You have received a new friend request from Heath
posted by Heath Buckmaster on September 04, 2007
Uh oh…not another one of those messages from a spam bot on myspace* or facebook*. How many of those do you get every day - none if you haven’t joined the bandwagon of social networking. Whether it’s myspace, facebook, or even things like sixdegrees from years past, there is a little bit of internet for everyone.
I’m a fan of social networking - having been one of the original joiners on sixdegrees when it first started. Back then you were basically chatting online with the same people you were chatting with offline. They were coworkers, friends, or family members who then linked you to their coworkers, friends, or family members, until you had a network of people you didn’t know going out into the Nth dimension.
Little has changed.
Today we have social networking sites that are a lot fancier in terms of visual styles and offerings, but the functions remain the same. You can link up with coworkers, friends, family members, people you went to high school or college with, people in your geography, or people who share a common interest. Now the network expands almost exponentially to the far reaches of the planet where Sylvia sits at a desk with her pocket pc updating her current status so I know that she not only shares my like for sushi, but she’s also currently drinking a diet soda. I don’t know Sylvia, but the social networking site tells me that she’s a good match for my personality and interests. Apparently she also clicked the right sequence of buttons that proves she likes photography, sushi, and happens to listen to Duran Duran.
At this point, that’s all I know about her, and honestly, I don’t have time to get to know much more. I don’t work with her, probably never will, and will with 99.9% certainty never meet her in person. So why do I care if 4 minutes ago she drank a diet soda? Why does she post that for people to see in the first place? Does anyone care that my current status is Heath is currently in a lot of back pain? The value of social networking has really gone to the dogs. It’s gone well beyond what a person likes, what skills they have, and where they went on their last vacation.
Now you can see a running timeline of a persons life. You know that at 7am they were up for an early meeting with someone in Europe. You can read that they finished the call at 7:42am, at which point they used the restroom facilities before grabbing a notepad and rushing to their 8am meeting. You move down the list to discover that the sausage and cheese burrito they had for breakfast isn’t sitting well in their stomach, so they decided to skip lunch and work from home the rest of the day, at which point their cat jumped on the keyboard and accidentally deleted their last blog post.
Who cares? How on earth does someone in the corporate world have time to read this level of detail about their vast network of online acquaintances? Does this serve any useful purpose at all?
I ask this, because there are explorations going on to determine if we could benefit from social networking tools within the company walls. Is there value in linking yourself with a myriad of other employees that you have never met, but have a greater chance of meeting than someone named Sylvia in a far off country? Is there benefit in knowing that a 3rd degree acquaintance used to build websites for a living before coming to Intel, or that a 5th degree acquaintance shares your love for group dynamics?
For these last two examples, I would say ABSOLUTELY. One of the things I talk about when teaching some of our management training courses is that work does not get done via your org chart. Work gets done via your social network. You are able to complete your project work because you know someone who knows something, or you know someone who knows someone who knows something. We don’t pull out an org chart, following it all around as it zooms around a mesh of reporting structures and matrix relationships. We call up a friend we worked with 2 years ago and say, “Hey, you used to do this, can you help me with this problem or do you know someone who can?” That’s how we get the job done.
I think social networks definitely have a place in the office, especially when used for education and increasing our productivity. I can certainly post in an online forum if I have a question about technology or a business process, but what if I could just log into my social network site and bring up anyone in my web of coworkers who used “organization development” as a keyword? Now that is the value I would get from social networking…regardless of what they had for breakfast, or their favourite colour of Post-it* notes.
This discussion continues on Intel Communities. Please join the discussion and add your thoughts!
* Website and product names are trademarks or copyrights of their respective companies, and are not affiliated with Intel Corporation.
Comments (5)
tagged: social networks
Comments
Sep 04 | Josh Bancroft said:
You must use the tools for good, not evil. Be selective about who you follow/add/friend. Don’t do it if you have to think for more than a quarter of a second “who is this person?”
Be disciplined in your friendships, and the value of your social network will grow and flourish. I discovered this on Twitter, by un-following about half of the people I had added just because they added me. Now. I know that anything I hear on Twitter will be from someone I know and care about, on some level or another, and that makes it infinitely more valuable for me. I know it’s a group of people to whom I can pose questions, etc. and likely get an answer I can trust.
So don’t be a promiscuous social networker! :-)
Oh, and on a tangent, check out “bacn” - the term for email notifications/updates/etc. from all of these services. They’re not quite spam, but they’re not really “ham” (wanted email), either.
http://grasshopperfactory.com/cbc/bacn-a-new-internet-term/
Sep 04 | Alex Balk said:
Amen to that, Josh.
My list of IM contacts is getting out of hand, so thinking of the keeping up with everyone on my social network, which is by far larger, makes me shiver. I’ve recently started using an internal tool that lets me have a morphing contact list, based on the people I collaborate with most. It’s taken the pain out of finding those people I talk to the most, but doesn’t solve the “staying in touch” problem with the rest.
Enter Twitter. It lets me have a pub-sub channel for letting the people who care about me stay informed of what I’m up to. As long as I stick to responsible posting it doesn’t turn into “bacn”. If they do the same, I can afford to follow them, knowing that I won’t suffer “contemplating lunch” twitters. What I gain is just that little peek into a person’s personal/work life that keeps our relationship from fading away. And it’s definitely less time consuming than following a blog.
Sep 04 | Stefan S. said:
The social networks are all a farce. There are them already since years, however, suddenly everywhere one socially says networks. everything only marketing and nothing the interesting.
Sep 05 | Heath said:
I do agree with “Friends” lists getting out of hand. There seem to be many folks on the currently popular sites who want nothing more than to win the “I have the most friends” competition. It’s become like that silly “the one who dies with the most toys wins” fad of the 80’s.
I don’t want more friends. I have just the right amount that I can realistically handle right now…but even within that subset of people I genuinely care about, I still don’t need to see them twittering about their trip to the mall or a silly bumper sticker they saw on a car 3 seconds ago. If it’s important enough, they can pick up the phone and call me, or walk over to my office and TELL me that their favourite colour of Post-it(tm) notes is cerulean blue.
:-)
Sep 27 | J Kellogg said:
It would be much cooler users could have gradations of friends and own their own data in one central place and selectively release it to networking sites.
http://www.it-techview.com/