Social Networking Software

What it is: Social networking software allows users to interact and share information. Consumer versions of these applications include MySpace.com and Facebook.com, to which the younger crowd flocks to post pictures and network among friends, and LinkedIn, where the professional set keeps up with colleagues and finds out about job openings.

Other popular consumer applications include Flickr, which allows users to "tag" personal photos (a process in which users choose keywords or descriptive terms to classify them), and Del.icio.us, a service for storing Web bookmarks. These sites, both owned by Yahoo, enable users to share their photos and favourite Web sites. Tagging is sometimes called social bookmarking because it allows multiple users to categorize online content.

A few software companies, including Contact Networks and Visible Path, offer corporate applications that mirror these consumer sites, promising to help business users organize and find information.

Business benefits: In two words, knowledge management. Corporations have struggled with KM for years, trying to get employees to share information. Now some companies are experimenting with social networking applications, hoping employees will adopt them if they see these systems are easy to use and deliver benefits quickly. Other companies are working on ways to help employees find data more easily by adopting tagging technology such as that used by Flickr.

At the Boston law firm Mintz Levin, attorneys search for contacts on the firm's intranet using Contact Networks' software. Fred Pretorius, Mintz Levin's director of IS, says he decided to give the enterprise social networking software a try two years ago, after attorneys complained about floods of messages from colleagues that would begin: "Does anyone know . . . ?" Now, the firm's 475 lawyers can search for contacts within the firm from a link on the company intranet page.

Pretorius provided Contact Networks with the firm's global address list, and the software company then installed the application on an existing server. The harder part, he says, was convincing attorneys to expose their client lists. "This was a huge cultural obstacle because contacts are what defines their work," Pretorius says. At first, 20 percent of the attorneys opted out of the system. As they began to see how it could help them, however, that resistance began to fade. Now, 99 percent of Mintz Levin attorneys use the system.

In addition to sharing personal information and contacts, companies are also trying out ways to organize corporate information using employee-generated tags, or keywords. Tagging makes information easier to find than is often possible on a corporate intranet. "I know of no organization that has an intranet that works well for everybody finding what they need," says Thomas Vander Wal, founder and senior consultant for InfoCloud Solutions. (Vander Wal created the term folksonomy, which refers to a tagging system created within an Internet community.)

Mitre, a non-profit research and development company, is experimenting with tagging using a customized application that was built on an open source tool called Scuttle. The pilot project, dubbed "onomi", is similar to Del.icio.us in that it allows employees to share annotated bookmarks. Donna Cuomo, chief information architect with Mitre's centre for information and technology, says the idea arose after she noticed that employees were using Del.icio.us and Flickr to share company information. So far, 900 of Mitre's 6000 employees are using onomi to organize their own bookmarks and share them with colleagues. "A lot of people have adopted it as the only way they want to share resources," Cuomo says.

The risks: As consumer technologies go, social software poses few major risks. Employees may use consumer social networking sites for business purposes, sharing photos on their corporate blogs using Flickr or posting company information on LinkedIn. If employees start using such applications under the radar, however, there could be confusion about where and when it's appropriate to share information. Mitre's Cuomo says that she feels more comfortable using an internal tagging system because employees won't be putting links to company information outside the firewall.