Social networking apps in the enterprise

Social networking has become a popular seed for entrepreneurs to building ideas around nowadays. Beyond the fad of the already existing online dating applications, there are some interesting web sites like LinkedIn.com which are trying to build paid services around the concept of providing an opportunity to network with the kind of people you want. There many claims and counter claims about the effectiveness of these applications. Not withstanding the unproven nature of these plans, many others have gotten on to the bandwagon. Check ICQ universe on icq.com for example.

While many of these have tended to concentrate on the retail customer, the enterprise customer is already being targeted with a different kind of application of social networking concepts. Combining the math of graph theory with the basics of social communication theory, companies like spoke.com and visiblepath.com are offering some really interesting applications to enterprise customers. Applying the social networking concepts to sales forces and business networking within organizations and combining such ideas with CRM applications these companies results in interesting consequences for the enterprise. It provides a new way of helping its own employees track, follow and close new customer deals using the contacts of fellow employees. The attempt is also to reduce cases where the lack of a referral is a bottleneck while pursuing a new lead. Pretty neat.

Lets also look inward into the enterprise. If you get to dig deeper into the math of social networking, you will notice a striking similarity between what the math helps you find out and what we learnt in term 4 as organizational behavior. Here is a way through which the computer mediated communication mechanisms (in short e-mail etc.) can be used to build a map of the organization that can tell you who is the center of the influence network, where the structural holes are and so on... If an application can analyze that and present it to you, especially if you are managing teams across cities and geographies, wouldn't that be great? If you can easily find answers to questions like, "Is my marketing and sales team in the US talking enough to my R&D teams in India and Philippines", I think there will be many takers.