The Business Value of Social Software

Almost every company is either thinking about or implementing some form of social software solution in their organization. Why? Because business is social – companies don’t create products, close deals or make service calls — people do. Leading adopters already see the tremendous potential of social software as the tool for improving business performance in the workplace – inside and out.
How? By connecting talent, teams and knowledge throughout the entire organization; across geographies, time zones and hierarchical boundaries. This new level of transparency leads to heightened corporate capacity, problem solving and innovation.

The Business Value of Social Software
An organization’s business value lies with its most important asset – its people. This is quite simply because companies don’t create products, close deals or make service calls – people do.

By embracing social software in the workplace, managers can start to facilitate, promote and even reward social interactions that drive business transactions for the company. This new behaviour is already beginning to shift the focus of management teams away from being gatekeepers to being enablers – to helping their teams to build relationships, share knowledge and solve business problems that lead to increased business flow and financial transactions.

But, as we all know, managing people is hard. This is because each individual has a different and very specific set of skills, experience, education, viewpoints and beliefs. And in most cases, people work together on teams that bring together diverse personalities and skill sets.
Incrementally then, we can assume that if managing people is hard, managing teams is harder still.

Teams drive organizational progress. Yet forming and leading high-performance teams is one of the most complex challenges facing any leader.

This becomes even more difficult when your teams are:
• Cross functional
• Globally dispersed across different locations and time zones
• Multi-generational (Net Gens, Gen Xers and Baby Boomers)
• Culturally diverse
• Mobile

The growing trend is toward a new virtual world of team work. As you might remember from our previous editorial piece, the new mobile numbers are massive, with over 878 million mobile knowledge workers currently toiling away on laptops, handhelds and cell phones (IDC).

So obviously, people need the right tools to work together as part of a high performance team.

Email – A Poor Substitute
Many organizations today still struggle with isolated knowledge workers, a limited understanding of organizational expertise and a lack of adhered to best practices. Information barriers hamper productivity, decrease employee awareness and cripple the pace of innovation with duplicated efforts and wasted time.

This is where online social software holds huge potential, both inside and outside the organization. Adopting and implementing social software for business is not a new concept. In fact, we’ve all been networking for decades – long before anyone ever heard of Facebook or Linked-In.

Every business today is based on building relationships. The quality and impact of your work and the profitability of your business depends upon relationships – with customers, co-workers, and competitors; with suppliers, distributors, and support services; with direct reports, senior managers and boards.

From the telephone conversations we have with our customers to the face to face meetings we have in the conference room to the business conversations we have in the hallway and after work. These are all early forms of social networking in the workplace that are still being used today.

With over 90 billion emails being sent daily, email is clearly the number one social networking tool being used today. It’s an ineffectual tool. According to Gartner survey, the average knowledge worker wastes 20% of their day responding, managing and organizing their email.
Our dependency on email as a primary communications and team collaboration tool for business is highly problematic.

Why can’t we use the cool and easy to use tools we have at home in the office?
Many companies are now starting to adopt social software tools in an effort to improve morale, increase business productivity and gain competitive advantage.

But consumer social tools and business social tools are quite different – night and day. Business owners need powerful and integrated solutions that offer web content management, collaboration and social networking tools in a single package. Corporate solutions also have to be secure, extensible and customizable, with support for Open API’s, single sign-on and robust monitoring and measurement tools.

Business users also need browser, email, desktop and mobility support for all of their social software applications that are used in the office – to support the multiple ways that employees work. Social software solutions, in other words, need to support the way people work – and the way corporations work – including adhering to corporate policies, procedures and guidelines.

Creating a Sense of Community
At IGLOO, we see a definite trend emerging – organizations leveraging social software to create a sense of community across their entire company; inside and out. Industry experts have already segmented this trend into two distinct categorizes – workplace and marketplace communities.

Workplace Communities are internally focused social software solutions that connect the workforce across geographically dispersed project teams, departments and business units. Companies set up workplace communities using social software solutions to improve team productivity, build corporate capacity and drive employee engagement – inside the firewall.
Marketplace Communities are externally focused social software solutions used to extend collaboration, knowledge sharing and networking beyond the corporate firewall to their prospects, customers, partners and suppliers. Many companies are using social software sites like Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In to raise brand awareness and attract new talent to their organizations.

Inside or out, it’s all about using social software to create powerful connections between people, processes and information to achieve business results.

Social Software – Redefining Team Collaboration
Fostering a work culture that values and cultivates collaboration is the backbone of team building. True to the Web 2.0 philosophy, the values of collaboration and cooperation lie at the heart of today’s high performance teams.

Social software tools change the way; the speed; and the options by which information is exchanged by team members.

By leveraging social software tools, managers can quickly and easily set up and coordinate project teams to meet deadlines, deliver results and develop best practices along the way.
What follows are some very basic tips on how to use social software to help you foster high performance teams.

1. Make your team’s expertise highly transparent. Encourage your team members to fill out their business profiles in detail so that you can align and cross reference areas of expertise, interest and experience. This will also give your team the ability to network based on shared experience and interests, as well as opportunities to directly contact one another to resolve issues, get fast answers to pressing questions and remove potential project bottlenecks.
2. Ensure from the outset that you establish high levels of communication with your team. This is crucial because output is the result of shared dependencies and establishing trust is based on open communications. According to Forrester, open communication is often associated with high performance.
   Social software for business places a loaded arsenal of bi-directional communications mechanisms at your fingertips that far exceed email-based collaboration. From blogs and online discussion forums to rating, commenting and sharing, the more outlets you give your team, the better. For example, the ability to comment on blogs enables you to create invaluable opportunities for team members to give and receive feedback.
3. Move away from traditional, hierarchical organizational models that can foster distrust and a competitive, unproductive team environment. Instead, concentrate on cooperative models for team performance. Using a virtual team work space creates a sense of focus for all of your team members and contextualizes blogs, wikis, members and documentation within the project itself. You can also use this space to monitor the contributions each team member is making on an individual basis.
4. Make sure that everyone has a clearly defined role on your team. Engagement and involvement are key to your team’s success. Team members need to feel as though they are in “partnership” with each other. Social software enables you to build teams and assign roles on the fly. Because individual contributions are accessible to the team, respect can be earned and key contributors recognized and rewarded, keeping your team involved and motivated.
5. Encourage collaborative leadership models within your organization. Advocacy within your organization is as important as advocacy beyond the firewall to encourage customer engagement. Your executive management team should visibly display their leadership with frequent and authentic communication. Leading by example, management can test drive social media tools including blogs, podcasts, broadcasts and videos. Social software delivers great tools for quickly and easily disseminating information that gives those on the receiving end the opportunity to respond.
6. Collect and distribute your best practices. One of the key benefits to a social software system is the ability to establish, store and share standard operating procedures to prevent duplicated efforts and ensure that projects stay on schedule. Social computing tools like wikis can provide a valuable piece of the high performance team puzzle. Wikis are web pages that any member of your team can create and edit quickly and easily. Content is created, shared and updated by a community of users. Wikis are ideal for aggregating and sharing standard operating procedures within teams, across departments and branch offices or the entire organization.
7. Appeal to the guidance of professionals to help to educate your team members. As social software tools gain greater acceptance among knowledge workers, guidance from experts in this field is necessary to ensure that organizations realize value from their investment. IGLOO offers a Community Playbook, a collection of proven social software implementation methodologies, as part of its customer engagement strategy.
8. Provide a consistent level of resources and support. One of the best ways to diminish motivation and hamper productivity is to expect people to perform without the tools and resources they need to deliver real results. Make sure that everyone on your team has access to the information and the tools (and the information about these tools) they need to perform.

Measuring Return on Investment
The business value of these emerging social tools has yet to be fully realized by most organizations. ROI from a social context is not about “monetization” but measuring the incremental value it brings to your business.

When considering the business value of your investment in social software solutions, consider the following questions:

1. Do you get new products or services to market – faster?
2. Are their resulting cost reductions in existing business units because of improved processes and communications?
3. Has the community improved knowledge sharing? (i.e., best practices and tools that improve the quality of processes, products, or services)
4. Are you better connected to your customers? And are they more satisfied? Resulting in higher customer retention and/or minimized support costs.
5. Has sharing increased rate of innovation? New product improvements, methodologies and ideas?

Discover the tremendous business value of social software for business. Complete our ROI Calculator and find out what your return on investment would be.
www.igloosoftware.com/solutions/challenge.

In Conclusion
Collaborative expertise is the new key qualifier for business success. Social software is revolutionizing the workplace by replacing structured, hierarchical teams with cross-functional, collaborative high performance teams and traditional ineffectual methods of communication like email with collaborative workspaces, wikis, blogs, discussion forums, profiles, messaging, and more. The business value of social software should be measured according to how effectively your teams are performing, and how well your overall business units are doing to meet the business challenges they are working to address.

Discover More
It’s as easy as 1-2-3:

1. Contact us for a free online session with a Community Architect. For more information: 1-877-664-4566 or sales@igloosoftware.com.
2. Attend an upcoming webinar: The Business Value of Social Software, visit our website: www.igloosftware.com/calendar.
3. Complete our ROI Calculator and discover the value of social software for your business: www.igloosoftware.com/solutions/challenge.