<p>Just about every company seems to have a rapidly growing portfolio of social media applications today. This is fragmenting our knowledge, locking us in, reducing business utility, and holding back ROI for our organizations.</p><p>These days it's largely expected that the latest consumer technology will be adopted in a new record-setting time. This was true of social media as it was of earlier communication revolutions. Yet the contrast between the widespread use of social networks in people's personal lives and the same phenomenon by the enterprise is often stark.</p><p>Much has been made recently of the likelihood of the first couple generations of internal social networking efforts to fall by the wayside, with Gartner recently noting that up to 80 percent of them won't survive. Fortunately, this isn't exactly unusual for a major enterprise-wide initiative that ushers in major change: Well over 10 years after they were introduced, ERP projects are still reporting substantial failure rates, with 60 percent of them creating less than half the expected benefits, according to the latest data from my ZDNet colleague Michael Krigsman.</p><p>With outcomes like this, there's no question that social business (defined here as the application of social media to the enterprise) is currently in the trough of disillusionment, even as more companies report success with the methods than ever before. In fact, nearly two-thirds of companies currently use social media to engage with customers and 49 percent to advertise, according to Stanford's 2012 Social Media Survey. What's more, internal social networks are on target to be key elements of the workplace experience in most enterprises by 2016.</p><p><a href="http://kpbj.com/business_daily/2013-07-03/are_social_media_silos_holding_back_business_results">Keep reading...</a></p>