Enterprise Social Media is growing up. Those working in the areas of corporate knowledge sharing, knowledge management and workplace collaboration have long known that the systems they help devise and implement can drive business transformation. Yet the industry has long been dogged by questions about measurable Return On Investment (ROI).

Instinctively, we’ve always known that enterprise social tools help businesses by increasing the opportunities for workers to collaborate more effectively on projects, share knowledge and experience more efficiently, and often help those seeking to get things done to cut through unnecessary bureaucracy by flattening corporate structures. Those of us in the industry know it’s true – we’ve seen it work time and time again – yet a good five or more years since the term “Enterprise 2.0” came into regular use, only now are tough questions about ROI being asked, and answered, in ernest. The second wave of adopters are demanding to see real numbers before taking the leap.

During Social Media in the Enterprise on the 15th of March, we’ll be asking all our contributors tough questions about ROI. What is measurable? What are they measuring? How do the costs and benefits of implementing enterprise social tools compare, directly, with the costs and benefits of parallel activities?

We’ll hear case studies from leading corporations, including Virgin Media, Pfizer, Santander, ASDA, AXA and ING.

We’ll also hear from the consultants who make their living helping their clients better understand the impact enterprise social tools can have on their business processes and, ultimately, their bottom line.

Leading journalists from the field will also be on hand, including Dion Hinchcliffe from Social Computing Magazine, Pete Swabey from Information Age, and Jemima Gibbons who has recently authored a book on Social Media at work, to provide an industry overview, helping us understand how these case studies and the work of leading enterprise consultants fits within the overall picture.

Along the way, we’re hoping to learn more about how the businesses at the forefront of the social business revolution overcome the obstacles to implementation, work towards increased levels of engagement, and sustain positive outcomes. What are the main obstacles and how can they be overcome? What resources are required? What tools are needed? Who “owns” enterprise social media?

Those of us working in enterprise social media know that it can and does transform businesses that embrace it and, on this day, we’ll be rolling up our sleeves and sharing our insights into exactly how we, and others, are making business transformation a reality.

Robin Hamman is Head of Social Media, Headshift
http://www.headshift.com

To find out more about the next Enterprise Social Media event taking place on 15th March 2010 at Olympia, London, visit http://www.enterprisesocialmedia.net/

The success of Web 2.0 consumer web sites teaches us many lessons about how we can improve internal IT and business to consumer online applications. Social technologies have made it progressively easier and easier for people to find each other, share information and collaborate, and we have seen how a singular focus on supporting individual needs can crete powerful network effects when aggregated at scale.

However, these and other lessons have not yet penetrated the world of corporate IT in most companies today, which means expensive, centralised and highly bureaucratic models of co-ordination and collaboration are the norm.

The recession is a perfect time to change this, and to seek leaner, flatter business processes and structures that act as enablers rather than dampeners of innovation and initiative. We simply cannot afford the high-cost models of internal co-ordination that have persisted for so long.

The key to this change is recognising that, in most cases, people power is the best way to get things done, and the role of technology is to augment human cognition and decision making, rather than try to replicate or replace it. People over process. This is why so many employees in companies have reached out to find each other using consumer online social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn in preference to their own internal systems, which do not provide easy ways to network with colleagues to get the job done. Similarly, we have seen people go outside the firewall to initiate wikis for collaboration, or blogs for sense making, or perhaps consumer RSS management tools for information management. Each of these capabilities should be available within a modern corporate IT setting.

We can now take advantage of a range of enterprise-ready social tools, including blogs, wikis, social networking tools, information management tools and so on, and these are generally a great deal cheaper and more effective than older generations of internal IT systems. As people have become accustomed to the simple user experience of Google’s tools or Facebook in their non-work lives, they are increasingly asking why the experience of internal IT in their companies must be so poor, so frustrating and such a time sink. The fact is, it doesn’t need to be that way. It can be smarter, simpler and more delightful to use, and the transition to lightweight social tools can achieve much of what internal IT has promised, but so far failed to deliver.

Lee Bryant is the Director of headshift www.headshift.com

To find out more about the next Enterprise Social Media event taking place on 15th March 2010 at Olympia, London, visit http://www.enterprisesocialmedia.net/

Time to let your staff use social media at work?

It’s a license for staff to waste time.   There’s no control about what they say.   What happens if a customer makes contact with them direct?

Today’s arguments against allowing your staff to use social media at work?  Actually they were pretty much the arguments used by companies to restrict email use in the mid 1990s.

That’s worth bearing in mind as the social media in the office debate rages.

Today it’s received wisdom that email is an essential business tool, and so it will be with social media before too long.

Especially with metrics firm Nielsen showing that communication via social networks overtook communication via email.   And from personal experience, I can now think of several instances of clients messaging me direct on Twitter as opposed to pinging me an email.

However just like with 90s email, the first stage of workplace social media acceptability is to publish dos and don’ts guidelines about what’s allowed.   Even though a survey by Monster showed that 90% of workers are afraid of using Twitter for fear of getting in trouble, a number of firms have done just that.

As with all internal guidelines this ranges from the simple to the ones filled with corporate speak.

For example, Opera, the makers of the Internet browser of the same name, published a series of eight easy to understand rules: Share your thoughts, be active, “we’re not your mama”, don’t give away the farm, check your sources, our friends are your friends, for the squeamish post a disclaimer and use your common sense.

Australian telecoms giant Telstra publicly released guidelines revolving around the ‘three Rs’ – responsibility, respect and representation.   And at the far end of the scale, Canadian broadcaster CBC published criteria that they backtracked on after it caused a fuss, saying that personal blogs couldn’t be used to espouse a partisan political opinion.

The bottom line is though social media isn’t going to go away, it’s part and parcel of today’s Internet environment and it’s what graduates in particular who join your organisations see as second nature.

As with so much of social media, you can either set out the parameters of your involvement now.   Or stick your head in the sand and wait until it comes to you, when you are forced to react to it.

Follow Dirk Singer, Director and Digital Planner at brand communications agency Cow, on Twitter at twitter.com/dirkthecow or visit his blog at http://www.thisisherd.com

The next Enterprise Social Media event takes place on 15th March 2010 at Olympia in London.