This post originally appeared on Our Social Times. I will be discussing subject in their free webinar ‘How to Create an Integrated Social Business,’ on 7th May at 2pm BST (9am EDT) with Jon Bird of American Airlines and Philip Sheldrake of Euler Partners. Register for free here.

Somewhere between 87% and 98% of companies now have a presence on social media sites, depending on whose statistics you choose to believe. Whichever figure is more accurate, it’s fairly clear that if your company doesn’t use at least one of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, etc., it is in an ever-decreasing minority. But just because you’re using social media for business, that doesn’t make you a “social business”.

Far fewer companies have applied the principles of social networking throughout their business; in many cases the Facebook and Twitter presence is just a Social Façade, a marketing layer that aims to disguise that in the rest of the company it’s the same old anti-social business as usual.

Of course, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with using social media as a marketing channel. But to see social solely for this purpose means missing out on much wider potential benefits. A report by McKinsey Global Institute in July 2012 claims that “while 72% of companies use social technologies in some way, very few are anywhere near to achieving the full potential benefit.”

To begin to take full advantage of social technologies, it’s important to recognise the three main types of social network, and understand how to engage with the right audience in the right place. Used together, social media, company-managed customer communities, and internal-facing employee social networks can form an integrated social business strategy that turns your company into a true “social business”. That sometimes sounds like rather vague and unattainable goal, so here are five pragmatic reasons why you need an integrated social business strategy.

1. Create more meaningful customer relationships
Public social networks are a great place for making contact with customers. With 200 million users on Twitter and a billion on Facebook, the reach of these services is immense so you would be crazy not to have a presence here. But they’re not great places to have more productive conversations with customers – there’s only some much depth you can go into in 140 characters.

A good example of this is Best Buy’s use of Twitter for pre-sales support. It provides fast, short answers, but needs to redirect more complex discussions to other channels. If you read through the stream of replies sent from @Twelpforce, typically every 4th or 5th response directs a customer towards a traditional email or phone CRM channel. Twelpforce is an effective, but very thin social layer. Integrating it into a Best Buy-managed customer community would enable deeper engagement, and more meaningful customer relationships.

2. Integrate Social and CRM for more consistent response
Customers of many companies have realised that if they complain loudly and publicly on social media they get a faster response. Indeed, some companies seem to be proud of their responsiveness on social media compared with traditional CRM, without thinking this through to the logical conclusion. Setting up a social media team as a rapid-response CRM team is clearly not sustainable – instead social and CRM need to coherently integrated, giving the same speed and quality of service whichever channel the customers uses.

For most companies, the level of integration between their Facebook page and their CRM system is very poor, so is it any wonder that irritated customers hijack the comments threads of the latest faux-cheerful marketing posts to complain? It’s perhaps a little unfair to single out any particular example of this when so many companies are guilty of it, but Three UK’s Facebook page provides as good an illustration as any you are likely to find.

3. Make your employees more efficient
While you’re establishing a more open, collaborative relationship with your customers, it seems rather unfair if your employees are still stuck with email and old-fashioned intranets as their main communication mechanisms. Unfair, and inefficient; the McKinsey report mentioned earlier estimates that use of social technologies inside the company can increase productivity of knowledge workers by 20-25% by reducing the time spent handling emails and searching for information. Indeed, McKinsey estimate that potential value of social inside the company is double that of the external value.

4. Learn how to be social
Employee social networks not only make the workforce more productive, they teach employees how to work in an online social environment. The list of social media disasters caused by inappropriate messages from employees grows ever-longer by the day, and while it’s easy to blame employee incompetence for this, the truth is that if you don’t regularly work in a online social environment, it can be easy to misjudge the tone or content of messages you send. Using a social network for communication with your colleagues gives invaluable experience that makes you a better communicator with customers.

5. Connect your supply chain
Perhaps the least explored area of social business is in connecting the company’s network of supplier and partner organizations. Very few businesses are entirely self-sufficient, so communication with other companies is essential. Yet business-to-business social networking is still in its infancy, with email still used as the lowest common denominator for communication. Establishing cross-company, private social networks can apply the productivity benefits noted by McKinsey to the wider supply chain.

Image credit: Networked Insights

CMSWire have published an article I wrote as part of a series on gamification. In More Than A Game, I describe how the benefits of applying game mechanics to the workplace to increase employee engagement needs to be balanced with some of the potential unintended consequences and employee scepticism. 

The very term “gamification” will immediately alienate some employees. Leaving aside the sheer ugliness of the word itself, it indicates that the resulting initiative is just a game. To many employees, this gives the impression of it being optional — “I don’t come to work to play games” and “if it’s a game, it can’t be that important” are common responses. While many employees will see such workplace games as fun, other will see them as a frivolous waste of time.

As I’m sure you’ve already read somewhere else today, Yahoo is banning working from home. This move has been met with derision as such a backwards step, but also with agreement from some former Yahoo employees. The quote that stood out most to me was this:

 A lot of people hid. There were all these employees [working remotely] and nobody knew they were still at Yahoo.

What struck me was how difficult it would be for an employee of a company with an established enterprise social network to hide in this way. Their absence would be noted both anecdotally (“Richard doesn’t seem to be in my activity stream much this week”) and statistically in usage reports.

I work from home all the time, but remain one of the most active contributors to BroadVision’s own internal Clearvale enterprise social network. I’m not the most active any more, but almost everyone who has overtaken me also works from home all the time. Indeed, we consistently see much higher activity from home-workers than office-workers. On an enterprise social network you can run (i.e. work remotely), but you certainly can’t hide – anyone can see what I’ve been doing recently, simply by checking my activity stream.

I have studied this trend of higher network activity from home workers over a long period of time, and it is far too well established to be dismissed as a coincidence. For home workers, the network is our connection to the rest of the company. We depend on it to stay in touch, whereas an office-based worker gets this interaction in person. Indeed, there have been occasions when I have felt some office-based workers were “hiding” from the social network, because discussions they had in person at the office never reached the remote workforce. It’s obviously not sensible for two people who sit at adjacent desks to converse online, but that doesn’t remove the responsibility of office-workers to share their knowledge with other people in the company.

Whether Yahoo’s move is the right move for their business, I wouldn’t presume to say. But I can’t help wondering whether implementation of a good enterprise social network would be a far less disruptive way for Yahoo to reconnect with its remote employees.

Part 2 of the series on The Bigger Picture about measuring enterprise social network adoption. In case you missed it, part 1 is here.

It’s a little surprising that so few companies measure the success of their enterprise social network adoption scientifically. One of the main reasons people is that they’re not sure what the most meaningful measurements are, and what benchmarks they should be aspiring to reach. Here are the first 5 of 10 suggestions, from The Bigger Picture video series.

One of the best ways of understanding precisely how your enterprise social network is being used is to visualize the activity using a social graph.  This two part series will look at ways presenting the activity and connections in your social network to illustrate where it is working well, and where further work is required.

The term social graph was popularized by Facebook’s use of it in 2007, but the principles of illustrating networks in this way is nothing new. The basic principle is that members of the network are represented by a nodes or vertices, and the connections between members are represented by edges. So the connections between 9 members of a network may look something like this:

This is useful, because it shows who is well connected (Molly) and who is less so (Ginny and Percy). But it doesn’t tell us much more than that, because it doesn’t describe the nature of the relationships between each member. Indeed, this is the major failing of LinkedIn’s InMaps, which although beautiful, are of relatively little use because my connection with someone I have worked with for 10 years is represented in exactly the same way as someone I met once. An enterprise social network has much richer information about the relationships between members, so let us consider how best to illustrate this.

Firstly, we need to decide the type of relationship we want to represent. Most people initially think of showing who follows who, but I find that this is little more useful than InMaps; following relationships often bear very little relation to how people actually communicate. I find that a far more meaningful relationship to show is the number of comments exchanged between members, as this more accurately represents the extent to which members are collaborating.

In the graph below, the weight of the lines between members indicate the number of comments they have given to and received from other members.

We immediately see the most active relationships in the network (Molly/George, Molly/Ron). We also see that some seemingly well-connected members (Bill) are actually weakly connected with several members, but not strongly connected with any.

Of course, not all relationships are equal, so it is valuable to distinguish between comments created and comments received. You may notice that in the previous graphs there are two lines between some nodes. This is because it is a directed graph, with incoming and outgoing indicated separately.

In the next graph, each node is coloured based on the number of comments created – green represents many comments, red represents few, yellow and orange somewhere in between. The edges are coloured to match the source node, making it easier to see the direction of the comments.

Here we see that although Molly is the centre of the network, the vast majority of her comments are directed towards Ron. We also see that it is George who is the most activer commenter, and Bill’s weak connection with the rest of the network becomes more apparent.

Finally, we can change the size of the nodes to represent the number of comments received.

Now, at a glance, we can see the rather more complex nature of relationships between network members. George creates a lot of comments but receives no more than Ginny or Percy. Molly receives a lot of comments, but creates few except on Ron’s content. We can use this deeper understanding of network member behaviour to help formulate our network adoption strategy.

In part two of this series, we will look at how these principles can be applied to much larger networks, and how different layout techniques can be used to highlight communication between  departments and regions within an organisation.

I am very pleased to announce the launch of my new series of video blogs entitled “The Bigger Picture: Strategies for Success In Social Business”.

Each video in the series will look at a particular aspect of social business, offering advice on strategy along with some practical suggestions. The introduction to the series is embedded below, and two further videos are available on YouTube. These cover some recommended reading and identifying three different types of social networks that need to be considered in an integrated social business strategy.

New videos will be added every week or two; you can keep up to date by subscribing to the YouTube channel at youtube.com/socbizpicture or following @socbizpicture on Twitter.

Everyone has heard the adage that on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. Until recently, I hadn’t realised that the original source of it was a cartoon by Peter Steiner published in The New Yorker in 1993, making it a remarkably prescient observation for one made so early in the life of the internet. Not, of course, in the literal sense (although the number of people who create Twitter accounts for their dogs continues to be one of my pet peeves), but because of what it says about the benefits and drawbacks of anonymity on the internet.

One might initially think that this has little relevance to social networks within a business, used for communication and collaboration between employees. Few companies would (I hope) tolerate employees participating anonymously in such a network, or portraying themselves as a dog. But many employees have subtly (or not so subtly) different personalities in online communities to real life. This isn’t necessarily a deliberate affectation, merely a reflection of the way they communicate. This presents both opportunities and challenges for community managers – reluctant communicators may be more comfortable interacting online, whereas others may shun the community in favour of face-to-face discussions. So while a company social network may not be full of dogs, there are several other species to watch out for.

The Owl
A proverbially wise creature, but very hard to spot. The owl may work different hours to the rest of us, and be easily scared away. A social network provides a great way of unlocking some of an owl’s wisdom by allowing them to contribute their knowledge in their own time and own way.

The Monkey
A very social animal, and therefore a natural adopter of a company social network. But prone to becoming rather loud and irritating, which can alienate other members of the network due to over-sharing. Community managers need to harness the monkey’s natural social enthusiasm, but stop it getting out of hand.

The Giant Panda
Shy and notoriously reticent to engage, even with their own species. The panda is valued immensely by everyone, but is endangered because of its apparent inability to consummate its relationship with co-workers. A social network may be the ideal way of unlocking the panda’s potential.

The Squirrel
A terrible hoarder of information, the squirrel is inclined to bury what it knows in places that only it can find. The squirrel needs to be encouraged to share its nuts with the rest of us.

The Lion
Undisputed king of the jungle, the lion struts around the company, delegating the hard work of hunting to his pride of lionesses. He may feel that participation in a social network is beneath him, a job for his lionesses. But all animals look up to the lion at the top of the food chain, and success of the social network may very well be dependent on encouraging him to participate to set an example to the rest of the animals.

With such a range of species, your enterprise social network becomes a veritable Animal Farm. And this highlights another challenge for community managers. The best social networks are self-governing, but, as all students of literature know, life down on the farm doesn’t work out quite so well. So a carefully balanced network governance and moderation policy is required; without it the network ceases to be useful as it becomes full of animals trying to overthrow the farmer. But if the governance is too heavy-handed, life on the network becomes too close to an even better-known Orwellian allegory. And that is equally disastrous for the success of the network as it deters participation.

So managers of successful social networks need to take their inspiration not from literary classics, but from Disney, whose animals all live together in perfect harmony, respecting each others’ talents rather than trying to architect new societies or eat each other.