Social networking in the workplace

Network World revisits the issue of social networking in the workplace this week. Social networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, are rapidly becoming the latest form of communications in social communications, but there's still the lingering question of whether they fit in to the business world.

Network World sees many similarities in the discussion around social networking in the enterprise with the controversy around instant messaging (IM) in the workplace a few years ago. IM started as a social medium and eventually gained acceptance as part of the unified communications strategy of many enterprises.

Network World explains:

And today's social networks are a simple extension/enhancement of IM and other essential communications tools.

One way that Twitter is most useful, for example, is in staying in touch with a large workgroup and communicating with that group to an extent that would otherwise be impossible. For instance, in an April 22 interview at "Marketplace", Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior noted that "[Twitter] does things indirectly to support some of the top leadership, some of the innovative ideas that Cisco is considering. I propose questions, I ask people for their input. And I get a lot of ideas back from people."

And the more personal side of networking with services like Facebook allow a distributed workforce to stay connected. In many ways, the "conversations" on Facebook can be considered the "virtual water-cooler" of the 21st century. We are moving increasingly to telecommuters for reasons from business continuity to green initiatives to employee satisfaction. Social networks allow the workforce to stay connected as a community.

And there's the outreach to colleagues and customers who are not a part of day-to-day personal interaction. The relationships that can be maintained to a certain extent in an era of fewer and fewer personal interactions can keep you "Linked In."

This increasing acceptance of social networking means better monitoring of web usage for malware and viruses by IT administrators, especially with the amount of viruses and malware that are targeting social networking sites. Proxies will gain a more important place in the network as social networking use rises.