Corporate Social Platform

This is Part 2 of Adopting a Corporate Social Platform. See Part 1 for more information on why Facebook is not the best option for a company social network. 
 
Why introduce a company social network? Internal communications teams have been working on implementing intranets in large companies for decades. Lack of effective communication between teams, departments and offices thousands of miles away can create silos, duplicate efforts and cause confusion around processes that change dynamically.

Idea or knowlege sharing, more transparency between departments or business units, and less redundancy between teams - these are just some of the benefits to implementing intranets, but that's nothing new. It's the "social" aspect that is driving interest in corporate social platforms today which enable many of the features popular on consumer social networks like Facebook and YouTube.

Imagine employees having access to a network of employees globally and user contributed resources. Picture the ability to follow departments, projects or company leaders to learn more about an area of interest or share feedback on processes. Or think of employees sharing their favorite moments from the last annual corporate meeting with satellite offices. With a social media-enabled intranet, employees can even benefit by building visibility and recognition for their work via blogs or furthering relationships with colleagues in other departments or offices through comments, messaging and other social networking features.

Company social networks, in addition to improved communicaions, increased transparency and reduced redundancy, have much potential to transform corporate culture, from employee morale to personal and professional development.

Corporate social platforms like Reality Digital's Opus Platform are easily customizable to include the features that will be most pertinent to and productive for your employees in a company social network, including the ability to upload and share videos, images, audio files and documents that contribute to a project's success, and the ability to interact and develop relationships with other community members via comments, ratings and blogs. And while you expect employees to have common sense in a business environment, moderation tools like those available in the Opus Platform should be in place to monitor and take action on inappropriate user generated content.

So what's this going to cost me? If you're interested in corporate intranets, you may very well know how much budget and resource it takes to build one from scratch or upgrade an existing system. White label social media platforms like the Opus Platform are provided as software-as-a-service (SaaS) which means you don't take on any infrastructure costs and can pay as you go, resulting in lower total cost of ownership. There are no headaches with hiring developers to build code, no hardware or software upgrades to provision, and no guess work when it comes to figuring out how to use social media effectively. It's all handled by the technology provider, in this case, Reality Digital.

So in conclusion, if you're considering implementing or upgrading your intratnet to a company social network, take a look at corporate social platforms like Reality Digital's Opus Platform to glean potentially enormous beneftis from increased employee communication at a much more affordable cost to building it yourself. I encourage you to learn more about Reality Digital's solutions by speaking with a sales representative today.

Just came across an interesting article on company social networks in bMighty and whether or not Facebook could be a viable option for hosting your intranet. The article shares a unique story where a midsize business has successfully adopted Facebook as a "radical" and free intranet solution and corporate social platform. With practically everyone now on Facebook, this seems like an easy way to connect employees already active on a social networking platform and a viable alternative to custom solutions that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build and require intensive resources to manage day to day.

Facebook, however, is a public online social networking site, a mass-aggregate community that probably includes in addition to your employees, your competitors. It is not an "enterprise platform from a security standpoint," the article mentions. If you're fine with the potential exposure of business-sensitive conversations and information as a result of Facebook's public nature, great. If that worries you, but you want to introduce social media and social networking into your company culture and keep data secure, consider adopting a corporate social platform for your company social network.

All this activity is available with a custom community platform and it can sit safely behind your company firewall to ensure security, according to Jeremiah Owyang, senior analyst for social computing at Forrester Research.

Built specifically for creating online communities where the use of online video and other media is central to communication, Reality Digital's Opus Platform is an enterprise-level social media platform that can be implemented as a "corporate social platform" behind your firewall to keep assets and interactions secure. This means you can take advantage of all the relationship building and resource sharing features you'd find on public social networks but in a secure, branded environment with content that is relevant to your employee base and safe from competitors. Opus Platform's high degree of customization enables you to dictate the right blend of features and security levels appropriate to your business and corporate culture, versus bowing to the limitations of Facebook.

Also keep in mind that with corporate social platforms, you own the site and all its content. You don't own a Facebook group; that content belongs to Facebook. In addition, you have little control over moderation and Facebook is probably monetizing your content in the process.

So why a company social network over a more traditional company intranet? I'll address that in part 2.