Now its time to get our executives who control the purse strings, to buy in to the need for Social Software in the context of team collaboration. An Information Week article from 2007, entitled Facebook Costs Employers More Than $5 Billion A Year, written by Sharon Gaudin, is enough to discourage IT strategists.

Dispelling some of these long held misunderstandings about Social Software in the enterprise is crucial to its adoption. Pragmatists must focus on the goal of maximizing the people and technology investments that a business has already made.

What about Business Conduct and Content Guidelines?

Ensuring that a business' social networking site is compliant can be daunting, however, social networks have also proven to be self policing due to self interest in ones reputation. It is crucial that leadership within a business participate, as this drives awareness and maintains a high level of professionalism by participants at all levels.

Lotus Connections social networking software makes your business world smaller by breaking down barriers imposed by geography, language, and demographics. The missing link in harnessing this new found advantage of a highly interconnected world is bridged by seamless team collaboration, through Lotus Quickr. Lotus Quickr team collaboration software delivers this capability by integrating with Lotus Connections to deliver a social collaboration platform that is ready for business.

Another concern raised by technology officers considering investing in Social Software is the "Good Enough" phenomenon. An officer could simply look at features and functions with social networking tools and surmise that a tool like Lotus Connections and Quickr are interchangeable. First, lets look at what part of a business' value chain each of these products is designed to address. Lotus Connections is designed to encourage intimacy and build high efficiency cultures within an organization. This brings value to the forming stages discussed before. Team collaboration with Lotus Quickr is designed to promote collaboration to solve very specific problems. The distinction becomes apparent as you consider the value the two tools bring to a business. When the IT strategy calls for maximizing the value of Social Software for building effective teams, neither social networking nor team collaboration is sufficient on their own. We find that social collaboration delivers the promise of Social Software.