Rajprakash Prabagaran
SNA Assignment

Definition – Social networking:

In general perspective, SN is defined as “Using online services to build social networks or social relations among people who, for example, share interests, activities, backgrounds, or real-life connections.”

In organizational perspective, social networking should be split into different types of social awareness and engagement. There's internal employee engagement, where colleagues and team members can find each other, intersect and discuss relevant details of their business and work, and there's external social engagement, where members of your sales, marketing and public relations teams come together to create conversations and interact with customers, prospects, vendors and others.

Advantages and Benefits of internal social media:

Regardless of the size and reach of the company, internal social media offers the following advantages and benefits.

• Social networking tools help employees remain focused on and aligned with corporate objectives.
• These tools flatten the corporate hierarchy, empower individual employees at all levels and provide a direct path to decision-makers and executors.
• Internal social networking encourages people to connect and communicate with each other, cross pollinate ideas and develop valuable insights.
• The ability to communicate issues, insights and solutions leads to generating new ideas.
• News and information reaches people more quickly.
• People can share resources and information easily and effectively.
• The company can more easily and effectively search for and consolidate employee skill-sets to match specific project requirements.

Collaboration:

Social media is not just about conversations; it’s also about collaboration.

Few collaborative tools :

Adobe Acrobat – Acrobat.com allows teams to work collaboratively on documents through their browsers.

Atlassian Confluence – offers a powerful wiki-based solution to enterprise collaboration

Socialcast – allows employees to discuss projects remotely through a microblogging service, which is also accessible from a smartphone.

Yammer – enables companies to create their own private social network, requiring a company email address to access the community.

The list goes on and very exhaustive.

Different Platforms:

Micro-blogging platforms

Instant messaging programs

Podcasting

Blogs

Wikis

Bookmarking