Had the pleasure to attend an interesting Yammer/Forrester webinar the other day and thought I would summarize the talking points I heard about social for the enterprise:
- Defining business value for a social enterprise effort is easier than other knowledge manager efforts. This is true, I go back to when I was helping directors come up with ROI slides on SharePoint as a portal and I thought wow this was hard. The business value for a team of sales people being able to communicate about a deal is a way easier story sell then people being able to share a document in under a minute.
- Video is the new killer content. This one was an old one for me, I remember people saying that when YouTube was taking off. I want to believe that it is because in the consumer world it is so cool to watch videos of my friends or family is really cool. But do we really want to see a video of the head of marketing recapping our achievements.
- Social cloud platforms have higher user adoption. I know it is bias, being a Yammer joint webinar, but I see it. Think of these cloud platforms, there aren’t hoops to jump through, they are always up to date, not a 2 year old instance of an on-prem server that IT forgot to update.
- The sales department is the place to start our company’s social adoption. The sales folks are usually quicker to pick up things that will help them close deals, and they have smart phones and lots of time to check newfeeds and respond to things. I would love to see the study of which department’s employees spend the most time on Facebook and other consumer social sites, I bet it would be the sales folks.
The second half was how Booz Allen, Hamilton uses Yammer. It was ok, but it didn’t resonate with me. I hope this helps give you some fresh ideas.
