Second day of the Social Networking Conference

After a good night sleep, I'm now in the second day of the Social Networking Conference. Met lots of smart people yesterday and last night at Lloyd's Bar and Distillery, and lots of them were very interested with what I am doing in China and my job as researcher in Nokia Research Center. They were very intrigued by the concept of using the mobile phone as an integral part of your social network, true real mobile social networking, recording real social interactions and creating social networks based on that.

Anyways, I'm in the first talk of the second day of the conference on Enterprise Social Networking in France by Andre Dan of Challengy. He helps companies understand enterprise social networking and how to use it. Companies are really opening up and becoming more human to their customers by incorporating enterprise social networking functions. The leading tools in Enterprise Social Networking are Ning, IBM Lotus Connections (as presented by Ian McNairn from IBM yesterday and IBM is a huge advocate of social networking and they extensively use it internally), Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Jive. Two French tools are blueKiwi and Inspheris. The open environments are LinkedIn and Facebook and are also used in enterprise social networking. A French open tool is Viadeo. Boostzone Institute is an enterprise social networking tank in France. BlueKiwi Software is the leading European provider of enterprise social software. A lot of companies are now using enterprise social networking software companies to integrate social networking within their business.

In first talk at Social Networking Conference

I'm now in the first talk at the Social Networking Conference called Enterprise social Networking at IBM presented by Ian McNairn. He mentioned about most of the people in IBM have been there for less than 5 years and IBM uses enterprise tagging and social networking extensively in the company. It is part of their company strategy. Heath McCarthy from IBM mentions we use social networking software is for connecting with people. In IBM, approximately 60% of employees are actively using social networking mostly outside IBM. IBMers used LinkedIn as the most popular social network. The benefits of Web 2.0 social networking is improving the productivity of knowledge workers and building communities. It helps you to find people, find information, sharing, socializing and promoting yourself.

But why run social software internally? It is to increase innovation, employee cohesiveness, work quality, knowledge sharing and reduces risk. In the company, we have many profiles in the organization and right now there are different systems and it is not connected together. We need software to link all these resources together.IBM has harvested the data and have taken the homegrown solutions and created an internal product. IBM has a social networking software called Lotus Connections.

Ian just asked the audience how many people have an online CV (all the attendees raised their hands). How many updated the CV within a month, all hands went down. But it is easy to update your status on social networking sites. With tagging, we create knowledge communities and knowledge sharing. Also IBM's social networking software can help to make connections with other people in the organization based on mutual systems and things that are in common and tells you how you know that person. At IBM, you can use social bookmarks of particular web sites that you bookmark and then it gets harvested and put into Lotus Connections. Ian just showed the tag cloud of Sacha Chua, an IBM social networking expert, and also a colleague of mine from my PhD days at University of Toronto in the Interactive Media Lab.