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Social networking in business
Networking isn’t new.
Social networking is the online equivalent of a offline meeting where, among other things, geography and schedules wouldn’t matter. Now, that’s a weird concept for some C-level dinosaurs but for the tech-savvy managers moving up, it makes perfect sense.
At the very foundation of networking, there are two things: humans and communications.
In a business setting, a basic goal would be for ideas to be clearly communicated, among all “humans”, in the organization. A more advanced goal would be for those ideas to mature and turn into “value”, one way or another.
Blogs and wikis haven’t replaced email messages and chatting but they’ve definitely added shared spaces where project data (and ideas) can more easily pollinate, more often than not, in ways that were largely unpredictable. Putting the information “out there”, for an entire team (or company) to see is a powerful way to leverage teamwork.
Social networking for businesses see communities of interest spring up around subject matters rather than organizational hierarchies. If you’ve been in business for a while, you’re well aware that the best ideas don’t necessarily come from the “top brass”. Networking at all levels of a company smashes the invisible glass walls which have the bad habit of strangling innovation, big time.
Generally speaking, social applications provide business value by letting people add context to information stores which, in turn, helps others identify what’s useful to them — it also makes search results that much more relevant.
Social bookmarks are a nice example of this since team members can share the web resources they like and learn from others about web destinations that have been overlooked. After a while, the bookmark list becomes a real time saver.
Naturally, enterprise social networking helps people find and connect with co-workers through user profiles, expert search and social graphs that map out any employee’s connections throughout the organization. This, in and of itself, makes for a strong argument for social networking, in the modern workplace.
Finding co-workers with domain-specific knowledge, in just a few clicks, can really propel any organization to a whole new level of communications, productivity, teamwork and of course, profitability.
Some organizations are obsessed with the “dangers of wasting time” wrongly associated with social networking. But that’s very bad management since social networking is a communications enabler and as such, it’s built to help channel information to the right people, wherever the people may be in the organizational chart.
If you’re just starting out in the social networking for business “adventure”, make sure to take a look at the quality open source scripts that are available to structure your data into blogs, forums, wikis or just about any other way you wish.
Tags: social networking, enterprise, business, work, workplace, colleagues, co-workers, employees, team members, managers, c-level, executives, decisions, ideas, communications, information, organization, open source, blogs, wikis
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