Professional Networkers

Have you ever taken a piece of paper and multiplied the number of staff you have by the number of people they are connected to globally?  How many products/ services that you sell day-to-day are endorsed on these social networks?  At your finger tips is a free user-endorsed brand marketing powerhouse that in most cases isn’t being used.

Isn’t it beyond belief that companies who live in the most international time in history have closed the doors on their future leaders of business accessing networking sites?  Think about it for just a moment... the most interconnected generation in history is using Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, My Space and Ning and yet none of these connections are permitted to permeate into the world of work.  Do all your staff even have your company name on their profiles? What would be the combined brand value of an update going out to all your staff’s contacts (the figure you came up with from the sum at the beginning) saying that they worked for your organisation?

Isn’t it beyond belief that all these connections are being kept purely for social reasons?  Imagine the position a company would be in if it was able to harness the potential distribution opportunity, and knowledge gathering opportunity, that they have in their Next Generation employees all around the world.  Our generation’s blurring boundaries between work and home life mean that out of all the generations they’d probably be the one most up for sharing these contacts. 

Informal social information networks will continue to grow.  This is a trend.  Those that are on the front end of harnessing the ‘informal knowledge ecosystems’ through technological social networks of people will be the future leaders.  We will go so far as to say that the companies that do not allow informal social networks and disconnect their employees from these worlds will lack the capability, through collaboration, to survive and will stagnate.

From the CIPD ‘People Management’ publication this month (23 APRIL 2009):

...networks are important and not only in good times.  They are arguably just as important, albeit in different ways, during an economic downturn.  Firms that recognise the importance of informal social dynamics and the technological platforms that power them will be more agile and better able to withstand economic shocks.