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.
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.
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