The last I remember

The last I remember, social collaboration was supposed to be about learning from the design concepts of social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, and adapting them to a business environment to spur productivity and collaboration. The key phrase here is "learn from design concepts and adapt them". Google Plus is an out and out consumer tool in fierce competition with Facebook. Can anyone show me even a single change made to Google Plus in Google Apps to make it adaptable to business? Surely there is some difference in consumer and business needs.

The enterprise is not about networking

Social collaboration in the enterprise is not about networking and sharing stuff for the heck of it. To tell the truth it means nothing if it is not connected with company information and processes. Social collaboration should not be an end in itself nevertheless subordinate to getting the job done.

Google Plus has no connectivity with other parts of the business. Even in Google Apps, it has no connectivity with other applications like Google docs, mail, calendars or tasks.  It might spur some light weight conversations and connections, however does not bring much business value.

The beauty of social collaboration is that it leverages the open, conversational design of social media, nevertheless combines it with the structure and policy control mechanisms required in business. So even during people share information freely, everyone has access to specifically the information they have rights to.

Admittedly, Google Plus has an interesting concept of intuitively structuring people into "circles". Nevertheless policy control needs in businesses go beyond that, and social collaboration needs to reflect that. Each group needs to have furthermore ability to distinguish between group members, and fine tune access levels right down to every piece of data.

Google clearly isn't going to have two versions of Google Plus, one for business and one for consumers. Its product direction is clearly going to be driven by the dynamics of the fiercely competitive social networking market dominated by Facebook. To tell the truth, its very future might depend on controlling the consumer social network market.

People at times confuse the concept of using popular social media platforms like Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter to promote their business, with the concept of using social media design principles internally to spur productivity and collaboration. The former is better described as "social media marketing" and the latter is "social collaboration".

The sense in the world to do social media marketing

It makes all the sense in the world to do social media marketing, and use all the attention and activity in these networks to market ones products. Even we have a company page on Google Plus to market ourselves in this community.

This, but, is a totally different baby from social collaboration, where networking, activity streams, "following" and other social tools are seamlessly worked into the collaboration tools we use to accomplish work on a day to day basis to improve productivity. In other words not Google Plus' forte.

At HyperOffice, we have been working on new social capabilities, which deeply integrate with our widely known communication and collaboration suite. Our attempt has been to bring businesses the benefits of new social technologies, however at all times keep it linked it to business data and processes, and contribute to job completion, to put it more exactly than distract from it.

An MBA by qualification, Pankaj Taneja has more than six years of experience in the SaaS and web collaboration industries. Having seen SaaS grow from a niche sector to the straightway big thing in enterprise research, he has a great enthusiasm and passion for the sphere. Pankaj has been working for many years at HyperOffice, one of the earliest players in web collaboration since 1998, an industry which now includes solutions from Google, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, Adobe and more. It is amazing being part of a pioneer in collaboration, riding a wave which only promises to grow.