Social DNA in the enterprise

Other enterprise-centric services are available. IBM and Microsoft, for example, offer a range of products, services and solutions. However, they are presented as "collaboration" systems, not social search, which is only a subset of those far broader systems. IBM has equipped many of its software systems with social application programming interfaces. There is a social network graph API, a search API and a social recommendation API. (For a partial list, see http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/appdevwiki.nsf/xpViewTags.xsp?categoryFilter=search.)

Microsoft SharePoint is a collaboration system that includes a range of social functions. However, Microsoft has integrated Facebook results into its public Web search system Bing. In addition, Microsoft rolled out the beta of Socl, whose url is www.so.cl. Those who want to test Socl are invited to sign up. The original link was at http://goo.gl/yFTzd. (Microsoft can close the invitation window at any time.)

SAP offers a social solution, Social OnDemand, which is a cloud service. The company says, "Using SAP Social OnDemand, you can deliver a great customer experience by listening to and engaging with your customers where they like to hangout. Find the most critical messages, and use enterprise data to glean customer insight. Then collaborate within your team or across the organization to resolve issues efficiently and effectively."

The SAP solution includes customer support, analytics and rich media. SAP's approach is to include "real-time Facebook and Twitter message response" and a "complete social profile and history."

Measuring social media

The Harvard Business Review's blog identified four key metrics for social media: revenue, sales volume, growth and customer retention. (See http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/12/why_your_social_media_metrics.html.). Access to social media content within an organization may be difficult to tie to those MBA-style indicators. Social is, after all, a human characteristic. Moving messages to a digital network is different from chatting up a prospect at a trade show. In a social media environment, much can be tracked, analyzed and scrutinized. Even the casual interaction can become meaningful. The Harvard approach exhorts managers to pursue the bottom line. Social media may be more slippery.

Social search and social services, in general, are front and center for many organizations. Several questions come to mind:

First, will social search improve enterprise information access? Social content is another "file type." Indexing the content and metadata from social content should make more information available to an authorized user of an enterprise search system. The reality is that the metadata available from social content is different from the metadata available from a Word document indexed by a traditional search system. Those differences may not be apparent until authorized users of a social search system can obtain such information as:

• Who in an organization is recognized as an expert in a particular field? The reality may be different from the job description.
• Which research scientist has a circle of contacts that include individuals working at competing firms?
• What senior executive exchanges information at the same geo-coordinates as a co-worker at a more junior position in the organization?
• What are the concepts of interest to the sales and marketing department in Las Vegas?

Second, are keyword indexes and the metadata available in social content and social networks compatible? The notion of a federated search is appealing, but do organizations want social content displayed with other types of results? Social search systems focus on relationships and presenting information that has for many people been invisible or very difficult to obtain.

Third, will the analytics that generate relationship maps be used to improve the organization or will those analytic tools be used to identify and equip managers with tools to take pre-emptive action?

Traditional vs. social content

My view of social search and the conflation of social content with indexes permitting one to find documents and Web pages is more challenging than a quick look suggests. There are significant qualitative and quantitative differences between traditional content and the social content. Among them is the fact that analytic tools can provide new ways to look at what employees may believe are intractable actions. Tools like IBM I2 Group Analyst's Notebook can be applied to the social actions of employees within an organization and available via public queries of Bing, Facebook and Google. When a person has access to a tool like Pattern Tracker, a new world of information analysis is available. A display that shows a heavy line connecting two employees in a situation of interest is not text retrieval.

With the strong interest in social content and social search, a number of business issues move to center stage. Is an organization's search administrator or its personnel manager prepared to use those tools in a constructive manner? Benjamin Franklin, a social revolutionary, said, "By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail."  Will organizations embracing social search heed his words?