Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum Blog

Thanks to Tessa, Patrick, John, Sharmila and Sheryl for the discussion ... please comment if you would like to add to or disagree with my summary!

General gist was alongs these lines:

Experiences with SN in the workplace varied very much depending on size of organisation. Large organisations pretty much all seemed to ban it (i.e Facebook, LinkedIn or Bebo at work) while small organisations seemed not to need/value it (people can chat face to face).

Wikis and blogs were viewed as almost ubiquitous but social networking less so ... 

In theory, however, all agreed that it has value, should not be banned, and should be pretty much open - i.e. a mix of personal and work networking (the same as the way email is used currently).

Maybe organisations should encourage personal social networking to just get people familiar with using the new platforms? Maybe ... but this could be a red rag to a bull ...  

There are different views about the extent to which 'personal' information ought be visible at work.  In practice people will probably still want to maintain separate personal and professional profiles ... Jekyl & Hyde or Hyde & Jekyl?

Large and geographically dispersed organisations ought benefit the most.

Public Facebook vs. private Facebook vs. internal corporate platform (say Lotus Connections for example)? The view seemed to be that many people are members of a number of networks and would want their network to be independent of their employer (so you didn't lose your network if you changed jobs).  This has interesting implications for the concept of social network portability/interoperability and for the likely take-up of corporate-owned social network platforms.  Maybe the solution will be the ability to export networks in the same way that contacts can be exported from Outlook?

Biggest use at the moment is probably the common behaviour of looking up people's profile to suss them out prior to a meeting ... but the interesting point here is that most people will use Google anyway rather then a search on a social networking platform as there are a number of platforms to choose from ... easier just to 'Google them'.

Public sector organisations really need this but are unlikely to do it any time soon!!