Best practices for embracing social networking

1. By 2014, social networking services will replace email as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users

Greater availability of social networking services both inside and outside the firewall, coupled with changing demographics and work styles will lead 20 percent of users to make a social network the hub of their business communications. During the next several years, most companies will be building out internal social networks and/or allowing business use of personal social network accounts. Social networking will prove to be more effective than e-mail for certain business activities such as status updates and expertise location.

1. By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration

The huge popularity of the consumer-microblogging service Twitter, has led many organizations to look for an “enterprise Twitter,” that provides microblogging functionality with more control and security features to support internal use between employees. Enterprise users want to use microblogging for many of the same reasons that consumers do to share quick insights, to keep up with what colleagues are doing, to get quick answers to questions and so on.

3. Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail

When it comes to collaboration, IT organizations are accustomed to providing a technology platform (such as, email, IM, Web conferencing) rather than delivering a social solution that targets specific business value. Through 2013, IT organizations will struggle with shifting from providing a platform to delivering a solution. This will result in over a 70 percent failure rate in IT-driven social media initiatives. Fifty percent of business-led social media initiatives will succeed, versus 20 percent of IT-driven initiatives.

Enterprises will need to develop entirely new skill sets around designing and delivering social media solutions. Until this happens, failure rates will remain high. A dearth of methods, technologies and tools will impede the design and delivery of social media solutions in the near term. But long term, enterprises will realize that social media is not a “hit or miss” activity naturally prone to high failure rates, and that a calculated approach to social media solution delivery must be an IT competency. At that point, post 2012, the social software market growth will accelerate as will the overall impact of social media on business and society.

4. Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications

As we move toward three billion phones in the world serving the main purpose of providing communications and collaboration anytime anywhere, it’s expected that more end users will spend significant time experiencing the collaborative tools on these devices. For some of the world, these will be the first or the only applications they use.

The experience with these tools for all who use them will enable the user to handle far more conversations within a given amount of time than their PCs simply because they are easier to use. Just as the iPhone impacted user interface design on the desktop, the lessons in the mobile phone collaboration space will dramatically affect PC applications, many of which are derivatives of decades-old platforms based on the PBX or other older collaboration paradigm.

5. Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity

Social network analysis is a useful methodology for examining the interaction patterns and information flows that occur among the people and groups in an organization, as well as among business partners and customers. However, when surveys are used for data collection, users may be reluctant to provide accurate responses. When automated tools perform the analysis, users may resent knowing that software is analyzing their behavior. For these reasons, social network analysis will remain an untapped source of insight in most organizations.

These five social software predictions were derived from analysts at Gartner Inc. The Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit 2010 focuses on workplace technologies, such as portals, content management, social networking, mashups, online communications tools, eDiscovery, search technologies, Web 2.0 and emerging collaboration tools.

Analysts will explore how these technologies are a key element in raising overall organizational productivity and employee impact, and how enterprises must change to get business results at the annual Gartner PCC Summit 2010, being held 9-11 March in Baltimore and 15-16 September in London.