The Smell of Good Business

“Enough social notworking, time to do some work…” – which interestingly enough was some blogging for a client….

Wikipedia defines social notworking as….. well wikipedia hasn’t defined this yet. There are many social networking tools that companies have endeavoured to ban, then eventually seen some benefit in the manner that they work. Facebook is one, wiki’s are another, blogs, gmail and so on. Why do they work? The instant ability to share information in a timely manner and get input – like a great brainstorming conversation.

Twitter is the latest in all of these (interestingly, each one of these social networking tools I have approached with “well, I thought <insert social media tool here> was a waste of time BUT this new thing… now that is a complete waste of time! I thought Linked In was a waste of time. It’s not. Then I thought blogging was a big waste of time and only for people who don’t have a life. Now I think non-bloggers are people that don’t have anything to say…. Twitter, now that I was certain was an unbelievable waste of time.

But these is no doubt that as a result media consumption habits are changing. Now we have a really different way of keeping ourselves entertained that doesn’t involve traditional media. For more on media consumption habits see  There are 2.4 million nonlines – this is a blog post I found out about on Twitter whilst I was writing this post.

Twitter is immediacy, and let’s face it – social networking tools promise what all we all want in a business context. I want to know what is going on right now. I want to be able to get hold of information quickly. I want to be able to interact with the person who created the information, and easily add  my piece of value on the top of it – then keep going with what I am doing.

So, tools that business get easily – intranets rebirth into wiki’s, groupware adds presence awareness through instant messaging and Voip that is calendar aware, portal products from vendors emulate social networking sites – witness the number of presentations where Sharepoint can look like Facebook. But the difference is that the big vendors stamp credibility on top of what the innovators have discovered elsewhere and already created value with.

Social notworking is somewhat like the big frontier – it particularly is where the digital innovators hang out. Television is, well, a big monitor that I hook my computer to. Media consumption habits are changing more and more….

What is your favourite bit of social networking? Do you prefer to actually meet people instead? What do you hate? Comments please!