Everyone who works on enterprise collaboration software knows that organizational adoption is really important, and can be hard to achieve. Yesterday’s Socialtext 3.0 launch has introduced an exciting new twist. In fact, I think it has completely changed the social software adoption game–for the better.
Socialtext 3.0 is going to appeal to non-power-users, or what I call the “I don’t care about the latest gadget, I just want to do my job” crowd. It’s not just the smooth user experience, personalizable dashboard, and global navigation (though those things certainly help.) To my mind, the real game-changer is the integration of social networking into the Socialtext collaboration suite. Socialtext 3.0 has bridged the gap between group collaboration and social networking. That is going to have a profound impact on enterprise adoption.
Finding people within companies, especially large companies, is a killer app. On virtually every corporate intranet, the Company Directory is by far the most heavily used application. It often accounts for north of 70-80% of intranet search activity. Even your least techno-savvy colleagues understand the need to find colleagues. So it’s relatively easy to get a new user to try the tools.
As new users start to use the tools, they quickly wake up to the possibilities. Public social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are penetrating the mainstream over-30 crowd at a surprising rate. More and more people are realizing that looking a person up in the phone book is only one way to find her. Best of all, it’s fun and addictive.
Once people try it, social networking has a unique ability to jump across organizational silos. Blogs and wikis led the charge of social software into the enterprise world. Those forms of collaboration are wonderful, but they can be difficult to scale beyond the department level. Individual teams and groups derive tremendous value from using blogs and wikis in the flow of their daily work. But the thing about daily workflows is that they tend to center around a defined group of members and business process. Even when one group is rockin’ and rollin’ on blogs and wikis, moving to another group within the same company can be a challenge. Each new department or team is a brand new adoption curve.
Harvard Business School Professor Andrew McAfee has blogged insightfully that social networking’s strength is the way in which it discovers, utilizes, and reinforces weak ties across a distributed social network. In an enterprise context, that means that social networking allows people to identify and connect to colleagues outside the usual suspects. Since those colleagues are almost always in a different group, department, team, business unit, etc., social networking has a natural ability to span across organizational silos more easily than other social software applications.
Because of the way Socialtext has integrated social networking with group workspaces, social networking adoption triggers adoption in other areas as well. The actions of my colleagues in Socialtext People automatically directs my attention to the workspaces they’re working in. That pulls me into conversations and documents that are new to me, and reinforces my use of other parts of the collaboration suite.
From an adoption standpoint, this is a whole new world.
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