The Social Collaboration Resource Round-up: Best practice Enterprise 2.0 tips from around the web

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When most people think about social media, they think of public sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. But social media is making just as big an impact inside the enterprise (and the extended enterprise) – as a turbo-charger for collaboration tools and intranets.

They used to call this kind of thing Enterprise 2.0 – but ‘social collaboration’ is gaining currency, so we’ll use that. Here are some great resources on social collaboration best practice that we’ve found in our midnight meandering across the windswept worldwide web.

Social collaboration themes: A few themes started to emerge from all the different advice we surveyed

• The community comes before the technology No technology will make a community thrive if there isn’t enough to bind people together anyway. People need a good reason to embrace a collaborative community – if they’ve got one, the right tech platform can be magic.
• A ‘Command & Control’ mindset doesn’t work Social collaboration is all about letting go – giving your people a place to grow communities, then allowing conversations to go where they need to go.
• An ‘anti-social’ intranet is doomed to fail We’re all becoming social networking natives. To offer collaboration platforms that ignore this is to take a fast track to irrelevance.
• Profiles and activity streams are essential It’s not really a social intranet if users can’t maintain profiles of themselves or monitor activities and changes of status for any projects or topics they’re following.

Social collaboration resources

Ten Strategies for getting the most out of social intranet
Dion Hinchcliffe of the Dachis Group presented this at a recent Social Intranet Summit. It gives a great overview of social collaboration and offers ten strategic tips, including:

• The importance of enterprise search
• Why unintended consequences are a good thing
• Social is not a single product

Dion also summarises the ‘SLATES’ checklist: Search, Linking, Authorship, Tagging, Extensions and Signals.

Social Enterprise ROI – a Socialcast Infographic
This excellent infographic gives you a visual snapshot of the three main drivers of ROI for social collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 tools:

• Increased employee engagement
• Decreased staff turnover rate
• Increased sales

Cameran Hetrick’s analysis in the accompanying blog post is excellent and still super-relevant.

5 questions to ask when choosing collaboration tools – GigaOM : Thursday Bram shares these five fundamental questions and explains why:

• Where will your team be working?
• Does it offer room for your team to grow?
• How stable is the company that makes the application?
• How bleeding edge do you need to be?
• How does the pricing break down in the long-term?

The comments on this post add a lot of value too.

The Pretzel Logic enterprise social blog
Sameer Patel does an excellent job discussing the issues surrounding social collaboration – including his weekly ‘My Favourite Reads’ posts. You can also follow Sameer on Twitter: @SameerPatel

AIIM – the information management & collaboration resource
AIIM is the community that helps organizations ‘find, control, and optimize their information’. There’s a Social Business Community, resource center, research and training. Plus the annual AIIM Conference.

What if Peter Drucker Taught Enterprise 2.0 Strategy?
Mark Fidelman’s excellent presentation looks at Enterprise 2.0 through the lenses of management guru Peter Drucker. Including a look at recent disasters that better collaboration could have avoided.

The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees.
In this book, two Gartner analysts make the case for exploiting social technology – including insights from their study of successes and failures at more than four hundred organizations. The book identifies the core disciplines driving collaboration success:

• Vision: defining a compelling vision towards a highly collaborative organization.
• Strategy: moving from ‘risky and random’ success to measurable business value.
• Purpose: rallying people around a clear purpose (rather than just providing technology).
• Launch: creating a collaborative environment and gaining adoption.
• Guide: influencing communities without stifling collaboration.
• Adapt: responding creatively to change.

The book is also behind a quick online Social Readiness Assessment you can take in a few minutes.

Is Social Media Really Collaboration in Disguise?

• Capacity – nimble, smaller teams beat huge ones
• Context – why the bigger picture matters
• Coherence – where inspiration and leadership emerges
• Complexity – where the rewards ramp up...

A new Definition of Social Media - Gartner
Gartner analyst Anthony J Bradley’s six core principles, shared back in 2010, are still excellent:

• Participation
• Collective
• Transparency
• Independence
• Persistence
• Emergence

Anthony also summarises the Six Cultural Attitudes Towards Social Media in another post.

Also worth a look:

• Getting Real About Enterprise 2.0 Two years old but still an excellent deck from Acando Consulting.
• The Forrester Blog for Content & Collaboration Professionals Insight from Ted Schadler, Phillipp Karcher, Leslie Owens and other Forrester analysts. This blog skews towards larger enterpises but the ideas are relevant to all.
• How CEOs use Twitter - Bloomberg Bloomberg reporters checked the Twitter pages of 18 company heads to compare their vital signs, then asked them how Twitter helps them run the show.
• How Social Media Has Prepared Us for Collaborative Business Salesforce’s Kraig Swensrud’s post on Mashable compares how social media in your personal life translates into your business life.
• Wikinomics:how mass collaboration changes everything You still can’t talk about social collaboration without referring to the book that spotted the trend first. By Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.

Don’t forget these Social Sales resources from Salesforce.com:

• The Social Success Enterprise Portal A social media resource centre for growing companies.
• The Social-Powered Enterprise eBook An overview of the key disciplines that affect social media the most.
• Interview with Jacob Morgan, Chess Media Group Jacob knows how to put social media to work for enterprise collaboration. This short sharp Q&A gives you an overview of his approach.