Social networking for your business
Jan 28 2009
The invasion of the workplace by ‘consumer’ technology such as wikis, blogs and social networking might be shaking up boardrooms and confusing corporate types, but the phrase ‘knowledge management platform’ is clearly one only a “suit” could love.
The phrase is essentially a business friendly way of describing social networking and the specific technologies that aim to bring all its benefits to the workplace without the productivity-draining distractions of an outside provider like MySpace. Yet without the lure of friends, such sanctioned networks can struggle to gain adoption.
‘Users want a more effective means of communicating quickly and easily; they want a rich conversational flow,’ explains Tim Young, CEO of internal social network provider Socialcast. ‘We’ve found that in an enterprise setting, when you first launch a social network there is a huge spike in usage as everyone sets up their profile. But users can soon get bored unless what is new – updates from colleagues, news from the company etc – can be found easily.’
Moving with the times
Socialcast began life in 2005 as a white-label social networking supplier for music industry brands. But as Young saw marketing budgets decline, he repositioned the company to provide social networks for internal, corporate use.
Corporate social networking has gained most traction in the retail sector, he says. Typically, 90 per cent of the workforce of retail companies operate outside head office, so software tools that promote knowledge sharing and company identity across premises are valuable.
While social networking tends to be regarded as the domain of those in their teens and twenties, Young is adamant that companies with older users stand to benefit the most from technology by preserving and disseminating the accumulated knowledge of these employees: hence the term ‘knowledge management platform’.
Such technology, he explains, can help tease out and document the knowledge that resides in the minds of employees who are highly experienced; especially important to the business when they leave or are approaching retirement.
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