July 2008 – Social networking and linking the links

What do Post-it notes, video-recorders, fax machines, Federal Express overnight deliveries, CNN news, people carriers and Red Bull energy drinks have in common?

They were all innovations and developments that we thought we didn’t need, according to Anja Foerster and Peter Kreuz in their recent book, Different Thinking, Creative Strategies for Developing the Innovative Business.

Fortunately for the success of these products, the makers went ahead and sold them anyway and people began to realise just how useful they could be. Sometimes, as a business, you simply have to go with the gut. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, once said that in competition among businesses “you have to be able to hear the grass grow.”

“If you wait for confirmed insights,” he said, “all you will be able to do is scrabble for the crumbs with the rest of the procrastinators.”

I remember in the mid-1990s when people were suggesting that the internet might be a flash in the pan rather like CB radio. Many of those who thought differently came unstuck in the dotcom bust of 1999.

The next generation, led by swiftly improving search engine techniques, is not only redefining communications but business itself. That is not to say that traditional businesses will be left behind, no more than farming was left behind by the industrial revolution.

But business must begin to understand new spheres of communications that are demanding our attention just now. If you find yourself responding or discarding daily invitations to join Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Twitter, Stumbleupon, FriendFeed and Plurk you are not alone. Is the grass growing or are we swamped with weeds?

Thousands of us, probably millions worldwide, are struggling to understand the benefits or otherwise of networking on the internet. I’m reluctant to use the phrase “social networking” because I think it’s important to understand that there does not necessarily need to be a difference between who we are socially and who we are at work.

Does a photograph of Tony Blair in his swimming trunks or a bare-chested Vladimir Putin change the way we view them as politicians? Do we think if we see a picture of Sir Philip Green, owner of the UK’s biggest fashion retail group, in fancy dress at one of his lavish parties, that he is any less of a retailer?

The traditional media – by that I mean newspapers, magazines and television – have always delighted in giving us behind-the-scenes glimpses of the rich and famous. While many such people value their privacy a good many others who earn their living in the entertainment business are not averse to employing publicists.

But questions about whether to shun or seek the limelight never troubled most of us before we discovered the power of the search engine. Now networking sites are springing up everywhere, challenging people to decide how much they want to reveal about themselves.

For most young people at university, joining their fellow students in an online network was such a natural step that few would consider the potential a few years down the line for embarrassing photographs of bun fights to show up in recruitment vetting.

Still, why should they worry? Both David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party and Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, were members of Oxford University’s Bullingdon Club, noted for its destructive binges, and it didn’t do either of them any harm.

Most of this potential embarrassment among job candidates is perceived, rather than real. Any employer that balks at mild ribaldry in the social lives of candidates probably doesn’t deserve to attract the best talent.

On the other hand, the sheer profusion of networking sites, many of which are beginning to develop their own character, not to mention an array of various “widgets” and enablers, is becoming confusing. I know, since I’m trying to make some of them work in my own life.

A big problem is inviting others to join a network. While you don’t want to clutter their mailboxes with unwanted emails, you know that the “big experiment” can’t work unless people participate. One of my business contacts replied to an emailed invitation saying: “Sorry, I don’t do this kind of thing.”

People once took that view of the telephone. I recall when mobile phones were made available in my former workplace. There was very little take-up at first. Journalists didn’t like the idea of a newsdesk that could reach them in the pub.

Today mobile phones and BlackBerry devices are checked nervously, constantly. Networking, once a means to an end, has become an end in itself. Perhaps we have reached a time that someone really should shoot the messenger.

In his provocative polemic, The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen complained that the internet had equipped the hoi polloi with the means to infest the world’s information channels with all kinds of gibberish undermining the work of intellectuals and respected journalists.

He likened the explosion of blogging to T H Huxley’s “infinite monkey theorem” where Huxley argued that if you provided an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters one of them would one day create a masterpiece to equal Shakespeare.

There must have been similar fears in the Vatican when Gutenberg’s printing press made its way across Europe in the late 15th century, allowing mass publications of the Bible in the vernacular for the first time. Would we have known Shakespeare without it?

The truth is that I don’t know where we’re heading with social networking or just how it is going to influence the workplace but I do see it as a disruptive force that will have both a positive and sometimes negative influence on the way we relate to work and the way we do business.

Jon Ingham, executive consultant at human resources consultancy, Strategic Dynamics, and author of Strategic Human Capital Management, has become an extensive user of networking technology in his business work.

“I get a lot of work through existing relationships but I’m also finding that work is coming through Web 2.0 technology particularly through the LinkedIn network that has proved useful for staying in touch with people overseas,” he says.

He shares my surprise that executives in the HR profession have been relatively slow to explore networking innovations outside the information technology sector. An American online shoe retailer, Zappos.com, he says, has been using the Twitter network – sometimes described as a micro-blog – for staff collaboration and customer relations.

A US-based tax advisory company, H&R Block is similarly using Twitter to engage with customers – a refreshing change from the kind of sterile responses you often get in online customer communications.

If these companies can take advantage of networking technology among their employees why can’t others? You can’t see the benefit? I share your reservations, but I do have my ear to the lawn.

See also: Facebook: workplace scourge or saviour?