Social Networking Services for Businesses (PART ONE)

To continue with the internal communication in more horizontal and flexible companies, we are going to talk a little bit of this new trend called Social Networking Services (SNS).

In order to highlight the benefits of this concept, let’s start by describing the current situation in lots of companies. Imagine that a good friend of ours, Sophie, wants to start a new project in the company she works for. So, she sends an email to her future coworkers letting them know about the project and rapidly they start a long chain of emails. There are lots of files emailed to everyone entailing two main disadvantages. Firstly, there is a copy of each file in every email account consuming lots of unnecessary virtual disk space. Secondly, it is hard to know which is the last and updated version. So people may work in different files and do the same work twice. Completely inefficient. Furthermore, there might be communication going on between some members of the group that Sophie can not see. It is also more difficult to track who is doing more work since redoing the emailed timeline is hard and time consuming and the information is not directly accessible.

Is there a better way to do this? YES. The answer is SOCIAL NETWORKING SOFTWARE (SNS) FOR BUSINESSES. So, let’s consider a similar situation but under the scope of SNS. Sophie wants to start her project, so she looks up for the best coworkers in the internal net. She can see past performance, availability, special aptitudes and more. As a consequence, the team forming (essential for success) is done with more information and in an objective way and not based in subjective personal opinions about past performance or skills. File sharing on the network is also more efficient. There is only one file copy that everyone can access, saving disk space and making sure that everyone can see the latest version of it. Dashboard communication (kind of facebook’s status updates) also brings some advantages. People can post what they are working at, and other team members can comment on it and collaborate in real time even though they might be in different parts of the world, creating a world wide workplace. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the advantages that this software can bring. I will continue to explore the rest in the next post.