Salesforce.com, Microsoft, IBM and many smaller companies are competing aggressively in the market for enterprise social collaboration, offering advanced tools specifically designed to help workers communicate and share insights.
But it turns out the dominate social collaboration tool inside big companies is plain old Facebook, followed by Twitter.
That’s one of the takeaways from a study released today (PDF) by Avanade, the Seattle-based consulting firm that specializes in Microsoft technologies. The firm says the finding suggests that businesses have “a false sense of accomplishment in social collaboration.”
The survey encompassed 4,000 end users and 1,000 business and IT decision-makers in 22 countries. Facebook was used by 74 percent of companies that have adopted social tools internally, followed by Twitter at 51 percent, LinkedIn at 45 percent, SharePoint at 39 percent, IBM Open Connections at 17 percent, Salesforce Chatter at 12 percent, Yammer at 11 percent and Jive at 7 percent.
Avanade notes that consumer-oriented social technologies lack document storage, the ability to share best practices across teams, sharing and group editing, the ability to search for experts inside a company, and integration with enterprise communication systems.
“The truth is that there is a stark difference between consumer social networks and what’s needed for enterprise social collaboration,” the report says. “Business and IT decision-makers believe they are enabling collaboration with social technologies, but the social technologies they report using most fall short in important areas needed for a business to effectively collaborate.”
However, Avanade says it expects a shift over the next 12 months, with more companies adopting actual enterprise social collaboration tools, such as SharePoint and Chatter. Microsoft doubled down in this area through its acquisition of Yammer for $1.2 billion.
The full Avanade study is available here.
