Network

Social Networking has transformed our world over the last five years. The explosive growth of sites such as Twitter™, Facebook™, Bebo™, LinkedIn™ and MySpace™ has shown the incredible collective power of individuals and relationships, and it has left corporations and organisations struggling to understand how that power can be applied to their businesses.

Whilst it is unlikely that managers and executives will encourage their staff to record what they had for breakfast, they should seriously consider an organisation-wide exchange of information. Staff have skills and experience, and harnessing that knowledge should be a key part of organisational strategy in the coming years.

It is no longer acceptable for users to save data in security locked sub-folders in their hard drive, then leave the company five years later leaving barely a trace of their existence. It does not make sense to ignore the potent power, experience and intellect of staff both on and off the payroll who may be able to contribute hugely to the well-being of the organisation.

There is now such a discrepancy between our behaviour on the web and the processes we employ at work that school leavers joining organisations are faced with a steep learning curve. The lack of alerts guiding them to points of interest, the mass of unregulated emails sitting in their inbox and the inability to find the simplest piece of information confounds them. Organisations that don't embrace this pragmatic approach to social management will surely struggle.