Why Employees Don't Like Social Apps

When it comes to social networking, most companies find themselves in a jam. While they're extending their brand presences on the ever-popular public social network sites--Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn--they're having a devil of a time getting employees to embrace their internal social networks.

We asked business technology pros to assess their internal social networks, and the results skew downward: Only 13% say they're excellent, 25% good, with 37% average and 25% fair or poor. For a high-profile initiative that everyone from the CEO down is watching, a 62% chance of producing average or worse returns counts as a high-risk proposition.

This comment from one survey respondent, a senior IT director with a large technology company, captures the mood: "We have tried for over four years to push social networking in the enterprise. People just view it as one more place to have to look to get information."

Lackluster adoption is the biggest obstacle, cited by 35% of the 394 respondents to our Social Networking in the Enterprise Survey at companies using one or more internal social networking systems. That's exactly the same percentage as a year ago, even as Facebook grew its user base 50% to 750 million people. Facebook's expected public offering this year will only add to the pressure for companies to do more in-house with social networking. Vendor CEOs such as Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff, Yammer's David Sacks and Jive's Tony Zingale are pounding this drum, promoting their own social software platforms, yet it's clear that IT organizations must do more than ride the coattails of Facebook and Twitter.

InformationWeek isn't the only one seeing employees slow to embrace social apps. Forrester's survey of 4,985 U.S. information workers, published last fall, found that only 28% of workers use any kind of social software at least monthly for work--and of those many are using only a public social site such as Facebook. Just 22% of social software users said the technology is vital to their jobs. The top reason people cited for using social software at work (39%) is that it's easy to learn to use and fills a job need. An almost equal percentage (38%) said it's the most efficient way to do their jobs. Ease of use and efficiency are much more important than the peer pressure of colleagues saying they prefer social collaboration, Forrester's TJ Keitt notes.

Another research firm, the Corporate Executive Board, released a survey of 53 companies in September 2010 showing that user adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies lagged initial deployment by five to eight quarters. Gartner this year is predicting the social business software market will get tougher for small, independent vendors, as giants such as Microsoft, IBM, Google, VMware, and Oracle focus on it.

So, is it time to write off corporate social networks as just another technology fad? No way. Social networking can pay off, but only if IT organizations take a stronger role in their companies' internal and external social networking efforts.

Internally, this means leveraging the habits users are developing on public sites and bringing those habits inside the company. In some cases, companies just need to tweak their in-house social software, integrating it better with email, for instance. CIOs and other business leaders must also give users a reason to stay active on internal social networks, by keeping content fresh and relevant, by making it easy to access, and by providing links to people they might otherwise connect with.

Most companies' marketing and support teams already are active on public social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Now IT organizations need to step up their role, providing guidance on everything from security and monitoring to the best way to share content outside the firewall.

Our survey finds that in 54% of companies, marketing has taken ownership of social network monitoring tools, up 13 percentage points from just a year ago. That may seem like a good fit, but not if marketing isn't correctly setting up monitoring and coordinating activities with other groups like customer support. It's not hugely important who's in charge of those tools, but if IT is to have any role in how a company uses Facebook and other external social sites, it needs to fix its internal social networking projects first. And that may require a change of mindset.

"People are trying to rationalize, police, and control the tool," says Chris Laping, CIO of the 30,000-employee Red Robin restaurant chain, which has started testing Yammer for enterprise social networking. "The power of information technology is sharing information. What we naturally do with systems is lock them down, which prevents us from sharing information."

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Crunch The Numbers

Even though companies have widely deployed enterprise social networking over the last couple of years, it's not at the core of how most of them collaborate, our survey finds. Eighty-seven percent of the companies in our survey have some form of internal social network (a blog, wiki, or portal, for instance), and the majority have had these systems in place less than three years.

But usage is lagging. Only one social networking feature--online profiles--is in heavy or moderate use at more than half of the companies (53%) in our survey. Wikis, discussion forums, and blogs trail far behind--more than 20% of survey respondents say these features are in place but rarely used.

When it comes to social platforms, Microsoft SharePoint continues to lead the pack--63% of respondents use its social functions, our survey finds, though that's down from the 71% who did last year. SharePoint's dominance may be slipping as companies adopt cloud applications such as Google Sites (19%) and Salesforce.com Chatter (11%) or build their own (18%). Most companies still host their social networking platforms internally (65%), but this percentage dropped 7 points from a year ago, as businesses move to cloud options.

One bright spot in this year's survey is a notable drop in the percentage of respondents who say IT must explain social networking's role to the company--down to 15% from 21% a year ago. That finding is important, because IT will need the support of company executives as well as the rank-and-file to make social networking a vital part of employees' lives.

When it comes to interacting on public social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, most companies still fall down when it comes to monitoring, security, and even responsiveness to customer complaints. For instance, the percentage of companies in our survey that monitor social networks for discussions about their own or competing businesses actually dipped 2 points this year, to 36%, while the percentage of companies with an official or unofficial presence on social sites rose considerably--Facebook presence is up 11 points, to 66%, while Twitter presence is up 8 points to 53%. So put your company's message out there, but don't bother to track how it's being received?

Internally, most companies use the basic tools of social networking: online directories, forums, and wikis. But those tools are just the beginning of a vibrant social platform. This year we see a slight rise in the percentage of companies using more advanced social networking tools, such as social bookmarking and tagging. Still, only 23% of respondents use them heavily or moderately.

Social bookmarking includes features such as Facebook's "like" button, a simple way for people to indicate their preferences for particular content. On an internal social network, bookmarking can help useful or interesting content get noticed. You might follow your boss, a colleague, or a project group, so you're alerted anytime one f them tags something and thus might find a relevant discussion or document. Tagging is similar to bookmarking but also lets people add a keyword or two to provide more context.

Chances are good that your existing social networking platform has social bookmarking and tagging features. If it doesn't, many open source and commercial plug-ins are available, as is integration with LinkedIn and Facebook "likes."

Set Social Free

Red Robin, a chain of more than 450 burger joints, shows how companies often ease into social networking with small-scale experiments. CIO Laping, who's also the company's senior VP of business transformation, sees the world migrating away from email and collaboration portals like SharePoint and toward texting and social networking. He says he wants to "let team members collaborate in a manner that more reflects the way they are working outside the office."

Laping wanted a tool that would let people upload and share files, do status updates, and create conversations. He wanted polling to ask employees about ideas, and he wanted to be able to set up workgroups for small project teams. About a year ago, Laping decided to try Yammer, a cloud-based social software platform that competes with the likes of Chatter and Jive.

"We didn't want to send out a memo and tell people we had a new tool," Laping says. "Instead, we wanted to see how viral it was and how little user training we could do to drive adoption." The first month, 20 to 25 employees stumbled upon it and invited others. People started asking about it, and Laping's team filled them in and gave them the green light. Usage is now up to about 400 users. "There isn't an overwhelming amount of usage of the system," he says. "People are still dipping their toes into the water."

Normally, Red Robin is hard nosed about metrics, but "this is a bit of an exception because the cost of entry is so low," Laping says. Long term, he would like to reduce the company's dependence on email.

He's also watching to see how the use of Yammer will affect Red Robin's SharePoint usage. Today, Red Robin completes about 95% of IT projects using SharePoint project workspaces, but a few early Yammer adopters are trying to organize their projects on the social platform. It would be cheaper to use Yammer, Laping figures, and he says it's "more in tune with how people collaborate."

Red Robin has a long way to go from its few hundred users on Yammer to its 30,000 employees, including people like restaurant managers and cooks who might use the platform to offer feedback on new uniforms, menu changes, and staff policies. Laping admits that such huge scale is "me dreaming the dream" at this point. But he's convinced that if IT puts the tools out there and offers some basic guidance, Yammer will take hold. "Users and employees are told every day to do this, do that," he says. "Give people some freedom to roam on this one."

What Do Users Want?

All of the comments and numbers in our survey boil down to a few takeaways: Employees want simplicity, usability, and integration.

Enterprise social platforms need to have essentially the same functionality and layout as Facebook and LinkedIn.They must let users search, recommend or like content, follow discussions or people, embed content such as photographs and videos, categorize information with tags, and share documents.

Ensuring that your social platform is easy for employees to use starts with single sign-on, which two-thirds of companies in our survey offer--that means a third of companies still require separate logins.

Social software won't be easy to use without tight email integration. Facebook and LinkedIn let individuals link those sites to a person's email, and that creates the expectation. Yet 42% of the companies in our survey don't offer email integration of their internal social networks. Such integration can simply be email alerts to new posts, but it also can include the ability to link directly from an email message to the social site without an extra login, and the ability to respond to a comment or post a comment from email and have it show up in the discussion string. Email is still the most prevalent enterprise communications tool, so this level of integration will help keep the social site in front of employees. If your company has deployed unified communications, integrate social networking as well.

Social Networking Gone Wrong

For an example of how not to do enterprise social networking, consider a $1 billion manufacturer's launch of an internal site in 2009 for sales and marketing collaboration. More than two years later, the site still existed, but it was rarely updated and used. Of the 500 employees who had access, fewer than 2% visited the site each month in 2011. IT and sales staffers complained about the time it took to manage the site. To get work done, the manufacturer's sales team went back to phone calls, email, and live meetings. There was talk of scrapping the entire platform.

When new management came into the company (which asked not to be identified) in 2011, it decided to revitalize the platform. The software didn't offer an Outlook plug-in, but IT was able to configure it so updates and replies could be made via email. The IT team added "follow" and "recommend" capabilities for posts and comments, which bolstered collaboration. The company doesn't have an instant messaging platform, but it added a simple cloud-based chat app to the site. Sales assistants who usually took phone calls from salespeople in the field looking for presentations or documents started doing those exchanges on live chat, turning them into promoters of the social system.

Adding a file-sharing option to the social platform instantly became a hit, as it let salespeople get around the company's unpopular size limit on email attachments. Don't think employees care about such limits? Enterprise usage of Google Docs and file-sharing site Dropbox (which claims to have 45 million users) is exploding because they offer a cheap and easy way to share big files. File sharing on your social platform takes that activity back inside the company domain.

But the manufacturing company didn't just spruce up its social platform. It also set specific goals as part of the site relaunch:

>> 70% user participation;

>> Daily login by users;

>> 30% cut in calls to sales admins;

>> 100% distribution of marketing content via the social portal;

>> Active postings by topic leaders.

That last goal was a big one. If companies don't provide meaningful content and a compelling reason to use a platform, people won't. You may have to break employees of longstanding habits, like emailing PDFs to one another.

Once the goals were set, IT created weekly snapshots using site analytics to provide executives with updates on the progress, so that they can brandish the stick should usage trail off.

Case in point: Site usage rose steadily after the relaunch, with 60% of employees logging in daily after 60 days. But then site visits dropped by 25% over the next few weeks--average daily page views declined 22% and on-site time fell 36%.

The culprit was stale content. The required regular updates from marketing and regional leaders slipped as people were pulled into different projects. Chat, document sharing, and several other site areas remained strong, but because marketing and regional updates were standard parts of users' customized home pages, their absence quickly made the site look stale.

Key to getting the site back on track was having the company's top execs hold the marketing and regional leaders accountable--much more effective than having IT leaders nag them. Traffic rebounded as teams refocused, but a challenge emerged that still lingers today: Certain top execs persist in sending mass emails rather than use the social networking portal.

Get The Data On Social Efforts

The above example points to the need for hard data on how social networking sites are being used. In our survey, 61% of companies still don't have analytics capabilities for their social sites. Of those that do, only 8% have enough analytics detail to understand participation and behavioral changes. IT professionals must be the champions of social data analytics, especially for initiatives related to the fuzzy world of user productivity.

Fortunately, there are dozens of analytics tools that you can drop into social applications, including SharePoint, to track usage. You can even use Google Analytics on a secure site for free. Analytics and reporting tools let IT teams know which features are and aren't being used so that they can make certain ones easier to use or add ones that are more relevant.

The growth of social networking is bittersweet for many IT veterans. Users fawn over Facebook and LinkedIn, while the pioneer social collaboration platforms--the likes of Lotus Notes, Novell GroupWise, and FirstClass--have lost their luster. IT organizations have been preaching social for years; they just couldn't get it quite right.

Use to your advantage the fact that Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have done the hardest work for IT--they've trained people to think in a social context. But now IT has to do its part. It needs to assert itself when it comes to use of public social networks, pushing to get monitoring, security, and posting guidelines in place. On in-house social networks, creating metrics will be essential to monitoring what people are doing, so IT can react and better content and features can be added if activity falters. Working with business unit partners, this can revitalize a moribund internal social networking platform and get the benefits you always expected. However, IT needs to get involved to make it happen. -- With Andrew Conry-Murray

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What Enterprise Social Success Stories Have In Common

InformationWeek: Jan. 30, 2012 Issue

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