Here at Altimeter Group, we’ve been working over the last six months to publish a slue of open research reports, and the latest comes from Charlene Li, supported by Jon Cifuentes and Alan Webber. Making the Case for Enterprise Social Networks was published last week — a look into how organizations can utilize social networking internally, across the enterprise. It’s the first of two reports that will be published this year that will look into the value offerings of social networks within vs. external to organizations.
A brief report summary is below. To check out the report in-full, visit our SlideShare page.
In 2011, the US hit a milestone — more than half of all adults visit social networking sites at least once a month. But when it comes to using social-networking technologies inside organizations, many business leaders are at a loss to understand what value can be created from Facebook-like status updates within the enterprise. Some organizations have deployed social-networking features with an initial enthusiastic reception, only to see these early efforts wither to just a few stalwart participants. The problem: Most companies approach enterprise social networks as a technology deployment and fail to understand that the new relationships created by enterprise social networks are the source for value creation. In this report, Altimeter looks at four ways enterprise social networks create value for organizations.
As enterprise social networking is a relatively new concept being experimented with, it’s no surprise that organizational maturity is still in its early stages for the majority:
Additional images from the report can be found in a Flickr set here.
Next on docket for Altimeter is a report that delves into online social influence from analyst Brian Solis. Stay tuned!
Jaimy Szymanski 