Social networks: "helping you define your work"?

Interesting article on social networking at The Sydney Morning Herald, which begins, "After years of socialising, Facebook and MySpace mean business..."

Many organizations are fretting about social media and employees wasting time with it. As reported last week, with the popular social networking site Facebook a majority of organizations are simply banning access altogether.

Do these sites and applications have a place in business? From the article:

[...Jerald Jellison, a professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and an expert in change management and social relations, said companies should embrace networking.

"People who lead businesses are reluctant to acknowledge the extent to which hard-working professionals do other things besides strictly working," he said. "We're human beings. We socialize. It's going to go on whether you allow it or not."

People often meet other employees of their own firms through the sites, said Jellison, who argued that such connections could be used to share resources and increase productivity.

"If there is somebody who has experience dealing with clients in a particular company and I find someone else who has done business with this company, I could get information from him, which could help in terms of making a sale," he said.

IBM has developed networking software designed for business clients to do just that.

"We tailor it to specifically help people organise their own activities," said IBM's Vice President of Emerging Technologies, Rod Smith. "The more you're isolated and not in the loop, it makes it tremendously hard to really define your work"....]

Does this resonate with you or your organization? There's no doubting the power of networking, and to somebody who's "pro social media" there's no doubting the applications have some use. But what about presenting to a sceptic? In my humble opinion, "defining your work" or "it can help to share resources" and, "they're doing it anyway" aren't the most powerful or succinct of arguments (and I say this even though I repeat the latter argument fairly often). In fact, the strongest point there is probably that of "help in terms of making a sale".

This stream of thought was echoed at last week's Summit and it was felt that, as with many things, if you want to implement social tools and you can demonstrate how this stuff can potentially help with the bottom line, it might help you get somewhere with the decision makers.

I've yet to see any concrete examples of people doing this effectively, though I'm sure they must be out there.

Comments

[Tom Hood]

We think it is important if you are going to engage the new generation of students and professionals entering the workplace. Add to that the fact that most social netwrkers maintain 4 to 5 times as many connections in the on-line world than in "real life" - that must translate to the bottom-line. Think customers, potential employees, suppliers, potential customers.

We are so serious about it we are trying to train our whole organization and even the CPA profession on Web 2.0 and social networking -see our efforts at http://www.cpalearning2.com