Social Networking's ROI
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What's the business value of social networking software? Harvard Business School professor and blogger Andrew McAfee has come up with a good, non-intuitive answer, courtesy of a seminal 1973 article by Stanford University sociologist Mark Granovetter: titled "The Strength of Weak Ties." |
We're good at collaborating with the people we work closely with—people with whom we have "strong ties." But when it comes to innovation, it's the people with whom we have weak ties—"infrequent and more casual" connections—that often matter more. These people are bridges to people we don't know, with different ideas than the ones we're usually exposed to, and to resources that neither we, nor our colleagues, have now.
Granovetter's insight has been validated by subsequent business research, writes McAfee:
"...The implication for SNS [social networking software] is obvious: Facebook and its peers should be highly valuable for businesses because they're tools for increasing the density of weak ties within a company, as well as outside it.My Facebook friends are a large group of people from diverse backgrounds who have very little in common with each other. Furthermore, their profiles give me a decent way to evaluate their expertise. These online friends, in other words, are a large group of bridges to other networks. Facebook already provides me with a few good ways to activate these bridges for my own purposes.
I anticipate that enterprise SNS (whatever that turns out to be) will have many more."
