Social Is Now a Noun

Inspired by the tremendous growth of Facebook and its endless ability to compel users to share, communicate and engage, companies have been trying to convince their employees to do the same at work. They hope that the same type of technology will help employees to share, communicate and engage inside the enterprise just as they do in the consumer world. Sometimes it works, although many companies are learning that just because you build it, they won’t necessarily come.

Social software is a very hot space right now.

What’s interesting, though, is how the industry struggles to find the right way to describe what it is we are doing here. The idea is not new, actually. Collaboration has been around for well over a decade and the benefits this new breed of social software offers is very similar to what collaboration did back in the early days of eRoom and OpenText Livelink. Heck, Lotus Notes has been called collaboration - the history of collaboration goes back to 1989! But of course we can’t use the old name ‘collaboration’ for this new hip, social software, can we?

Dedicated collaboration/social software is becoming rare

So the industry went on a long journey, searching for the right term. We started with extended collaboration, extended enterprise collaboration, collaboration software for the enterprise, team collaboration, and content collaboration and that apparently wasn’t cool enough, even though all these terms are still being used by various vendors. Then we borrowed the term social networking since that was how we used to refer to the thing we did on Facebook back then. That didn’t last very long and new terms came along including social software, social communities, social workplace, social business, and social collaboration. At some point, the industry even briefly toyed with the idea to seriously call this software category the Facebook for the Enterprise.

That, thankfully, didn’t take hold and so the journey continues. The latest trend is using just the word ‘social’. Yeah, I know, it is an adjective but old rules like grammar shouldn’t stand in the way of progress and world domination. And so, social became a noun.

More and more, social capabilities are built into enterprise applications

Well, maybe, the search will be over soon. It is becoming increasingly apparent that ‘social’  is becoming a feature rather than an industry. Social capabilities are increasingly becoming integrated into other enterprise software - from content management, business process management, customer experience management, to CRM and ERP. So, perhaps we don’t have to worry about what to call the space because it is not a space at all - it is an integral part of enterprise applications.