(This is part two of a three-part blog series on the Rise of Social Business Applications based on a meeting with Geoffrey Moore, world-renowned business consultant and author, Dave Hersh, CEO of Jive Software, and Eugene Lee, CEO of Socialtext.)

What To Look For In A Great Social Business Application

A well-designed social business application should provide several avenues for driving more informed decisions. Management should be able to leverage the wisdom of crowds, identify and communicate with experts, and aggregate and analyze input in real-time to quickly eliminate bad choices from consideration. But with so many vendors jumping into the “social” fray, what should a company look for to make sure it doesn’t choose the wrong solution? There’s an awful lot of “social” makeup being applied to some truly ugly “process” pigs, so I’ve compiled my top 10 list of things required in a true social business application:

1. The application should be organized around people, not transactional data. Business transactional data should be secondary to the primary task of connecting people to people and people to information, leveraging expertise through the entire collaborative process.

2. ROI should be driven by unlocking the productivity of people, including customers. Real-time ROI metrics should be continuously available to help guide best practices and ensure delivery of real ROI.

3. The application should be deployed with a specific business focus, but with the potential for broader applicability.

4. The application must be effective across departmental silos.

5. The application should be designed to inform the middle manager’s point of view. Metrics, reporting and real-time analytics for middle management are essential, as are powerful search and other exploratory capabilities.

6. The application should enable “collaboration in the moment,” providing for rapid, mass collaboration to resolve issues and get to answers quickly.

7. The application must be social-channel rich. It should leverage the heck out of popular social media and emulate their best features.

8. The application must include robust permissions and access controls around both people and information. Companies must have control over what people can do and the information they create and access.

9. The system should provide plug-and-play connectivity to both existing business systems and to communities in the cloud.

10. The total solution must be incredibly easy to deploy and require very little training. SaaS and application appliances are great for this, as is a consumer Web app look and feel.

If you have a corporate strategy to push decisions down in the organization while leveraging social media and customer relationships, but you don’t have a system that meets these social application requirements, then you will fail. Period.