Why Social Employee Engagement in the Enterprise?

Facebook celebrated their 10th anniversary this week. Just imagine, if you could, a typical day in our lives before facebook, twitter, LinkedIn and similar social media. Social almost meant something completely different. All the connections we made, occurred across our traditional channels—web, email, phone, and face-to-face. This actually not only affected the pace with which we could discover, establish and engage in new connections but also severely limited the opportunity for customers to engage, influence, and advocate around brands. Today when we think about social, we think immediately of social networks in the consumer space, in experiences like Facebook and Twitter. There are currently over 2 billion tweets per week, 100 million per day, and 1.1 billion Facebook users—the growth in these numbers over a short time is incredible. While, in the first place, it’s hard to think of any other applications which have grown as rapidly and into this scale, what is more important is the transformation they have caused in consumer engagement. Consumer engagement on social networks has evolved so rapidly and into a paradigm where consumers are responding to information and influence from within their social networks as they make decisions about purchasing and brand loyalty.

Within enterprises organizations, departments have been similarly limited in the past—operating in silos, which create barriers to cross-company collaboration and productivity. These barriers limit the organization’s ability to engage and co-create with their partners, and also limit the ability to create and deliver a cohesive and comprehensive brand relationship with their customers. Meanwhile, employees are experiencing greater need to connect across the organization and with consumers. They face the challenge of:

Their organizations going global, and needing to find ways to work effectively with remote workers, etc.

Working better with partners, making it easier to create value together.

Delivering a truly connected customer experience, where internal collaboration becomes so seamless that customers experience a singular brand relationship.

If instant messaging taught us anything, communication and engagement behaviors that we adopt so quickly and evolve so rapidly in the consumer world, will be equally or more successful within enterprises in spite of the challenges they appear to pose to the traditional governance models.

The opportunity for your business:

With a decade into the world of facebook, we are seeing an emerging culture and set of modern social capabilities in enterprise space as well.

• Customer Engagement: Customers are talking and collaborating with each other, sharing information, and influencing decision-making. Businesses are seeing a growing imperative to be savvy about influential customers and turn them into loyal advocates.
• Employee Engagement and Collaboration : People are bringing these new behaviors and capabilities into the enterprise. Employees want to be able to find each other, talk, share information, and build new value together across traditional hierarchies and silos.
• Enterprise Content Management: Content in the enterprises is no longer spreadsheets and word documents. There is News feeds, Pictures, Videos, Surveys, Blogs, feeds from external/internal sources, updates or notifications and rich implicit content hidden in Comments, User activities, interests etc.
• Channel and Partner Engagement: The real power in social comes when you extend this reach to include stakeholders who are external to your organization—your channel partners, distributors, your dealers and your customers. By providing to your employees, your partners, distributors and dealers with a common platform to collaborate, engage, co-create, share knowledge & best practices, you can build new efficiencies in existing business processes, open up new opportunities. By connecting your enterprise, you can deliver on a truly connected customer experience. Our longer term vision is to help you connect to your customers and have your customers connect to your workgroups.
• Line of Business Integration and Automation: Finally, these interactions are generating a lot of new information and insight. The ability to harness these insights to drive business processes and decisions—and to deliver ever more engaging customer experiences—will transform business, creating significant opportunities for differentiation and new business models. iLink Framework on Sharepoint 2013 offers a great platform to integrate these business processes and create new capabilities, efficiencies. When social information becomes embedded in your everyday business tools and processes, you become a connected enterprise.

How can iLink Systems help you embrace enterprise social?

• The foundation for connecting your business on the inside (or “social layer”) is iLink’s Social Employee Engagement framework with intuitive, familiar social tools—like Lync and Yammer—that you open and use for a specific purpose, such as voice/video/text communications or micro-blogging. These tools are connected and embedded by design, enabling their features and capabilities to be accessed across business and productivity applications and enabling new efficiencies in the Line of Business workflows. Imagine having access to all of your contacts across business and personal address books, with their presence/availability information visible in all your productivity apps—including in the new Office and line-of-business apps, and across your PC, phone, and tablet, both in and out of the office. Imagine following or ‘liking’ a document you’re interested in, in the same way as you follow posts by people you know.
  • Now, if you look at what we’ve done with our framework we have taken the Sharepoint 2013 platform capabilities, the hooks available for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and built various intuitive and highly useful features, so that you can harness that information and take advantage of an integrated social, collaboration, email, and unified communications experience. We also have Lync-Skype connectivity for presence, IM, and voice.
  • We have integrated Yammer with SharePoint which really lights up the power of internal collaboration and the ability to find, use, and share information.
• This is all made possible with a unified platform that makes life easier for users and IT alike. For users, a single logon gains access to a roaming profile that ensures the same secured information is available across any device they use. And for IT, a common user-based management approach simplifies the task of securing information and analyzing usage. This enterprise class platform for identity, security, and management is critical-especially as we consider new challenges in regulatory compliance and the need to protect sensitive and personal information.
• So we’ve got an incredible story that we’re bringing to the market right now with Social Employee Engagement framework. Just think about how a connected, next-generation experience could transform your organization.