Private social networks are blanketing the enterprise, with hundreds of thousands of organizations having deployed them over the last year and a half, reports Carolyn Duffy Marsan at Network World. Millions of employees are using Yammer, Chatter, Huddle, Jive and other relatively inexpensive, cloud-based private social networks, replacing some use of email, wikis and blogs. The services are making companies more agile by changing the way workers communicate internally and externally.

Yammer, which rolled out three years ago, services 100,000 corporate accounts, including PitneyBowes, Deloitte, Ford and gourmet burger chain Red Robin. The restaurant chain's leadership has found that the network is delivering new-found insight into what's happening on the ground.

"It's a great way for me to get a pulse check on the topics that people are talking about in the regions, whether it's labor costs or food costs," said Chris Laping, CIO of the restaurant chain. "There isn't a week that goes by that I don't see some conversation on Yammer that I don't think: 'Wow, that's interesting.'"

Red Robin's regional directors are showing a preference for Yammer when contacting each other and employees at headquarters. "For people to be satisfied at work, they need to feel connected: connected to one another, connected to the best practices in the organization, connected to the way others are working, and connected to the current state of affairs in the company," Laping said.

For some organizations, email isn't cutting it when it comes to many-to-many communications. It isn't convenient for searching, and it doesn't command real-time conversations. "You get better adoption on initiatives and greater return on strategy when people feel involved and bought in," Laping said. "You can have great ideas and the promise of returns, but what gets between them is this nasty feature called behavior change. If you can't drive or enable behavior change, you don't see the return. That's where Yammer helps us tangibly."

Yammer is adding 200,000 new users each month, mostly in large companies. Users can do a lot of the things they do on Facebook, such as create profiles, post and share content in real time, and create groups, with the added benefit of privacy and security.

Chatter, from Salesforce.com, is also witnessing an explosion of customers, including Burberry and Kelly Services. The service is giving more people within organizations an opportunity to have an impact. 

"What we're seeing happening with social technologies is that the barriers are falling down in terms of who is an influencer,'' says Scott Holden, senior director of product marketing, Sales Cloud at Salesforce.com. "Everyone gets a voice, and the best ideas are bubbling to the top. Employees are using these technologies to turn themselves into meaningful voices in the room."

DenMat, maker of dental products, expects to have its entire workforce on Chatter by the end of the month. The company let employees use the network on their own initiative, and usage grew from the sales departments to accounting, R&D, marketing and customer service.

"Before Chatter, there was a lot of e-mail, but there wasn't a tremendous amount of collaboration," said Jon Green, vice president of IT at DenMat. "People were pretty much head down on their own jobs. We didn't have sales talking to accounting."

Customer service has improved as a result, Green said. In one instance, a customer complained to a sales person about his website's prominence on the DenMat site, and the IT department was able to address the complaint immediately.

For more, see:
- Carolyn Duffy Marsan's article at Network World

Related Articles:
Survey: Companies forgo Facebook-like intranets
Email use declining