Enterprise Social Networking - Who will win the race? Microsoft or Salesforce.com
It looks like almost everyone around me has discovered the Social Networking Game. The Plaxo, Hyves and LinkedIn requests keep pouring in….
More and more companies however deny their employees access to these sites. Not without reason if you look at the hours people would spend on them if allowed. However professional social networking gives a huge boost to collaboration and knowledge sharing if provided in the right format.
Finally today it hit me how companies can have the benefits of a true social network within their own walls (and with limited features outside these walls) and not be depended on the commitment of it’s workforce to join in.
Companies however do need to have written permission from their employees that they are allowed to see the content of their mailbox (only mail headers, agenda & contacts is enough).
The idea is quite simple.
Scenario on Microsoft based environment.
You create a server application that analyzes your contacts/activities on the CRM-system and all content on the mail server like:
- Address books
- Mail headers
- Meetings in Outlook Calendar (if integrated also the netmeeting server meetings)
- Distribution lists
- Call option data (in Outlook)
You throw all this info on one big pile and per person you generate a profile.
This profile is nothing more then the entry in the Global Address List in Exchange.
By creating an algorithm that analyzes the frequency that the person interacts through mail, meetings, use of the call option with the other persons and the distribution lists its a member of it generates a view of the persons informal network.
The person must be able t0 select which non-colleague contacts to show to various type of people depending their status in his/her personal network.
Imagine that all your employees have editor rights on the customer data in your CRM system (of course there needs to be an auditor in place to make sure that the data updated is correct) without having to bother them with learning a new program.
The only Microsoft-program that shows a small resemblance with my idea so far is SNARF.
This counts the number of mails sent to/by people in your mailbox and can analyze mail threads.
With Salesforce.com it’s probably easier to realize. Just create a SN-Portal application in combination with a web based Outlook-like client that interacts with Salesforce.com.
One add-in I found for Salesforce.com is Faceforce.
It’s nice but it still doesn’t give an insight in the internal Social Network.
I know that legislation regarding the use of mail/contact information is a critical issue, but if employees are well informed in combination with enough features that enables them to exclude information, they don’t want to have published, this could be a valuable tool to optimize employee /customer interaction.
