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Q8-6 What Is an Enterprise Social Network (ESN)?

the morning paper and the evening news. A small number of people decided which stories were
told. You got what you were given with few alternatives.
Communication within organizations was similarly restricted. Employees could communi-
cate with their immediate supervisor and coworkers in their vicinity. It was difficult for employ-
ees of large corporations to get private meetings with the CEO or to communicate with their
counterparts in other countries. If an employee had a good idea, it was passed up through his
or her boss to senior management. As a result, it was common for bosses to claim subordinates’
ideas as their own.
In recent decades, the Internet, Web sites, social networking, email, cable TV, and smart-
phones have radically altered existing communication channels. At the societal level, you can
now get your news instantly from hundreds of different sources. Traditional news organizations
have struggled to adapt to changes in traditional communication channels.
Communication channels within corporations have changed in equally dramatic ways.
Using ESNs, employees can now bypass managers and post ideas directly for the CEO to read. They
can also quickly identify internal subject matter experts to solve unforeseen problems. In addition,
ESNs also enable collaboration with teams dispersed across the globe.
To better understand the potential impacts of ESNs, let’s consider an example. In 2012,
Yammer (a Microsoft subsidiary) conducted a case study analyzing how restaurant chain Red Robin
42
used an ESN to transform its business. The CIO of Red Robin Chris Laping rolled out Yammer to
Red Robin’s 26,000 employees across 450 restaurants in an effort to give line employees a voice.
This effort yielded more than just stronger employee engagement.
When Red Robin rolled out its new Pig Out Style Double Tavern Burger, for instance, the
customer response was disappointing. Employees used Yammer to give management immediate
feedback about how the Pig Out recipe could be fixed. Within 4 months, the new-and-improved
burger was ready to go. Here, using Yammer to improve internal communication resulted in
an increase in organizational responsiveness. The result was a reduction in the amount of time
needed to revamp the menu from 12 to 18 months to just 4 months.
In another example, Red Robin’s CFO offered a $1,000 employee bonus for the best cost-
saving idea. The winning idea was reusable kids’ cups that saved hundreds of thousands of
dollars. Laping attributes the cost savings to the ESN, stating, “I’m convinced that idea would
never have surfaced if we didn’t have a social network.” 43

Deploying Successful Enterprise Social Networks

The use of ESNs in organizations is new, and organizations are still learning how to use ESNs suc-
cessfully (creating fascinating job opportunities for you, by the way.) Before deploying an ESN,
organizations should develop a strategic plan for using SM internally via the same process they
used for their external social media use. Once a strategic plan has been created, an ESN can then
be implemented.
Deploying new systems—including ESNs—can be problematic, so the organization’s strate-
gic plan should be sure to address possible challenges, including the likelihood of employee resis-
tance. Will employees adopt the new system? Not everyone uses every social media platforms in
their personal lives, so why should they use them at work?
In order to ensure a successful implementation of an ESN, organizations can also follow
industry best practices, or methods that have been shown to produce successful results in
prior implementations. You’ll learn more about systems implementation in Chapter 12. When
implementing an ESN, successful companies follow a process of four stages having the ele-
ments shown in Figure 8-13. Read through the items and reflect on what you went through
when you first started using SM. Think about how important your friends were in your decision
to start using SM. Having an internal champion or defender of your internal ESN is equally
important.