What is an Enterprise Social Network?

Tuesday May 21st 2013 - Atlanta GA

If you do not already know what a Enterprise Social Network (ESN) is, or ever wondered what separates OGGflow from the other offerings out there - this blog post is for you!

What is an ESN or Enterprise Social Network?

Since the beginning of the information age an increasing volume of information and types one deals with in their day to day duties in a modern company has become challenging to manage. Years ago your customers and contacts corresponded via phone or post box. Now we are on a 24 hour per day global basis sent onslaughts of contacts and news via mobile, text messages, emails, social networks, forum posts, blog posts, comment sections, photo sharing services, CRM updates, desktop chat clients and still the standard old telephone.

In addition to dealing with that mass volume of external information that must be sorted and responded to, many organizations still spend many hours per day in meetings or in other forms of correspondence separate from said information systems in huddles discussing how to deal with and respond to the volumes of information. And what is the result of said meetings? MORE emails, posts, follow-ups etc.

The world must have a way to simplify and unify corporate communications and make it more of a natural process that is a part of how the organization itself moves on a day to day basis.

For this purpose we are on the horizon of a handful of great ESN solutions that have already changed the way the worlds most advanced companies work, and will soon revolutionize every workplace or business operation whether it is a 3 person start-up, a single independent consulting firm or a 50,000 employee enterprise.

The fundamental purpose of a ESN is to reduce the volume of meetings, volume of emails and take all of the 100+ external modalities your customers and partners may choose to contact you on and bring it all into one place where your teams and internal employees can all collaborate together in one corporate cloud universe and more efficiently deal with these items and touch points all while reducing redundant and external communications normally required to manage it all.

Sounds complicated right? Not really - a good ESN can make it easy as sitting down, logging into a social network like Facebook and sharing pictures, videos and posts with your friends and family.

Remember personal sharing and communications before social networks? To share pictures with your friends and family you might have to hook up the camera to your PC, transfer the pictures to your computer, edit them, upload them to a website or attach them to emails and send them to groups of friends and family members. Sometimes the pictures were too big and wouldn't send, or maybe some of your family members weren't on email yet. You might have to go to the photo mart, make hard copies and then ship them out in photo mailers. To share a batch of vacation or wedding pictures it might take you a few days or even a few weeks to get it all done and you would spend hours to even prepare the content.

Now with advanced social networks and modern mobile devices, the pictures can be shared with the friends and family you choose seconds after the content has been created and with as little as 5 taps of a touch screen and typing in a description. You dont even in most cases need to say where you are at as the GPS on your mobile device will automatically set location in your album or in the pictures themselves.

Lets take a look at what happens at a company. You have teams of people who have items and bits of information sent to them via phone, social networks, email, etc.... You also have a CRM or Customer Relationship Management system in place to track all of this information, separately your engineering team likely has their own project management system, and your finance team has some separate systems they work within. If sales or support wants to know what engineering, finance or some other part of the company operation is doing the information isn't in the system they work out of day to day. To collaborate with these other teams the communications and dialogue must be taken external to their own system such as a CRM. Then once a collaborative effort has taken place the results of it or the new information created must be added back into the CRM or using other external systems such as email, private message or telephone call be communicated to the other team members or external customers. Its one company working together - why have all of the internal systems separate? ESN solutions seek to allow cross department sharing and collaboration between teams while also maintaining privacy where needed (private company finance information). The direct and immediate result of moving your company to a ESN is a reduction of meetings and external communications that often get “inboxed” to one employees desktop where the rest of the team waits on that employee to get a chance to circulate it like one might forward a chain of emails around.

Separately the problem with most CRM, or sales CRM solutions in the modern world is that they are built on the world of old, where contacts mostly came into your company via phone or writing / email.

A well designed ESN will bring all of these external touch points into one place so that your teams can instantly deal with, collaborate and respond all in one place - and separately unify communications between your internal teams so that the entire operation can perform more efficiently and effectively from a single interface all while eliminating redundant information.

A business focused ESN makes this as easy as logging into Facebook or Google+ and communicating with your friends or family and sharing news and content. In the business sense a ESN allows you to organize projects and teams by groups so you can keep up with efforts individually or view all of the company activity in a live news feed similar to the news feed found on the popular social network sites.

Some examples of modern ESN solutions are;

- Microsoft Yammer

- Salesforce Chatter

- Icoa OGGFlow

How is OGGflow different from the other offerings in the marketplace?

The OGGflow Enterprise Social Network is a slim and flexible ESN framework that can be used as is at Oggflow.com or even set-up within a companies private infrastructure for maximum security. Currently no other ESN product offers this flexibility.

While Yammer is built around Microsoft’s products such as Office365.com and Chatter only works with Salesforce.com - OGGflow is technology agnostic and designed to work with and adapt to all of the modern company cloud services used today such as Google Apps for business, Office365.com, Salesforce.com, Evernote, Facebook, Twitter, Skydrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, Gmail, Outlook / Exchange Server, etc. This freedom of services choice is critical and allows for a large organization to have mixed groups of users working together within the same ESN. With technology agnostic OGGflow a company could even change services it uses for storage such as Google Drive vs Skydrive and then even use the apps provider of choice Google Apps vs Office365.com seamlessly together. These options are not available with Microsoft Yammer or Salesforce Chatter.

The OGGflow ESN flexible connector technology allows for integration options not possible with Yammer or Chatter - In the open source development community companies like Hackerfleet have created very specialized and interesting uses for OGGflow. A Hackerfleet technology connection in OGGflow allows for Hackerfleet node events within a shipping lane fleet management operation such as an engine problem on a cargo ship at sea to trigger an OGGflow post in a support project. This allows for a global engineering community to collaborate on solving the ship engine event or failure using the OGGflow ESN collaboration framework on desktop computers or mobile devices. Other examples would include allowing a company to use their own homegrown CRM or infrastructure alert applications to trigger team collaboration posts in OGGflow with events from their own inhouse solutions.

The OGGflow ESN platform has 60% more functionality than Yammer or Chatter in a single post or event. (think about the links on a friend / family social network post that let you like a picture, comment on it or share) Some key differentiating features about OGGflow events;

- Quickly attach or create any type of object or document.

- Allows for realtime team collaboration on documents created within OGGflow. When a Google Apps document is created for example all members of the project team automatically have sharing access permissions set up for them within Google Drive and can chat / collaborate within the document or using the realtime comment feed on the OGGflow post itself.

- Tasks added to OGGflow posts are not flat checklist items. They include an entire workflow and audit trail that can be used to track many items and communications across the organization.

- Tasks added to OGGflow posts include time and resource management features. Team members can start/stop working on a task and automatically record and report on the time spent.

- Tasks added to OGGflow posts have accountability features where another team member is designated to verify that the task has been completed and sign off on it with 3rd party approval.

- OGGflow engineering “Milestones” and sales “Deals” allow for a real time view into every dependant task tied to a new product rollout or sales opportunity without leaving the OGGflow ESN or visiting any other external service, making a phone call or externally chatting anyone in the organization (these kinds of update seeking distractions also pull your team members and co-workers away from their work!)

What features are critical for your organization to get the most value out of a modern Enterprise Social Network?

Some reading around the web;

CNN - Where social networking is headed next

Wharton University - Enterprise Social Networking: The Next Competitive Advantage

The Next Web - Best Practices for Enterprise Social Networking

Techcrunch - Yammer Taps Microsoft Translator To Bring Cross-Language Translation To The Enterprise Social Network

Wikipedia - Yammer

Techcrunch - Producteev’s Social Task Manager Now Free And Enterprise-Ready As It Preps For Full Jive Integration Later This Year

Techcrunch - Enterprise Social Network Startup Batterii Closes $2.5M Seed, Led By CincyTech, As It Builds Out Feature-Set & Adds Android App

PR Web - Convo Launches New iPhone App Designed for Increasing Mobile Usage in their 5,000+ Enterprise Social Networks

NY Times - Companies Are Erecting In-House Social Networks

NY Times - Microsoft to Buy Yammer for $1.2 Billion