Microsoft calls it TownSquare. Deloitte hosts D Street.IBM有蜂箱，百思买its BlueShirt Nation.
No, it's not a real estate explosion. In industries from retail to high tech, banking and manufacturing, companies are increasingly building networks behind the firewall where employees can create profiles and connect with one another in ways first demonstrated byLinkedIn,Facebook和MySpace.
"The whole Web 2.0 explosion has moved from the consumer and college student world to professionals in the business world," says Amy Shuen, author ofWeb 2.0: A Strategy Guide. (O'Reilly Media, 2008). "Employees are seeing this as a way of enlarging their sphere and interacting with colleagues."
她说，这不仅仅是电子水冷却器。公司可能会从帮助员工感到更加联系的想法开始，但这仅仅是开始。随着人们之间更加轻松，更快的联系，突然之间的跨部门合作更加自然地发生，从而导致更大的创新。舒恩说：“人们不仅聊天；他们与人建立联系，最终谈论对业务产生影响的事情。”
Forrester Research Inc.同意，2008年是迅速采用内部社交网络的时期，引用了包括社交网络功能的软件套件，例如Anvareness Inc.的企业社交媒体，Jive Software的ClearSpace，IBM的Lotus Connections和Microsoft的SharePoint。
这是三家公司已经从早期采用内部社交网络中看到的好处。
Deloitte LLP: D Street
The idea for Deloitte's D Street began when the firm's talent organization wanted to make a large company feel smaller. In addition, it wanted to create an environment that would appeal to its mostly younger workforce. At a company where the average age of employees is 28, "we knew we had challenges to win the talent war," says Patricia Romeo, the leader of D Street. But in January 2007, when the group began to create the business case for the social networking environment, it also started to envision some of the side benefits the initiative might engender.
For instance, by enabling connections among employees, the company could more easily offer flexible work arrangements, establish virtual teams, bring new employees up to speed, improve collaboration and increase retention among people who hadn't felt a strong sense of belonging.
After getting the support of Deloitte leadership and partnering with internal IT, communications and knowledge management groups, the team launched the alpha version of D Street in June 2007, basing it on a commercially available collaborative platform. The initial rollout was to 1,500 employees.
罗密欧将D街描述为具有类似于Facebook的功能，除了配置文件已有基本信息，包括名称，职位和联系信息。员工可以通过照片，简历，工作和社区隶属关系以及以前的雇主来个性化个人资料。D Street使工人能够互相介绍，列出外部社交网络成员资格并撰写博客。还有一本“留言簿”，访客可以发表评论。
And D Street helps people connect. An employee who searches on "Web 2.0," for example, will find other people interested in that topic, as well as their connection to him.
Since few employees personalized their profiles initially, early adoption was slow, Romeo says. "People aren't going to go in as readily when the well is 75% empty," she explains. But with the encouragement of leadership, more people got involved, and they were soon demanding access to the rest of the organization.
Next, the development team tweaked the system with enhancements such as reporting capabilities and launched it this year to Deloitte's shared services organization. Currently, all 46,000 members of the organization are in the system.
根据罗密欧的说法，每周有400至500名员工在个性化个人资料，在头八周内实现了25％的员工参与的目标。
Avinash Jhangiani, a senior consultant at Deloitte Consulting LLP, says D Street has helped him expand his internal contacts at the company, which is especially helpful because he's a mobile worker. For instance, he says, the organizing committee for Deloitte's community service initiative found him on D Street via a simple people and keyword search.
"From there, I was asked to join a volunteer project that allowed me to share my passion with nonprofit organizations and help them build their online presence," he says. "What a cool way to enhance my personal brand within the organization."
罗密欧说，合作传教士和“这不是他们的DNA的一部分”之间仍然存在差距。为了鼓励勉强的人，团队将继续向员工教育协作技术的价值，并计划扩大技术以提高D街的价值和实用性。
That brings up another challenge: to not be diverted by some users' desire to add new features. "We're going slower than what our users would like, but we want to be strategic" about making enhancements, Romeo says.
Romeo's advice: Continue to build leadership support, even after the early-stage buy-in. "Make sure support is there throughout the organization," she says. Once the platform begins filling with valuable content, she adds, "it's really about viral adoption."
IBM：蜂巢
八年前，IBM创建了Bluepages，这是一个基于网络的公司目录，其中包括包含联系信息，员工照片，名称发音，经验，自我描述，书签和博客条目的配置文件，以及“朋友”和信息引人注目的功能。
"Very early on, we recognized the importance of connecting people within IBM and moving beyond a static view of the individual," says Jeff Schick, vice president of social software. The heavily used directory includes 450,000 employees and gets 6 million lookups per day.
IBM采用了一个名为Beehive的倡议，正在进一步实验。该应用程序使用基于Lotus Connections的Bluepages的代码库，但它是一个单独的系统。
Beehive旨在作为一个合作平台，可以模仿体育工作环境，员工展示了照片和奖杯等个人物品，并聊了聊昨晚的游戏。Schick说：“我们为配置文件功能增加了新的维度，以创建办公室的老式友情。”这个想法是要发现Schick所说的“水冷却器效应”是否会帮助人们建立更牢固的人际关系，从而建立更有效的组织。
For Michael Ackerbauer, a manager in the CIO's office at IBM, the results are already in. He learned about Beehive a year ago, and "I quickly got hooked," he says, especially since he manages a team of developers who work remotely. "It's valuable for the team to get to know me on a personal level, and I like to get to know them."
Ackerbauer says he can now connect with people on a social level that's typically absent when working remotely. Such connections help his teammates relate to one another like human beings and not just as resources or assets. Just recently, Ackerbauer says, he ended up speaking at a technology leadership conference, thanks to a connection he made with another employee who wouldn't have otherwise known he had expertise in the subject area.
尽管具有实验状态，但Beehive的用户群体在九个月内已增长到38,000，主要是通过病毒采用。Schick说：“当其他人写博客或为其添加书签时，人们会通过口口相传。”在产品管理，人力资源，人才管理和全球服务咨询业务领域，采用率最强。
Because Beehive is behind the firewall, Ackerbauer says, people feel free to discuss internal business topics. For instance, he has used Beehive to explain his views on the topic of breakthrough thinking. "I've had people come up to me and say, 'I didn't know you knew all that stuff. Can we talk more?'" Ackerbauer says. "The connections lead to collaboration, which leads to innovation, which leads to transformations in the industries IBM serves."
Schick的建议：请注意，一种尺寸并不适合所有尺寸。为了增加参与，您需要从多个角度解释社交软件的故事。
"What appeals to some will make others almost cringe," he says. For instance, new employees may want to use social software to increase their visibility, while veterans may be motivated to keep people informed. Similarly, he says, focus more on why than on how in your training program.
Schick说：“今天的知识工作者没有时间在他们的一天中增加新的活动；他们正在寻找如何更聪明地工作。”“不良的用户收养很少是因为用户不知道如何而是不明白为什么。”
百思买：蓝军国家
Two years into implementing BlueShirt Nation (BSN) at Best Buy Co., Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt see internal social networks as organic entities. Many of the goals they had for the platform in 2006 had to be scrapped once the site -- which now hosts more than 20,000 participants -- took off.
Koelling现在是社会技术高级经理，是Best Buy广告组织的创意总监，当时他和Bendt首先想到使用技术从商店员工那里收获营销想法。科林说：“有望能够外出并利用140,000名员工并使用计算机魔术来做到这一点，这对我们真的很有吸引力。”他认为这是收集支持，获得资金并制定实现这一目标的步骤的问题。
Instead, "we got schooled quickly that not only did we not know about [technology], we also didn't know how people would react to a planned social network," he says.
For instance, instead of providing answers to Koelling's and Bendt's questions, participants preferred to talk about World of Warcraft or something funny that happened at work.
BSN is based on open-source software, and since internal IT lacked those skills, Koelling hired a development firm. The network was promoted virally; all participants found it through referrals or word of mouth.
On the site, employees can create their own profiles and host forums on topics of their choosing. The result, Koelling says, "is more scrumptious than what we hoped for."
Now that employees are connected, the site is rich with idea exchanges and discussions that have even helped change company policies. For instance, when one employee posted his thoughts on why it would be beneficial for all full-time employees to have e-mail access, it sparked a conversation that eventually led to a shift in policy to enable just that.
To Nick Pfeifer, a retail associate in one of Best Buy's Colorado Springs stores, the site provides a social outlet, a protected place to discuss work- related topics and a way to close the gap between store workers and corporate employees. "As with any big company, it's easy for the message of the customers to be lost when you don't turn your attention to the people who interact with them on a regular basis," he says. "Until BSN, there's always been a schism between the two."
To help close that gap, the site now includes an application called Loop Marketplace, where people can post new ideas, with the hope that a Best Buy executive will notice one and fund it. The challenge is to encourage more execs to visit it, Koelling says. "We're trying to find ways to make visiting the Loop Marketplace a part of their workflow."
There have been plenty of mistakes along the way, Koelling says. For instance, some users wanted to adopt a system in which people received points based on their participation on the network. But once he initiated that, Koelling learned quickly that most people thought it was elitist.
Koelling's advice: Understand that on a social network, everyone shares equal status, even the person who runs it. "When the user tells me, 'This is how I want to use it,' I have to do whatever I can to accommodate that," he says.
Brandel is a Computerworld contributing writer in Newton, Mass. Contact her at marybrandel@verizon.net.
这个故事“防火墙背后的社交网络”最初由Computerworld .