The fallacy of business social networking

What if you threw a party and nobody came? That’s what seems to be happening in the world of business social networking. In our personal lives, nearly everyone is on Facebook, and lots of us are on Twitter and Pinterest. In our professional lives, many of us use LinkedIn to stay in touch with colleagues and associates — in case we need a new job or are hiring. But the use of social networking within the office appears to be small, despite the constant noise by vendors and management about trial efforts. Many end up just wasting everyone’s time and effort. (There’s little actual data, so I’m going on what I observe and hear anecdotally.)

If you step back and think about it, the reasons for the lack of uptake are obvious. They’re not a lot different from the failure of corporate intranets a decade ago, which also were to be the social hub of the modern enterprise.

Socializing is not what businesses want It always amazes me that managers and vendors yammer on and on about the value of social networking at work when, in fact, that’s not what companies want. They don’t want employees posting pictures of their kids, sharing funny videos featuring animals, comparing their stance on Team Jacob vs. Team Edward, or describing their out-of-control birthday bash. Nor do they care for the corporate equivalents, such as rumors as to who might be having an affair, which manager most resembles Pee-wee Herman, or how much sales spent on that team-building trip for sushi and cycling gear.

All sorts of sticky HR issues come up when people socialize freely in a business session — what happens in the office doesn’t stay in the office. Then there’s the concern many companies have about employees wasting time, though oddly, many firms pushing business social networking tools also block employees’ access to Facebook, Angry Birds, and the like.

What companies have long wanted is better collaboration across a distributed workforce, even as they’ve grown larger and more geographically disperse. Thanks to email and the Internet, companies want to have their cake and eat it too, replicating the kind of collaboration that can occur within a specific office across thousands of people. That’s a tall order, but the global Internet has let management dare to dream that local offices need not be distinct and isolated from each other. And through email, phone conferencing, instant messaging, wikis, and Facebook- and Twitter-like tools, some companies and even multicompany groups have made big strides to realizing this vision for specific projects and workgroups.

But by portraying it as a social goal, businesses immediately fail. Employees see the disconnect and shine on the latest management “let’s all adopt social networking” exhortations. They remember the corporate intranet project that no one ever goes to. Or they point to the president’s blog intended to “communicate directly to our valued employees,” but stopped being updated after two entries or simply parroted the latest company press release.

Socializing is not safe for employees The other stifling aspect of social networking at work is the Big Brother effect. Putting aside the kind of naïveté some employees may have about appropriate sharing at work (as well as on their personal social sites), there’s the stark reality that whatever you post on a business social network is viewable, discoverable, and storable by your company. How safe does that make you feel?

If you say something to a colleague in the lunchroom or on the phone, you have some deniability if you crossed some line — and certainly some forgettability. If you say something in a conference that you end up regretting, there’s at least some context — an outburst in a tense budget session is more understandable and forgivable than someone going postal in a routine status meeting.

You might remember the fear you experienced as a youngster about an infraction going into your “permanent file” at school or your first job. By your mid-20s, you realized that what went in rarely came out. No one went back into dusty archives to peruse the contents of your file, unless it involved a major HR or legal issue. The same is true of what you say in email or on a social network — but because they store everything digitally, everything you write is much more easily discoverable through simple searches. Anyone looking for a reason to deny you a promotion or lay you off can much more easily find some excuse.

In the early years of corporate email, we saw lots of people fail to understand this detail, expressing sentiments that ended up harming them or their companies. (It still happens, in fact!) In the context of business social networking, where the environment is supposed to be very informal and personal, expect people to either forget they’re being recorded or, worse for the desired collaboration, remember they’re being recorded and thus not collaborate freely or honestly. (InfoWorld’s Lisa Schmeiser has put together a nice guide to social networking business etiquette.)

Certainly, some business cultures don’t penalize honesty and debate, as long as there is respect — they’ll probably avoid the Big Brother effect. I’m willing to bet that’s a small minority. For the rest, honest and open communications in an informal environment is viewed as a trap set by the management police. You need to work very hard with management and employees to get past that fear.

External social marketing should be treated like any marketing As for the other major use of social networking — external marketing and customer listening — you treat these tools like any other: The people who represent you professionally need training on what is permitted to say and do publicly. Too many companies want it both ways, asking employees to use their personal networks to further the firm’s interests, but fearing that an employees’ personal comments in a nonwork social media setting might harm the business.

You can’t double dip; that’s unsafe for both the company and its employees. Your media policies — who can represent the company and under what circumstances — need to apply to social networks. On one extreme is Apple, which forbids employees from discussing anything about Apple or its business in any forum. At the other extreme would be a company that decides the risk of an employee harming its reputation is small compared to letting the employee be public in a merged business/personal venue, such as a blog or a Twitter account.

Either way, the key is consisency of policy regardless of the technological medium. For some reason, many companies don’t understand that, treating communications via social networking as wholly independent of all other communications channels, such as press interviews, conference presentations, and so on.

Social networking won’t solve email frustrations The reason I hear the most — even moreseo than better collaboration around projects and ideas — for business social networking is to get rid of email, which some view as nothing more than a giant spam engine. The theory is that real, valuable communications will move off email, so people can reduce communications overhead dramatically.

This is an amazingly stupid hope.

Anyone with any social network account knows how much spam — meaning stuff you don’t care about, not just phishing and unwanted marketing pitches — comes through those channels. Spam goes wherever the communications occurs. It’s not an issue intrinsic to email. Even point-to-point communications technologies such as instant messaging can feel spammy if one party overcommunicates.

There are risks of adding communication channels to solve the alleged email problem. One is a fracturing of communication, forcing employees to pay attention to multiple channels, often via different tools. With email at least you can have multiple accounts flow into one software client, and even apply consistent filtering rules to all of them, as well as search them simultaneously from one location. That’s not the case with the various social networking tools — each is its own island.

Another risk is sustained by the business. Corporate email is typically stored for e-discovery and archival purposes. If you add channels, those too must be stored for e-discovery and the archives, yet many social networking tools aren’t rdesigned for that. Thus, the liability risk for regulated companies increases. Where vendors have added e-discovery and archival capabilities to address the liability issue, the price is a more complex IT environment and a more complex e-discovery process across the multiple tools.

Focus on specific collaboration needs, not social networking If your business’s goal around social networking is to improve collaboration, put social networking to the side and look instead at collaboration tools.

Do your employees have problems finding helpful colleagues in other groups? Work on your internal corporate directory to expose more about what they know and do, in a searchable way.

Is your problem that people in different locations can’t easily collaborate? Look at wikis, message boards, and other asynchronous forms of shared communication — such “social” collaboration tools can work very well for small to medium groups that share a mission or project. Don’t forget about using email folders either!

Also, most modern laptops and tablets have cameras, microphones, and speakers, so you can do simple videoconferencing over inexpensive and even free chat services — Windows and OS X have built-in support for several such clients. Likewise, whiteboarding applications such as Adobe Connect and Yuuguu can show people mockups and the like via computer screens. If your company is very process-oriented, tools such as Socialcast can integrate the communications workflow into the entire workflow for specific business processes. Be warned: These tools can have a whiff of Big Brother monitoring about them that will make employees avoid them or use them only pro forma.

Is your problem email overload? Teach people how to use the filtering tools in their email clients, as well as how to think about what they email. Not all problems can be solved with technology; ironically, this should be obvious if your instinct is to encourage the use of social tools. Social means people, and that’s where you need to start.

This article, “The fallacy of business social networking,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Smart User blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.