Part 1 - What is social netting?

Let's start with the usual dichotomising

When thinking about this subject, it helps to distinguish between social networking and social media. Social networking is people conversing over a network. The network can be the Internet (including intranets and extranets) or a mobile telephone system.

The essence of social networking is interactivity. If you communicate with me, the system lets me respond promptly, sometimes immediately.

Social media is publishing. It can be one person to a few people, one to many or, on some networks, one to multitudes. Any interaction is slow and sometimes through another channel, such as emailing the author of an article.

A distinction already blurred

The division between the two social technologies is not always clear in practice (or, inevitably, in journalistic or marketing use). Many services that look at first like one-way publishing machines also include a way of responding.

Blogs are an example. These are the online equivalent of personal journals or, to use an old term, commonplace books. The difference is that almost all blogs let readers publicly comment on what the blog's author has written. On the more active blogs, other people respond to those comments and the conversation expands and ramifies.

Twitter is similar. Indeed, some people call it micro-blogging. The service lets recipients reply to a sender's messages or 'tweets' (nothing to do with Sylvester the Cat). This can be openly, so the rest of the receiving group ('followers') see it, or privately, so only the original sender sees it.

According to the Alexa service, two of the most-visited Web sites in the United Kingdom are social networking sites - Facebook and YouTube. Both combine publishing and interactivity.

How is this relevant to your organisation?

The sites I have mentioned so far are all public services, free to join and open to anyone with a network connection. They have value for organizations, as I explain in Part 2, but are not designed for use in an organization. That calls for purpose-made software or a purpose-made service.

It is these organization-specific systems that Carl and I are concentrating on in our survey. All the same, looking at a good public site such as Yelp will give you a free education in the principles of social netting, should you feel you want one.

What should you look for?

Your organisation will need a product or service that offers at least some of the following features. They might duplicate or overlap with tools that your organisation uses already. That should influence your choice, as should the ease of integrating or at least linking with what's there.

1. Publishing tools. These include, on their own or in combination, blogs, wikis, podcasts and content feeds (e.g. RSS, news; press releases or internal data)

2. Interpersonal communication and collaboration, such as instant messaging (IM), texting (SMS), email, forums and shared editing

3. Searching and navigating. Most of the major public services succeed because they make it easy for users to find what they want, be it information, people or other resources. This is equally important to company-owned networks. Maps, directories and 'tunable' searching are helpful, probably essential. So, too, is the ability for users to bookmark, tag or rate what they find.

4. Community creation and management. You are unlikely to develop and maintain a community feeling without some means of encouraging helpful communication. Tools include forum moderation, user rating, content promoting and invitation issuing.

5. As well as what the users see, there need to be robust and usable tools for managing the system. Fundamental requirements include security, audit trails and content management. Single sign-on improves usability. Tools for search engine optimisation can be helpful to publicise the system. In addition, you will need tools for, and possibly help with, installing and running your chosen software or service.

So what's new?

If you've been in or around computing for a while, you might think this sounds familiar. Weren't many of these features present in the groupware, like Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange, that began to be promoted in the 1990s?

Yes and no is the answer. Yes, in that those products were intended to promote and exploit group information creation and decision making. Some of the expectations then sound much like the things commentators say now:

...computers and their networks are more valuable to corporations when they are used to create and manage interpersonal relationships, not just to create and manage information.

Michael Schrage, Los Angeles Times, 10 June 1995

And no, because on the whole the products and the users weren't ready. Notes was dogged for most of its early life by having a user interface that was, to put it politely, idiosyncratic. (It didn't help that data centre staff found it hard to work with.) MS Exchange was hampered by being little more than an electronic mail server for much of its early life.

Other technical aspects have changed since then. On the publishing side, blogs, wikis and podcasts didn't exist. Search has become faster and cleverer. In the communications side, tagging, instant messaging and SMS were rare, often absent.

Above all, the broader setting is different. Many people now see and use these newer tools every day in their personal lives. Familiarity breeds acceptance. Enthusiasm as well, often.

Everybody's doing it, doing it

In March 2009 The Nielsen Company issued a multi-country survey of social netting, called "Global Faces and Networked Places". It estimated that in 2008 two-thirds of the population of the world's main Internet-using countries had visited a social networking site at least once.

Many of those people lingered. Nielson reckon that what it calls 'member communities' accounted for almost a tenth of the time people spent on the 'Net overall. In the United Kingdom, they accounted for one in every six minutes online, more the double the figure for 2007. (In Brazil, social netting took up almost a quarter of people's online time.)

As have others (see this posting), Nielson noted that much of the increase in use has come from mature users, not teenagers.

Whichever way you look at it, people working in organizations are getting plenty of free training in the use of social netting tools. As I mentioned last time, this is also conditioning their expectations of what they get at work and how easy it is to use.

OK, you might say, so people are used to these arrangements and might expect to see them at their place of work but of what value is that to their employers? The answers to that follow in part 2.

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It's not too late to take part in our survey. Just follow the link and you'll see what to do.