Social Networking Occurs Before and After Collaboration

June 2, 2008 at 1:43 pm | Posted in collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, social software | Leave a comment

I’m just putting the final touches on my presentation on social software at the Domino Notes Users Group conference “Social Collaboration for the Enterprise” in Bremen, Germany and ran across a great posting from Gia Lyons (until recently of IBM Lotus, now at Jive Software).  Her description of what Connections does is a good description of the role of social networking in an enterprise environment in general.  An excerpt (full posting here):

Lotus Connections helps you:

• Find the ‘good’ people with whom to collaborate, whether they’ve filled out their profile or not.
• Find information that your trusted colleagues think is good, without relying on unsatisfactory search solutions.
• Find the knowledge “crowds” that are locked up and hidden away in your company, so that you can lurk-n-learn, or connect-n-collaborate.

This posting got me thinking about how social networking fits with collaboration.  The conclusion I came to was that it can be useful before or after collaboration:

• As a prelude to collaboration: After finding and tracking people with whom you share interests, like, or respect, a situation may naturally arise where you wish to connect to achieve a shared goal.  This may take place this afternoon or in ten years, but once the process of growing connections becomes second nature, the harvesting does too.
• To maintain social links after collaboration: Sometimes collaboration triggers a desire to network rather than the other way around.  In this instance, collaborating on a project with someone lets you get to know them and their skills.  Adding those you have learned to respect to your network leaves the door open to mutually beneficial collaboration or sharing of additional network ties in the future.

If you’re going to be in Bremen, be sure to see my keynote address on “Sharing, Collaborating, and Networking in the Social Enterprise” on Friday and stop by afterwards to say hello.

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