Corporate Social Networks

If you are a member of any type of social network, you probably understand the ease with which you can stay connected with friends and colleagues. In addition, you can discover new groups, communities and applications. This is exactly what is happening to me in Facebook. I see the applications they add, the communities they join and even people they connect to. Within less than 10 minutes a day, I can get a bird’s eye view of what is going on in my network of family, friends and colleagues.

How can we take this effect and translate it to our organization? How can we stay connected with our customers, employees (present and past) our advisors and partners. How about deploying a corporate social network?

In 5 Reasons to Deploy Corporate Social Network, CIO Insight highlights the opportunities and challenges of deploying corporate networks. From improving knowledge management, to increasing business opportunities, this presentation covers several benefits of corporate social networks.

I think there are a couple of other intangibles. First of all social networks are fun. Knowing a bit more about my colleagues is more likely to make my interactions with them better. Second, social networks may make hierarchical organization look flatter. Informal networks will blossom given the opportunity for interaction. Finally, I think social networks are great tools for harnessing collective intelligence.