On Social Networks for Business
Should you build a Social Network for your organization to use in-house? Can you leverage existing services like LinkedIn, eCademy or FastPitch? Could you build a Social Network for your customers? Here’s a llok at our take. For a company to build a Social Network we call that Internal and for building for customers, we call that External.
Internal Social Networks
The short answer is “yes”, in fact there is some move towards using Twitter in the Enterprise. Most larger Enterprise organizations today view Twitter much like they viewed IM services in the late 90’s – as distracting and too hard to control and being mostly for kids. Yet many Enterprises later went on to adopt modified IM services from the likes of AOL and MSN. We suspect the same will happen to Twitter (should it survive the current economic climate), in a modified way.
Twitter in an Enterprise environment is but one module of an overall Social Network. Applications like Facebook come closer to adding value. The issue becomes provisioning such a service in a large organization; how to ensure levels of privacy, the right productivity tools, security, VPN or similar outside firewall access, file management etc. So while we see the value, smaller businesses will likely be first to engage Social Networking tools inside the company.
Another issue internally is that Social Networks are designed to be more “fluid” and non-heriarchical; this is anathema to corporate structures, which are top-down organized and compartmentalized – hence the “provisioning” question. We say that while it makes a lot of sense, there are many issues to be considered.
External Social Networks
Some clients we’ve met with (large and small) have thought of creating their own Social Network and getting customers, suppliers, shareholders and other stakeholders engaged inside such a service as managed by the company. Our view; it will become your worst nightmare. Again this comes down to the whole basis of Social Media and Social Networking – it is fluid. Groups form around issues and topics.
Aside from provisioning, approvals and such, consumers are not likely to remain deeply involved in your brand to bring in friends and family. Sorry, as good as your brand is, it’s not the level consumers want to engage at as some major brands have discovered. A company/brand will find better opportunity engaging within existing Social Networks. This also allows for fluctuating engagement and is less costly.
Summary:
Once organizations have adopted the concept of “project working” with less heirarchy, then both Internal and External Social Networks will become more viable. Consumers will engage where they can decide how, when and where they participate. This is a stark reminder that no company creates a brand, a “brand” is a concept created by the market place.
As Chris Brogan wrote in his blog, there is a case for individuals to build powerful networks in the coming year. Eventually, the Enterprise will be able to leverage these tools internally and some companies are building these tools, though our experience has been they are not quite there yet. Some of these companies are Clearspace, OneSite, and Brandstation, although we anticipate some of them will struggle with larger implementations in the coming months.
(Author: Giles Crouch, Managing Partner)