Social Networking Business Portals Are Just As Much About Consolidation As They Are About Collaboration

While business websites and portals created using social networking software platforms are known to have the “community” and “collaboration” as key objectives, there is one other “C” which is just as important and objective to keep in mind. “Consolidation“.  Consolidation of people like customers, prospective customers, and employees towards a single online location rather than have them scattered across different websites. Then you have consolidation of communication channels which again is usually done through several websites and applications. Lastly, consolidation of content which is just as good a reason to consider social networking-like business portals.

The amount of content that we absorb, go through and refer to online is immense as compared what it was even three to four years ago. The social media and social networking revolution has fueled this increase in content by making it easier for users to publish their own content, communicate online, create discussions, develop learning material, and search through previous communications and so on. In a single working day, the need to access content online could drive you through several websites and applications. From having a conversation on Skype with a colleague, logging into your business email account to check mail, then moving over to LinkedIn to check for messages and new group discussions, to posting project updates on an online project management software before checking your favorite blogs for new posts. From there you could login to PollDaddy.com to set up a poll which would help you get some research stats for a an online meeting with your customers on WebEx but you also need to check your local company intranet to confirm if there is any update on the team meeting which may end up clashing with the customer meeting. It’s too much content spread across too many places!  INFORMATION OVERLOAD.

Sure you have RSS readers and single sign on tools, but there is only so much they can do. There are just too many different websites to login to and keep a tab on in our every day working lives. All these websites enable better communication, provide good content or improve collaboration — but the fact that they are at different locations online brings about some level of inefficiency with it. It’s tedious. When a business uses a social networking or social business collaboration software platform to build a more unified portal it can help do away with some of these inefficiencies. Perhaps it’s not possible to avoid visiting multiple sites to get different things done.  A business portal that combines forums, wikis, groups, blogs, instant messaging, polls, membership, and single sign on to “bring them under one roof” helps to consolidate the people we need to interact with, the communication channels we need,  as well as the content we need to access during the working day — and that can make life easier. Believe me, it does.

Social networking for business portals are just as much about consolidating everything into a single location as it is about collaboration and communication.

Related posts:

1. Business Collaboration Application Platforms
2. Social Business Collaboration Software
3. ROI on Social Business Collaboration