<p>"Relevant" and "context" are two terms one often hears in discussions about social collaboration. It's usually built into phrases such as, "We make social collaboration relevant by placing it in user context." Context is a nice idea that has yet to be fully implemented in software. That's too bad since context is the final part of the machinery that will get the social collaboration engine moving at top speed.</p><p>The original idea behind social collaboration, especially enterprise social networks, was that by using social media's conversational type of communication scheme microblogging, for example organizations could interact in ways that were previously quite difficult.</p><p>That's because freeform social communication had limited advantages. Entrenched applications and techniques, especially email, were more familiar and performed basically the same function. As social collaboration software evolved, vendors focused on adding more features to help workers find value in these new platforms, including content sharing, lightweight workflows and most recently, integration with systems of record such as CRM. All of these new additions were designed to make social collaboration a part of the daily working life of the average knowledge worker.Too Many Choices</p><p>Yet, a large number of knowledge workers still do not use social collaboration products even though their companies pay for it. That should change somewhat as social collaboration becomes better integrated into company processes and lightweight workflows help teams to work better together. Still, those improvements won't be enough. For the most part, social collaboration is still a "build it and they will come" affair. Companies deploy a large variety of features, often in the name of choice or flexibility, which leaves knowledge workers with the unenviable task of trying to figure out how to them work into their environments and processes, and in a way that best supports their individual job functions.</p><p><a href="http://www.cmswire.com/cms/social-business/context-the-next-generation-in-social-collaboration-021162.php?utm_source=MainRSSFeed&utm_medium=Web&utm_campaign=RSS-News">Keep reading...</a></p>