John Udell paints the wide landscape of enterprise social software in his InfoWorld column. You may recall that Jon wrote the book on practical internet groupware some time ago and has an in-depth understanding of the promise of lightweight web-native collaboration.
We are social animals for whom networked software is creating a new kind of habitat. Social software can be defined as whatever supports our actual human interaction as we colonize the virtual realm. The category includes familiar things such as groupware and knowledge management, and extends to the new breed of relationship power tools that have brought the venture capitalists out of hibernation...
Computer-mediated communication is the lifeblood of social software. When we use e-mail, instant messaging, Weblogs, and wikis, we’re potentially free to interact with anyone, anywhere, anytime. But there’s a trade off. Our social protocols map poorly to TCP/IP. Whether the goal is to help individuals create and share knowledge or to enrich the relationship networks that support sales, collaboration, and recruiting, the various kinds of enterprise social software aim to restore some of the context that’s lost when we move our interaction into the virtual realm.
Restoring, or constructing social context is especially important because the vast majority of knowledge work involves remote collaboration, an accelerating trend. Jon also takes on the issues of transparency which enables group memory:
In networked environments, everything we do can be monitored. Absent the natural cues that establish social context — it’s hard to see groups form at the water cooler or hear voices in the hallway through e-mail or IM — social software systems ask us to strike a bargain. If individuals agree to work transparently, they (and their employers) can know more, do more, and sell more...Of course, we humans don’t always need to discover new collaborators. We’re already members of teams. Within those teams, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all social protocol. Outspoken individuals author the blogs popping up on corporate intranets. But other team members may prefer to contribute to a wiki, which is a collaborative space for Web writing. Ross Mayfield is CEO of Socialtext, a company whose hosted workspaces support both modes. “A blog enables people to express their identity,” he says, “while a wiki page de-emphasizes the individual and emphasizes the collective understanding of the group.”
The same person may find both modes useful in different ways. Adam Hertz, VP of technology strategy at Ofoto (a division of Kodak), uses Socialtext to coordinate his development team. During a period when he was traveling a lot, he says he started an internal blog to keep his team updated on his outside activities. It was helpful, but was unnecessary after he rejoined the team.
Whatever the mode of communication, the primary goal, Hertz says, is to create group memory....
The article describes how enterprise social networking services can help in sales intelligence and identifying collaborators. These are tools that take more explicit approaches to building relationships, where connection comes before content. They raise different privacy and transparency issues than tools that encourage people to opt-in to conversations and participation in different ways.
The Socialtext approach is similar to how people network using weblogs in public. There, content comes before connection. Social context supports the decision to connnect and the group memories of conversation enable greater trust.
UPDATE: Wish more had made it into the article, as Jon says himself, here's an interview with Valdis Krebs.
