Michael Idinopulos is chief customer officer and general manager of Socialtext.

Michael Idinopulos

The business community faces immense pressure to embrace each new social network, keeping up with the pace that their employees have become comfortable with in their personal lives on sites such asFacebook and Twitter. Creating a community in the workplace where employees can share and engage on a real-time platform makes everyday communication and collaboration easier and more effective, delivering tangible business results.

When it comes to today’s fast-paced workplace, there’s no better place for social collaboration. But over time, our society has changed from an open setting of collaborative work to a closed, cubicle environment where work is isolated and trapped, confined by our digital domain. We went from verbally discussing and sharing information to doing our jobs secluded from the very people who we bounced ideas off of and who kept us informed on what was happening.

When technology advanced to facilitate and automate our tasks, it also gave us something to talk to each other about. But we became locked behind digital walls even though our cubicles had been dismantled. Thankfully, we have now come full circle and have the tools to once again collaborate and learn on the job with the use of advanced technology available in the workplace. Breaking down the “private office” has become easier than ever and has unleashed what can only be described as a productivity revolution.

In 2012, “social” was all about collaboration and mobility in the workplace, creating a physical and virtual community that brought in-house and remote workers together. It’s no surprise that businesses are racing to adopt enterprise-wide social, simply because it works. More and more companies are adopting social collaboration tools to provide employees the tools they need for immediate access to what is needed to get work done through interaction, connection and collaboration. This in turn provides a more embedded place within an organization.

In 2012, social business resounded throughout the business land as companies were beginning to realise the potential of going social. However, 2013 is the year when companies will invest more heavily in social business, and will have to take into consideration the implications of coping with big data. Various factors will impact the workplace and bring the role of the CIO to the forefront of corporate influence.

Rob Howard, founder and CTO of social enterprise and community software company Telligent, shares his predictions for 2013 in social business: 

1. Businesses will continue to shift investments from Facebook and back to on-domain communities:

In 2013, businesses that previously shifted marketing funds away from their traditional dot-com domain towards Facebook, will reverse that trend. Research from Forrester Research Inc. and other analyst firms continue to validate the need for organisations to invest in their own websites and community experiences. Why? Consumers have different expectations and behaviours in consumer social media and branded communities.

Here’s a summary table I put together to show how we can work more effectively using social tools for common work tasks.

 Thanking Colleagues

Common Approach Results

• Send thank you e-mail

• Copy everyone on e-mail
• Forward to team and manager (lots of e-mails)
• Eventually e-mail gets lost or deleted

New Social Tool Approach Results

• Write on colleagues Internal Company Profile Board
• Micro blog about it
• Update your Status to thank them
• Connect with them online using social platforms

• Their manager and network can see the thank you
• e-mail not required
• Highlights expertise of person
• Builds their reputation online within the company

Creating Presentations

Common Approach Results

• Create draft presentation and e-mail team, get feedback from team

• e-mail as attachment
• Spend lots of time integrating feedback
• Stuck in mail jail from multiple attachment versions

Ray Kurzweil’s analysis in the “Singularity is Near” predicts that technology capabilities grow at an exponential rate. Long periods of preparation and solving many small problems set the stage for the ability to combine those smaller solutions together and solve bigger problems. Moore’s Law is used as the canonical case, but my favorite example is the rate of progress in mapping the Human Genome, which followed this pattern.

What has become known as Social Business is now at the elbow of such a curve, in my opinion. From basic telephony, to email, to centralized forms of collaboration such as forums, wikis, and blogs, we have come to an integrated suite of capabilities served up to us through Jive Software, Lotus Connections, Salesforce Chatter, Yammer, and in many other products.

It is possible to see these suites as the end of the road, as the culmination of a set of capabilities into a product category that will last for 30 or 40 years like ERP or CRM. I reject that view and instead assert that the culmination of Social Business will instead be a new paradigm that changes how knowledge is captured, how processes are designed, how applications are created, and how work gets done. Consider the rest of this article a manifesto for completing this transformation.