Has anyone seen a work social network that wasn't a joke? We have one, and the only use is that your director/VP asks their org to follow them, and then posts various strategic stuff they want you to see. There's zero peer-to-peer usage at all.
I think this is because of the inherent inequality that exists at work. In a typical social network, everyone is essentially "equal" when it comes to who you know and interact with. At work, you necessarily are very closely involved with people who hold significant authority over you. Because of this, you have to act incredibly more guarded at work and on its related networks.
For a social network to have value, you need users who are compelled to frequently submit content. By adding a power structure, users have to evaluate their decisions, which can generate anxiety or extra work, leading to a drop off in contribution rate.
It's one of the reasons teenagers ditched Facebook once their parents joined.
It's not quite a social network, but Skype got quite a bit of use at my previous company. If there was a topic that people wanted to share links or ideas or discuss things about, we created a new Skype group with everyone pertinent in it. We had serious and less serious Skype groups too.
So we'd have one for the Project X team discussion, and another for Project Y team discussion, one that included the QA team if we needed to discuss bugs with them, and we'd make a temporary one if we just needed to discuss prep for an upcoming meeting, etc. And then we had the group that wanted to share meme pics and youtube links, and the group that wanted to share links to metal music, and another to discuss anime, etc.
You could also put in filters so it only notifies you if certain words appear in the chat, like your name or some feature you're in charge of. It was simple, dynamic, and more effective than any other company I've worked for before or since.
The social network/collaboration tool we use at gigantic_company is fairly useful. However it's mostly a less-usable version of facebook with document sharing bolted on.
One of the bigger issues with the tool, however, is adoption. Maybe an enterprise facebook would have a higher usage rate because everyone already knows how to use it?
If everyone actually used the official collab tool here at gigantic_company it'd be a lot easier to find out if another department already solved your problem so you could learn from their implementation, rather than relying on the tribal knowledge of someone who's been here for years and years. I'd like that.
We use Yammer where I work and some groups use them and some don't. I find that there's very little reason to use it.
Most communication happens in Outlook/Exchange mailing lists.
I do think that Yammer and it's ilk offer somethings that plain email don't - better attachment integration and history (with email you can't see discussions that occurred before you joined).
One thing I don't like about Yammer (and other social networks for work) is that discussions are very "flat". Contrasted to email discussions at my work, which can get very lengthy and include many branches. They wouldn't scale to Yammer at all.
Microsoft uses Yammer as its corporate social network (obviously), and it's pretty active. Since teams working on the same product are in different buildings/cities, there's a group for each product/feature/team and people ask and answer questions pretty frequently. I personally use it as a public knowledge bank to search for solutions to issues I'm having before sending out a group email.
For smaller companies where all employees are in the same place I guess it wouldn't have as much value though.
At least in the early days of Google+, the internal instance was really great. I don't work there anymore so I don't know if it is any more. But people would post about stuff they're working on, questions they have, frustrations, etc. I thought it was super useful. Much more useful than external Google+ has ever been...
Chatter got some use as a proper work social network when I was at Salesforce, currently at another company that also uses chatter and it's exactly as you mention, a barren land with the occasional person tooting their own horn "@VP @CEO @Mom"
We use Chatter where I work, and I think it's used pretty successfully. It's not exactly a "social network" because, let's face it, when you're at work, you're (hopefully) going to be a lot more professional and not treat it like Facebook. Instead, I'm seeing our sales team communicating with the product team to ask questions about our products, post suggestions they've received from clients, ask for example clients, etc. It seems to work. It just doesn't work like Facebook because, well, it's a completely different environment.
