Enterprise Social Networking

Think you’re enslaved to social networking? Is work your only escape from the stream of status updates that are Facebook and Twitter? Well, hold on to your sanity because the corporate world is getting ambushed by business-focused social networking applications, and your work day is becoming a little more social.

Enterprise social networking gives corporate, non-profit, and academic employees the ability to collaborate and communicate in real-time with staff members across the globe. Similar to The Little Rascals “He-Man Woman Haters Club,” business-centric social networking is a “Work Friends Only Club” that allows employees to update work-related statuses, share documents, follow people, create groups, and chat one-on-one and/or in a group setting. Basically, a Facebook for the enterprise.

Leading the enterprise-networking pack is San Francisco-based Yammer, which has secured over 90,000 companies, including over 80 percent of the Fortune 500. Originally designed as a Twitter-like micro-blogging service, Yammer expanded its features in late September 2010 to mirror those of Facebook. Offering file uploading, group creation, a company directory, profiles, comment archiving, and business-to-business third-party application development, Yammer looks to transform social interaction in the enterprise.

Yammer is available in two versions: free and premium. The free version offers all the aforementioned features, but lacks advanced security controls, a virtual Firewall, and data exporting — among other important needs. The premium version of Yammer is $5 per user per month.

Storming in behind Yammer is Salesforce.com’s Chatter. The “no software” enterprise cloud computing company looks to bolt its way into corporate social networking by offering Chatter free for Salesforce customers and $15 per month per user for the rest of us.

Marketed as a means to collaborate in real-time on documents and on projects with employees throughout the country, Chatter is hoping its 87,200 customers adopt the social solution. Chatter’s features are comparable to those in Yammer, but go the extra mile by suggesting friend and group recommendations and displaying dashboards and real-time analytics.

But I wonder. As enterprise social networking companies such as Salesforce and Yammer convince organizations that these social tools are necessary to increase productivity, eliminate meeting time, and facilitate collaboration, will these platforms eventually hinder production? Will employees begin to ignore work-related tasks as they explore employee profiles, follow status updates, and chat with one another throughout the day?

If anyone has ever succumbed to the powers of Facebook, getting lost examining profiles and reading wall posts, it’s hard to believe that social networking could be considered a productivity solution. But maybe that’s just me. What do you think?