A CMO friend and I were having lunch and she asked me about Twitter*and whether I thought it was a decent solution for helping her sales teams communicate real time at conferences where they're trying to track down prospects and partners and such. I had to tell her "no" because Twitter is so open and she didn't want all her competitors seeing who their top prospects were on her sales teams' tweets. I knew it was just a matter of time before someone figured out how to capitalize on this opportunity, and sure enough I later tripped over Yammer, which appears to have jumped on this market opportunity to create private TwitYam networks. I've shot it off to my friend and hope her sales teams will soon be yammering away. Yammer makes me hopeful that we are now entering the phase of social tech where businesses will weigh in with some cash and legitimize and invest in our budding industry. That being said, I think it may be a rough transition because social tech is just really complicated.
Being old now, I've seen this cycle so many times in the communications space. I'm generalizing a bit here but new communications tech waves, from telephone/telex (ok, I'm not THAT old, but I started my career in telcom), email (I AM that old), SMS/txt, IM and now Tweets and LinkedIns - they all get frothy attention in the public network space where innovation thrives and viral usage can explode to prove the validity of the medium. But then they run smack into the business model problem.
The solution is sometimes just sheer volume, but if you're not a public telephone company (which have their own problems commercializing this stuff) the solution is in adapting the technology into the private enterprise and government space, where new requirements for security, privacy and performance create barriers to entry and slow down the frothy, viral excitement of the adoption curve. By the time the cool stuff gets built into the enterprise infrastructure, some of the coolness has worn off, but when it works we can say that the technology has found a way to pay for itself with something other than the commoditized micro-payment price model (for messages, minutes or ads).
I saw this up close and personal when I was VP of Marketing at Bantu in the pre-social days and we commercialized a web-based, secure instant messaging product for the government and enterprise space. The developers had spun up this really cool IM product in less than a year for practically nothing, but it took us years and bucks to refit it to meet the big guys' needs.
So when I look at social networks - Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, BlahBlah - I wonder how the transfer will take place. Even leaving age demographics aside, the social enterprise need is different and more specialized than the general public's social need. Specifically and in addition to security etc. enterprise users need more collaborative tools than people typically want in the purely social realm. I'm running into this tension with a client right now and scratching my head at how we're going to affordably address their needs on the one hand for generally social interactions and on the other for deeper collaboration capabilities. They are an association whose audiences include some folks who just want to network and other's who need to work side-by-virtual-side to create position papers, publications and issue briefs, socializing on everything from the big ideas to the identification of the last typo. I even wonder, in talking to the vendors targeting the association sector if they really understand the breadth of these essential needs.
Really big enterprises (including the government) tend to have really big solutions to this problem (e.g., Sharepoint), but even they struggle with getting people to use it. This is not only because online collaboration requires behavioral change, but also because it requires bringing structure to a typically unstructured process. Social networks handle this unstructured communications better (I could analyze that statement, but let's just pretend it's true and move on since this post is already getting lengthy).
One of the more hopeful steps in starting to address this challenge of blending social and collaborative needs for both public and private networks is LinkedIn's application platform and partnership strategy and particularly, their partnership with Huddle.net. I haven't used this tool yet, and am sure there are questions about how private it is from an enterprise standpoint, but if it is successful and LinkedIn continues to build out its partnerships with such collaborative vendors that businesses are comfortable working with, we may begin to see the path to non-advertising based social networking appear through the fog. Certainly something to watch for.
If anyone else out there either shares this problem of finding blended social and collaboration solutions for business, or better yet, has found the answer - please let me know. I'd love to collaborate:)
This musing has now begun to encroach on my turkey prep (in real time, it's Thanksgiving today). I hope everyone has a thankful day!
*Yes, I caved and got a Twitter account: dtheus. Feel free to follow me.
