Enterprise social is less about "social" and more about collaborative problem solving

The Social Lair team had a fairly busy two days at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. A lot of work went into the preparation for the conference. It also required a lot of energy to keep up with the visitors in our booth and discuss our approach and the solution stack with them. So I want to first thank our team that made it successful.

I have been preaching the "un-socialness" of enterprise social software for some time now and the message was validated by the majority of people that I met at the conference. When you think about Enterprise Social  Software, you think about socializing the way people do on Facebook, only this time it is inside an organization. People tend to forget a key difference between enterprise social and consumer social. Facebook or Farmville do not care how you spend your time on their platform/app as long as you spend enough of it and help pull your friends in the conversations so that their reach continues to expand. In the enterprise world, we primarily care about "quality" of conversations not really its volume.

At Social Lair, we are building a platform that enables organizations to "collaborate" not just "socialize". We have created a platform that facilitates solving business problems and making better decisions by leveraging the wisdom of crowds; unlike many other players in this area that just pay lip service, we really do it. Our analytics and gamification engine helps significantly reduce the cost of social transactions. The conversational constructs embedded in user's activity stream provide quantitative aggregation that can be used for predictions, preference ranking, resource allocation, etc.

Overall we had a very positive reaction to our overall message. A lot of people were complaining about how noisy some of the other platform are and the challenges encountered in making them sticky. Most people liked the term "Collective Business Intelligence" platform. We found some like-minded partners that will soon join our ecosystem.

Enterprise social tools must help people collaborate not just communicate

I recently came across a post by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman titled "Facebook no match for old-style politics". The story begins with an incident related to Egyptian elections. The election choice is between Mohamed Morsai, the candidate of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and Ahmed Shafik, a retired general who also served as Hosni Mubarak's last prime minister. The article talks about how the inner workings of the society hasn't really changed even though information sharing via Twitter and Facebook may have been responsible for the democratic revolution. He goes on to mention a comment from an egyptian friend "Facebook really helped people to communicate, but not collaborate". That's exactly how I feel about may of today's enterprise Social platforms.

We have been dealing with the information explosion problem for over a decade and many of today's enterprise social tools are making it worse by throwing even more information in users' activity stream. I have talked to many enterprise users and they have invariably complained about how noisy these systems become and how he/she has stopped using it.

At Social Lair, we have a fundamentally different outlook towards building an enterprise social platform. Socializing without purpose cannot give organizations the ROI they need from these systems. We certainly support information sharing, but we have created several conversational constructs that promote purposeful interactions. Our primary goal is to allow our users to get their work done faster, better, and cheaper by leveraging the energy of their co-workers, partners, and customers. For us, sharing is just the tip of the iceberg; we "socialize" many other business functions including innovation, forecasting, coordination, and strategy management.