Internal Networking in organisations

Social Networks can be regarded from two view points. Firstly the online community is creating their personal network with friends, friends of friends and other people users are sharing private interests. On the other hands business networks provide opportunities to stay in contact with colleagues, find interesting contacts and maybe find the job of dreams. In short words Facebook is the fun of networking, LinkedIn is for career opportunities.

But what are the advantages and the drawbacks of employees using Social networks? Are companies concerned about the time their staff is spending on Social Networks while working?

From my point of view Social networks provide a great opportunity to stay connected even when time is scarced to interact with people in real life. It takes only a few seconds to keep contacts up to date. This applies for private contacts as well as for business contacts.

Here is a list of benefits for companies which engage in Social Networking from an internal point of view (no advertising)

- Find possible job candidates

- Better networking of employees

- Share knowledge and interesting knowledge sources

- More innovation

Even if most social networkers are enthusiastic users some pitfalls are fact and have to be considered:

- All information published by users are open for the whole bunch of the internet with all the positive and negative aspects

- Possible job candidates are scanned by new employers

- Employees might spend too much time on Social Networks

- Do you really want to let your superior know what you did last weekend?

- Phishing

- Spam

Most concerns regarding Social Networks are due to the data openess and the internet criminality. But if users publish their data carefully (most Social Networks provide the possibility to share certain data only with connections), users can profit from the benefits of Social networks, have fun and build up a professional network.

The following issues have to be considered with Social Computing in business:

- Lack of social media literacy amongst workers.

- Social software is still perceived as too risky to use for core business activities.

- Need to prove ROI before there will be support for social software.

- The needs of community management.