"Social Business" - separate the wheat from the chaff

The Cloudforce event and several things I've read recently have got me thinking about this notion of "social business" and the "social enterprise".  Is this just a lot of  companies jumping on the "social" bandwagon promoting their own technologies and services in the same way that consulting firms and software vendors suddenly all started offering knowledge management solutions in the late 1990s?  I'm particularly wary of companies that employ "evangelists" to promote their products and services - it conjures up images of loud, charismatic preachers shouting at us to stop sinning and believe in "their" god.  If your product is so good why do you need an evangelist?

Maybe I'm being a bit unfair but I think some of the claims made by social business proponents need questioning at the very least.  This comment by Michael Lazerow on the Wall Street Journal's All Things D website is fairly typical: "In the future, all businesses will reorganize around people, as failure to connect is not an option. It’s a corporate death sentence."  Surely businesses have always been organized around people and not connecting to people has never been an option for a business that wants to survive.  Every business has employees, customers, partners and suppliers and people work in all of them so what is different now?

Of course the internet and the social networking platforms built on top of it are changing how we communicate.  Information is shared and exchanged in far larger quantities and at faster speeds than ever before.  But, is that really changing the fundamentals of business?  People still need to talk to each other, to trust each other and companies still need to make profits.  Social networks make it easier for customers to share information about the companies they deal with and I can imagine it will become harder for businesses to get away with poor service and bad quality products.

However, I cannot think of a single example of a "relationship" I've got with any business that has been influenced by any online social network and I'm no luddite on that front.  I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon and their customer reviews of products influence many of my purchases.  So in that respect there has been an increase in transparency brought about by the internet.  However, no requests for me to follow a company on Twitter or like them on Facebook has resulted in what I would call a relationship with them.  That all feels so cold and clinical to me.  I use Amazon because they offer low prices and good service - if they stop offering that then I'll go somewhere else.  I feel no loyalty to them despite having used them for over 10 years.

So is talk of "social business" a lot of nonsense?  Yes and no.  There is lot of hyperbole, unsupported claims and the rehashing of the same old case studies.  But there is something much deeper going on: companies will find it increasingly harder to offer substandard services and products as social networks and a more transparent web allow people to share information about their experiences. This is where companies like Salesforce.com that allow companies to tap into these networks to improve customer service will do well.  That is not going to go away.  But let's not get carried away and think that online relationships with companies are the same as real relationships between people.  Social only goes so far online.

Cloudforce impressions

I spent this morning at day 2 of the Salesforce.com Clouforce event and took part in a roundtable over lunch to discuss SMEs and cloud computing.  I took away 4 key things from the morning:

• The meshing of internal CRM data with external social media and other web-based data is inevitable. There were some impressive demos of new Salesforce.com products during the keynote by CEO, Marc Benioff which showed that real-time CRM data across multiple devices would become the norm. (The guy operating 5 laptops and 4 mobile devices to show the live demos deserves recognition);
• How we teach information systems at my university needs to incorporate these changes.  I know that the big ERP/CRM/BI, client-server systems are not going to disappear any time soon but web-based/could-based, or whatever you want to call it, systems offer huge advantages in a number of areas.  Mobile access is one and, for CRM systems, linking out to social media services is another;
• Organisations that move quickly with these tools and integrate them into their workflows will have a competitive advantage over those that hold back.  Like most successful technologies this advantage will decline as it becomes the norm but there is certainly a window of at least several years before this happens.  2 of the SME customers taking part in the roundtable discusssion described some real advantages they had gained both to their internal communications but also their dealings with customers.
• HTML5 will kill apps - that might be a bit extreme but the mobile demo showed how effective HTML5 is at providing an app experience but with faster updates for data-rich services.

Evolution of the API

As more applications offer APIs and integrate their service with others I can see that the way we think about application providers will change.  A recent post on the Box.net blog started me thinking about this.  It seems a fairly obvious direction of travel that we’re moving from running software on client machines to cloud-based applications.  This migration will take time and will not necessarily apply to all types of software.  However, it would be a mistake to assume that the paradigm of discrete software operating in isolation will apply on the cloud.  The way that new services such as Salesforce.com, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Docs  etc. can talk to each other and share information across their platforms is one of their strengths – each can focus on what they do best and draw on others to create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts.  How this plays out over the next decade is anyone’s guess – there may be consolidation and the Google monster might devour them all or perhaps a thriving ecosystem will emerge based around APIs where the best apps survive.  Whatever happens it will be a stimulating environment for innovators and developers.

Social enterprise tools - keep it simple, stupid

Ahead of a roundtable at Salesforce.com's Cloudforce event that I'm taking part in later this week, I was thinking about some of the enterprise collaboration tools I've used in the past.  My previous employer used Lotus Notes and I remember it as an awful system that was clunky, slow, difficult to navigate around and virtually unusable offsite.  I daresay it has improved since those days (I certainly hope so for the sake of its users).  Other intranets and content management systems I've used at other organisations have been equally bad.  

One of the main problems was their complexity and the usability barriers that made it difficult to upload and then find the information you needed to do your job.  One of the reasons that Google has been so successful, apart from the excellent search results it serves up, is its simple interface.  The user has to do the minimum amount of work while the system does the complicated stuff in the background. 

Euan Semple sums it up nicely in this extract from a recent blog post:

"This is for me the biggest difference between truly social tools and many of the enterprise tools that go under that name. Tools that work are simple to use, but have complex and rich effects and require an investment of thought and effort to make them truly effective. Tools that don't work are complicated, difficult to work out but make it easy to write inconsequential flotsam."

Own the data and be indispensible

Social media sites come and go.  Facebook controls the consumer space at the moment but social users are fickle as MySpace and Friendster found to their cost.  However, business sites are a bit different.  Business users are more conservative about investing time and effort in social media as time is precious and nobody wants to risk their professional reputation on a fly-by-night service.  This is where LinkedIn has steadily built a business by being THE site for professionals to maintain an online presence.  I wrote about this last year and although it's anyone's guess whether LinkedIn is worth its current market value of $10 billion, the company certainly seems to be the only game in town for online social business networking.  Despite a hiccup in June the share price has bounced back and is now 16% above its flotation price.  Pandora or the Dow Jones index have not fared so well.  

Pandora is not short of competitors such as Spotify and Last.fm and relies on paid-for content from the music industry.  LinkedIn, as with other social networks, gets its data from its users who have an interest in contributing this for free and keeping it up-to-date.  It's hard to see how a competitor could come in and take that away in the short term but I suppose Salesforce.com and its Jigsaw acquisition could be a threat.