Business Applications for Social Networking
Another article from The Economist...this is a short one that I found in their April 7-13, 2007 edition, and it looks at business uses for social-networking sites. One obvious application would be the marketing of products or services. Ted, whom we assume (and hope) is a fictitious Pizza Hut driver, has a profile on MySpace where he alerts friends of the chain's promotions: "Dude, I just heard some scoop from the Hut." Hmm. In all charity, what can I say? They have guts? Well, how 'bout that they're still up and running. Not so for Walmart. They just got booed off the stage and closed down a site devoted to teens, but Reuters is looking to jump into the fray with a site for those in the financial-services industry. Safe to say that many more such ventures are on the horizon.
The article goes on to discuss social-networking as a job recruitment tool. On sites such as LinkedIn and Jobster, members pass suitable vacancies on to friends and colleagues, and refer potential candidates to recruiters. This is, at present, social networking's greatest value to companies. Need we say how very valuable this is to the social-networking sites? Here are the figures cited for LinkedIn: ten million members and $87,500,000 in revenue. Well, the article didn't exactly say $87,500,000. What it said was that more than 350 companies pay up to $250,000 each to advertise jobs to LinkedIn's expanding network. Meeoow--a very long tail indeed!
Another interesting and, I would imagine, very lucrative application for social-networking is "knowledge management." Apparently, IBM has just floated out "Lotus Connections," a platform that allows company employees to post detailed profiles about themselves, team up on projects, and share bookmarks. The article cites that one manufacturer is testing the software by using it to put inexperienced members of its customer-services team in touch with the right engineers. That sounds pretty good, as does the software's capacity to identify in-house experts. Quite frankly, if I were working at such a company, I'd be more than a little watchful. My fear? After the company makes participation on the site mandatory, I am sure I would open my big mouth about something that would allow them to nail me with some horrible task and banish me to the metaphorical hinterlands. Yes, I know. I'm a cynic, but I've seen and experienced it, and probably for lesser disclosures.
Lastly and most curiously (at least for me), The Economist article discusses the work of VisiblePath, a New York-based start-up that analyzes email traffic, calendars, and diary entries to identify a company's strongest relationships, both inside and outside the company doors. This can generate sales leads. But, the author of the article asks the following question: will sales people, driven by commission, share their best leads with their colleagues, or will they hide them with their cloaking devices? I wonder about this as well. We know where this leads: one person does the work, someone else closes the deal, and worker bee gets screwed out of a commission. Happens every day, without the benefit of the software. That aside, the article concludes with a nod to the software's obvious potential: if who you know is more important than what you know, this product's on to something.
I pretty much summarized the article, but if "Joined-up thinking" is still online, you may read it here in full (and without commentary). Otherwise, you might try the VisiblePath link above, to see if they're still hosting a link to the article.
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