With the proliferation of social media participation, users are embracing personal tools that enable them to connect with others, share their locations and what they're doing—even taking conversations that develop during social networking to other applications to better facilitate them.
Here are a couple of comparative examples that provide a few ideas about how social media might be considered a test run for unified communications:
Twitter was founded on the premise of "What are you doing?" - which has now morphed into "What's Happening?" as a way to minimize the literal interpretation that led people to share a lot of noise about what they ate for breakfast, and other mundane clutter. People still post their whereabouts to let people know where they are. Restaurants, airports, meetings, etc. Think of this as a form of presence represented by unified communications. Direct Tweeting between individuals is an external form of instant messaging.
LinkedIn groups enable people with similar interests to ask and answer questions. The threads are preserved for use after the fact. This is similar (although broader in scope) to how a project team might use a WebEx Connect workspace to collaborate about the deliverables for a project. However, LinkedIn also simulates presence with status updates and trip notifications.
YouTube allows anyone to make a video and post it online. With a Flip video camera, anyone can share rich media that's instantly more personal than a text message. Rich media is transitioning from a novelty to an expectation from users. Unified Communications that enables the sharing of videos and video conferencing on demand delivers on those expectations.
However, with social media comes concerns from the business about governance. That's one of two findings that Neil Hair of the Rochester Institute of Technology discusses that resulted from a Cisco-sponsored study into the effects of social media on the enterprise.
The point is that collaborative tools are being brought inside the enterprise whether or not IT is the one providing them. The good thing is that people are adopting the tools and showing a higher interest in communicating, connecting and collaborating with peers and colleagues, business partners, customers and suppliers. This could make user adoption of unified communication tools a much easier process than previously thought—especially with an intuitive interface that pulls all these modes of communication together.
For additional insight about how people are influencing the adoption of unified communications via their use of Skype, this post provides further proof that your work force is embracing the tools whether or not IT is providing them.
These are all great indications that IT can proactively respond to the needs indicated by their end users' behavior and harness that enthusiasm to implement UC to more easily connect colleagues, customers and partners to improve collaboration in an organized and integrated way designed to produce improved business results.
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