Musings on Social Networks

If you think in terms of population, Facebook members would be the third largest country in the world after China and India. Facebook has gone from zero to 350 million members in only six years. Every week, 3.5 billion pieces of content gets shared on Facebook. The sharing of video, picture, and text - - this fundamentally represents a huge shift and upgrade in people's ability to communicate with one another.

The business world is still in a quandary regarding social networking and blogs in the workplace. Only about 10% of all corporations grant employees access to social networking sites. The primary issue is the value proposition of social networks given the "soft" and unknown cost-benefit analysis of the technology and its application. You really have a tale of extremes and potentials on the business side of social networking. For example, Kogi BBQ, which has several trucks serving Korean food in Los Angles, now has over 52,000 followers on Twitter and uses the service to tell customers where they can find its vans each day (In this case, the value proposition would produce much "firmer" data for a cost-benefit analysis). How and where does this type of success fit into a large, global manufacturing organization? Are social networking applications more appropriate for small more retail oriented businesses? One obvious critical element in the equation is the nature of the relationship between the organization and customer base along with the content and need for customer commentary regarding the information being transmitted and received between the various parties. The larger question for organizations is how do you utilize social networking as an important vehicle for news, information, and establishing channels of influence within the market space?

Look to firms in the traditional business world to come up with social networking applications tailor-made for the corporate world - - with the first step being internal applications. These would work much in the same way as Twitter or a Facebook, but keep information off the public screen and well behind a corporate firewall. The focus would be on knowledge-sharing and internal communications. A study last year by IDC, a research firm, found that knowledge workers spend between six and ten hours a week just hunting for information. Part of the goal would be to utilize social networks to find data faster, thus freeing up large chunks of their time for other things.

Many managers (and maybe a large percentage) are going to worry about allowing informal groups of workers the opportunity to spring up within an environment they cannot control. But fundamentally, networking is about saying the long good bye to silos - - where it is critical to understand that new ideas and insights come from the informal in an atmosphere of the multidisciplinary and integrative versus the formal world of barriers and constraints. Control will be replaced with a greater need for managerial awareness (Do others believe you have a strong awareness of what is going on?), conceptualization (Do others communicate their ideas and vision for the organization when you are around?), foresight (Do others have confidence in your ability to anticipate the future and its consequences?), and community building (Do people feel a strong sense of community in the organization that you lead?).

Collaboration should not be little more than boring collections of documents. Networks can be a tremendous opportunity to capture knowledge and identify experts on different subjects within an organization. Look for internal social networking systems having the ability to combine content with commentary from people whose know-how might previously not have been recognized.

Overtime the "soft" cost-benefit issues will be firmed up by internal experiences and lessons making the value proposition easier to define and measure. This will allow organizations the opportunity to splice together their internal systems with the outside world creating a platform to share know-how with outsiders.