Social Networking for the Enterprise

The hype around Social Networking is at its optimum and now are all enterprises looking for how to use it, afraid of how their competitors will find all the secrets. Because there must be a hidden secret of success right?

First of all, I am very found of Social Networking both in my private life and in my work. (What is the difference btw?) My job is a little special and I get so many good ideas from networks. My very personal view is that companies shouldn’t rely on proxies with filters. Using the money on better and informed leaders is a wiser investment. The only useful filter is protecting against virus and malware. Punish the bad sites not the employees! With that said I will not argue more about filter or not filter. When I talk about filter here it can as well be a written company policy of how to use resources at the Internet.

Many jobs are about delivering a certain very well defined result at a certain time. The need of research needed is more or less nil and networking will just steel your time from your task. Every enterprise have a bunch of tasks like this. Let’s focus on knowledge workers that are supposed to solve business problems and find opportunities. These people always need to keep up with trends and the latest findings within their area. They can not invent everything by themselves. They must get information and new ideas from other people and they will also contribute with new ideas just by interacting with other people. There is variety of more or less knowledge intensive jobs. A programmer for instance don’t have too much time to spend on networking. They have to deliver their code in time but sometimes there are problems that effectively can be shared and solved by the “crowd” out there. This is a typical situation for all types of knowledge workers. Some have the time and need to do more research and some less but they need to do it in order to deliver a good job.

Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise social software is also known as Enterprise 2.0. It is social software used in the enterprise. Mostly are these tools used internally. From wikipedia: The “unstructured” information provided by social technologies has proven particularly useful in business processes that lack rigid pre-definition, but where people work together in an adaptive way to innovate solutions. The challenge then becomes how to distill meaningful, re-usable knowledge from other content also captured in tools such as blogs, online communities, and wikis. Social networking capabilities can help organizations capture unstructured tacit knowledge.

Of course there are some examples of successful Enterprise 2.0 applications but many companies started up Enterprise 2.0 activities, such as wikis and blogs, without anything achieved. Almost no employee contributes. Big disappointment!  Why did this happen? Here are some typical mistakes:

1. Keeping social software on the intranet behind the filter and the firewall will NOT activate people much. It will only work in some very special situations with an active community inside the company walls.
2. Starting a very structured and heavily moderated forum, will just show the employees that the “company doesn’t trust me” so why participate?
3. The CEO blog can be quite nice reading, but who have the courage to strongly disagree with the CEO in a moderated forum where you can not be anonymous? A CEO’s blog on the Internet is a different matter. It will probably will give a great deal of valuable feedback both from employees, customers, partners and other people!
4. Applications like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have been filtered out by enterprises as dangerous time-consuming gibber. Even LinkedIn is still filtered out by some enterprises.
   • Maybe they are right in some cases… Many companies quickly understood that their customers and partners can be found out there in Facebook and other Social Networks.
   • Trying to setup internal versions of social networks is just severely wrong! An internal LinkedIn with mandatory participation is the wrong way to go…
5. Finally, the key to success for all of the mentioned applications is the millions of people out there. Self organizing groups, “the long tail” model, “wisdom of crowds” and free resources is something that enterprises have trouble to deal with. “It is not fair that most people get more value than they contribute with”. Where is the business logic? Can we trust free resources? How can we measure quality? Furthermore, it is very hard to get these “crowd effects” inside the walls.

In most cases the real power is outside the the walls!

Can we now open up the walls to social networks for all the employees?

There is no Yes-or-No answer here. Companies are different.

I think that there is no immediate profit for most enterprises in this and it is a huge difference between a company such a Google that lives on the net and a manufacturing company such as Boeing. In general we have at least 2 levels of engagement.

• Show brand presence on the network. This is done by a limited group of central resources. Preparations must be done in order to have a back office to catch up the communications.
• Let employees in general use Social Networking for knowledge sharing, B2B and B2C activities.

The second one is not a big deal for enterprises with an established brand and with a customer base that is not in the consumer market. Yet all enterprises have groups that may gain from open source, open specifications, forums and other social networking. Keeping these groups locked in behind filters is the same as throwing away investments by effectively and systematically missing valuable information and opportunities.

There is at least one type social networks that every company of every type should start to utilize more and that is Social Bookmarking.

There are many choices but my personal favorite is Diigo, as can be seen in Delicious or Twine? The answer is Diigo!

Some links of interest:

• Blog posts about Enterprise 2.0
• Blog posts about Enterprise Social Networks
  
• Wired (2007): As Applications Blossom, Facebook Is Open for Business
  
• Chris Anderson (2004): “The Long Tail”
  
• Chris Anderson (2006). The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More
  
• Ted talks: Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. collaboration (Excellent video about the Long tail)

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