When They Say It, It’s Worth Listening To

McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm is a trusted advisor to many of the world’s leading businesses, governments, and institutions, and, now more than ever, an advocate of social tools. McKinsey takes seriously, “telling the truth as they see it.” A truth they’ve recently documented concerns the real value organizations gain by going social.

In 2010, McKinsey analysts found that the ability of companies to engage in more collaborative internal ideation enhanced organizational productivity. This year, their fifth annual survey asked over 4,200 global executives how organizations deploy social tools and the benefit they provide. The survey findings once again underscored the value of social tools, stating they “continue to seep into many organizations, transforming business processes and raising performance.”

The McKinsey survey reveals, “levels of reported benefits not only remain high when respondents’ organizations use social tools for internal purposes but have also increased among those that use them for communicating with customers and for integration with partners and suppliers.” Executives at internally-networked organizations seem to note the highest improvement in benefits from interactions with employees, while externally networking organizations gain most from customer outreach, according to the survey report.

However, despite this great potential for social in enterprises, there continues to be lingering resistance toward becoming fully networked; towards adopting both internal and externally facing networking tools. As 2011 ends, companies can still stand to improve their use and mastery of social technologies. Moreover, while the use of external (customer facing) social tools seems to have increased slightly over the past year, internal tools continue to suffer from neglect.

At NewsGator, we’ve seen our customers benefit from deploying internal social tools, providing capabilities that streamline collaboration and expertise discovery to create a more productive working environment.

How does NewsGator Social Sites increase internal collaboration?

NewsGator’s Social Sites 2010 allows for faster and more collaborative search integration, increased adoption among stakeholders, streamlined communication, improved employee recruiting and retention, and improved overall productivity. First, Social Sites Activity Streams collect an aggregate flow of relevant events, content, and activities from within the system, providing users with the right information faster. And to eliminate information overload, all streams can be easily filtered, enabling users to sort for specific sources or opinions for a given assignment.

Next, to streamline expertise discovery, Social Sites builds on existing SharePoint profile data, and rather than just making it easier to “mine expertise,” provides ways to cast a wide but focused net to a specific audience using familiar social tools such as hashtags.

Use a particular hashtag in a microblog post, and your comment will automatically show up in the Activity Stream of any colleague who has included that term on his or her user profile, making it easier to collaborate with the right people faster.

And for more focused collaboration, Social Sites communities provide an interactive setting for internal and external stakeholders, letting users convene around communities of practice and interests for projects, ideation, new initiatives, or even fun things at work.

Finally, with Social Sites Expertise, scoring can be based on what you DO, in addition to what you SAY you do. Drill into a particular topic and a graphical representation shows exactly who has the most knowledge, based not just on their self-stated areas of expertise but, also on an assessment of their behavior and other users' reactions to them. This capability enables increased confidence in collaboration across all ranks of the organization. Try and recognize these strong performers using Spotlight – a badging, recognition, and expertise discovery module. This value-add module is driven by meaningful, measurable participation, and allows users to shine as subject-matter experts and earn merit-based, electronic badges, while letting organizations quickly locate, recognize and motivate top performers.

The McKinsey survey reports what we at NewsGator have known for some time now: “When adopted at scale across an emerging type of networked enterprise and integrated into the work processes of employees, social technologies can boost a company’s financial performance and market share.” Moreover, “many believe that if organizational barriers to the use of social technologies diminish, they could form the core of entirely new business processes that may radically improve performance.”

At NewsGator we’re telling organizations to get on board now; make the move to social, and watch your organization transform in employee satisfaction and profitability. If you’d like to discuss how your organization can benefit from our enterprise social computing solution, please contact us today!