In this final post, I talk to John Stokdyk’s comments about social networking:
I admit it, I completely missed the social networking craze and its impact on business when looking into my tea leaves last year. Put it down to personal prejudice – I have dabbled on MySpace and have many friends on Facebook, but in too many cases it ended up taking over their lives. I get enough pointless email as it is. The late summer saw an extensive debate on the site about whether employers were right to ban access to Facebook and other social networking sites, but Ernst & Young and Deloitte have taken it to heart, as has the Bristol and District Chartered Accountants Society (BADCASS). If you aren’t quite ready to have fellow accountants plastering your fun wall on Facebook, it is possible to experiment there are less demanding alternatives such as LinkedIn. Dennis Howlett, our accountancy-trained scout out on technology’s cutting edge is more taken with Twitter, the instant message-like diary website and Seesmic, a video-based social network.
John’s scepticism should not be swept aside. Many people see these tools as glorified time wasters yet we’re at the early stages of understanding how this all comes together from a business perspective. Different people see these things in different ways and it is perhaps unfortunate that so much of the conversation is centred around the idea that new forms of media must have an advertising component. I’ve argued many times that business environments neither want nor need ad polluted tools. They’d rather pay to play.
This has yet to sink into the brains of those who are at the forefront of developing the tools. One CEO recently said to me: “I’ll be in my grave before business gets this.” If that’s true then these social networking tools are doomed. I think he’s wrong and that’s because I don’t believe the developers have much clue how to address the business market. Fortunately, I have some examples that show how this can be successfully overcome.
Finally, I’m an avowed tech nut that likes to play with all the latest toys. In part because I’m curious but in part because I’ve seen how this stuff can benefit. When we cam off Wang 2200 and onto Finax (now Viztopia) productivity soared. Productivity took another leap when we networked the systems. At the time, almost no-one else was looking at networks.
The fact is that the ‘daddy’ of all this stuff, the blog, is not going away but is driving many kinds of inovation in the world of communications and media. I don’t think Facebook is going to do it for business but I do believe Twitter – or something very similar – could easily make the jump to business. The same goes for Seesmic but it needs a few important features before it’s fit for purpose.
