CRA Inc

23 Apr 04 @ 5:51 pm

Friendster for Business?

This article from Fast Company, A Little Help from Your Friends, provides some good background on how businesses use, or are thinking about using, social networking technology. (For more background on social networks, check out Alan’s previous post … and for more extensive background on social networking technology, check out Jeff’s previous post.)

So how does it work? These programs scan contacts in your address book, appointments in your calendar, and senders and receivers of your email, and then make maps of all the relationships they find among your contacts—and even go so far as to calculate the relationship “strength” based on the frequency with which you interact with the people in your network (we’ll get to that in a second).

bq. If it works for romance, why not commerce? A handful of companies have begun using Friendster-style social networking to help businesses and professionals find a perfect match. We’re not talking romantic partners here, mind you, but access to previously unreachable customer leads, investors, business partners, job candidates, and employers.

When thinking about internal communication professionals, two uses in particular come to mind:

* Stakeholder management: This kind of technology would have prolonged the illusion that old-school stakeholder management systems actually predicted success. Why? Because it would accomplish the one thing that no one could ever do: keep the database up-to-date. Now, would this work with new approaches to stakeholder engagement? I think so, although it’s not the perfect solution given the fact that there’s no way the “strength” calculator could be accurate. Even though we know that shorter, more frequent interactions will have a greater impact on a relationship than longer, less frequent ones, this technology over-simplifies what makes a relationship strong. It appears that this type of technology, however, could still automate some of the process and identify existing relationships and potentially give a sense of who influences different stakeholders.

* Informal Networks: We know that best practice internal communication shops understand the power of informal networks and have processes for pushing information into the organization through this group and gathering their feedback. Social networking technology would help to (1) identify the bridges and stars in an organization and (2) identify the right person to target to get to specific groups.

posted in category(s): Emerging Case Studies