Does Social Collaboration Always Equal Efficiency?

You may find yourself wondering, does social collaboration equal efficiency? The answer is, “Well, it depends,” which leaves you in dire need of some explanation. Let’s answer the question by taking it to the next level. Rather than merely answer the question, here are four guidelines that can inform you as to how you should think about social collaboration—and how to make it work for your company.

Start with the process, not the social. Collaboration is in business-speak a process. That being said, you are placing the cart before the horse if you are thinking about “social collaboration” before you begin to discuss the necessary process. Back the cart up a little bit and ask yourself, does this process need social collaboration? Nine times out of ten, the answer will be “yes.” It is an integral part of nearly any process, product, or purpose. Nonetheless, examining your process before the social helps you to focus on the business essentials rather than get distracted by novelty.

Define (or redefine) your target market. Unless you are selling widgets to Martians, you are probably going to use the web in some way for business. In the front-facing environment of your business, it is important to understand how this kind of collaboration will meet your customer’s needs or wants. Online collaboration is probably going to be far more important business tool for an organization that creates cloud-based productivity software, than it would be for a brick-and-mortar hardware store. Your target market should have a big say in how collaboration looks for your business.

Trim and Bear It. You’ll need to decide how social will be played out in your company culture. Throwing around vapid terms such as “community,” and “networking” mean nothing unless you know how you plan to use the social tools. Choose your platforms, social media outlets, blogs, wikis, or whatever else. Trim what is unnecessary, and bear with the selection you’ve made.

Beware the bugaboo in social computing. Online collaboration is a powerful business concept, but it can too easily degenerate into something that defeats efficiency. If your collaboration approach is not maximizing company time or revenues, it is inefficient.

Inefficiency happens when your online collaboration efforts cost too much money (in terms of platforms, software, employees), and take too much time. In this case, rather than ditch it altogether, rework your process to make online collaboration work for you. Because it can. And should.

The Critical “How-To”

When the rubber of personnel meets the road of the project, you’re going to need an engine that makes the whole thing go. The engine of social collaboration is the software that facilitates that collaboration. Finding that software is the critical leap from theory to practice…and profit.