Kraft Foods, which had launched an internal social network in 2011, saw the
potential to raise the level of collaboration and knowledge sharing across
the corporation by investing in a more powerful social technology platform.
The new system supports microblogging, automatic content tagging, and
easy creation and maintenance of subgroups for communities of practice
(e.g., pricing experts). This has accelerated knowledge sharing, leading to
shorter product development cycles, as well as quicker responses to actions
of competitors.
Firms are exploring using social media tools to reduce email, which is
responsible for more than a quarter of the typical office worker’s time. Global
IT services provider Atos SE pledged in 2011 to become a “zero email”
company by 2014 and aims to boost employee productivity by replacing
internal email with a collaborative social networking platform.