More Social Networking examples...

Shiv Singh at TheAppGap tell us a bit about his panel talk with representatives from Best Buy, Serena Software and Oracle on their use of Web 2.0 social software.

The BestBuy experience is very interesting as an example of how certain kinds of business knowledge aggregation come out of social networking, but the one I am going to have to research more is Serena Software:

Serena Software is another interesting company and I blogged about them a few years ago (on another blog) when they first rolled out their Facebook Fridays initiative. Rather than trying to build a behind the firewall social networking enabled intranet, Serena chose to build their intranet on the Facebook platform. But not just that, they also built tools to allow the Facebook pages to connect with company data sources in a safe and secure manner. So rather than bringing the employees to the intranet, they went to where their employees were spending most of their time - on Facebook.

This is exactly what most companies are scared of doing on security/productivity grounds, so I think it's a fascinating development.

[N.B. After lunch with Steve Ward today, I realise I've been blogging far too much about various technologies and not enough about culture and communication as it features in my general work. Expect a shift of emphasis over the coming months.]

Technorati Tags: Best Buy,business case,future of internal communications,Oracle,Serena Software,social media,social networking

 

Momentum of Social Networking in the Enterprise.

 

It's growing. I posted recently about IBM, I was at a recent event where Michael Ambjorn described the tools they are putting in place at Motorola and Lee Smith notes that social networking has landed at BT.

I'm not surprised by this, I've argued for a while that the large corporation is exactly the kind of large, geographically disparate body that could benefit from social networking.

Questions that remain:

a) If it's obvious for large corporations, how do we persuade the remaining "big boys" to take it up? Senior management resistance is still a big issue.

b) How big does the organisation have to be for social networking to be a no-brainer? What's the needed "critical mass" of a network to make this kind of software useful?

 

Technorati Tags: BT,business case,future of internal communications,IBM,Motorola,social networking

Is this Facebook's answer to LinkedIn?

So the new app on the Facebook block is the Visa Business Network. It's interesting because it isn't in fact a direct analogue of LinkedIn. Rather than being a tool for presenting our "business personas" it appears more geared to being an organisational persona for smaller businesses.

It's only in Beta, so the networking features are rather rudimentary and until the number of participants increases it's not clear how useful they will be. And personally, I'm not sure that this will be enough for Facebook to take on LinkedIn. I think they are going to have to take on board the fact that we all have more than one persona (the usual example is business vs personal) and if they want to be a site that contains both, they have to give people a way to present both sides. This seems to do so, a little bit, for those of us who own smaller organisations, but I'm not sure quite what it does for those who work, say, for IBM. By contrast, LinkedIn at least has some potential there (along with a growing userbase.)

Of course, this could be an example of one of those "enabling technologies" that helps smaller businesses create "virtual organisations" or "network businesses" to cover market requirements that are normally served by much larger organisations. However, there doesn't seem to be enough interactivity to really be better than a phone directory so far. Also, the address form assumes you are in the USA.

This is a pet peeve of mine, but so many "Web 2.0" sites hobble their functionality by not considering non-US users when they first start up. If you're looking for early adopters, it's best to cast the net wider. Ignoring the world outside the US might save 10 minutes coding up the HTML for location, phone and address handling, but you lose half the advantage (geo-location neutrality) of a Web App in the first place.

 

Technorati Tags: business case,facebook,linkedin,social networking

On new channels

Over at Black Belt Dojo, guest poster Jeffery McMillan posts some musings about podcasts and their place in his new assignment in Russia. He makes some interesting points about how the different medium elicits different responses from interviewees and how it can build a more intimate connection with the audience.

However, what got me thinking was this:

Let's return to the paradox with which I began this blog post. It seems the better I get at producing podcasts the lower the number of listeners tuning in.

...

It could be a cultural thing. Perhaps podcasting is as of yet a western phenomenon. PwC Russia is a solid 93% Russian in its staff composition and, let's face it, maybe you can't blame my Russian colleagues for having an instinctive skepticism toward the media—corporate media included. I wonder what the experiences of my colleagues around the world have been. Do podcasts resonate further in some necks of the woods than in others?

Now I'm no techno-slouch, per se. I have 2 iPods (car and general use) and I'm rarely without my laptop. And yet... I barely listen to podcasts. It's true that I don't work for an organisation that puts out vital information in this format, but plenty of high quality blogs in the IC space and others produce a podcast. But the only podcast I generally make an effort to listen to each year is the Guardian's Tour de France daily report. And I usually end up listening to that in the evening on my laptop.

Now there are a variety of reasons for this, from the fact that I don't drive on a regular basis, to the miserable quality of bandwidth on the train and in various hotels for streaming.

I must also admit that once I get the new iPhone, I might be more likely to find it easy to organise such that podcasts are with me all the time.

I think that these sort of infrastructure issues are a big part of Jeffrey's situation. It's often not that convenient/appropriate to sit in an open plan office listening to a podcast. But elsewhere, bandwidth can be a bit scanty. And (guessing) perhaps the Russia office has a lower iPod ownership.

And this is a problem which a lot of new media channels face. The main reason every "social networking" conversation eventually turns to Facebook (and occasionally LinkedIn) is that they are the main ones with any kind of serious user density.

For myself, I can see lots of interesting possibilities for mixing my virtual life with my physical one. Examples include things as diverse as Facebook's status update, Twitter and Dopplr. The problem is, candidly, very few of the people in my physical world are on any of these services.

Interestingly, email was easy, because everyone got it with internet access. I wonder which other channels will turn out to be "basic" in the same way.

 

Technorati Tags: podcasting,social networking

Culture and Web 2.0

Over at The AppGap, Matthew Hodgson has made a post uniting some of the themes I've been blogging about recently: the effect of different cultures on the take up of Web 2.0 tools.

Of course, I have to add the industry standard disclaimer that I too have philosophical and technical doubts about Hofstede's categories like "Power Distance" but overall it's not a bad starting point in this case (and definitely a post worth reading) Hodgson points to some recent research:

 

The book The Emergence of the Relationship Economy looks at a wide range of factors in the adoption of social computing tools, including culture. In bringing together a number of studies, chapter nine [1] deals specifically with the issue of culture.

The book reports that cultures who have very high Power-Distance scores also have low adoption of social computing tools. What organisations are likely to be high Power-Distance cultures? Many government agencies, defence and security organisations, and manufacturing companies could be described in this way.

He goes on to muse on how to address the problem. I agree overall with his contention that you can build an organisational culture that accepts social web tools even where the national culture seems to mitigate against it. However, what I've seen so far is that many companies still fail to take the time to consider that there may be cultural differences across different branch offices before they roll out these tools. So I make that the most important take home point of this post: Find out what cultures are operating across your organisation before you roll out a one size fits all change program.

 

Technorati Tags: corporate culture,culture,internal communications,international communications,social media,social networking

Merlin Mann on Social Networks...

So this embedded video is possibly the most important contribution to understanding what drives the creation of social networking sites at the moment.

What worries me is that I say that not only because it made me laugh but because of how much it reminded me of a recent event I attended, a gathering of new startups, VC types and some luminaries from various corners of the Web 2.0 world...

 

Technorati Tags: social networking,startups

Social networking in the enterprise (again...)

So over at Talking IC, Lee Smith links (via Jim Berkowitz) to Jake Swearingen of CNet, who pours cold water on Kris Dunn's idea of experimenting with a social network for his company.

Jake isn't overly polite, so my first instinct is to note how interesting it is that some "technology experts" are very keen to draw distinctions within "Web 2.0" between wikis, blogs, social networks, etc. and yet at the same time think of social networks as this "stuff like Facebook" blob, rather than realising that Facebook et al. are bundles of technologies, which don't all have to come together and could be bundled up with other parts of "Web 2.0" (or even Web 1.0!) and that might well turn out to be the future.

However, I have to echo Lee, (and Kevin Keohane) when he makes the point that it'd be really nice to see some of the people who are always promoting "social networking in the business" actually involved in implementing some, rather than just talking about it.

And yet, that's another reason I find the reaction towards Kris Dunn a bit excessive. At least he's trying to do some empirical work. Maybe it will turn out just as Jake predicts, but at the same time where did we get so sniffy about people trying to "walk the talk"? I at least want to applaud Kris Dunn for trying to make his ideas real.

And as much as I share the general fatigue of Lee and Kevin about the fact that there are more people making money out of talking about social networking in IC than actually doing it, I think there are a number of barriers to current adoption:

Shel Holtz recently posted about JotSpot and in there discusses one of the barriers:

A typical IT response to the notion of introducing social media tools to the intranet focuses on the time and expense involved in testing new applications to ensure compatibility with existing software. If you suggest that the social media tools can be hosted offsite, the odds are pretty good that you’ll be told the information those sites would contain is too sensitive to risk maintaining it outside the firewall.

(This excuse is pretty lame, given that every single one of the US-based companies that has raised this concern in my experience also maintains its employee 401(k) data on a hosted server.)

Now, Shel points up with this last remark that the IT dept's fear of "hosted social networking" might not be wholly rational, but that doesn't mean to say it isn't real. Also, there's a world of difference between putting company data on a pension transaction company's hosted server and putting it on Facebook or even on Ning. There's nothing in the Facebook/Ning terms of service which give the IT Director any kind of job security in the event of a security breach.

So, Lee links to Ning, but fun as it is to experiment there (as Kris Dunn is doing) it's not really an enabler for experimentation in larger corporations. The "where is the data, is it safe?" remains a significant barrier.

To overcome this, you need a internally hosted solution. I don't know how many people have one of these for sale/use. Maybe I'm wrong, but I haven't seen one in an operational state. Without that, we're not going to see much happen. If anyone knows of a good one, let me know.

Other barriers include that fact that everyone thinks "Facebook" when someone says "social network" so there is a lack of other models for what it might look like in circulation. Hence people can't see some of the possibilities. I'll try to repair that in a post later this week, as this is already getting too long.

Reacting to the 3 specific problems Jake mentions:

1) Email is more efficient:

Well, it is now, but it didn't use to be, before Notes, Exchange, Outlook, etc. I remember a day when I did business over email but sent all the docs using a fax machine. Email didn't look that useful then, but it's day has since arrived.

It's easy to see that the messaging systems on social network sites can be improved a lot. Part of why they haven't yet is because social networks have been, up to now, universes-to-themselves for their teenage/college student main customers. Developing the user interface for multi-media communications (blog, email, IM, twitter, SMS) is the hardest part perhaps here. But it will happen.

2) Social networks lose engagement over time.

Complex one this. Studies I've seen suggest that youth communities who establish around social networking stick with it, but being youth communities, the communities lose engagement over time. The older people who rushed into things like Facebook rarely integrated it into their community and so naturally their interest waned. The tool cannot create links that are not really there. If you're married with kids, you have commitments to social networks that are stronger than your Facebook friends list, unless they happen to include the same people. But that's not a common condition.

Corporate social networks do need to be integrated with the rest of the intranet functions, in particular the corporate directory and communication technologies. If it's set up as just another optional site, it won't get much interest. If it's actually a proper part of people's work eco-system, it will, like email, get a lot more use. Especially once you integrate the internal VOIP system (and potentially videoconferencing too.)

3) Social networks are, well, social.

Jake claims that the workplace is not about selective connection. Interesting working life he must have led, connecting with everyone in his organisation equally, every day.

It's true that part of the power of social networks is to cement existing relations, but they also serve to create links, particularly about factual matters (here's where the workplace can really benefit) between people who would normally find it too much effort to stay in touch.

No corporation really wants people to spend all day socialising on the internal network. The value is in creating loose connections between people who would otherwise not have a way to find each other. Yes, everyone can blog about their projects, but how will you find interesting blogs, especially when people have less time to comment and trackbacks still don't work properly? RSS still requires you to know about the blog in question...

Social networking has the potential to answer that. It creates visible topologies which can be followed and human reasons to do so. (And yes, that adds a bunch of human, emotional pitfalls too, but that's always the case in human organisations.)

This of course raises the point that social networks only make sense inside larger communities. If your office is small enough that the "global listserv" email list isn't totally clogged all the time, you probably don't need social networking to help navigate the infospace of your organisation. This is another barrier to adoption.

The laugh is, I type all this and I'm not really a social networking zealot. I just see that blogs, wikis, podcasts etc. are mostly just extra content channels and to me, it's the various kinds of "social" technology that can help us navigate all this content and make it useful, in the end.

Finally, this isn't my area of business, so as interested as I am in it, I'm unlikely to make it happen any time soon. I guess another question for the readers, who do you know who is really working on this? After all, they are the ones I should be inflicting this discourse on...

 

Technorati Tags: future of internal communications,internal communications,social media,social networking,technology

Visualising Social Networks

Via the MindJet blog (MindManager is a great piece of mindmapping software) comes thoughts on Social Media Fatigue by Josh Catone and a great diagram, visualizing one person's online social network activities:

 

[Click on image for larger size version.]

 

Technorati Tags: overload,social networking,systems,visualisation

Advanced Internal Comms

Over at CommsOffensive325, Mike Klein joins the debate started by Liam Fitzpatrick over on BlackBeltDojo about "Advanced Internal Comms" and whether there are any revolutions left to come in the field, or is it all about really implementing basics we already know about?

Mike poses the debate as one about concentrating on competency (the Liam suggestion) vs the prospect of "fundamentally reinventing" the field. Mike suggests that:

Liam’s view only really holds water if you accept a view that organisations are fundamentally hierarchical and that internal communication exists to support the smooth functioning of hierarchies. If you accept the notion that organisations are simultaneously hierarchical and networked in nature, then it is worth recognising that very little work has been done in developing an advanced approach to internal communication that harnesses and influences the social networks in and around organisations while supporting what necessary hierarchy is required to drive an organisation towards its strategic or commercial objectives.

While the Holy Grail still eludes us, the emergence of social network tools and social network thinking are likely to play a key role in propelling the Internal Communications profession as we continue on its quest. And with the challenges we are likely to face in the short term as the budget-cutters seek easy targets, I for one think this quest is well worth continuing.

I think I have some overlap with Mike's view but I'd like to take a moment to muse on the philosophical question of "fundamental reinvention."

In the comments on BBD, I mentioned that I felt Liam was having it both ways. I said this because depending on how you cut the definition it's easy to cast something as evolution or revolution.

For example, let's take small group (4 people or so) transport. Let's think of the bullock cart from the Indian village of my grandparents, the mail coach of the Napoleonic London to Portsmouth route, one of Daimler's earliest 4 wheel vehicles, the Honda on my drive and a concept car of tomorrow, environmentally friendly which uses technology to drive itself.

There are lots of axes upon which one can measure some kind of fundamental change, for society. The increase in speed makes a huge difference to what transport can do, we seem to go in a circle about the environment, from animal power to "clean hydrogen" or whatever. And the notion of a car that drives itself has something to it too.

But, from another point of view: 4 wheels, power plant, somewhere to sit, control interface... nothing has changed in 500 years at least...

[Another set of objects for consideration might be: portable gramaphone, boombox, walkman, ipod.]

And so to the debate on IC. I do think that there are large elements of current theory (and some elements of practice) that are not going to go away. There will still be a need for various existing forms of organisation communication. So, you can fast forward 30 years and I think Liam can easily expect to find people doing "the basics" and so it's easy to argue that "fundamental reinvention" just isn't happening.

 

Of course, I'm not sure that's the right way to look at it, particularly from the point of view of IC professionals, because I think there are changes on the horizon for the typical IC department in the next 30 years. Mark highlights how social media trends mesh with the notion of an organisation as a partly a network (rather than just a hierarchy) could radically change the kinds of communication needed in an organisation.

One analogy for this might be the change from "Managament Information Systems" (MIS) departments to "Information Technology" (IT) departments. In the 60s and 70s, companies had an MIS department, which served to use technology to gather information on those doing the work and present it to managers. In a modern organisation a group of similar people are still there, but their role is (to some degree) now to think much more about how information moves between those doing the work - IT. Of course that role is still evolving, but I think it has something to say about the coming change in Internal Comms, from a management focus to a whole organisation focus.

My own contribution for now would be to suggest that once you move into that "whole organisation focus" it becomes apparent that where "communication" currently stands as a proxy for moving around particular information sets, in the future that has to expand. IC will have to overlap more with IT and think more about all the different aspects of communication. But I'll say more about that another time.

 

Technorati Tags: business case,future of internal communications,internal communications,lateral communications,social networking,systems

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.]

 

Technorati Tags: business case,facebook,internal communications,linkedin,privacy,security,social networking,walled garden

Social Media, Facebook and Privacy

This topic has been around a while and will doubtless rumble on for at least a generation. What brought it to mind recently was this post by David Murray over at Shades of Gray.

First of all, in the context of a "professional community webboard" then there's the obvious case for some kind of anonymity if you want to provide people an area for discussing ideas or difficulties related to potentially sensitive commercial matters. In the age of google, it's only a short step from a real name and a description of an episode from working life to full identification of the person and their employer.

Especially in an arena like communications, that kind of risk means that if you fully ID online postings, you won't get much discussion of real events from people who work in-house. It's the only safe approach for them. So it really is a practical issue of what kind of community discussion you hope to create.

The spammy, thread-jacking and obnoxious behaviour of some anonymous posters is of course a genuine problem in the same practical vein. One approach is to moderate anonymous comments, which can be onerous. Another is to have "anonymous registration" where you can only post if you register a pseudonym, but that discussion is also protected from anonymous readers and google. I've seen this second approach work in real online communities, but I don't know how well it stands up if everyone is working in the same field (which provides more clues to identity.) It does however allow people to be anonymous and yet have a "reputation" and thus a consistent community identity.

Moving on from the practical to the philosophical. I'm part of a generation who (thanks to my geeky past) grew up with online communications and has been typing to people across the other side of the world long before some excited communications consultant discovered AIM, let alone Facebook or Twitter.

One side effect of that is that I've accumulated a bunch of online identities almost by accident. Not all of them were kept intentionally separate, sometimes it was just an accident of technology. However, since it's been a natural development for me, I rather suspect lots of other people exist in that world too. Now that's not to say that you couldn't (with google and some hackery) connect up all my online identities and reveal all my secrets, of course you could. But, there are some clear divisions which I'd guess a random HR researcher would not cross. That's not because I have something particular to hide, as much as accidents of history of online technology, but I don't think it's all bad when it comes to letting me decide who I introduce from my personal network to my business one and vice versa.

It sometimes seems to me that the people who most breathlessly wish for absolute transparency and connection of business and personal networking online are those who've pretty much come to online activities through their business interests. As such, they've not really developed any personal connections online that didn't have them asking themselves "Am I happy for people at work to see this?"

That is of course, pretty farsighted of them, but:

1) It makes me a bit cynical about when they get on a high horse about "I've nothing to hide and neither should you have." [Not to mention that many of them, like myself are self-employed and thus a bit insulated from the whims of corporate bosses.]

2) I do wonder about the day they make an inevitable mistake in self-censorship. It's easy to talk about accepting consequences for your actions and views, but it gets more complicated as the memory and span of things like google allow a picture to be built up of you that goes far beyond what anyone outside spy land would have done in the past. I do think that it's true that newer generations will alter the boundaries of acceptability, but it's going to be slow and painful going. For now, corporate blackballing and retaliation is a reality and it is part of why privacy needs to be thought about seriously.

3) It's also observable that many of these commentators don't really use the internet in a private capacity or they do so in ways which have not yet easily leaked out for searching. I don't think there's anything to hide in my list of amazon.co.uk purchases, but it might not be fun discussing them all with a corporate client. For now, along with my google search history, these items are not easily available. But they will be one day and that's part of why privacy as a principle still has resonance.

3 a ) On that theme of private conversations, there are mediums like IM which might yet leak details out. Flirty conversations between single people have no moral or commercial relevance to a job opportunity. But once they leak out, how much fun is going to be to discuss them every time?

4) The critical implicit worry is that the more transparent your current online identities are, the easier it will be to connect them to information which should have remained private (due to contractual or personal obligations from the other party) but which technology and the increasing size of the surveillance society bring out into the open.

An extra example might be the question of private areas within a Facebook account. You might reserve an area for only friends to see photos, but if your Facebook account is connected to your boss, they may well end up seeing it one day. Now photos of you drunk at a Halloween party might not be the end of the world, but the possibility of your boss (and every future boss) seeing them is a quantum leap forward in accountability.

I suspect younger generations will wear this kind of embarrassment more easily and that's how they will deal with the problem. However, until that approach reaches critical mass, the rest of us are left with some difficulties. One can of course attempt to constrict the personal, by seeking blandness to avoid embarrassment, but that is a frighteningly anodyne life, especially when one considers just how disapproving some employers are. As such, perhaps our only option is to, like the young ones, be loud and proud and crusade, refusing to care about lost opportunities with those who hold unreasonable attitudes about various lifestyles.

I've been a pioneer a lot of my life, so I can't say I'm terrified to take that approach, but it's usually quite hard work. We're going to see a lot of opportunities fall into the laps of "bland suits" and it's not going to be fun to watch.

My personal advice on "personal" and "business" would be, put some effort into keeping them separate. Don't use your own name on myspace for recording fun times and weird bands. Sure it's a little extra effort to have a couple more email addresses and you have to stop and think sometimes about whether someone fits in the "personal" or "business" box, but the value is that you get to choose the pace of integration, rather than having google force it upon you. And isn't that choice a good thing?

 

Technorati Tags: facebook , identity , privacy , social networking

Facebook/Social Networking

Just recently there seems to have been a rash of posts (1,2,3) about Facebook/Social Networking.

So far I've steered away from getting involved in discussions of particular technologies, because as one of the posters (Valdis Krebs) says:

"IMHO, just putting social web technology into a strong culture, averse to sharing and connecting, will not change how things get done. MySpace and Facebook worked because the were dropped into cultures eager to connect. The IC needs to get the sociology right before they support a new culture with new technology."

Or, more briefly, if the human situation isn't good, technology can't save it, you need to work at the human level first.

But, as the drum beat goes on, I should talk about social networking a bit as I'm dedicated to promoting lateral communication and these technologies are largely about enabling this very concept.

Some quick thoughts on pros and cons then:

Pro: The technologies are largely based on letting the user choose their own connections. That's a welcome change from some of the control-freakery sometimes displayed in corporate environment.

Con: A lot of the links that will be created will be enforced by the culture of the company. Everyone will be signed up to be connected to the CEO's "publicity account" and cross connected to the department head and all the other people who work in the same room as them. (That's not all bad, but it's enough to make many people just stop at that point.)

Pro: It opens another channel for communication between people in disparate parts of the organisation.

Con: That channel may be insecure (e.g. public sites like Facebook) or potentially unwieldy (internal networking site that has no connection with the outside world.)

The list of course can go on and on. I would draw attention to the myriad issues around mixing personal and organisational networking tools on the internet, because I think too many "comms gurus" haven't thought all the privacy issues through, but that's a post for another day.

Overall, I'm well disposed to this technology, but I think the devil resides in the details. In particular, if you want people to connect more, are you giving them not just the technology, but also the time and space to do so? I don't think the business case for social networking is impossible to write, but it's not as clear cut as some commentators are making out. Generic increases in productivity and innovation through "connectedness" can be real, but they depend on very good implementations and socio-cultural grounding of the technology in the organisation. Without this, you'd be better off working on less complex and more focused programs to improve lateral communication in the organisation.


Technorati Tags: facebook, social networking, lateral communication

Powered by ScribeFire.