User:JasonHier/Business social networking

Overview
The ability to connect and communicate with people both internally and externally within an organisation has increased dramatically. Although this ability has been positive, it can lead to a myriad of various communication threads on numerous aspects of business with a number of serious consequences if missed, misplaced, not understood or sent to the wrong person or audience.

It is clear that the world today is becoming ever more connected in real time and there is an increasing expectation for people to respond almost immediately to a question, request, instruction or order, both in business as well as socially. So much so, that there is a convergence and sometimes an overlap of both business and social communications within a business organisation, that could lead to some of the issues as stated above.

With the continual arrival of email in your Inbox, mobile telephones, smart phones and the arrival of social networking, it is not going to get any quieter. In particular the phenomena of social networking is growing at an incredible rate with the proliferation of various technologies such as twitter, Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, YouTube and the like, people are using these as there real time collaboration platforms both socially and in business because of their ease, format and style of communication. Looking at social networking on its own and trying to develop a business reason as to why a business should use these social networking channels as a formal communications channel is still too early and embryonic for most companies. Refer to attached link http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/comment/2258379/best-harness-social-networking

However, social networking in a business context is not always ideal for various reasons such as security of information, company IP, the ease at which people can connect and share with other people lends itself to an organisation being exposed to unnecessary risks, albeit unintentionally most of the time.

How then can the positive social aspect be used within a business environment so that collaborating real time anywhere, anytime and anyplace is still possible? Combining the needs of business in a social networking environment is starting to have a positive influence and will go some way to supporting the new business model of “knowledge and services” from the traditional “product-driven” economy.

The internet continues to facilitate organisations to look at new innovative ways to conduct business. Applications delivered online such as sharpcloud (www.sharpcloud.com) based on the new Microsoft Azure (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/) Cloud Computing platform is emerging as one of the technology leaders in business social software.

All of this needs to be in a secure environment, sharing information that can be highly critical and sensitive so that business collaboration can be conducted and connected to the right people and groups. Being able to see who is in the group, who is online whilst reviewing issues and making business decisions in a real time collaborative manner, allows the social behaviour to continue within the constraints of a secure business environment.

Being able to bring these two aspects together in a more acceptable format for small local business, to large global corporations and governments, is starting to enable businesses and global corporations to operate in a connected environment. The result is that it permits organisations to complete critical business activities such as strategy planning, R&D roadmaps and be able to communicate these visually with their organisation, clients, partners and shareholders in a social context.

Now that the technology is in place and improving daily, organisations need to review their lines of communications, agree the way forward, support the technology adoption and change of culture, through training and appropriate governance. It could also be argued that business social networking has been with us for a very long time. We just called it something different because we did not have an enabling technology to put it on.