Social Networking Is Just Business

Lora Bentley spoke with Ross Johnston, new business development VP at Dotster.

Bentley: What features are businesses looking for in social-networking tools?
Johnston: Businesses are really looking to moderate discussion, so they're looking at forums, blogs, article submissions. Businesses are also looking for content management, so they also want a built-in CMS, galleries for photos, newsletter distribution and archival. Then, if they want to step it up a bit, they get into audio streaming and video streaming ... We also see classified ads, RSS feeding, chat rooms, video syndication for pushing their content out there rather than bringing in content through RSS feeds.

Bentley: What about security features? Do they come into play?
Johnston: Permissions are the key feature for businesses moving into more customization of the tools. They want to be able to say how many people [and which people] get to do what or have access to this. For example, if they're a consultancy working with IT companies and they're talking to 10 different customer segments, they only want people from a certain segment, people they invite into a chat room, to be able to participate. Business is using social networking differently than the portals, than MySpace and Facebook.

Bentley: How so?
Johnston: Business is bringing in suppliers and vendors and moderating conversations. When that's happening, you want that to be in a closed environment. The environment can either be called an intranet or an extranet, but it's not being crawled by the search engines like Google. That is a key differentiator between business social networking and the social-networking portals. You still have the backup of a user profile, a picture of the person you're talking to, limited bio information, but then you also can have all these other features, depending on how much customization you want and how much you're wanting to spend. The business can build in anything it wants. It usually takes the form of an additional "community" tab on an existing Web site.

Bentley: So what you're seeing so far in terms of business social networking is companies wanting to interact with vendors and suppliers?
Johnston: Well, that's one aspect, but they're still, first and foremost, wanting to interact with customers. Social networking is a means of brand-building ... differentiating a company, and connecting with customers for things like increasing event attendance, providing conference notes during and feedback after a conference.

Social networking can also be a source of revenue. If they listen [to customers] better, they'll innovate faster, and they'll have improved product development. If you have a healthy chat going on around your product and your product managers are moderating it well, you're going to have a lot of feedback that's as good as, or better than, paid market research. You have improved delivery of products and services, and it also allows you to get to know your evangelists, whom you can then partner with to get the word out.

Finally, there's also ROI improvement. By doing these things, you can cut some of your marketing expenses, as well as some of your customer service and related support costs.

Bentley: So far we've heard about business-to-business communication and business-to-customer communication, but what about collaboration and communication within a single company? Does social networking aid that at all?
Johnston: Absolutely. Say you're Nike, and you've got product design in Beaverton, Ore., you've got marketing in LA, and you've got production in the Philippines. That's a medium to large company that has everyone collaborating. You've got pictures of the people you're talking to, you've got a chat board, you've got a forum where you can talk about the project you're working on. Each department has multiple team members contributing, so they go to one place on the Nike intranet where they chat amongst themselves, they pull from document and data repositories, they can have an online conference, etc. For the most part, all the tools are there, and it can't be crawled by the search engines because it's behind the firewall. Yet it is social networking.

Sometimes I think "social networking" isn't the best description when you're talking about business. Maybe it's community. Maybe it's a word that hasn't even been invented yet ... Some time, I think we will reach the point where social networking becomes ubiquitous. It will be everywhere. It will be on every site of everyone who's doing business, and it will just be called "business."