Have you ever pondered how unified communications could positively impact your company? Maybe you have, and maybe you haven’t.  Think about how many times you have sent multiple e-mails or made multiple phone calls for days, sometimes weeks, on end without receiving a response.

Sometimes, that’s just the name of the game in the business world.

How could enterprise social media, which allows for nearly instantaneous communication, change that?  What might be some of the advantages of this type of communication?  Learn more about some of the benefits your company could experience unified communications.

Costs are reduced long-term.  Make no mistake about it – there will be an associated up-front investment in equipment, installation, and employee training.  However, over the course of time, improved communication reduces the need for traditional business communication methods – fax, video conferencing, phone service, and others.  You may need to invest in a more reliable data pipeline, but that will reduce your need for many fax and phone lines.

Your employees have improved access to company leadership.   Enterprise social networking breaks down the walls of your organizations so employees can hear the thoughts of their executives and in return executives can leverage the insights of their employees. (continued…)

In The World in 2012, part of a series of annual publications by The Economist, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, writes about the link between sharing and caring. You share photos of your kids because you’re motivated by the far-away grandparents who like to watch them grow up. You share because they care. Sheryl Sandberg’s argument is that social media flips the cause-and-effect and she outlines how you-care-because-they-share also holds true: compelling stories are brought to your attention allowing you to react and re-share with your social circles.

We like to draw attention to parallels between the world of social media and the application of social technologies in the enterprise. So how does this story fit into that picture? The answer is that it is just as compelling in the corporate world.

The first direction of causality is our traditional enterprise model. You share that project report because the stakeholders care about the project.

Enter the information-rich world of the modern enterprise where sharing is a by-product of work. Almost all events that are detected in systems of record emit a ping that gets channeled to the people who need to react to that event and those who want to know about it because they feel that it helps them make better decisions. (continued…)