Many businesses fight an uphill battle in their enterprise social network deployment: In fact, Gartner predicts that 80 percent of such initiatives fail. Here are the three most common obstacles businesses face and tips for how you can avoid them.

1. It's a good intranet alternative. Most companies have an intranet meant to facilitate employee collaboration and act as a portal for company information. But employees often use it so infrequently that they forget their passwords. Lawrence DeVoe, chief technology catalyst at Initiative Media, deployed Yammer last April, starting with 10 invites, and within three weeks had gained 400 users. Today, the Yammer population at the company has grown to 1,400. And DeVoe says Yammer cost less than half of what was spent on his previous Intranet tool.

The CSIRO is undertaking an experiment few commercial organisations would dare to consider — switching off email for an entire day.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has adopted social software in the hope of providing greater collaboration across its 3200 strong workforce.

BankWest has revealed details of its internal social networking service, IdeaBank, with the platform resulting in more collaboration and innovation.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's controversial decision to ban employees from working from home led some to question the value of social business tools. Two executives from social business providers say Yahoo's problem isn't about collaborating. It just needs to manage better.

A new report from Forrester Research finds that while businesses continue to adopt enterprise collaboration tools in 2011, they're not seeing a wide range of benefits from them.

Budget constraints and limited technical support make it critical for most small and medium-size companies to work as efficiently as possible. An important first step in getting more and better work from relatively few people is to enable them to work together in real time, no matter how distant they actually may be.