Social Networking and the Enterprise
One of the things I recently started thinking about was the relevance of social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, Plaxo, LinkedIn, etc. have to enterprises. While there are certainly individual usage of these sites, is there a play for the enterprise? Ann All of IT Business Edge, had a post about two weeks ago titled, “Facebook Not So Useful as a Business Tool,” quoting a study from Flowing Data that “just a tiny percentage of Facebook’s 23,160 applications are business-oriented.” In the comments that followed, one reader named Peter stated “businesses should take a serious look at integrating social media in their marketing strategy.”
The more I thought about this, the more I agree with Peter. If your company has individuals as either direct or indirect customers, I’m sure that the marketing department has segmented them into different groups each with their own strategy for how they will be marketed. I don’t know of any enterprise of significant size in the U.S. that doesn’t have an internet presence, and I’m willing to bet that nearly all of their marketing departments see their web sites as more than just a place to get electronic versions of paper documentation or marketing materials. In other words, the web site has gone through three phases.
- The Information Web: In this phase, everything revolved around pushing information out to the visitor.
- The Transaction Web: In this phase, the communication is bi-directional, predominantly focused on information from the enterprise, and business (i.e. money) coming from the visitor.
- The Participatory Web: Here, the emphasis shifts from the individual to the community. It’s not just the enterprise pushing information out, it’s the full ecosystem all of the site visitors and all of the enterprise’s partners.
The big challenge with this third phase comes down to community. When an enterprise tries to own the community, it will probably work very well for established customers, but it may have a hard time bringing in new members. In contrast, a site focused on enabling communities of all sorts, like Facebook or MySpace, is better positioned for community growth. If this is the case, why wouldn’t an enterprise try to involve these sites in their marketing strategies as a growth tool. The point would not be to own the community, but to attract new members to its community. This is no different than the physical world where a company establishes a branch office or a retail location in a community. It has to compete with others, but at the same time, if it is perceived as valuable and meeting the needs of the community, it will survive and thrive. The time is ripe is to think about how your company can build applications and content for these sites to attract new interest.
3 Responses to “Social Networking and the Enterprise”
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The difficulty that many organizations have with the third phase is whether to try to build their own community space, or provide tools and applications to allow it to take place elsewhere, such as on Facebook. There’s a strong tendency to want to control what people say about a company, and many companies try to maintain that illusion of control by putting the community site under their own site, and moderating the content. Others contribute to third-party sites such as getsatisfaction.com to allow the community to develop their own voice, rather than trying to orchestrate it.
Exactly right, Sandy. When utilizing an external community, you abide by the rules of the community. Internalize it, and you define the rules. In the former situation, the company must decide if it is worth it to abide by the rules, in the latter, it is the people who must decide.
The cluetrain manifesto (http://www.cluetrain.com/) is an attempt to verbalise the ways in which a business *should* be interacting with its customers – and employees – given the possibilities inherent in social networking.