Social networking turned up in quite a few places at VoiceCon Orlando 2009. Among other things, I moderated a Birds of a Feather session on social networking, and we drew a lively crowd of IT people, most of whom were just starting to get their own feet wet in things like Facebook and Twitter, some of whom were more advanced, and a few of whom remained highly skeptical of everything Web 2.0.Among the key points that came out was the importance of policies and governance for enterprise employees' use of public social networking sites. In another instance, one gentleman who represented a contact center organization at an enterprise, said he felt on a gut level that the agents in his organization could benefit from social networking, but he couldn't get a handle on how to deliver this capability to them in a way that wouldn't interfere with their very tightly controlled regimen as customer-facing representatives.
Social networks also turned up in Avaya's VoiceCon Orlando keynote (video embedded below), where a demo showed a customer interaction happening through Facebook. I'm not entirely sure I bought into the idea that Facebook will be the platform from which people shop and do other activities on line, but it makes sense to me that the preferences and personal information that are stored in Facebook could be made available to CRM and enterprise communications systems (assuming adequate security, of course).
On a slightly different note, all the recent attention in social networking has been focused on Twitter. Since a significant portion of our country doesn't make a move until they clear it with Oprah, it's a big deal that Oprah has given Twitter her blessing. Somehow Ashton Kutcher figures into this too. (That being a sentence I'd never imagined this particular job would require me to write; Fred never hinted at any such thing in the interview.)
It's easy to rail against Twitter's tyranny of 140 characters, but that's missing the point. A tweet without a link does, indeed, risk banality; you truly can't say anything much in 140 characters--except the thing that Twitter is best for: "Look here" or "Go here" or "Do this," followed by a link to some other element of content on the Web.
The point isn't what you're saying, it's who you're saying it to. In an ideal world, you follow and are followed by like-minded people who know that when you recommend something-either something you did yourself at another site, or a third-party item-that your followers will be interested. Or you know that when you have a question, this community is likely to contain someone who knows the answer, or knows where to find it.
In this way, the Twitter paradigm is ideal for inclusion in the enterprise communications tool box. Your co-workers (and corporate partners, vendors, etc.) are nothing if not a community of interest.
Social networking is going to be an ever-bigger part of future VoiceCons, both as a subject of discussion and as a way that we interact with our attendees-and with our audience that isn't on site. The show was huge on Twitter during the week of the event; at one point we were the fifth-highest "Trending Topic;" and the volume of traffic into NoJitter.com from Twitter, though still small relative to other sources, has grown steadily since the first of the year, with of course a big jump during VoiceCon.
Social networking and Twitter are a piece of the answer, for our organization and for enterprise communications generally. But there are other pieces: When it comes to enterprise communications, mobility is a huge element of the equation that social networking overlaps with but does not fully encompass. The same goes for communications enabled business processes (CEBP), which is where I think the real payoff (and momentum) are right now.
But I've found Twitter to be a useful tool, and I invite you to follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ehkrapf
