Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

LinkedIn might start to lose its dominance as a social networking platform in the technology sector after today's beta launch of Solaborate...

Its not often that I see a tech demo that makes me go "wow". But I am really impressed with what I have seen so far with new social networking platform Solaborate. Solaborate is the first social networking platform dedicated to technology professionals. And it pushes all the right buttons for techies too. Launching in beta today, Solaborate enables tech professionals and companies to connect, collaborate, and create an ecosystem around products and services. It provides technology professionals a central place with the right tools and services to collaborate in real time — both internally and externally — and solve business problems....

Social collaboration is becoming increasingly important within organisations and it’s easy to see why. Research outlined in this infographic demonstrates how collaborative software can significantly improve team efficiency.

According to a recent survey, online collaboration tools will play an important role in 75% of businesses by 2013. As we are already accustomed to social networking with friends, family and (sometimes) customers, using social software to collaborate within organisations seems a logical progression.

Despite this, it is astonishing to see how much time companies waste by using email for internal communications. Professionals send and receive over 300 business emails a week and spend an average of 2-hours a day reading and responding to them. Just as worrying is the number of documents we share using email – an average 15 a day. This makes it impossible for more than one person to make edits and it quickly becomes difficult to keep track of changes.

This handy infographic from Clinked (above) shows how social collaboration software can remedy this. Collaboration tools can help to reduce email volume by 30% and make it 33% faster for teams to draft documents. According to one study, 97% using of businesses using social software said they could service more clients, more efficiently.