Social Enterprise 2013: Opportunities And Obstacles

The BrainYard's 7 Social Business Leaders Of 2012

The enterprise social networking revolution has been a long time coming, and I don't expect it to arrive in 2013. Talk of a "revolution" implies big changes, which take time. The American Revolution took eight years, from the first hostilities to the signing of the Treaty of Paris, and in between there were times when General Washington was on the run or his men were freezing their toes off and starving at some makeshift fort. Even worthwhile revolutions are hard.

Constellation Research's Alan Lepofsky predicts 2013 will be a year for less talking, more doing, as the need to explain social business basics fades and more companies put social tools to work solving practical problems. "For product vendors, 2013 will be less about creating shiny new features and more about helping their customers (and prospects) derive real business value from their platforms," he writes.

Lepofsky sees social task management going mainstream, as well as more and better integration between social tools and enterprise business applications. More enterprises will see the utility in creating custom apps that use the metaphors from the cloud and social media to tie together business processes that span multiple systems. I won't try to summarize his full set of predictions, but I'm happy to endorse them for the most part.

[ Want tips on how to make it work for you? Read Understanding Social Business Integration. ]

I'm just not confident that we will see a dramatic change in 2013. The rate of adoption might accelerate, but it will accelerate gradually, in fits and starts, having to overcome resistance at each stage. Consider the issue of integration between social apps and line-of-business systems. There is the potential for standards to help, and I've been watching for signs for that since the introduction of OpenSocial 2.0 in August 2011. A year later, we've started to see some of the potential of that technology as implemented in products from Jive Software and IBM. But it hasn't exactly become an overnight sensation. It's more at the stage of something that "demos well" for Jive and might sometimes win it an extra customer or two. But is it a widely accepted standard with clear practical benefits? No way, at least not yet.

At the beginning of 2012, I published a pair of columns: What Enterprise Social Success Stories Have In Common and 10 Enterprise Social Networking Obstacles. Although I still see the same potential to imitate the successes, I can't say the obstacles are any less formidable today.

In addition to technical issues such as integration, the obstacles include cultural ones such as leaders who are unsure how much they want to embrace transparency and open debate within their organizations. One obstacle has arguably gotten worse. Number two on my list of obstacles, back in January, was overcoming the negative connotations of "Facebook inside your enterprise." By that, I meant some business leaders looked at internal social networking as an invitation to frivolous time-wasting. At the time, we assumed many leaders also would want to emulate Facebook as a business success. When my colleague Debra Donston-Miller wrote about how the Facebook IPO affected social business, we thought for sure the effect would be positive for social business firms and social business initiatives. That was before the stock went public and quickly lost half its value, partly because of technical and procedural screw-ups, but also because of doubts about the company's business model. As a matter of guilt by association, the idea of social business saw its stock fall as well.

If Facebook did not live up to its world-beating hype, however, it continued to plug away at building its business and proving the naysayers wrong. Now there are signs that Facebook might know how to make money in mobile after all, and the recent upward trend in its stock price has short sellers on the run.

If there is a lesson to take from Facebook, maybe that's it -- persistence and focus. Will 2013 be the year of social business? Probably not, but who cares? The real question is, will it be that for you? Will this be the year you show that you know how to put social software to work in a way that pays off for your business? If your competitors don't figure that out in 2013, so much the better.

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr or Google+. The BrainYard is @thebyard and facebook.com/thebyard

Social media make the customer more powerful than ever. Here's how to listen and react. Also in the new, all-digital The Customer Really Comes First issue of The BrainYard: The right tools can help smooth over the rough edges in your social business architecture. (Free registration required.)