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Social networking should be useful in business

Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Nov 2007

These days I frequently read about organisations banning the use of social networking tools like MySpace, LinkedIn or FaceBook. The issues of rising bandwidth usage and the associated costs, and the potential waste of time if employees are spending too much time on these sites that support such a decision. However, perhaps organisations should take a step back from their immediate reaction and explore a strategy that might embrace social networking in the enterprise.

Banning the use of external social networking sites may be short sighted and unnecessarily clumsy. The key is to find common ground -- perhaps limit the time that these social sites are available, say in until nine in the morning and after four in the afternoon. Or over lunchtime. Taking the high ground and embracing the the way modern employees work by implementing social networking as a form of knowledge and people management within your organisation can lead to happier, possibly more productive employees and more importantly better informed employees.

These days I frequently read about organisations banning the use of social networking tools like MySpace, LinkedIn or FaceBook. The issues of rising bandwidth usage and the associated costs, and the potential waste of time if employees are spending too much time on these sites that support such a decision. However, perhaps organisations should take a step back from their immediate reaction and explore a strategy that might embrace social networking in the enterprise.

Firstly, the assumption that all employees are keen to waste time and bandwidth while at work should be challenged. Most organisations have something in their strategy about how people are amongst their most important assets and how they put people first. If that is true, then organisations should not immediately be expecting (or accusing) their employees of imprudent waste. Trusting your employees is a good place to start -- and if you're don't feel able to trust your employees then perhaps some other strategic thinking is in order to understand why.

Generation X, Y or Z...

Secondly and probably more importantly, there is the issue that a typical modern employee is young -- probably under the age of perhaps twenty five when you hired them after congratulating yourself on unearthing this new, raw talent. To this younger generation (and probably quite a few people that might be well into their thirties)social networking is a norm. through modern technology such as mobile phones, SMS, and the web, these members of your team are comfortable to open a somewhat public view onto their lives through one or more social networking sites and are comfortable creating and developing friendships online. To young people the Internet is not something used from time to time when you need to do banking. Young people live, literally, on the web.

The decision to quickly turn off access to social networking (and even fairly innocuous sites such as gmail or hotmail) is frequently made by older senior executives that might not have thought long enough about the modern, young employee. This isn't to say that the youth are always correct, but at least an executive decision should recognise the role of these technologies in their lives.

There is probably some business value to be found in employees using these sites: at least some of the people they are communicating with might be past employees you would like to keep up with or potential future employees that you would like referred to the business. Don't expect a flood of résumés, but do get excited when your employees are noting where they work and joining networks of other people that are or have been involved in your organisation. That network of people might be a valuable asset to your organisation.

Relationships & the network effect

Thirdly, decisions to shutdown social networking sites may seem rash even from a purely business point of view. If your strategy is authentic when it speaks of the importance of people, then surely you would want to tap into the knowledge that they have, and the relationships through which they gain and support that knowledge?

Organisations in both the private and public sectors are continually challenged by how to capture the tacit knowledge within their employee-base so that it persists into the future and can be shared with other employees. In most cases, it would be advantageous to extend the "knowledge network" to include business partners. Managing tacit knowledge caught up in the experience, relationships, and working patterns of team members is the most difficult knowledge to manage successfully.

As a result, progressive organisations are implementing their own internal social networking applications aimed at organising and facilitating the social interactions between employees. Unlike previous efforts at managing employee knowledge and relationships, social networking applications let the team members and the network effect they create by connecting with each other do the work. This is contrast to past efforts where information was submitted to a central server or central "knowledge manager" before being distributed to identified groups of interested people. This type of knowledge management has largely failed because it is akin to communism where central management has a hard time keeping pace with the requirements and interests of the team members at the fringes that are actually dealing with customers. The whole point is to let go -- this type of information wants to be free. Let employees "take control" of what happens on internal social networking (probably referred to as some kind of knowledge or skills management since "social network" as a term makes executives nervous) platforms. Step back and you will notice people and their information self-organise as they make small links between themselves and their information. Each small link contributes to the rich, web of linked information where employees will easily find someone they know and trust that has information they require -- all without following formal reporting lines or a structured organisational chart.

Finding common ground

Banning the use of external social networking sites may be short sighted and unnecessarily clumsy. The key is to find common ground -- perhaps limit the time that these social sites are available, say in until nine in the morning and after four in the afternoon. Or over lunchtime. Taking the high ground and embracing the the way modern employees work by implementing social networking as a form of knowledge and people management within your organisation can lead to happier, possibly more productive employees and more importantly better informed employees.

Social networking should be useful in business was published as Strategym #54 in the November edition of Intelligence magazine.

Updated 12 Nov -- Six Apart & Forrester Research held a conference on the related field of using social media in the enterprise

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Essays | Technology | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym

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social networking (1) | enterprise 2.0 (1) | linkedin (1) | collaboration (1) | information management (1) | facebook (1)

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