Social Networking tools like Facebook and MySpace are increasingly being adopted by businesspeople. College students use it to find other friends, play online games, organize their weekend activities and build relationships. The business people I know use it to connect with old high school friends, keep tabs on current friends and to maintain their social relationships. Observe how business users and college students are using the tools for similar purposes which social as the nucleus. Is there a business model to be made by these tools in the workplace to increase productivity?

Many companies like Proctor & Gamble and GE allow their employees to use Facebook to organize company events and keep tabs on their friend’s activities. Other companies have organized corporate Facebook pages to allow anyone including customers to “friend” them. Twitter is being used to communicate with prospective customers and search for consumer sentiment of their brand.

Those activities aside, there are several grounds for business and technology managers to be wary of Facebook, and other social networking tools aimed at the consumer. Forrester Research recently conducted a survey and discovered that 14% of companies have disciplined employees and fired 5% of them for social networking offenses. Many employees are posting confidential information on these sites or spending too much work time updating their social status.

The following chart from Aaron Fulkerson (MindTouch) does a nice job of differentiating from the noise around consumer social media.

Still, corporations are testing the social networking model and applying it to business in an attempt to realize increases in productivity, efficiency and revenue. I believe they will fail. Think about how work gets done in the typically company. For profit business is about delivering products and services that solve customer needs. Ideally, company employees collaborate and execute on an optimal strategy to deliver the best possible product or service at the highest possible margin. The customer is the axis and the company revolves around them.

In contrast, the social networking model is about user centered participation where the user is the axis. I friend you – you friend me, we each follow each other’s activities, share pictures and forward that funny video on YouTube. It’s about enriching and promoting oneself and less about finding ways to help strangers solve problems.

The idea that social networking tools are a solution for employee productivity gains and solving complex business issues is weak. Their original purpose was to connect people and share social information (hence the term “social”). It’s akin to hanging out at the local bar with your friends or the proverbial water cooler at your office. Trying to fit social into business situations may work at gentlemen’s clubs, restaurants and bars but the typical company doesn’t profit from it.

Instead new tools are needed that focus the enterprise on collaborating around delivering products and services. As organizations look to lower expenses and increase efficiency, relevant content and collaboration have become vital elements for business success. Collaborative networks are needed to connect employees with their coworkers to achieve group objectives and measure results.

Groups of employees collaborate today by email. In fact a preponderance of emails are about teams and groups coordinating business activities, discussing work related matters, or tasks like editing documents and sending them back and forth as attachments. Collaborative Networks like MindTouch and in some cases Microsoft’s Sharepoint are answering these inefficiencies by encouraging groups of people to converge to produce crowd sourced content, ideas and solutions. The companies claim that Enterprise Collaboration Networks can be used to increase productivity and efficiency because the focus is on solving business issues and not enterprise social interactions. They assert it can facilitate a culture of accountability that values results, transparency, and innovation. Most important, it can be an effective way to build a customer-centric organization that listens to its customers and discovers new information from that interaction that increases revenue.

Sure there are business uses for social network as I’ve mentioned above. Twitter is an excellent tool for customer research and delivering timely 140 character messages to potential prospects. Facebook can help connect employees with potential clients, and some smaller companies have used MySpace to sell their products and services. Yet they still focus on the user and one on one interaction. They are not solutions that increase revenue, decrease costs and improve inefficiencies because they were never designed for that purpose. Companies trying to re-purpose them for these objectives should be looking at Collaboration (not social) networks as the path forward.

About Author : Mark Fidelman is a eVP of Sales for a leading open source internet company. Mr. Fidelman has worked with software, social networking and internet companies as a senior sales and marketing leader.

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