Three Things I Learned About Social Intranets During My First Month at Social Edge

Before entering the world of Social Edge and Jive I worked as a Public Relations Assistant Account Executive at a communications agency. Despite their modern culture, I found some of their daily processes to be mundane and after a month of working at Social Edge I realize they were outdated.

If given the chance to "pitch" social collaboration to my old company's CEO I would highlight three things:

1. Everything doesn't have to be done through email.

A few weeks into my PR role, I learned email was going to become my frenemy. After one sick day I returned to an Inbox full of unanswered emails, which easily added hours on top of meetings and daily deliverables.

Within the first 48 hours of working at Social Edge I learned that email is the old standard of collaboration and quite frankly has become a daily nuisance. Leveraging Jive, Social Edge's collaborative social intranet, dubbed Edgeville, I now communicate with my peers in use case specific communities and no longer find myself sucked into email trees where one email branches into 20 separate discussions. We have one thread to discuss one topic.

Along with keeping the conversation cohesive the thread is now transparent to others who may have been interested in the topic and not included on the mail. Living outside of my Outlook inbox not only saves time but it exposes relevant information to my colleagues which in turn saves us time and we all know time = money.

2. Finding documents doesn't have to be difficult.

I began working for Social Edge around the holidays and each family function introduced a set of questions about my new job. Social technologies are transforming the way people work and it was no surprise my aunts and uncles who had been in the workforce for 25+ years were curious how Jive could improve their corporate daily workflow.

It was my dad who helped affirm my decision of switching from Public Relations to social technology. During one of these holiday conversations he confessed that his company's shared drive was a complete mess. For his sanity, he keeps a Microsoft Word document as a guide to where to find other documents in the shared drive. He has a document to help him find other documents (cue sighing millennials everywhere)! I told my Dad about Edgeville's robust search feature and the concept of categorizing and tagging content, which would help him find what he is looking for at a minute?s notice. With some improvements in how and where the company is storing content he will not need a manual to find what he is looking for.

3. Updating documents doesn't have to be confusing.

Last but not least, I would emphasize the seamlessness of updating documents with a collaborative CMS. My old company required a lot of document management. As part of my weekly tasks I would update multiple reports and save the new version on the shared drive. This, as you can imagine, resulted in multiple versions of the same document on that drive.

At Social Edge, we manage documents through Edgeville. With the appropriate entitlements, multiple users are able to update and change documents while the built in version control tracks the latest changes as well as the person who made those changes.

Taking it a step further, I recently downloaded the Jive for Office tool, which allows me to edit Office documents with others, providing real time notifications to users working in the same document.

So, what have you learned throughout your social collaboration journey?