Corporate social networking: "Trust is cheaper than control"

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There’s no shortage of debate about social networking from a consumer perspective, but corporate social networking often gets ignored. Whether it’s internal communications, B2B communications/online PR or simply employees networking, the corporate picture often makes way for amusing viral games or YouTube when it comes to online attention.

So, I was pleased to have the opportunity today to attend the Corporate Social Networking Event, organised by Six Degrees. Unfortunately, I could only attend the morning sessions, but this seemed to be the summary of what I learned, based on my notes and looking back at the Twitter stream.

1. Suraj Kika from CMS company Jadu opened proceedings and said that it was the end of the “document web” and we’re now in the “social web” 
2. Niall Cook, author of Enterprise 2.0, spoke about digital natives and said that corporates need to watch out what happens when then they enter workforce in a management capacity. He also said that a culture of command & control couldn’t survive
3. Robert Johnson from COI said (tongue firmly in cheek) that the difference between social networking and corporate social networking is that you replace all your friends with people that are useful to you
4. He also talked about how corporate social networking can help employees seek out information for themselves and discuss what’s on their minds with peers. It reminded me a great deal of the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the self actualisation aim. At times the event had a very HR feel, probably due to quite a few internal comms people in the audience.
5. When talking about the fear organisations have to allow staff to use social media, Dirk Single, co-founder of Cow, came up with a good analogy and said that social media in the workplace is a bit like email ten years ago. He described a company he worked for at the time when you had to go down to the IT department to receive emails which were printed off because companies were frightened of staff spending all day emailing friends or talking directly to clients
6. He also said that so called ‘cyber slackers’ (people using social networking sites at work) are the most productive members of the workforce, according to some research from Ohio University, which I dug out from his blog
7. Euan Semple, formerly director of knowledge management at the BBC, said that part of the problem businesses have is in the use of the word “social”, which implies staff aren’t working
8. Sonia Carter, head of online internal communications at AXA, explained how she managed to crack social networking for internal communications in a “traditionally risk averse” organisation
9. Part of her success was attributed to bribing/ignoring the HR and IT departments and reverse engineering corporate approval, but did confess that she got rapped over the knuckles for doing so. That said, 6 week roll out and £4k budget makes for good potential ROI
10. Soundbite of the day went to Lee Bryant, CEO of Headshift, who was talking about Enterprise 2.0 in the recession and said: “Trust is cheaper than control”
11. The runner up in the soundbite competition went to Thijs Sprangers from Krem, who spoke about how to get employees to engage in social networking, citing a LinkedIn case study: “Fish where the fish are”

In fact, overall throughout the morning, the issue of trust kept coming up with speakers urging companies to give up the mentality of controlling communications and trusting their staff a little more. Of course, this is a lot easier said than done, especially if it involves convincing a risk-averse CEO. But, at the end of the day, staff are online ambassadors these days whether companies like it or not. It may be that we’ve taken our first steps to understanding what this means for online PR and corporate communications, but sessions like today’s gave some clues to what it might look like.

Tagged as: corporaet social networking, Euan Semple, Jadu, linkedin, Ohio University, online PR, Robert Johnson, social networking, suraj kika, trust, twitter