Companies venture into social networks terrain

by Nancy Weil

June 22, 2005 —

Not long after he launched Franbuy Inc. early this year, Kevin Abt decided that he needed to showcase his credentials and his company's values to prospective clients who find him on the Internet. Abt connects people who want to go into business for themselves with franchises that could be a good fit for their needs.

"It's kind of like being a matchmaker," Abt said of the business, which he operates out of his home in Sharon, Massachusetts, south of Boston. "I will put them before two, three, four opportunities that I think will fit with them."

Abt wanted to control the information that was presented about him, so he turned to Ziggs Inc., a Boston-based search startup where professionals can seek out potential business contacts from online profiles hosted by Ziggs and written by the individuals they are about. Abt chose to have a family photo along with a biographical narrative on the Ziggs database while he finishes a Web site for his company. His domain, franbuy.com, redirects to the Ziggs database.

"In 60 days' time, I've built relationships with consultants and business brokers in 35 different cities," Abt said recently after he had used Ziggs' service for two months. His use of Ziggs is an example of how people are increasingly using technology for building work-related webs of relationships, or social networks.

Social networks as an area of study is well established, melding elements of sociology, psychology, management, information systems and computation. More recently, the combination of technology and social networks has taken root, sprouting startups hither and yon. At the same time, companies have increasingly turned to collaborative tools and applications to cut costs and increase performance and communications. Web logs, both publicly available and behind corporate firewalls, are a fairly new and important element of social networking, which is a whole different beast on the Internet, with its possibilities for connecting people.

Ziggs is one of the most recent entries into that ever-expanding commercial zone focused on helping people in a diverse spectrum of professions connect with others and keep their contacts current and organized. Ziggs' focus is on search technology rather than on networking per se, but the business model in play finds its roots in social networking, which caught a wave of investors in 2003, the year that LinkedIn launched.

Based in Palo Alto, California, LinkedIn is one of the most oft-cited examples of a commercial venture based on social networking concepts. LinkedIn membership is free and permits searching a database with information on 2.8 million professionals, according to the company. That number grows as users invite others to join their networks, prompting LinkedIn to send e-mail invitations to attract more people to sign up. Users can search for potential clients, sales leads, partners or industry experts, as well as look for jobs. Lawyers, public relations and marketing professionals, management consultants, financial planners and IT specialists also can be searched for at the LinkedIn site.

Friendster Inc., which sticks more with helping friends rather than business contacts stay connected, is another example of a social-networks service. Both Friendster and LinkedIn store profiles, allow users control over information kept and disseminated about them, and rely on search technology.

About 10 percent of the 400 million or so Internet searches daily are people looking for other people and in most of those cases the searcher "wants a concise, up to date accurate overview of the person -- where are they working, how do you contact them; if there's a photo, that's a bonus," said Tim DeMello, Ziggs' chief executive officer and founder.

People who are most adept at finding, organizing and managing their networks tend to use as few electronic devices as possible for doing that, invest time weekly to deal with information, make lots of lists and have had instruction in using search technologies, among other things, Tom Davenport of Babson College, in Wellesley, Massachusetts, said at a social networks conference hosted by IBM Corp. earlier this year. The "informationally adept" also focus on learning the capabilities of work-related software to help them keep control of information, including e-mail, which is integral to the social networks of many people today.

At IBM, in-house social networking bloomed despite the commercial failure of Discovery Server, which was launched by IBM subsidiary Lotus in 2001, after years of work. The loose idea behind that now defunct product was to provide a software system for organizing business contacts, Web sites and other sources of information. For instance, if someone at IBM research wanted to see who else in the company might be working on similar projects they could search the database and pop up contacts, as well as whatever other information the other person wanted to provide, complete with a photo and the ability to chat via instant message. Meanwhile, a personal portal stored URLs (uniform resource locators) and provided quick access to other data.

Discovery Server was released at about the same time that IBM stepped in to fully take over Lotus, which had been beset with leadership issues when it was a subsidiary. A combination of that bad timing and issues related to the software system left it doomed. IBM stopped selling the software in September 2004 and dropped support for it a year later. However, the company continues to use knowledge management software, theory and practices in-house and also devotes resources to social networks research. That effort includes support for a blog network that operates both internally and for public consumption.

"It's good to be here. I feel like I found the lost tribe of KM," said Dave Newbold, who was the discovery server architect, at a social networks workshop sponsored by IBM early this year. For a time in IT, knowledge management had created a big buzz partly because of IBM's weight. Newbold now works in emerging technologies at IBM, in the office of the chief information officer, but was part of building the "monumental" KM (knowledge-management) systems at Lotus.

IBM's KM system includes BluePages, which is part of the company intranet, providing biographical information on company employees, who choose the information they want to reveal about themselves. The IBM system also includes blogs accessible internally among particular work groups or more broadly within the company and support for employees to post on public blogs, an activity for which IBM has a corporate policy. IBM isn't unusual in its use of blogs or in its social networks research and use, but it has long been a leader in those areas.

"If you use blogs well they can enable you," blogging expert Bill Ives of Cambridge, Massachusetts, said in a recent interview at the IBM research campus also in Cambridge. "If you don't use them well, they can disable you or even get you fired."

Kate Ehrlich, an IBM researcher whose social network includes Ives, uses blogs as a navigational tool on the Web to find information she's looking for, as well as to connect with people. "Instead of going to Google, I go to Bill's Web site," she said of his blog, which includes entries on KM and links to other KM blogs and sites, as well as food and music entries and links (Ives' weekend postings).

Ehrlich uses blogs as a barometer to tell her when she should seek out more on topics that turn up in entries. She follows particular blogs in her areas of interest to see what information others have gotten and sifted through to post, she said.

Her interest in using such tools is practical -- to get her work done more efficiently -- and also academic because social networks are her area of expertise.

At its most academic, professors render 3D models of social networks built by analyzing the flow of e-mail within particular work groups or among individuals. They can use such analyses to show, for instance, that supervisors are communicating too much to each other and not enough to subordinates or to show where breakdowns occur in e-mail communications. Such social network analysis is widely used, including to study patterns of communication in cases of corporate malfeasance such as with Enron Corp.

Those who advocate that companies provide better training and tools for employees to manage information and social networks argue that doing so can lead to greater organizational success, less informational overload, and therefore less stress, for workers. After all, as Ehrlich said: "There is a network or multiple networks underlying all of our lives and everything we do."

IDG News Service