Enterprise Social Media is not a platform, rather a process...

Last year when the buzzword ‘Social Media’ was catching up, we also clamored for one in our company. Being a small company, caution is inherent and we decided to go for ‘Yammer’ to use for our internal collaboration to start with.

Last week, heard a comment that this platform is not working and we should look for something new. That brings in a fundamental question “what actually are we looking for from an Enterprise Social Media Platform?”

Key to social media is the word social. Hence social media platform implementation is not about the project start date and end date, nor it is about how many users logged in, rather it is all about people. It is all about having a culture of conversation, engagement of thoughts, creative debates and open dialogues.

And Enterprise Social Media is all about connecting and sharing thus building a professional relationship crossing the organizational hierarchy. It is not a tool or technology platform; rather it is an ongoing process, a change mechanism of culture and prevalent behavior of the organization.

Success of such a tool lies in the hands of senior executives to start their conversations, engaging their teams, fostering an open dialogue on the subjects of interest to the organization and highlighting major learning/ take-away from such conversation for implementation.