Antisocial: Why New Communication Tools Aren’t Catching on Faster at Work

March 13, 2014, 11:06 AM ET

Antisocial: Why New Communication Tools Aren’t Catching on Faster at Work

STEVE ROSENBUSH

Deputy Editor

The growth of new customers at Jive Software Inc.JIVE -0.45% reportedly has slowed, and the company is said to have put itself on the block, potentially raising questions about the outlook for a new generation of tools for collaboration and communication at work.

Jive has approached Oracle Corp., SAP AGSAP.XE -0.63%, and Workday Inc. as potential buyers, Recode’s Arik Hesseldahl reports. Recode, citing unnamed sources, said Jive had retained Frank Quattrone’s investment bank, Catalyst Partners, but that it had no offers.  Jive has had a tough time since its 2011 IPO because expenses are outpacing the growth of sales, and the growth in the number of new customers to its subscription-based service dropped to 76 last year, from 133 in 2012, Mr. Hesseldahl says. A Jive spokesman told CIO Journal that it could not comment on rumors or speculation.

Jive didn’t confirm or deny that the number of new customers dropped last year by nearly half. However, its strategy of selling additional products to existing customers is working well, the company says. The renewal rate last year was 90% excluding upsells, and more than 110% including upsells, according to Tim Zonca, senior director of product marketing at Jive. Year-over-year, the company has seen a 19% increase in spending by existing customers, according to Mr. Zonca. “Our customers are engaged, because they see value,” he said.

That may well be true. The question is whether the pace and breadth of adoption of Jive and similar services is shaping up the way people expected it to two or three years ago. Even Mr. Zonca acknowledges that the market has changed in many ways. “Gone are the days of social for social’s sake. That was a myth. You really need a plan,” he said.

One might argue that tools like Jive probably make more sense as features in a broader platform than they do as standalone businesses. There is some justice in that argument, given the fact that Microsoft Corp.MSFT -0.99% acquired Yammer, another social business tool, for $1.2 billion in cash in 2012.

Yet it’s possible that the hurdles to adoption are deeper and more fundamental than the structure of the market. In the world of venture capital-backed startups, entrepreneurs and investors love to find “broken” applications and experiences. If something is broken, then one can make a case for starting—and funding—a new company that can fix the problem. Over the years, a lot of people have become convinced that email is one such “broken’ experience, a tool that was created in the primordial years of the Internet, before the Web, let alone the current social Web, was formed. That conviction underscored the business case for a new generation of communication and collaboration tools for the “social” era of the Internet.

Perhaps the experience of email isn’t quite as broken as some people say it is.

The shortcomings of email are apparent, and the broken-experience argument has some validity. Some people are unduly burdened by the sheer volume of email they receive, making the task of sorting through their messages a frustrating chore that leaves them with an intimidating number of unread messages. And email is a vector for cyberattack, spam, and unwanted messages from any number of generally benign but annoying sources.

The problem with the broken-experience argument is that these hurdles aren’t as high for all users, and for most people, the advantages of using email more than offset the disadvantages.  When asked if saw the need to enter the market for email clients with something new and better, Box Inc. CEO Aaron Levie told CIO Journal in a conversation last month that“most people don’t have that big a problem with email.”

There are a number of fundamental barriers to the adoption of new social communication and collaboration tools according to Ted Schadler, an analyst atForrester Research Inc.FORR -0.53%

“Email is not the greatest-ever application, but it is universal. Nothing else approaches it in terms of its availability. It’s not based on an invitation model—there are no ‘come and join my network’ messages. It’s one to one, one to many, and it’s very flexible. Social is none of those things,” he says.

There are certain social applications such as LinkedIn that make sense in the workplace, he argues. But too often, “social takes off in communities where people want to brag about their lives online, or lurk. If you apply it to business, it runs out of gas pretty quickly.”

While email inboxes can be a source of frustration when the unread messages pile up, at least the inbox lets people know what they have missed. Social tools, on the other hand, require constant monitoring. “If I am not confident that I am aware of the good stuff, I become frantic,” Mr. Schadler says.

Email isn’t going away, and that means that the adoption of social tools requires users to learn yet another platform and add it to the list of tools they have to monitor. Email and consumer-oriented social tools such as TwitterTWTR -1.71%and FacebookFB -2.89%, not to mention LinkedIn, already are widely used in business. Getting people to add more business-specific tools can be a tough sell. “It’s another feed. If it can do something of incredible value to me, okay—but it really has to be worth it,” Mr. Schadler says. “I already have this addictive behavior around email. Do I really have to acquire another addictive behavior?”

None of this is to suggest that there isn’t a place for social communication tools in the workplace. But the outlook for rapid, mass adoption might have dimmed a bit.