Social Networks for business?
I use a few social networks (mostly Facebook, LinkedIn and Last.fm) and see the value of each of them. I’ve been thinking how can a similar concept be used within organizations. What would be a useful way to take some aspects from each of those sites to create something which would be useful to organizations?
LinkedIn is great for maintaining your external business contacts and for keeping in touch with former co-workers. But it really doesn’t do much more than that.
Facebook is fun, but I’ve yet to completely grasp the use for it in business terms. Besides, some of the apps friends invite me to try really aren’t what I’d want business contacts know know about.
I’m a music lover. I listen to quite a bit of music. I love the way Last.fm tracks what I listen to and allows my friends see what new tunes I’m listening to. Ok, it’s mostly old stuff from the 80’s but…well, it’s fun to see and share music with it. Not much business applications there if you aren’t in the music industry though.
So where am I going with this? Since the mid-90’s, I’ve been working for organizations who have some kind of Intranet to share information. Back in the “Dark Ages” getting something updated took a lot of time. The Intranets I recall consisted mostly of HR information. Not a great deal of information about day-to-day running of the organization was posted there. I assume this usually was due to things changing all the time and by the time something was updated, it was already out of date.
Recently, Wiki’s have been used more. These are much easier to update and have made Intranets much more useful. However, they only goes so far in providing needed information.
One common beef I heard is email, or the volume of email you get at work. Spam is one thing. Most companies have Spam Filters which do a pretty good job. However, how often do you get cced on email threads which you only need to know the final response yet you get 20 discussion emails you need to sort though? I know for me it’s easier to catch my boss in the hall and ask a quick question than email it to him. It’ll take days for him to respond to an email, if at all.
How about a better system all around?
When you log into your Facebook account, you get a page with all the activity your friends have had recently. This type of opening page on your Intranet could go a long way to helping you clean out your inbox.
Think of the groups you have at work. Work groups, Project Groups and so on. Each group you are involved in would have it’s own page with discussion areas and other information. Rather than dealing with a pile of email, you can see what discussions are going on. If you need to get involved, you can. If not, well, that’s less you need to clean out of your inbox. How about document sharing? Rather than having to sort though folders on the shared drive or find the right Wiki page, they’d be right there.
Each person would have their own page on the Intranet. This would list, contact information, groups they are in and what they are doing–calenders can easily be tied into the page. Also, we all use some type of Instant Messenger, why not tie your IM status into the page as well?
To be honest, these are just a few of the ideas I’ve come up with. There’s a lot more available technology which businesses can harness into a network like this. Pulling in CRM or ERP data would be another example. The thing is, too many people look at these networks as something for kids or pedophiles, however, I honestly believe there’s a very solid business case to implement something like this. If nothing else, I’m convinced it would increase productivity in no time….people would just have to use it.
Of course, I don’t have the time, money or ability to develop something like this. But, I thought I’d throw it out there and see. Maybe in a few years we’ll be seeing something like this being used and I’ll be able to say, “I told ya so.”
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