There’s been a lot of hype around social networking and social network analysis as of late. Time magazine called “Facebook for Spies” (and again yesterday) one of it’s top 50 inventions for 2008. A number of other organizations are focused on deploying internal social networking solutions, so that their employees can better keep up with their colleagues. But the question that sometimes remains in the ether is why are companies doing this? As an aside, I sometimes wonder whether organizations understand why they are deploying social networking services, but that’s another issue.
What’s the Point?
To me, the reason for deploying social networking services is clear: Work is really not that different from “real life”. Think about this (preferably with an open mind): Why do you use Facebook? I can’t speak for anybody else, but it’s a number of things for me:
- It’s a big address book with almost all of my friends in it
- It’s a great way to contact friends
- It lets me figure out what friends are doing with relatively minimal effort
I think these three reasons are the primary reasons that most people use Facebook, whether they realize it or not. Now swap out the word “friends” for “colleagues”, and you have your reasons for corporate social networking services.
It’s about People
Social networking services, at least the good ones, are brilliant because they allow people to connect to people. That’s one of the core principles for my job (the other two being connecting people to data and data to data), and ultimately, that’s the part of collaboration that most technical solutions miss: it’s telling that a Gartner conference on collaboration that I attended last year had the word “Portals” in it. To me, there’s nothing less collaborative than a portal because it completely ignores the “people” aspect of collaboration. Really? A common website makes a community of interest? Everyone uses Google as a portal to the web, but nobody surmises that all Internet users are really a community of interest.
The beauty of Facebook is that it is a technology that is completely built to facilitate interactions between people. There’s not a whole lot more to it than that, at least to me. Collaboration is about people. It requires that you connect people, that people communicate, and that you can rally the necessary people behind a problem when the metaphorical balloon goes up.
Social Consulting 