By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View/UC
Strategies Expert
As
defined by Wikipedia, “Social media
refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share,
and exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks.” This
definition applies primarily to any form of business interactions, rather than
for personal socializing.
However, as people increasingly exploit
mobile smartphones and tablets for accessing the Web and for multi-modal
communications flexibility, we need to expand that definition to include
Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP) applications that will initiate
contacts with end users through social networks. This is something that IBM is
pushing strongly as “Social Business.”
Social networking is primarily a means
of posting user-generated information and comments to a virtual community of
interest. Members of the community have an option to be notified when a new
posting occurs, as well as an option to post a response to the new posting. So,
it’s not quite like person-to-person(s) email. However, as is already starting
to happen with new capabilities from social networking services, end users are
being given options to switch modalities to respond to the person of a
particular post, by email, IM, or a real-time voice or video connection.
(WebRTC should prove very useful for this!)
So, what we now have is a growing open
communication arena based on community content interest relationships, where
unified communication (UC) integrations can provide flexible interactions with
people in the community, not through a traditional personal address book or
organizational directory for person-to-person contacts.
Mobile Social
According to the Wikipedia
write-up,
mobility is playing an increasingly stronger role in allowing community members
to participate while mobile, i.e., by being proactively notified when a new
posting of interest has occurred. In effect, mobile communications reinforces
the speed of social messaging activities across a common interest of any size
community. However, once an individual user is mobile, they will need the
flexibility of UC to be notified and respond in the medium that is most
appropriate, i.e., speech, text, or even video.
As I have frequently discussed in the
past, UC enablement facilitates greater flexibility in initiating and
responding to communication contacts with mobile people, and mobile social
networking is no exception. Tablet usage increased from 3% to 16% in 2012 and
mobile users spend 30% of their time with social networking. Once a user
becomes actively engaged in a particularly interesting topic and opts to be
notified of new posts, the capabilities of smartphones will allow multi-modal real-time
notifications of new post or replies to significantly increase. That’s where
the challenge of BYOD comes into play.
The result of such increased social
networking activities can be applied to both personal social networking
communities or to organizational business groups, and seamless “dual persona”
capabilities of smartphones and tablets (e.g., the new BlackBerry “Balance”
smartphone software) will be able to keep mobile social networking activities
properly separated. However, there will always be the challenge for individual
end users to manage their mobile time efficiently. So, as with any form of
real-time contacts, social networking notifications must be manageable by the
many mobile recipients in a community.
IBM’s Push For "Social Business"
Aside from mobile access to social
network posts, there is a bigger role for social networking for business
contacts. As note in this very interesting discussion
with IBM’s John Del Pizzo, Program Director, Social Communications, and Head of
Product Management, IBM Sametime & Sametime Unified Telephony, IBM is using
social networking to interact more easily and efficiently with anyone in a
community group, inside or outside of an organization.
In a way, it is like “skills-based
routing” used in traditional customer call centers, except now it is not a
voice phone call connection that has to be made first, and it will be usable by
anyone in the community group. As John describes it, “We
call it ‘The shift from reach to relevance.’ It’s not about the one-on-one
interaction with the people you know that you can reach. It is about the
relevant people who can help you regardless of where they are in the organization.”
So, add social networking to the UC
enablement list that will impact business communications.
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Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide
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