“Let’s get one of those social network jobbies”

April 14th, 2011 Tags: ,
Posted in Collaboration, Connected World |

I’ve heard it a few times recently. One large corporate organisation recently told me that they were looking to implement a corporate social network across their internal network. The supplier was all lined up and then the supplier was asked, “What do you use”.  They didn’t. Buying social media is not like buying SAP.

On the back of the Facebook effect, organisations have been talking about harnessing the social interactive power of their employees for around three to four years. Many organisations have spent much money implementing solutions. Just search Google. There are plenty of opinions.

• “Corporate Social Networks are a waste of money, study finds” http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/corporate_social_networks_are.php

• “Starting a corporate social network, don’t” http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/may2009/ca2009058_371160.htm

I didn’t find any good opinions. And to be honest I’m not surprised. Social networks succeed because those people who WANT to participate do so, because the social network gains a critical mass of people who interact, have common interests, create content of value and interest within their communities. There are plenty of choices out there. If you’d invested in implementing “the equivalent of” bebo, myspace, Friendster, Friendsreunited or ning, then you wouldn’t be happy because your community would be disappearing. I just don’t buy that you can mandate A corporate social network adoption.

The fact is that those of us who are fully engaged in the social media world don’t just use one network, not even two. In fact they aren’t even social networks really. There are just plenty of services out there that allow you to interact with other people. You just need to work out where the communities are.

I use twitter to share information, I use LinkedIn to maintain my work contacts, I use Facebook for friends, I’m on Yammer, Plaxo, Quora and probably several others that I’ve registered for at various times in the past. If I was Brazilian, I’d probably use Orkut rather than Facebook. If I was Chinese I’d probably have Qzone or Renren.

My point is that the social networks are here. They work. They evolve. And I think they come and go. I do not subscribe to the theory that there is ever a “best”, ever a “favourite” for all time. The proliferation of networks has then demanded the arrival of the social media dashboards, commonly illustrated by tweetdeck and hootsuite (http://blog.hudsonhorizons.com/Article/HootSuite-VS-TweetDeck-Which-is-the-better-social-media-tool.htm). These are great for providing visibility and co-ordination across the range of social tools that you use. And they are, in essence, what the corporate business needs.

My message is therefore simple. If you are thinking of implementing a “social network”, don’t. It is a wasted investment. There are plenty of options out there in the big wide web world. They will evolve faster than you can ever specify change of one service. The moment you choose one solution, there will always be something else attracting your employees energy that lies outside the corporate boundary.

However, DO invest in gaining clarity around your corporate social media strategy. How will you facilitate creation of communities? How will you share information? How will, or do you need to, you moderate content? And DO consider a corporate social media dashboard. How might you integrate content that is specific to your corporate environment, with content that is circling around Linkedin, facebook, orkut, renren, twitter, blogs and many more.

Social networks work on a viral basis. Whilst you can create a virus, you cannot enforce it to skip happily from one person to the next. Recognise the world has changed.

Other relevant reading:

http://mashable.com/2011/03/18/china-top-social-network/

http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/social-networks/social-networks-2011-winners-and-losers-as-shown-via-search-volume/

Rob Price

Rob leads the IT Leadership Practice in Atos Consulting, combining the experience and confidence of a focused delivery consultancy team with a passion for innovation and collaboration and all things new. He applies this, both personally and as a team, to drive forward a CIO Advisory consultancy practice that delivers strategic technology advisory with a pragmatic can-do delivery mentality. He successfully melds inspiration and creativity with strategic direction and implementation, focusing on driving more efficient and effective exploitation of technology and services to drive benefits to the client and their customers. He has an extensive background in the delivery of major projects and programmes into predominantly the Transport, Construction and Government markets, including most recently the 2012 Olympic Games. His competitiveness and passion for all sport, combined with a love of the challenge, drives his desire to win. Winning can be realised through trophies, awards, contracts, achievements .. But more importantly in this case, by creating a leading CIO/CTO blog that adds real value to the space in which we operate. Welcome to the promise.

5 comments

  1. Steve Nimmons says:
    May 18, 2011 at 12:10 pm

    What would be really interesting would be the Facebook’s of the world providing true, secure walled gardens for corporate social networking. Then I would buy more into the ‘use the best the web has to offer’. In the meantime, I think we need some kind of enterprise solution – which agreed is probably not the best approach, but it strikes a balance between libertarianism and protecting corporate information. I like your ‘dashboard’ idea, it would be interesting to see this populated with sentiment analysis and reputation protection widgets and also to ‘watch’ public sources for potential information leaks. The boundary of the enterprise is very very porous these days, I’m not sure a social media policy really cuts the mustard without detection mechanisms to highlight where is has been ‘flouted’.

    ps. If you’ve not yet tried Tweetdeck for Chrome have a look. Very nice app.

    Reply
  2. Mike Simpson says:
    April 25, 2011 at 2:45 am

    Interesting thoughts! Having started on BBS then moved onto irc (which combined with screen or tmux) is still proving very useful I have pondered the concept of communities and their enablement through technology. I watched as 2nd life was going to be the next realm of business interaction, was pestered by offers to be linkedin or join orkut/myspace. I finally gave into the Borg collective of Facebook (to monitor my daughter’s wall) but don’t use it to any real extent. I see the business value of IM and twitter but wouldn’t bet my money on any of these always being there due to the lack of viable means of monetisation.
    I do wonder if the end result will be a combination of something like OpenWonderland crossed with Apache (nee Google) wave with a BIND like “views” capability to separate external facing from internal workspaces. This would be distributed, potentially self-hosting and above all fad proof.
    I like the wow concept which reminds me of the doom/pskill crossover programme but having played single shard MMOs I would worry about the lag :)

    Reply
  3. Guy Lidbetter says:
    April 15, 2011 at 5:14 pm

    I think you both miss the point. Social networking is here and people use it to establish targeted communities of shared interest to collaborate, communicate or whatever. It is not about a Borg like communal consciousness and neither can companies afford to endorse their people revealing company sensitive information in public domain social networking platforms. Rather, recognising that people are collaborating and communicating using these tools, how do you harness an estbalished way of working within the company domain? The answer is to create an area where staff can securely establish their working networks across organisational boundaries whilst protecting the sensitive information that will inevtiably be passed between them. In other words …. a corporate social network, which is just another one of the numerous communities people belong to as the article contends.

    Reply
  4. simondelliott says:
    April 15, 2011 at 10:00 am

    Corporate social networks can be good when they are trying to make something open to compete within the social ecology.

    If we are honest, the really big reason people go to work is because of extrinsic motivation with a small amount of intrinsic motivation about their discipline or role. Whereas the reason people interact on social networks is 100% because of intrinsic motivation, often engaging in the subjects that they are intrinsically motivated to do at work.

    Oil and water.
    Superman and kryptonite.

    A tricky balance.

    Reply
  5. Will Hyams says:
    April 14, 2011 at 4:52 pm

    Social networks have always existed in business, just on a physical basis. One could argue that the development of email created a social network via your list of contacts and the ability to get chummy with someone you’ve never physically met – so has the telephone for that matter. Are you talking about formalising this already existing network and making it easier for these existing networks to collaborate – or are you talking about making one big corporate social network under the assumption that because someone else works for the same company we must be friends and they will fall over themselves to help me in my request? Is ‘just say no’ the right answer, as people will often just go find their own (Yammer, FB etc) ?

    Perhaps the answer is to turn modern business into a version of World of Warcraft where people then play/work as a huge team 12 hours+ a day through choice and love it! Now all we have to do is find a way to turn a timesheet into a demon and we’re halfway there…

    Reply

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