We are all familiar with the multitude of social networking applications that are popular today. Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, LinkedIn…the list goes on and on. In a time when the online world is so easily accessible to the mainstream, it’s no wonder that these types of social networks have grown in popularity. However, while the aforementioned sites are predominantly aimed at teenagers and college students, a new phenomenon is taking place. As a recent eWeek article points out, social networking is becoming more and more compelling for businesses. This begs the question: will corporate social networks be the next big thing?
Professional social networking websites are becoming more and more common. A few months ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article about a social network for licensed physicians. This site, Sermo.com, serves as a way for physicians to share information, keep each other up to date with daily happenings, and even to help one another make the correct diagnosis of a patient. The article describes how a network of doctors were able to correctly diagnose a 21-year-old patient without ever having physically met. Other such professional websites, such as LinkedIn and SelectMinds, provide professionals with a means of staying in contact with others in their field as well as with their colleagues and friends, which bears a striking resemblance to the MO of the websites aimed at the younger demographic.
But what if a small or medium size company wants to have a bit more control over its company’s social network? As the eWeek article points out, there really aren’t specific vendors for this kind of venture: “The big names in social networking don’t really provide tools for enterprises (there’s no Facebook Business Edition, for example).” However, as the article goes on to discuss, this is not as big a problem as some IT professionals may think. The article offers up three potential systems that will work with a company’s enterprise portals and Web 2.0 applications:
- Microsoft SharePoint Server – an enterprise portal system originally intended as a way of offering data flow control. Integration with the Microsoft suite makes building a social network with SharePoint easy and practical. The downside to this system is limited functionality of many popular social network features, like blogging. It could easily be integrated with an open source blogging tool though.
- Plone – open-source web platform which, according to eWeek, has been used “for everything from enterprise portal systems to project management to Web 2.0 deployments. Every feature needed to run a social network site is available within Plone.” The main drawback here is that the platform is based on the Python language, which is less commonly known and therefore would require a certain skill set among a company’s hired IT professionals.
- WordPress – a highly popular open source blogging platform, with recent add-ons that make it a great fit for low-demand usage. If it can be made more suitable for enterprise use, this platform will be a major competitor in the world of professional social networking.
The Human Capital Institute asserts that corporate social networking is the new frontier in making up to date information readily available to the global community, and also serves as a way to bring professionals together. However, as the popularity of these networks grows, there are several legitimate concerns, the most pressing of which is the need to protect intellectual property. While this has always been a priority of competitive businesses, the advent of these new social networks will add a new level of difficulty in protecting one’s own work and ideas. Heightened security features, which need to operate internally and externally within any enterprise, will no doubt have to be implemented as these social networks gain a foothold in the business world.
Still, even with the added risks, corporate social networking seems to be the latest application to be introduced in the trendy work place. Professionals have finally learned what teenagers and college students have known all along, that social networks are a great way of staying in touch and sharing information with friends, colleagues, and contacts from all walks of life. And while I don’t expect that professionals will be fully assimilating to that culture (although, the thought of reading a corporate budget proposal inundated with terms such as “lol! j/k” does bring a smile to my face), it is clear that social networking has entered the workplace in a big way.