Link social software to social strategy for business success

Gartner predicts that by 2011 enterprise social software revenue will reach $769.2m

Companies are adopting more collaborative approaches to business and this will see an increased demand for enterprise social software next year.

But the technology is most successful when enterprises incorporate social networking into their business strategy, according to Gartner.

"The social software market is evolving in response to the demand for flexible environments in which participants can connect, create, share, and find people and information relevant to their work," said Tom Eid, research vice president at industry analyst Gartner.

"Social software improves the connectedness of workers, promotes collaboration and helps capture informal knowledge. Specific business value can be derived through customer intimacy, product/service excellence, operational effectiveness and creating innovation," he adds.

Enterprise social software can be seen in the form of blogs, discussion forums, expertise location and feeds. It is implemented to enable participation through formal and informal interactions and aggregates these interactions to reflect the collective attitudes and knowledge of participants.

Gartner indicates that cloud-based delivery continues to be a key factor in social software uptake. Of the 80 vendors Gartner tracks for this marketplace, more than 50 provide social software through cloud-based services. This model is thought to work for a lot of businesses, as a lot of social software deployments are carried out with fixed budgets.

Gartner also highlights that the success of social software is evident when enterprises incorporate it into a strategy.

"Success is to be found in managing the information and relationships in support of business initiatives and not the simple deployment of technology," said Eid.

"One of the major goals is to capitalise on community involvement to drive higher leverage and productivity."

Gartner forecasts that enterprise social software revenue will reach $769.2m (£495m) by 2011, a 15.7 per cent increase on 2010.

Total revenue currently stands at $664.4m (£428m), which is a 14.9 per cent increase on 2009.