Enterprise Social Networks (ESN)

Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is the social enterprise. Melanie Wheeler (@tweetwheeler) pointed out at the beginning of this year’s Social Media in the Large Enterprise conference: business has been social for a long time, it just hasn’t been as visible as it is now.

Social necessarily means human, and this resonates with the need of understanding human behaviour when it comes to finding digital solutions for any organization. At SMiLE discussions were tinted by the tension between, on the one hand, building on the past and, on the other, using new technology to help organizations succeed. I felt lucky to join the select group of practitioners along with my IABC colleagues to discuss all things social. If you want to know how the day went, just take a look at #SMiLELondon on Storify .

If you weren’t there and if like me, your day job goes beyond digital communications, you might be interested in three ideas that I think apply to all communications work:

1. Culture still eats strategy and platforms for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Everyday.

The case studies presented, from industries as varied as construction, professional services and soft drinks, highlighted that we need to understand the culture of a company to make any communications solutions add value. Culture understood through people’s behaviour. So if you want to influence your company start with people.

As Marie Wallace from IBM demonstrated, when you base analytics on behaviour, the business case for your work becomes easy and you can make changes that matter. Which takes me to the second point:

There was a time, before the onset of the internet, when news was controlled by relatively few media outlets. To influence the news agenda your only choice was to go through one of these channels, and the news corporation themselves would be the arbitrary judge of whether your story was newsworthy or not.

The world has moved on considerably since these times, with social or ‘web 2.0′ technologies like Twitter and WordPress giving voice to literally anyone with a desire to express something, however profound or pedestrian it may be. We have seen the extent to which these new found liberties have changed society, from the arab spring risings to the London riots.

In a nutshell, we have become uber-connected. We are not bound by physical location, language or even time anymore – anyone can connect with anyone else. The long term effect of this inter-connectedness remains to be seen. Optimists predict a world of infinite possibility, pessimists see a dystopia around the corner. One powerful consequence however is the liberation of the individual and the new found power to not only publish but to find an audience. People can become influential almost single-handedly.

Large business has remained largely unscathed by all this recent technology change. Technology has had a seismic effect on business processes from automated supply chains to the advent of email and desktop publishing, but social and web 2.0 technologies have done little to infiltrate their ways in to large corporations and how employees behave.

This is all set to change. With Microsoft acquiring Yammer last year, the new Microsoft Office platform (called Office 365) has social networking threaded throughout it. Facebook are due to release their ‘Facebook at Work’ product and a plethora of other vendors such as Jive, Zimbra and IBM Connections are all permeating their ways into organisations. Social networks in business looks to be the next big thing.