MySpace Mind-Set Finally Shows Up at the Office By LAURIE J. FLYNN

April 9, 2008
MySpace Mind-Set Finally Shows Up at the Office By LAURIE J. FLYNN
AS online social networking weaves itself more extensively into the fabric of everyday life, a new class of technology vendors has set out to make the social Web relevant in the workplace, too.

These companies, with names like InsideView and Genius, seek to integrate broad Internet searching with social networking and business intelligence software to give workers access to interrelated pools of information.

“There’s a value in who knows whom that companies are trying to unlock,” said Antony Brydon, co-founder of Visible Path, a social networking company acquired by Hoover’s, a publishing and market intelligence company, in January.

Despite the huge popularity of networks like MySpace and Facebook, they have had a slow start in the business world, where I.T. managers and executives remain leery of them. But that is starting to change as the technology is becoming more integrated into corporate software applications.

“The enterprise segment is trailing the others significantly,” Mr. Brydon said. “But it’s getting traction like never before.”

These days, more companies are starting to appreciate the potential benefits of social networking programs like Visible Path, as well as communications programs, like SelectMinds, that put workers, clients and others in touch with one another. “Social networking solves a lot of problems in the enterprise,” Mr. Brydon said. It can, for example, relieve overburdened corporate e-mail systems by moving much of the group communications to another realm.

As social networking technology has become a more familiar part of the landscape at many companies, it has brought a new buzzword: “socialprise,” referring to the mash-up of social networking features and standard enterprise computing applications.

“In its basic form, companies using social networking are trying to help employees put a face on the other people in the firm,” Mr. Brydon said.

Visible Path is a sort of corporate version of LinkedIn, the popular networking tool that maps the connections among people, providing them with a view of who knows whom among their contacts. Visible Path performs a similar function for the corporate world by working with the existing software infrastructure, giving employees in a company a map of their contacts and their contacts’ relationships. Dun & Bradstreet has used the technology to add relationship mapping to its Hoover’s online catalogs of corporate and executive information.

Further movement of social networking into business appears inevitable. Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, among others, are increasingly adding social networking features to their corporate software applications.

Late last year, Oracle announced an on-demand version of its sales-automation software, CRM On Demand, that includes social networking features similar to those found in MySpace or Facebook, like the ability to create and join groups through its Sticky Notes and Message Center functions. Likewise, Microsoft is adding social networking to its SharePoint program, a Microsoft Office tool for letting groups work together. And just last month, Cisco Systems announced it was buying Tribe.net, a small social-networking site that will allow it to help clients bring their customers together online.

Today the battle lines in corporate social media are being drawn between established technology companies like Oracle, Microsoft and IBM, social media companies like Facebook and MySpace, and start-ups focused from the beginning on business. Corporations are eager to find out the sources of more of these applications — and when they are going to arrive. For them, the true “killer app” remains to be seen.

“It’s an open question who’s going to win this battle,” Mr. Brydon said. “As a whole, the question the Fortune 500 is asking is where is the Facebook for the Fortune 500 that can do for us what Facebook and MySpace have done for consumers?”

Some businesses have adopted social networking to better identify job candidates, in part by helping them maintain relationships with former employees who could serve as an informal recruiting network. SelectMinds works with a company’s enterprise software to create an electronic water cooler where former employees and managers can keep in touch.

“Companies are looking at the knowledge loss and wondering if they can do something to retain it better,” said Mike Gotta, principal analyst with the Burton Group.

Social networking is also finding its way into the sales department, as something of an automated prospecting tool. Programs like InsideView’s SalesView help sales teams identify leads and target customers by scouring more than 20,000 information sources, from the most popular social-networking sites to job boards, blogs and news sites.

For example, a salesman for a financial services company might use SalesView to get information on a prospective client, from her job history and education to her hobbies and favorite restaurants. “The guys who are using this information think of it as a competitive advantage,” said Rand Schulman, chief marketing officer at InsideView, based in Foster City, Calif. On the other hand, there is what Schulman calls the “creepy factor” behind the ease with which companies could use this new class of programs to peruse personal information.

For the past year, Joe Busateri has been looking for a better way to tap into the collective intelligence of his company, MasterCard. Mr. Busateri, a senior business leader in the Global Technology and Operations business unit, has turned to social networking technology to create a system to get employees talking, brainstorming and cooperating across departments.

“The goal is to try to stimulate innovation, to share information and collect ideas,” he said. He has established blogs and wikis, including a site called Priceless Ideas, where employees can broadcast their latest inspiration.

After spending the past few years snubbing the social networking craze as a time-wasting hobby for teenagers (more than 11 percent of online time is spent on MySpace, according to a new study by Compete, a Web analysis company), even the largest companies are beginning to see value in using Internet technology to foster employee communications. But that’s not to say that all enterprises are ready to embrace social networking.

For some corporate managers, the prospect of investing in something that has long been seen as consumer technology is nerve-racking, given the hard economic lessons of the Internet era. For others, promoting unmoderated communications among employees and customers is scary. And then there’s the notion that social networking’s potential to waste employees’ time might outweigh its benefits.

“A lot of companies had been looking at social networking the same way they were looking at the Internet 15 years ago,” said Denis Pombriant, a consultant and technology analyst at Beagle Research Group. “They saw that the Internet could be useful, but in the meantime a lot of investment dollars went up in smoke.”