Rhymes with Cars

I’m often surprised by the parallels between my current role at Socialtext and the old days when I was selling Yahoo! Enterprise Messenger.  One of the major objections that we faced when selling enterprise IM was that people would just use it to talk with their friends. This was dumb, of course and it showed a more serious problem of not trusting your workforce, but in the end (long after YHOO shut down the BU), executives realized that instant messaging & presence was an important communication channel to get things done.  We are facing the same challenge with enterprise social networks.  As executives become more aware of these collaborative tools, they have two schools of thought. The first is that this is just MySpace or Facebook behind the firewall and that employees will just use it to flirt with the cute girl in marketing or the hot guy in sales.  Waste of time & HR nightmare.  On the other side of the coin, there are more forward thinking people that recognize the value in social networks as a conversation starter amongst employees that may not necessarily know one another but have projects or success metrics in common.   These are the people that understand that enterprise social networks will act as a tool to identify not only where the knowledge is, but who are the experts and provide a mechanism to connect them with one another. Years ago, my first impression of social networks (Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo! Groups to some extent) was that they were, in my opinion, a ginormous time sink with no inherit value.  Now that I’m utterly addicted to them, I am amazed at a.) my ignorance b.) the conversations that have started with people who are much more knowledgeable than I in this industry and c.) by opting to receive others broadcasts, I can learn more about what the leaders in this industry are doing and keep abreast of market trends. The fascinating thing about these public networks is that the information, since it is public, needs to be fairly genericized.  If I work for a large company on Project X, I can’t very well broadcast the latest ongoings of the project across Facebook or Twitter.  It would be career limiting at best and I’d probably end up in a major lawsuit at worst. However, there are people outside my immediate circle of managers and employees that are probably interested in what is going on with Project X.  Equally as important, I’m interested in who these people are that are following Project X and what I can learn from them.  I want them to be able to reach out to me and provide their guidance and insight as to what they know. It is important to make friends with the people that you work with.  At the end of the day, though, it is more important to get stuff done.  With Enterprise Social Networks, you can accomplish both.