When most businesses/organizations think of Social Media, they think “customer facing” and marketing or reputation management. Often overlooked is the viability of Social Media tools and services within the organization itself. Social Media internally might be more aptly labeled Corporate Social Media, while some have called it Enterprise Social Networking but is “social” the right word? Regardless of the label/term, it can make good business sense. Some companies have already adopted Social Media internally and others are beginning to look closer. How can Social Media tools and services benefit the organization?

Part of the challenge for many organizations may be in the word “social” itself, since in business terms, we don’t equate the word “social” with productivity or work. We associate “social” as being non-work related activities. Looking at a thesaurus, there are no related “business” oreinted words comparable to social. While generalized chat around the water cooler or in the cafeteria is good and can prove to help projects, it’s not considered “productive” time. Additionally, to many senior managers, the concept of Social Media is empowering anybody to create and say anything, which is antithetical to current organizational structure. Thus the term “social” adds an additional level of  challenge based around integrating such solutions into an existing set of best practices and processes and potentially empowering someone too much.

Since the late ’90’s we’ve been through a series of “terms” that were highly fashionable buzzwords, but as with any buzzword, they eventually faded. We’ve had the Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) and we still have the Chief Information Officer (CIO) with conflicting and converging responsibilities. Perhaps even the moniker “media” doesn’t help either, given our frame of reference for what we see media as. Yet the term “knowledge platform” suffered and died on the vine as a “business trend” itself.

Taking the discussion of the right words out of it for a minute, Social Media tools and services bring inherent benefits to an organization. They may in fact, be the best evolution of knowledge management services to date. Original knowledge management systems were heirarchical databases and mostly leveraged via the corporate Intranet. They were the precursor to what has evolved as Web 2.0 or the Social Web or Social Media. Today’s Social Media tools like Wiki’s, blogs, microblogs, vlogs or photo sharing sites with tagging capabilities can enable better collaboration, provide a “corporate memory”, reduce meeting times and needs and speed up innovation and product delivery.

We could posit that the term “Social Media” or “Social Networking” aren’t ideal terms for the Enterprise or any large organization. The tools are the same, but more importantly, the business objective and purpose is different. For consumers, it is organized chaos, random and fluctuating. Business is heiarchical and needs to deliver profit at the end of the day. Therefore Social Media tools/services must integrate with workflow, best practices and IT infrastructure.

We might suggest some alternative “terms” for Social Media in the Enterprise. Microsoft’s Sharepoint is edging closer to being the type of platform such activity could be. So perhaps some terms like:

- Corporate Media Systems
- Organizational Collaboration
- Organizational Media
- Enterprise Collaboration

It’s a challenge to think of appropriate terms/words that might replace “Social Media” in relation to the workplace. We suspect it will simply remain “Enterprise Social Media” or “Enterprise Social Networking”. Perhaps you have some ideas? Will re-phrasing even make a difference?