Business Social Media: a Bunch of Jive?

Social networking tools have been popular in the consumer market, but companies have struggled to find useful applications for the technology. Jive Software has made a sweeping series of enhancements designed to make its software more business friendly.Jive announced product enhancements and partnerships with two industry giants. On the product front, the company developed Jive What Matters, which is designed to aggregate information on a single page, so employees can make business decisions. Jive includes Now, an aggregated view of information; My Communications, a single place to examine relevant comments, messages, or other relevant data for users; and My Actions, which that prioritizes action items, alerts, and project notifications. Two elements power these functions. Jive Chatter Filter is designed to help users sift through information sources, and Jive Genius recommends useful content based on learned preferences and behaviors.

In addition, Jive announced its software is now available in the Google Apps Marketplace. The vendor also signed an agreement with Twitter and licensed Twitters firehose, an index of tweets (usually 65 million) that are posted to the service daily.

While Facebook and MySpace have garnered hundreds of millions of users, business social networking sites have not been as popular. Jive claims to have 3,000 customers and a total of more than 3 million users of its software platform. Social networking sites enable individuals to collect information feeds from a variety of information sources. Because of its flexibility, businesses have had problems determining how to take advantage of the software. So while Jive offers small and medium businesses a way to collect information, how they can use the product to enhance productivity may remain unclear.