The Enterprise Social Network Primer
312.529.3000 www.duoconsulting.com 2
DUO
Most people who work in today’s enterprise business
environment have better and more efficient tools
to collaborate with their friends (Facebook, Tumblr,
Instagram, Foursquare) and business connections
(LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) than they have to collaborate
with their work colleagues. That, however, is changing.
And it is going to change your business.
Evolving business practices and the maturity level of Enterprise Social
Networking (ESN) technology are redefining how businesses leaders view
social media. In fact, those in the business of identifying and tracking
business trends expect ESNs to make a significant impact
on business processes over the next five years based on their
potential to:
• Become a mainstay replacement for organizational intranets.
• Reduce (if not replace) the clutter of email inboxes.
• Speed innovation by stimulating internal and external
collaboration.
• Archive the knowledge an organization creates and
make it accessible via simple search.
If your organization is looking
for a way to better connect its
people and knowledge, it’s time
to start building a business case
for the adoption of ESN.
Enterprise social networking
tools are driving positive top
and bottom line results for
progressive organizations
globally. But we’re getting
ahead of ourselves.
Let’s start with
the definitions.

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What is Enterprise Social
Networking,anyway?
The Altimeter Group provides research and advice for companies challenged by business disruptions,
enabling them to pursue new opportunities and business models. In 2012, Altimeter Group released
a definitive study on the state of enterprise social networking. To help the audience understand the
practice, the organization defines the Enterprise Social Network — the practical term for an integrated
system of this kind as:
“A set of technologies that creates business value by
connecting the members of an organization through
profiles, updates, and notifications.”

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It’sAbout Productivity
Think of an enterprise social network as a place to apply online social
interaction strategies to work and productivity focused channels. It’s the
reading, sharing and communication power of Facebook applied to the
enterprise. And focus your mind on the positive aspects of Facebook. Don’t
go down the rabbit hole of challenges confronting this one social platform.
Enterprise social networks make categorizing communication as simple as
posting a piece of content to the right group, where you already know the
audience cares. These technologies change the way people interact across
department lines. What’s more, they can act as forums for partners and
clients, extending organized communication with a social bent outside
the virtual walls of the enterprise.
ESNs take everything that’s sticky about social media and apply it to
business interactions. More organizations are adopting this technology
and finding ways to make it successful. Yours could be among them.
Make your enterprise more lithe and more efficient with an enterprise
social network.
I’m sold. How do I build
a business case?
Looking to build a business
case for adding enterprise
social networking tools for
your business?
This eBook is for you.
You’ll learn:
• Why internal email must be leashed
in for the sake of business efficiency
• Enterprise Social’s ability to capture
knowledge and why that’s important
• How Social makes online collaboration
easier and more rewarding
• How silos can (and should) be broken
down with ESNs
• A few examples of how companies are
using enterprise social networking

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Rumors of Email’s DeathAre
NOT Greatly Exaggerated
To realize the benefits of an ESN, organizations will be making a significant break
from their current favorite (but ineffective) archival and communication tool -
email. That’s right. This bad boy has got to be reined in.
If you took a guess, what percentage of your time during a given week do
you think you dedicate to managing your email account? McKinsey Global
Institute recently found we spend 28 percent of the workweek on average
reading, writing and responding to email.
Yep, you read that right. A quarter of your workweek. And how many
emails still sit unfiled in your inbox?
That doesn’t imply communication inside of the workplace is a bad thing.
Still, many of us understand the pain of digging through emails, tracking
email chains, figuring out who should and shouldn’t be on a thread and other
time-consuming practices that don’t seem to track with today’s ultra-efficient
business environment. Yet it remains our primary business communication
tool. What gives?
We spend 28 percent of the
workweek reading, writing and
responding to email.

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IT research and business advisory firm Gartner, Inc. saw the landscape
changing as far back as 2010:
“By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the
primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent
of business users.”
Like email, enterprise social networks archive useful interactions and knowledge exchange.
But that’s where the similarities end.
Enterprise social tools offer new ways to interact within public and private environments. ESN members
have a single identity, rather than both a name and an email address. Communicating with more than
one person becomes more intuitive, eliminating much of the hassle involved in managing chains.
Does it make sense that the people who work in your enterprise have better
and more efficient tools to collaborate with their friends and business
connections than they have to collaborate with their work colleagues?

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The best part is that you’re organizing and
archiving as you go.
Wondering how this happens? Most ESNs are configured in “groups.”
These groups represent what’s relevant to members of the group, and
only group members see the content you post. You don’t have to think
about who should receive the communication; all you need is to consider
the topic of the content. Another way of thinking about it is that the
content creator “pushes” the content into the group environment.
The content lives there, not in your inbox (although that is still an option).
Then members of the group interested in the content “consume” it.
No email queue. No routing. No reply all.
It’s simpler to break through the noise of an amorphous email platform
and make sure your information gets to the people who need it most.
Each group is already categorized, and ESNs typically include robust
search functionality. You don’t have to rely on each person to organize
his own “inbox.” Think of the newsfeed as the next generation of
the inbox.
How does a social approach impact how
organizations archive and search for information?
Think of an enterprise social
network as a place to apply
online social interaction
strategies to work and
productivity focused channels.

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How Knowledge Capture Makes
the Enterprise More Efficient
Communication is an important part of enterprise social networking.
The flip side to that coin is recording that communication — creating
an environment that automatically captures data and making it more
practical to use that data.
Knowledge capture through enterprise social networking functions from
real-time and long-term perspectives.
• Real time: Capturing knowledge in real-time through a public forum
can help departments or teams avoid duplicating the work of another
team. Also, identifying the expertise or position of a team member is
quick and simple through user profiles.
• Long term: ESNs offer a searchable database that makes it easier to
form best practices around internal processes. When team members
move up, over or out, you have simple access to their content track
record and the knowledge they’ve shared over their time with your
group, team or organization.
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The most unique part of how enterprise social networks capture knowledge is making this knowledge
actionable. An ESN has the ability to do this in two ways:
• Making knowledge public and searchable: An enterprise social network doubles as a central
repository for knowledge. The “central” part means it’s much easier to find pieces of data, creating
a library of sorts from which your entire organization can benefit.
• Simpler analysis: With the rise of big data, enterprise organizations are finding more ways to use
data to their advantage. An ESN is a great place to apply data layers, offering you insights into how
your organization works.
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Social Media Makes Collaboration
More Intuitive,Rewarding
Humankind is a social animal. Yet human resources software firm SilkRoad
says 57 percent of recent survey respondents reported they aren’t allowed
to access social media at work. So why do we fight sociability in the
workplace?
The popular thought process holds that social media like Facebook,
Twitter and Tumblr distract employees from doing their jobs. OK, we’ll
buy that. But what is also true is that you can wrestle some of that social-
oriented mindshare away from sites that are unproductive for business and
redistribute it to tasks that are. In sum, capture our social nature and put it
to good productive use.
What? You have an opportunity to take advantage of a technology that is so
compelling, so engrossing that employees can’t tear themselves away from
it — and you aren’t interested in finding a way to use that behavior to your
advantage?
Humankind is a social animal.
So why do we fight sociability
in the workplace?

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Think about enterprise social networking as a way to make work more engaging for employees
at your organization. From a high-level perspective, enterprise social networking:
• Takes advantage of intuitive technology:
Professionals understand how to use websites like Facebook and LinkedIn. As social networks,
these websites are intuitive in their own right. As places where people kill 18 percent of their time
online (on average), they are clearly designed in a way that makes them simple to manipulate.
Is it the topic matter that makes these sites sticky? Or is it the user experience itself? Surely
constant social validation is a reason why social networkers keep coming back for more, and that’s
why enterprise social networking also…
• Incentivizes collaboration:
Social validation (through ‘likes,’ comments, etc.) is a huge factor in making social networking sites
sticky. It shouldn’t be surprising to think that an enterprise social network would encourage the
same type of social validation. In essence, that validation incentivizes the collaborative process.
As result, enterprise workers are actually rewarded for interacting with their coworkers.
You can imagine this could have a huge impact on how employees use enterprise communication tools.
Clearly, something about social media keeps people interacting (and doing it often). And ‘often’ might be
an understatement: Recently, researchers found that social media was as tempting as cigarettes or sex.
So, you know, don’t worry about making your pitch to your CEO ‘sexy.’ It already is.
Clearly, we can’t resist social media.
How do we turn it to our advantage on the business side of the equation?

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Break Down Silos to Collaborate,
Innovate Build Camaraderie
Enterprise organizations spend countless hours attempting to break down the walls between
departments. Many people believe these walls are obstacles to collaboration.
Enhanced collaboration drives more innovation. And why would you build fences between friends?
Enterprise social networking tools break down those walls, opening an organization up to
collaboration across borders — departmental, geographical and hierarchical. Here’s a great
explanation by management and business expert Marcel Côté of how organizational silos
work against an enterprise.
“The symptoms of the silo effect are easy to recognize: lack of
cooperation, internal competition and breakdown in communication.
The result is that one division gets pitted against another — head
office against operations, one department against another.”

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How can enterprise social networking address
these issues?
• Cooperation between departments online:
An enterprise social network creates a forum where members
of disparate departments can reach across the aisle. These new
interactions open the door wide for innovation.
• Validation and constructive criticism, not competition:
Yes, social media can have a negative side. But employees are
familiar enough with business networks like LinkedIn to understand
appropriate, professional conduct. With enterprise social networking,
interaction typically takes on a constructive bent.
• Engaging public and private communication options:
Communication gets much more interactive through social
channels. Retain the ability to communicate privately while opening
other conversations to more people.
These benefits, coupled with the nature of interaction over social media,
create a great foundation for teambuilding. A strong, happy team is
essential to effective internal communication.
Researchers have found that
social media was as tempting
as cigarettes or sex.

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Enterprise Social Networking
Tastes Success
ESNs aren’t brand new. A few courageous early adopters have been testing the waters over the past
few years, making sure it’s safe for us to swim. That’s part of why we have so much confidence in
enterprise social networking as a practice.
Here are a few great examples of how enterprise organizations currently
use enterprise social networking tools.
• Wells Fargo:
The financial giant recently spoke to InformationWeek about its various experiences with
enterprise social networking pilot programs. The company has run into its fair share of
obstacles — but says ESN tools have had a positive impact on sales. While the company
is sold on the concept, it hasn’t found the right software vendor just yet. (Might we
suggest a custom implementation through Drupal?)

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• SAS:
The Hub is an ESN for SAS employees launched in 2011. Former Chief Knowledge Officer Frank
Leistner called it “one of the key communication tools within SAS, citing widespread adoption
and direct increases in collaboration.
• GE:
This well known engineering brand uses Salesforce Chatter to power its social networking
internally. GE CMO Beth Comstock cites reductions in time investment for certain processes
dropping from a week to mere minutes.
These are just a handful of examples of how enterprise organizations are applying enterprise social
networking tools.
There’s a whole rich world of potential in your enterprise, just waiting
to be tapped. Is 2013 the year you’ll make it happen?

DUO
Duo is building Enterprise
Social Networks
Duo has been involved in the strategy, design, development and
deployment of several enterprise social networks and business community
sites. Based on our experience, our clients’ successes and the evident social
business momentum, we continue to focus our efforts building custom
enterprise social tools for organizations like yours.
If you’re looking to cultivate a happy, healthy internal culture that spurs
innovation and saves your organization time and money, talk to Duo
about your next initiative.
Call 312.529.3000 or email to chat about how Duo Consulting can make
your enterprise more social.

Enterprise Social Network Primer White Paper

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Enterprise Social Network Primer White Paper