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the Free CMSWire NewsletterPrivate or closed, social networks are becoming more popular as a means of collaborating online in business. Tools such as SharePoint, Confluence and Yammer all have their uses in the collaboration space. The original sites that inspired these tools have not gone away, though. Far from it, they grow stronger on the web every day. Sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and the social giant Facebook have their own role to play in enterprise collaboration.
LinkedIn and Facebook, in particular, have a strong following in this area. LinkedIn has a growing reputation in the business world, with repeated rumors of going public and a recently launched social news service and Facebook is, of course, the undisputed king of the social network, but can it translate this success to the enterprise environment?
LinkedIn started out in 2002, and now has over 90 million members in 200 countries. It bills itself as the world's largest professional network. In essence, it allows users to build and maintain relationships with like-minded professionals. The site offers a number of different account levels:
- Basic (Free) — Offers the lowest level of functionality to users
- Business (US$ 24.95 month) — Builds on "basic" by offering direct emailing to other users and improved search. Also provides more stats and extended profiles
- Business Plus (US$ 49.95 month) — Allows more direct messages and search results
- Executive (US$ 99.95 month) — Further enhanced messaging and search and full name visibility of third-degree contacts
- Pro (US$ 499.95 month) — The top-end account gives the full messaging service, a premium search service (with more profiles and save searches) and the maximum number of ‘"Introduction requests"
LinkedIn’s key selling point is the nature of its audience. Users are only on the site in a professional context. They are encouraged only to connect with people they have worked with or know professionally. It's quite a contrast to sites like Facebook, where people typically collect large numbers of "friends" they don’t really know.
Users can interact and collaborate in groups, both private and public. They are somewhat like normal web message boards, but tend to be much more useful as the audience has already been vetted. Conversations and debates are generally professional, and as a result, groups can be a great place to collaborate and work.
A more recent addition was the Facebook inspired "status," where you can now link to useful articles and blog posts. These links can then be "liked," and comments can be added. It is common to find interesting discussions going on right in your daily status feed.
LinkedIn is now a common place to extend enterprise collaboration. Professionals can use it privately to work together, using groups or individual connections. Alternatively, it can be used to push (by using Internet "share" buttons or similar) content out to a wider, more public audience.
Looking at the audience and demographic, Facebook is straight away a different proposition. Users tend to be younger, connections tend to be more casual and the content added and shared is less business-focused. But many do see Facebook as a business tool because of the huge number of users it commands, currently over 500 million worldwide.
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