Then there is the customer-facing side of the social equation. Phillip Easter, director of Mobile Apps for American Airlines, says the company's app has already been downloaded 4 million times and is available on mobile operating system platforms including the , and more recently the Nook and Kindle Fire. "Everything has to have a great UI," he says. Easter demonstrated, for example, new capabilities within the AA mobile app that allow customers to have a live text conversation with an American Airlines customer service representative while in the air. When users access the system through the application, the AA employee automatically knows who he or she is talking to, what flight the user is on and other "intelligence information," that is used to provide customized service to the passenger. Social collaboration and a unified communications platform power that, he says.

There are a variety and growing number of tools on the market to help enterprises become more collaborative. Virgin Media, the U.K. cable operator with 5 million customers, has made a year-and-a-half migration toward being more collaborative. Colin Miles, head of technical services for the company, says Virgin explored SharePoint 2010, Jive and others. In the second half of last year, Virgin undertook a 1,000 user trial using Cisco's Quad, which the company this week. The Cisco system, he says, integrates WebEx video collaboration with unified communications and social collaboration tools, whereas Jive and Microsoft, he says, only excelled in the text-based collaboration feature set. In an effort to drive employees to use a unified control system, Virgin chose the platform with all those feature sets.

As part of the company's annual survey this year, employees who were part of the initial pilot reported a seven-point bump in employee engagement compared to workers not in the pilot. "Workers feel more connected with each other and customers," Miles says. "That's a win-win."

Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.

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