Internal Networking within 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 with. On the other hands business networks provide opportunities to stay in contact with colleagues, find interesting contacts and maybe 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.

Other opportunities are available for companies that do not want to create open networks. Ning is one example tocreate own “closed” networks within organisations.

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.

Examples of excellent blogs

When I started blogging a couple of weeks ago I read some great blogs to get an idea how to create a good blog. Today I am going to give examples of these blogs and describe why these blogs are so good.

First of all good blogs have some attributes in common:

- High frequency of publishing

- Attractive layout

- High quality articles as brief as possible

- Adequate links to support arguments

- Media mix (e.g. Twitter, Images, Vides)

- Expertise knowledge demonstrated

- Strong online CI

- No advertisement

- Easy to find in search engines (mainly Google)

The following blogs are wonderful examples of great blogs as they provide their readers expert knowledge, are easy to read and are a great ressource to link. I tried to find a good mix of private blogs as well as company blogs. In the following is discussed what additional characteristics make these blogs so successful:

- Edgewater Technology
Edgewater Technology is a technology management consulting firm in North America, providing special Information Technology services. In their blog main technology trends including web 2.0 trends are described with an innovatione character. Due to the comprehensive knowledge Edgewater can give well-founded practical examples from different perspectives (eg. health environment, insurance market, project management, Web analytics). I haven’t found any advertisement for Edgewater Technologies in the blog so far but many practical tips (eg. the great post “6 ways to get your web presence and infrastructure in shape for 2010″), written for the target group of consultant solutions.

- Technology, Mobility, Usability and other Musings
The author of this blog works as a product manager in an Indian Telecommunication company. It is his own personal blog where he publishes interesting posts about trends in the telecommunication and online market. The posts are pregnant and brief and supported by links to further sources. One of my favourite posts is “Why we tweed” which I have linked in my prior post “How can Twitter be used by companies“. A good selection of reasons why poeple might tweed is given as well as a fundamental discussion whether Twitter makes sense or not.

- Inbound Marketig Solutions
This marketing consultation company provides support for small business to use the internet effectively for their marketing. The posts are quite interesting, especially for the Enterprise 2.0 discussion of our unit as the main expertises are SEM/SEO strategies as well as Social Networking tools. The post Twitter: How To Use It For Business…. Effectively! provided me some qualified input for my recent post “How can Twitter be used by companies?“. The other blog posts contain as well valuable input for the readers, but hardly any advertisement.

- GMBSG
This comprehensive blog about software development, the .NET framework and related programming languages looks back on more than two years of high quality blog entries. The blog is written in German as the author is one of the best developer (and problem solver) I have ever met, engaged by my recent employer in Germany. I mention this blog in my blog list as this was one of the firsts blogs I determined to get ideas for my own blog. On the other hand I would like to thank Ilker for some tips for my online presentation.
But there are further reason why it is worthful to go over GMBSG. First of all the high frequency of blog posts for more than two years in an absolute specific area as well as the comprehensive tag cloud. The about page gives the reader a good introduction about Ilker’s expertise.

- Rock the job
Rock the job is one of my favourite blogs. The simple message is how to earn money and that is of course interesting for nearly everybody. They give tips and tricks how to find a good job, how to create a blog whichs brings money and so on. But what makes this blog so unique as there may be more blogs out there talking about jobs. It is the interactivity of the page as Rock the job uses vodcasts rather than writing long and boring blog posts. It is the informal way how they are transfering their messages and it is the fantastic opportunity to discuss with them on facebook .

There are much more good blogs out there and if you know some, please let me know and write a comment.