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Social media and unified communications are two technologies whose potential is untapped in the enterprise. Could a combination of the two unlock the benefits of both?

No-one would question the usefulness of telephones and email in modern business – indeed, it is hard to imagine business life without them. To date, though, most attempts to build on these communication and collaboration technologies have failed to attract adoption.

Unified communications, which promises to enhance the telephone network with such functionality as presence information, videoconferencing and instant messaging, is the perennial ‘next big thing’ but the absence of a solid business case has impeded adoption.

And while somewhat more widespread, enterprise adoption of social media – arguably email’s natural successor as the dominant Internet-based communication method – has been capped by the difficulty of proving financial benefits.
So could a combination of these two technologies, a combination that a number of vendors now argue represents the ultimate enterprise collaboration and communication platform, overcome the setbacks of its component parts, and finally deliver the long-awaited revolution?

Or will it simply concentrate their weaknesses, further undermining the business case for technologies that address the way employees – and customers – communicate?

Location aware

A glimpse of how UC and social media might converge was seen at the VoiceCon event in San Francisco in November 2009, when communications equipment vendor Siemens Enterprise Networks (SEN) demonstrated a ‘mash-up’ of its OpenScape UC platform and public micro-blogging service Twitter.

Beyond simply incorporating the Twitter interface into SEN’s existing UC dashboard, the demonstration showed OpenScape analysing the content of employee ‘tweets’ – short status updates of 140 characters or fewer – in order to detect their authors’ location and availability. When the system came across a phrase such as ‘just landed’, it would detect the geographical location of the employee’s mobile device (using Google’s Latitude geolocation service) and adjust their contact preferences accordingly.

The vendor argued that this kind of automation would greatly reduce the cost of intra-enterprise communications by cutting the time employees spend locating their colleagues.

This Twitter mash-up is not a product that Siemens customers can buy – instead, it was meant as a demonstration of OpenScape integration capabilities. In Siemens’s view, it is through such integrations as this that ‘unified communications 2.0’, as it has inevitably been dubbed, will transpire.

“The beauty of this is that you have not had to go out and buy another product,” says Adrian Brookes, vice president of UC technical vision and strategy at SEN, explaining that IT departments are free to tailor the use of web-based platforms to the specific requirements of the enterprise.

Calling out

Enterprise social media has outward-facing applications as well as internal uses – indeed, a recent Gartner report predicted that customer-focused social media projects were significantly more likely to succeed than internal deployments. It is logical, therefore, that UC 2.0 might also be deployed in a marketing or customer service context.

In August 2009 at the ITEXPO West event in California, UC technology vendor Avaya showcased a prototype application for use with Facebook known as Facephone, which adds real-time communications features such as click-to-call and videoconferencing functionality to the social networking site.

This, the company argues, could prove a powerful tool for so-called ‘social CRM’ – the use of social networking sites to interact directly with existing and potential customers.

“The relationships that consumers have on social networking sites are not just with other individuals on a peer-to-peer basis, but also with companies and organisations,” says Brett Shockley, vice president of emerging products and technology at Avaya. “If you’re already inside Facebook, why not initiate conversations [with companies] inside Facebook too?”

While Avaya’s UC 2.0 experiment uses Facebook as an interface, the communications between users are channelled through Avaya’s secure Aura IP communications platform.

That the two platforms – telephone system and social network – can be tied together so simply is yet another demonstration of the possibilities unlocked by IP-based communications.

UC 2.0, then, has potential uses in both internal and external communications. But according to Robin Gareiss, vice president of industry analyst Nemertes Research, its ‘killer app’ may prove to be a combination of the two. An example of this is what she calls “just in time fetch the expert”, a concept that leverages UC 2.0 equally as a CRM and employee communications utility.

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