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There’s a growing phenomenon that is beginning to influence enterprise communications, and that will become an increasingly important element of unified communications—online social networking. Wikipedia defines online social networking as “a category of Internet applications to help connect friends, business partners, or other individuals together using a variety of tools.”

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past year, you know about MySpace, Facebook and YouTube, which are used overwhelmingly, but by no means exclusively, by teenagers and the Y-generation to connect with new and old friends. We’re already seeing social networks in the enterprise pop up with networks like LinkedIn that are primarily used to help make and keep contacts for jobs, sales opportunities, etc.

Just as IM and SMS started with teenagers and mobile business workers, and then carved major inroads into the corporate environment, the same will happen with online social networks. At CMP’s Collaborative Technologies Conference (CTC—now renamed Enterprise 2.0), companies such as NearTime, Foldera, Parlano and MindAlign, joined IBM, Microsoft, BEA Systems and others in displaying shared workspaces where information flows quickly through wikis, blogs and RSS feeds.

I’ve recently become a convert to using online social networks because of a most unfortunate incident. When a teenager in my community was in a terrible accident, his friends and schoolmates began immediately getting the word out not through the phone, email, IM or text messaging, but through MySpace. While the adults were frantically calling each other trying to get information on the situation, the teens had already informed each other about what had happened, and had even organized a vigil using the MySpace bulletin boards and the various other MySpace communication modes. With the difference between the speed of communication using the “legacy” and next-gen methods being like night and day, it won’t take long for leading-edge enterprises to jump on this for competitive advantage; the application is simple to define: when information needs to be disseminated and decisions need to be made quickly.

Following that personal experience, last month’s Cisco’s analyst conference had a similar theme. CEO John Chambers called social networking, “the model for the future for the networking industry….our generation doesn’t do a good job of it, but our kids do.” Throughout the conference there were numerous references to online social networking websites like MySpace, YouTube and Facebook, and about how the incoming generation of enterprise employees will use social networks to communicate and interact with colleagues, partners, suppliers and customers.

Location services such as Dodgeball, which let you know which of your friends are within a ten-block radius of where you are and then sends a text message to you with their location, also have potential impact within the enterprise. Today these types of services are mainly used so friends can find each other while barhopping, but it’s easy to picture salespeople using it to find out if a customer or channel partner is in the same airport or hotel. Imagine being able to determine the presence and location status of a potential customer, and then have an impromptu meeting while waiting for your flight! These sorts of solutions are becoming available through cellular GPS services and are being applied in field services, logistics, sales and other applications. Mobility applications such as the Orative Resource Finder (recently acquired by Cisco) are already applying these concepts to businesses.

We’ll see most of these social networking methods and tools captured in secure inter-enterprise workspaces. We already see features such as enterprise-grade instant messaging and click-to-call voice and video communication capabilities. As those tools blend with the collaborative workspaces, we will see some highly effective social networks evolve. The result will be faster decisions, improved processes, and increased revenues.

What do you think? Write to me at bpleasant@commfusion.com or here in the forum

Blair Pleasant
COMMfusion and UCStrategies.com

Posted in Market Trends, Implementation, Tech Trends, Blair Pleasant, Unified Communications |

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