Jive and Social Business

Just because social media such as Facebook and Twitter are known to sap productivity at the workplace doesn’t mean that they aren’t efficient. Quite the contrary- social media’s allure comes from its amazing effectiveness for connecting people, forming virtual communities, compiling, developing, and delivering relevant information and, most recently, perfecting and distributing apps. Realizing that the power of social media could be used to save rather than waste time, Jive Software was the first to harness these capabilities and bring them to the enterprise as social business.

As Jive likes to point out, the advent of the Web revolutionized business, with the early adopters of tools such as websites and email developing a huge advantage while those slow to change were crushed. Web 2.0 offers a similar leap in capabilities that, until Jive began working on social business software, was hardly being exploited. Now, with their newest offering, Jive 5, clients have managed to increase customer satisfaction by a 33% and brand awareness by 34% while lowering time spent searching for experts and information by 34% and decreasing support calls by 28% according to survey results.

Jive accomplishes this through three capabilities. First, it allows enterprises to better engage their members by building internal communities. Just like on Facebook, this makes finding other employees, sharing information, and keeping in touch easier. Finding whomever you need to complete a task, whether that is the head of a department who needs to sign off on a decision or a subject matter expert for advice, becomes effortless with the help of profiles, blogs, polls, statuses, and a host of other social features. Relevant people to a project come together in fast-growing, self-organizing communities. Jive also stores documents and conversations that can be easily found later or, through its filtering and aggregation for information discovery, they can find you. Communities on Jive can then exploit its collaborative tools to create, edit, and share content.

Next, Jive can also be used to engage customers in external communities. Social media monitoring tools allow users to find online conversations about a company or product, analyze them, and respond. Jive can follow conversations and keywords as well as determine influencers on social media, helping companies find who best to engage. Jive also fascilitates customer support communities which allow users to help other users get the most out of a product. As most of us have already experienced, customer communities tend to provide faster and better solutions than the customer service phone tree, which becomes a last resort for exotic queries, without taking up company time and resources.

Lastly Jive is also a platform for business apps, sort of like Facebook is with games. Jive allows you to buy apps on the Jive Apps Market or sample them first with a thirty day free trial. These enterprise-grade applications do not take IT support or even a CD to install. If nothing suits your needs, you can find a developer or build the app yourself. Jive Apps are developed in common programming languages using open web standards rather than proprietary technology.

Social business, like social media, has the potential for information overload, so Jive borrows and improves on solutions to keep users from being lost or overwhelmed by all of the tools, information, and application. Like Facebook’s news feed, Jive offers an activity stream which brings updates on people, places, projects, and content together in one view. As with Twitter’s stream, however, you can filter to only see the activities you follow. You can also filter by what “Matters Most” if you only have a few minutes to get up to speed on major developments. “Jive Genius,” Jive’s recommendation engine, determines what matters to you and tunes out the rest based on what you reacted to or ignored in the past.