Social networking - time to 'party on'

It’s impossible to ignore social networking. According to Ofcom, half of all children in the UK have a profile on a social networking site along with one in five adults. The popularity of this latest online phenomenon has risen so much businesses are examining how it can be adapted to help their organisations.

One of those at the forefront of this work is Dr Nicola Millard, customer experience futurologist at BT Global Services Consulting. She’s carrying out research into social networking and trying to understand its impact for business.

“The intriguing question now,” she explains, “is whether social networking tools will become as much part of the office suite of tools as e-mail and the telephone?”

If it is, then two things need to happen. First, businesses need to be able to quantify the benefits of social networking. The snag is, figuring out the return on investment (ROI) can be tricky.

“However, this is not a reason alone to discount social networking,” says Nicola “since it would probably be just as difficult to articulate the tangible business benefits allied to more conventional office tools, such as e-mail and telephony.

“I could probably argue that e-mail actually makes me less efficient,” she says.  

The answer to the ROI conundrum, according to those she’s spoken to, is to ‘suck it and see’. In other words, businesses should press ahead with social networking and figure out the benefits once it’s up and running.

The second thing that needs to happen is people need to participate.

As Nicola explains, “A social network is only as good as its active community members – no activity means no social network and zero business benefit. What’s more, achieving critical membership mass in a social network isn’t easy.”

Busy schedules

And there are plenty of reasons why. “For employees, we may not want to share our knowledge because we feel that giving it away will make our job redundant...or we simply don’t have the time and energy in our already busy schedule to blog or comment on stuff. In other words, it isn’t about the technology,” she says.

But even resolving this issue isn’t enough. For social networking to work in a commercial environment, businesses need to break down hierarchies and relinquish managerial control. At the same time they need to build trust among staff. And to ensure that the whole thing doesn’t get out of hand, business also need to establish a viable governance strategy that treads a fine line between overbearing control, on the one hand, and chaos on the other.

And there’s something else to consider as well. For social networking to succeed, the environment has to be right. It can’t be imposed. Any move to force people to take part simply won’t work. Instead, people have to engage in the process. Their inclusion needs to be nurtured and encouraged. And they need a reason to take part. And Nicola thinks she may have worked out how. 

“My favourite analogy treats social networking as if it was a great party. I interviewed an enthusiastic US-based web community founder as part of my research, whose perspective on social networking was refreshing. He told me that his social network it ‘feels like there is a party going on all the time’ and that even if you are not there, ‘it’s still happening’. He told me there was ‘genuine excitement about all these really intelligent ideas and all these fun, cool people with great conversations’.

In other words, the ‘rules’ that govern a good party can be mirrored in social networking. In fact, Nicola has identified more than a dozen ‘party’ rules that could equally be applied to social networking. The similarities are striking and it will be interesting to see how this theme is developed. In the meantime, it is this kind of innovative thinking that is creating a real buzz of excitement around social networking. For Nicola, it’s just the start.