Business Social Networking: Public and Private – There is a Place for Both

By Len Rosen Aug 18, 2009

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When Reid Hoffman, Founder of LinkedIn talked to the Fox Business Network at the recent Fortune Tech Conference in Pasadena, he stated, “we live in networks, and what online networks do is make you use the networks you already have more effectively.” He compared business social networks to Google. “There was all this information in the world before Google. Google just made it a lot easier to find it all,” Hoffman stated.

Hoffman has tried to differentiate LinkedIn from other social networks by focusing on business relationships. He describes it (see interview) as a professional social network connecting former coworkers, clients, suppliers to collaborate. There are numerous other public business social networks such as Plaxo, Xing, Referral Key, Partnerpedia and BizNik, all focused on business-to-business relationships. Even Facebook and MySpace have many business interest groups within their popular social networking environments.

Business Social Networks: Beyond Facebook and LinkedIn

As much as these public social networks try to cater to business users, where social networking should have an even greater impact is within the walls of organizations, inside the firewall, creating true collaborative work environments where organizations can harvest the collective wisdom of employees, suppliers, existing clients and prospective customers.

What a well-designed business social networking site does is put together all of the communication tools and technology created to manage projects and teams, share wisdom from the executive office to the shop floor and back, leverage previously unknown talent, and ultimately through virtual space understand collectively what’s really happening in and around an organization. Those tools include blogs, wikis, chat rooms, document sharing, shared calendars, meeting rooms, whiteboards and other gadgets and widgets that can be found on public social networking sites today.

Social Networks Coming in From the Cold

In a recent article by Andrew Conry-Murray entitled “Can Enterprise Social Networking Pay Off?” he talks about a number of companies that are investing in internally managed business social networks.

One of these is EMC. Using Jive as its social networking platform, EMC reports an active user community representing more than a quarter of its 38,000 employees. Another 40% are watchers and consumers of the social network content, but have yet to provide postings themselves.

Pfizer employs a number of different tools in its social networking environment. PfizerPedia is an enterprise wiki built using the same tool that underlies Wikipedia. In addition the company uses SharePoint for social profiles, and shared links and content. Drupal, the open source social media application tool has been used to develop an enterprise-wide blog. Pfizer reports that 63,000 of its 98,000 employees are regular SharePoint users. The blog receives 10,000 visits per month and 2,300 users are contributors to the wiki.

John Parkinson, the CTO of TransUnion, a credit rating company, estimates that his company has saved US$ 2.5 million in its first five months after implementing the social network platform, Socialtext, while spending only US$ 50,000. Parkinson derived the dollar savings by counting things that the company deferred from buying. He observed that brainstorming ideas across departments and groups had significantly reduced demand for new technology and outside consulting services. The need for new software tools, processing capacity and hardware dropped dramatically.