Enterprise Social Networking: Focus on Relationships (Altimeter Report)

Altimeter’s latest report now on Enterprise (inside of companies) social networking is now out from Charlene Li, author of Groundswell, Open Leadership and my business partner. She conducted thorough analysis by surveying 185 users, surveyed 81 ESN decision makers and interviewed 12 technology vendors.

Fig. 5 Enterprise Social Networks Have Only Moderate Impact On Business Goals
Key findings that attracted my eye include:

  1. Long term adoption often unsuccessful beyond one department. What’s interesting is there’s lots of initial enthusiasm but a slow decline after deployment. In many cases, primary adoption occurred in the marketing/product section, IT, followed by sales and corporate communication.
  2. Highest adoption of fremium tools. Interesting breakdown of vendors, with self-service Yammer in the lead, followed by Chatter and Tellingent and IBM connections.   What’s interesting is these fremium tools enter the market, get their hooks in and grow adoption and switch to premium offerings.
  3. Companies are measuring in the wrong way. Lack of metrics (or measuring the wrong way) by focusing on measuring conversations or engagement rather than measuring improvement in relationships

Who said social media will reduce emails?
What’s interesting is that enterprise social networks don’t actually reduce internal email. The report also includes an actionable plan to get started, while there’s lots of details in the bullet points (filled with real world examples from real research interviews), they include four ways ESNs drive business value, including: 1) Encourage Sharing, 2) Capture Knowledge, 3) Enable Action, and 4) Empower people.

Open Research: Use it, Share it, and We’ll Publish More
We’re continuing to publish reports, and have a growing archive on our site, and will be doing a variety of webinars in support of these research findings. If you found them helpful, we look forward to you engaging with us in the conversation, and appreciate you using, sharing, and applying the findings.

You’ll find the full report embedded below which you can download, print and share, also read Charlene’s post.

 

 

28 Replies to “Enterprise Social Networking: Focus on Relationships (Altimeter Report)”

  1. Again, very interesting research by Altimeter. Thanks for that. What I found interesting is the part of ‘capturing’ knowledge. I would have guessed it would improve unlocking already captured knowledge. But maybe that’s the same thing.

  2. Again, very interesting research by Altimeter. Thanks for that. What I found interesting is the part of ‘capturing’ knowledge. I would have guessed it would improve unlocking already captured knowledge. But maybe that’s the same thing.

  3. I believe to be able to measure the success of enterprise collaboration tools we should first identify what specific business goals we are aiming to achieve. After this determining what numerical measurements we use, e.g. not “reduced emails” but how much time do we save distributing and consuming information in a specific activity.

    Bart Schrooten @ Lumo Research

  4. I am interested to see how this report compliments or continues the suggestions laid out in the Altimeter’s Social Marketing Analytics report from 2010. Will dig into this one soon. Thanks for pushing the conversation along, and for making us all a little smarter.  

  5. Unsurprising that employee retention remains unaffected, and decision-making and streamlining are probably adversely affected if anything! I guess emails are still necessary because social media messaging isn’t really “safe for work”

  6. Unsurprising that employee retention remains unaffected, and decision-making and streamlining are probably adversely affected if anything! I guess emails are still necessary because social media messaging isn’t really “safe for work”

  7. Im surprised with the results. We’ve been using Yammer in our small company for 5 years now, and it reduced email dramatically. 

  8. The social networking these days are one of the most important factor for any business because it really produce a better relationship wherein you can built a good morale and ideas which considered too as the main factor to improve any business. People have the voice to share.

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