Social grows up in the workplace

The following is a guest post by Paul LaBelle, a marketing and corporate communications executive with deep experience in the software industry. A former journalist, Paul lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts.

Welcome to the party

There’s a party happening today on more than 1.5 million PCs, laptops and mobile devices worldwide as tibbr celebrates its second birthday. No, that wasn’t a typo — tibbr is the name of a social networking platform for enterprises — think of it as an internal, secure, company-wide Facebook for the enterprise. With 1.5 million paid users in more than 104 countries, it’s been cited as the industry’s fastest growing collaborative technology with the broadest scope of functionality at work in enterprises today.

To put this in perspective, think back to the early days of the Internet, when the term “Web Years” was a common term. It meant the length of time it takes for Internet technology to evolve as much as non-web technology develops in a calendar year, commonly thought to be about two months, thus equating a Web Year to six standard years.

Fast forward two decades later and we find the meteoric rise of new Web-based developments make Web Years as relevant as ever. Witness how the Internet of Things, 4GL mobile Web apps, GPS-enabled everything, and social computing for the workplace are transforming markets, politics and global social movements at incredible speeds.

So tibbr and its enterprise social siblings are really reaching adolescence in Web Years. And just as some early teenagers sprout up and mature much faster than others into productive members of society, only a few of these social platforms are truly mature and enterprise-ready, delivering solid returns on investment for their users and companies.

Nexus of Forces

Gartner places social computing among the must-have technologies for enterprises to best leverage a “Nexus of Forces” required to remain competitive in the 21^st century. They define the Nexus of Forces as the convergence and mutual reinforcement of four independent trends: social interaction, mobility, cloud and information.

According to leading industry analysts in this area, the key capabilities effective social computing platforms need in the workplace are ease of use, contextual collaboration, integration into real business systems, enterprise grade security and entitlement, with all able to run on any mobile or tablet device.

These capabilities, being intuitively adopted by millions of employees worldwide, promise to provide all corporations productivity force multipliers as they enable employees to easily collaborate, communicate, and find experts and content they need in real time to reach and achieve their individual and company’s goals.