will be the year the change happens.
