More Thoughts on Enterprise Social

It occurred to me that enterprise social is kind of like holiday parties — AKA: enterprise socials.

When you go to a holiday party, you probably primarily interact with and socialize with the group of people that you work with on a day to day basis anyways.

But more importantly, according to recent studies, while 9 in 10 companies plan to have a holiday party, only 1 in 20 employees actually want to have a holiday party.

In my opinion, this more or less mirrors top down enterprise social initiatives.  Employees would probably rather have better communication and collaboration tools and don’t actually care about social tools (I make the distinction because you can have communication and collaboration without social).

It is the leadership that crumbles to the sexy sales pitch of enterprise social, failing to make the distinction between communication, collaboration, and social.  Give your employees more communication and collaboration and skip the social.