«Social HR» is a confusing term. It seems that every social HR expert uses it differently – for some it's all about the company’s Twitter/Facebook policies, others talk about using LinkedIn to recruit top talent and the rest talk about a private social network used internally.

To make things simple, social HR tools should be divided into external (Twitter, LinkedIn, HootSuite, etc) and internal ones, which fall under the Social HR software category. Because Social HR software as a category is still rather broad, let's look at social HR tools one by one.

#1 – Social Intranet

Social intranet and enterprise social networking are frequently used interchangeably, but technically that is not correct, because some vendors (like Bitrix24) have a social intranet and ESN combined into a single solution, while others, like Microsoft, require that you install both SharePoint (intranet) and Yammer (enterprise social network), if you want to have social intranet in your company.

The distinction between social intranet and ESN is simple – social intranet is about work, because it simply wraps intranet tools into a social interface, while enterprise social network is about internal communications – replacing email, at least to some extent, with a private social network. So while social intranet by definition can always be used as an enterprise social network, ESN (unless it has intranet already built in) does not typically have all the necessary intranet functions.

Social intranet consists of the following components:

Activity Stream

An Activity Stream is a unified, interactive update feed where all the changes and new additions to the intranet are listed. These include company announcements, new posts, polls, comments and replies. Unlike a traditional intranet, a social intranet activity stream is personalized, so while everyone receives important companywide news and announcements, each employee sees activities only relevant to him or her. This prevents information overload.

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1. Too social

The first generation of enterprise social collaboration tools, as epitomized by Yammer or Jive, were essentially Facebook or Twitter clones built for companies with the idea collaboration revolves around communications. However, it is now exceedingly clear that in many organizations, especially smaller ones, collaboration revolves around specific business tools, typically project management, document management or CRM – not social networking. The second generation of ESNs effectively solves the problem by seamlessly integrating sales, planning, communication and HR tools into your company intranet or private social network, giving your employees a reason to use it on a daily basis for their work routine.

2. Top down implementation

Vendors and consultants frequently stress how important it is to get support from top management and start implementation with them. But contrary to this “common wisdom” this strategy frequently doesn’t work. In order for social collaboration to be strong in a company, it has to have grassroot support. Selling enterprise social to C-level executives and decision makers may be much easier (that’s exactly why vendors and consultants do this) but it is, to borrow a political analogy, astroturfing. Especially since management uses these tools very differently than regular workers. In reality, there are individuals and departments in your company, typically sales, marketing and IT, who are very open to social tools and you should tap into their knowledge and enthusiasm first. This will make choosing the right solution for your company and implementing it MUCH easier.

3. No/wrong usage metrics

This is a big one. Because early social collaboration solutions mirrored social networks, they adopted the same approach to analytics – how many posts were made, which posts got most likes, which users are most active and so on. But as far as company wide adoption goes, different metrics is important. What percentage of registered users actually use the solutions on a daily basis? Which particular tools are they using? How many use desktop or mobile app? Identifying people and specific tools which are underused allows to quickly overcome problems with implementation and help those who are struggling. Coupled with gamification strategy that actively engages employees and encourages them to explore all available features, you get ‘natural’ adoption that is much better than using ‘brute force’ or hiring consultants.

4. Got to be mobile

One of the main advantages that comes with social collaboration tools is that your employees and co-workers become available almost 24/7. You’ll see people use company network on weekends and during holidays. Questions get answered much quicker than via e-mail. That’s wh ere the importance of good mobile app comes in. And it has to be a true mobile app – not mobile optimized site or responsive design, because you will not get push notifications, contact synchronization and other features that are possible with the mobile app only. It may not seem important at first, but when testing different social collaboration solutions you absolutely should test mobile apps as well. Otherwise your most mobile employees will switch to WhatsApp, WeChat or their clones, and abandon your company network, creating a split.

5. Work together

Buying CRM does not mean you’ll get swamped with orders next week. Using project management does not guarantee all our projects will always be on time. Likewise, enterprise collaboration tools will help you immensely only if your company already has the culture of sharing and working together. Don’t buy into ‘Enterprise 2.0’ hype and don’t expect miracles. Don’t trust vendors that make overly optimistic ROI claims – the numbers probably made up anyway. But while social collaboration tools can’t be used as a substitute for culture change, they are oftentimes extremely good at identifying problems and bottlenecks by making your company and its business processes more transparent. The difficulties and outright failures that you encounter along the path can help you make necessary organizational changes that may not have been obvious before.

By being presented in social media and networks, your company can benefit from general recognition and attention as well as from the use of these channels for announcements, publications, promotions, and interaction with current and potential customers.

If the above is of interest to your company, and if you use Bitrix24’s CRM or are considering it, and if you are ready to cut the path to integration of your business and social networks, this article is for you.

We present to you a scenario wh ere leads from social media and networks are automatically added to your Bitrix24 CRM. This way, your sales managers can work with potential clients who have shown interest in your company or products via social networks from inside the Bitrix24 CRM.

This article will discuss Twitter integration. Events such as direct messages, retweets, replies and adding your tweet to favorites causes a new lead to be created in the Bitrix24 CRM. Subsequent events from the Twitter user are added to the lead as activities.

Similar integrations with other services can be set up.




Brief description of integration:

1. The settings of corporate accounts in social networks allow subscriptions to various events and allow an email address to be entered wh ere notifications will be sent.
2. The email address in Point 1 is entered in the Bitrix24 CRM’s settings.
3. The Bitrix24 CRM processes these emails and creates new leads or appends event to existing leads as activities.
   

How to configure collection of leads from Twitter

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Tags: bitrix24, crm, integration, lead, social networks, social services, twitter

Updated design in Bitrix24 Desktop App – convenient left-column menu

We have revamped the look of the app – now all actions which were in the upper part of the app interface are in the menu on the left.



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Bitrix24’s CRM has several important updates:

• We have released the first elements of the duplicate detection system to prevent doubled-up contacts with Leads, Contacts, and Companies;
• More flexibility for working with Companies (more flexible access settings, option to set responsible during import and from the main Company list page);
• New name format settings for Leads and Contacts.
  

We’ll look at each of these individually.


Duplicates in Leads, Companies, and Contacts

When working with the CRM, checking for duplicates is important. Often a single Lead or Contact has multiple employees working with it, and so it’s important that all the information related to the client is located in a single record.  
Even if there is only 1 sales agent, it is impossible to remember all the clients that have ever been registered. Repeated correspondence and confusion in communication can result, wasting time and energy.
Bitrix24’s CRM now has a duplicates checker which works when new objects are created – Leads, Contacts, or Companies.

When a new object is created, the system will indicate whether a similar object has already been registered, along with information concerning the data fields which match (first or last name, company name, email, and telephone number).


 
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It might sound as a cliché, which doesn't make it any less true, but the nature of workforce is changing. More and more people are telecommuting, working in geographically dispersed teams or hiring/offering their service as freelancers.

Try googling 'telecommuting tools' or 'remote employee management tools' and you get articles that recommend using 10 different tools for 10 different things - Skype for face-to-face meetings, Dropbox for file sharing, Google Docs for working with documents, and so on. That's the wrong way to go. If you want to manage your geographically dispersed team or teleworkers effectively, all the tools should be in one place easily accessible by everyone, just like they are in Bitrix24.

Here is a list remote employee management tools available in free Bitrix24 plan

1.     Private social network
2.     Group chat
3.     Videocalls and videoconferencing
4.     Telephony
5.     Group tasks and group projects (workgroups)
6.     Shared team calendars
7.     CRM and sales team management
8.     Lead management and email marketing
9.     Invoicing
10. Bitrix24.Drive for online storage and file sharing
11. Online document management with multiuser editing
12. Time tracking and employee workload planning
13. Daily planner
14. Team checklists
15. Workflow automation
16. Mobile workforce management
17. Employee self-service and HR tools

To repeat, these are all available to you at no cost as long as your team is 12 users or less (you can buy extra 12 users for just $25 a month, if necessary).

Here is a list remote employee management tools available in paid Bitrix24 plans or the self-hosted edition.

1.     Remote employee training and learning management
2.     Time management
3.     Work reports
4.     Extranet
5.     Helpdesk and ticketing
6.     Meetings and briefings
7.     Records management

Additional tools and integrations with third party solutions are available in Bitrix24 Marketplace and are provided by Bitrix24 partners.

Happy remote collaboration to you!

If you are an accredited business school or a university with a business education program, you are eligible for a free Professional Bitrix24 account. To apply, fill out this simple form. Please note that this offer DOES NOT extend to student organizations or educational institutions that are not accredited as business schools or don't specialize in business education.

Here are a few ideas regarding what you can do with Bitrix24. First, you can use Bitrix24 as a private social network for your business school or university. Second, you can use it to collaborate with your coworkers and other faculty members. Third, you can use it as an extension to the physical classroom by sharing study materials or assignments as well as carrying on discussion threads inside the clean and well-designed interface.

In return, after you had a chance to start using Bitrix24, you’ll be asked to submit a formal case study. We also encourage all education and knowledge management professionals to check out the self-hosted version of Bitrix24 that comes with eLearning module (not part of this offer).


THIS OFFER IS NO LONGER VALID

In this post we’ll take a look at the collaboration tools for documents in Bitrix24 which have received additional and updated functionality.  

Collaboration is even better now:

• Open access to a folder in My Drive to any number of your coworkers! Work with colleagues together on documents and have everything synched through Bitrix24.Drive.
• Work with documents from groups, the company drive and from other users offline! Correct documents even without an Internet connection, and when a connection is available again, all files will be synched automatically with the intranet.
• Additional storage can be purchased at only $0.25-$0.10 per GB.
  

Please note, after significantly expanding Bitrix24.Drive features, My Files, Group Files and Common Documents have been renamed to My Drive, Group Drive and Company Drive to reflect new document sharing and collaboration functions now available to you.
 
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Tags: bitrix24, collaboration, documents, drive, files

As you may have noticed, you are now able to purchase telephony credits from inside your Bitrix24 account or at http://www.bitrix24.com/prices/tariffs.php. The tariffs page also has telephone call rates that are available to you, depending on which country you are in and what type of call you are making.



If you go to Settings –> Telephony Settings you will also be able to specify a relay number. That’s a phone number that people you call to will see. We highly recommend you add the number that you want your customers to call back at.



While you can use web phone calls from Bitrix24 to talk to your co-workers, this feature is mostly used in Bitrix24 CRM. All calls made from the CRM are automatically registered and added to CRM activity list. However, you can also record the actual phone call made from the CRM either for quality assurance purposes or so that before you make your next phone call, you can quickly refresh your memory about the last one.

Please note that in some countries and states you have to notify a person about the fact that a phone call is being recorded. Make sure you follow your local laws and regulations.

We at Bitrix24 love startups. After all, even though Bitrix was founded way back in 1998, we treat Bitrix24 as our own internal startup. Brandon Bouck, the Founder and CEO of LearnJack.com was kind enough to tell us how Bitrix24 helped him build his startup. Here's the story of LearnJack:


Nearly a year ago I was attending networking groups searching for the most fantastic team who could take an idea I had and build it into creation. I soon found a partner from a business relationship who helped Learnjack source it's engineering team. I was divinely blessed to find the right team, a team of high regard, and begin building Learnjack.com from scratch in an almost non-existent niche industry. We found a group of web engineers in Budapest Hungary though another Hungarian contact of my partner. We sold a team of six high level web engineers on the idea and who agreed to build the product and see it through to completion for an equity stake. Because our team was spread from the US, England, and Hungary we were faced with the task of communicating, keeping organized, maintaining a team, and quite frankly getting to know each other. As an executive team we needed a tool that would allow us to continually motivate a team of 8 - 10 people on a weekly basis so that we could create a very challenging website.

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Part I. We've asked several Enterprise 2.0 and social intranet experts what they expect from 2014. Is there 'social enterprise' bubble or not? Will this year become the year of big breakthrough and wide adoption? Do you expect any surprises from the industry in 2014? Here are the replies that we got:

Stowe Boyd. Lead researcher at GigaOM Research on the future of work and social business. Stowe blogs at stoweboyd.com, and tweets at @stoweboyd.

2014 is when 'social' (in the enterprise) will shift: less of a set of design metaphors for work tech, and instead a set of principles related to our scientific understanding of sociality. Social will form one thread in the expanding discourse around new ways of work, but not necessarily the hottest one. Work tech vendors have had their hands on sociality for over five years, and they haven't done much with it, honestly. Innovation among the most well-established companies actually seems to be slowing. It's become a war of attrition. There's more exciting work at the fringes, with some interesting chat-based solutions, and the increasing interest in small-and-simple task-centric and performance-centric tools. The combination of innovative business practices -- like holocracy, Results-Only-Work-Environments, and leanership -- with narrow-and-deep cooperative tools will begin to shift the conversation in a different and perhaps more productive direction.

Do you agree or disagree with expert opinions? Did they miss an important trend? Feel free to use comments to share your views
Tags: 2.0, 2014, business, CEO, collaboration, enterprise, enterprise 2.0, forecast, predictions, trends

We are planning a few changes to our main page and adding client testimonials and case studies is one of them. If Bitrix24 has absolutely changed the way you run your business, saved you thousands of dollars, helped your sales explode or performed any other technomiracle, we sure would like to hear your story. Please send your testimonials and case studies to DID at Bitrix24 dot CO M, with CASE STUDY as subject. Please, include your name, title, photograph and URL of your organizations. We will feature most interesting testimonials and case studies on our website, blog and in social media.

We've asked several Enterprise 2.0 and social intranet experts what they expect from 2014. Is there 'social enterprise' bubble or not? Will this year become the year of big breakthrough and wide adoption? Do you expect any surprises from the industry in 2014? Here are the replies that we got:

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Tags: 2.0, 2014, business, CEO, collaboration, enterprise, enterprise 2.0, forecast, predictions, trends

In May of 2013 Bitrix24 added audio and video calls between users of the Bitrix24 Intranet, providing them with a convenient means of communicating with colleagues without using add-ons, additional downloads or plug-ins, etc.



Thanks to VoxImplant (by Zingaya, Inc.), at the end of 2013 Bitrix24's cloud service was extended with a new feature - IP-telephony to mobile phones and land lines. This feature supports convenient direct dialing from CRM contact and lead lists, and recording of the conversations, as well as a regular dialpad accessible from the Bitrix24 messenger.



We will look more closely at the use of IP telephony, costs, its future development and the technical details and service requirements.

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Tags: bitrix24, crm, ip-telephony, voxImplant, zingaya

We have added three new features that have been frequently requested. First, if you are using our free plan, you can now buy 12 extra users for $25/mo. A lot of you complained that paying $99 or $199 each month so that one or two additional users can work in Bitrix24 made no sense. So now you can have up to 24 users in your account, without having to switch to Bitrix24 Standard or Bitrix24 Professional.

Here are the important things to keep in mind – you can add 12 extra users only once. If you need to have more than 24 users, you will need to upgrade to the Standard or Professional plan. Second, buying extra users does not give you access to features available in our premium plans and it does not qualify you for priority support.

Likewise you can now buy extra disk space if you have exceeded or are getting close to the limits permitted by your current plan, including free one. Extra disk space is sold in packages of 25GB, 250GB and 1TB for $25/mo, $50/mo and $100/mo respectively. As with buying extra users, if you use our free plan and decide to buy additional disk space, this will not unlock premium features, nor qualify you for priority support.

Finally, the new version of Bitrix24.Drive now works with group files, in addition to personal files. Now you can also share folders inside your personal files and specify which Bitrix24 users are allowed access to them. Synchronization with company files via Bitrix24.Drive will be added soon.


Tags: extra, users, 12-user-pack, online storage, disk, space, drive, bitrix24, purchase options, buy, order