Enterprise social networks are built by using networks and relations of the workforce of an organization with the people of common business interests, as of the workforce. It helps to break down the business hierarchy and allows the people at different levels to connect and establish a work group around specific projects and tasks.
An enterprise social network can be categorized in two forms,
- Internal social publication, where the employees, colleagues and team members i.e. everyone who works for the organization connects using this platform. They meet, share and discuss details of their work and business operations.
- Then there is an internal social engagement, which welcomes the involvement of external entities like customers, prospects, vendors etc. Suggestions from any of the mentioned individual group can be shared and asked for. Internal discussions can also take place in this type of social integration.
Enterprise social networks helps companies to gain more clients, communicate with them and share the knowledge and anomalies to understand the possible results under a critical condition. Deloitte has been using corporate social networks regressively for consulting purposes whereas various E-commerce portals like eBay, flipkart etc. are making use of enterprise social networks for helping customers to choose the best.
Other benefits which can be drawn from an enterprise social network are:
- Innovations in processes and operations: Crowd-sourced ideas bring in collective efforts on executing an idea and harness the knowledge and wisdom of employees. This gives the advantage of learning newer dimension related to a subject and contributes in building a growing organization with a collection of smart and advanced workforce.
- Decreased inefficiency of operations: It provides the overview of projects progress and operations and helps workforce to understand the status of each. Widespread consultation improves the decision-making capabilities and eliminates friction and choke points to smoothen the workflow. Effective communication reduces the chances of tasks repetition and duplication in order to save efforts.
- Efficient customer support: Enterprise social network can be operated in issue tracking and resolving systems. Online support assists in customer interaction which further boosts the speed of service and improves customer retention. It also helps to create brand awareness and eventually supports brand building.
- Improved contributions: Employees, at individual level, can share their own thoughts in order to bring advantages or efficiency in any of the related business operation or process. Collective study of those ideas can produce an efficient execution strategy and provide an efficient way of practicing the business operations.
However, there are always setbacks with an emerging or new concept which disrupts the absolute adoption. The notion of expecting an enterprise social network as similar to a conventional social network hinders the adoption of this concept. A specific amount of training is required, but learning about the enterprise social network is not actually tough.
Some sectors of industry may not be able to deploy the service due to the nature of service they provide. Defense of a country and government agencies are some sectors which can’t make the best use of enterprise social networks as they may not be able to provide absolute transparency of their operations.