Social Networking in the Business

At the beginning of the month, Ron Shewchuck made some predictions about the year ahead for internal communications, including this section on social networking:

3. Facebook will launch a sister network designed for business (along the lines of Linkedin, but better) that will become extremely popular, but will prompt many companies to install clunky internal social networks in a vain attempt to keep their "walled gardens" closed to the outside world. In a related trend, employees will start bringing their own wirelessly connected personal laptops to work so they can stay hooked up to their social networks during the day. Some will get fired for this, making headlines and inspiring others to follow.

Now, I've been advocating Social Networks as a tool that could be useful in a business sense for promoting innovation networks (as an example) in larger technology companies. And worse, I've been one of those who have been talking in terms of internal solutions that don't violate the "walled garden."

So, I guess I better respond.

1) If Facebook actually develop a business arm, that could be very powerful. One of the flaws of LinkedIn is that there isn't really the same drive (for most people) to keep going back to their profile. It's fun to make contact with people from the past, but if you do have something to talk about, more than likely it's not work, most of the time and you'll end up either in email or on Facebook with them anyway.

I'd say the potential of a Facebook business arm is analogous to the way email used to work (when most people had just one address) or to bringing corporate issues into access through the TV. That is to say, alerts about business stuff can pop up alongside interesting leisure alerts, which could rather improve the likelihood of them being noticed.

As such, Ron is right that this will make internal solutions look much less attractive.

2) However, the quick use case I sketched out in a comment at Black Belt Dojo suggests that the business value of social networking is that it aids the spread of business information around the organisation. The problem is, the kind of business information you need to put on there to get that kind of value is very extensive.

It's easy to say that corporations should be more transparent, but when it comes to project work in firms, the open source model still has a lot of ground to make up. So, internal research projects on the business side of Facebook would seem to be a bit risky. Or to take another example, suppose you want internal feedback on entering a new market area or a new promotional scheme. There's a lot of value in discussing this in-house before you announce it to the world. Yes, you're unlikely to keep the intention a secret from your competitiors, but I do think that opening them to the details of your thinking isn't always wise in the current environment.

Of course, part of the problem is that none of the public sites like Facebook or LinkedIn have a proper privacy structure that allows you to control who sees particular discussions in an easy way. That's why you can't help but feel even if Facebook has a "business arm" the interface makes it likely that information can easily accidentally leak into someone's social circle and from there to the world.

Also, I have to point out that Facebook's design looks a lot like Emmental in security terms. So far, no-one has publicly exploited it, but it's a big risk to take with sensitve information. The problem is, if you restrict it to non-sensitive information, how much value can you really get out of it?

So that's why I think internal social networks, at least in larger corporations, do have a future.

[Just to note, I personally have no problem with employees being on Facebook and playing with it in working hours. If people are distracted and demotivated about their work, Facebook is a symptom, not a cause.]

 

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