Article from The Hindu Business Line: Social networking is serious business

Source: The Hindu Business Line (http://www.blonnet.com/2010/02/14/stories/2010021452440100.htm)

Social networking is serious business



Anjali Prayag
Swetha Kannan
Bangalore, Feb. 13
Too full after a heavy lunch at Mainland China,' reads Neeraj's Facebook status update. Two minutes ago, he had posted a comment on Shah Rukh Khan's latest brush with the Shiv Sena. But before you assume he is simply idling away at work, another window pops open and Neeeraj gets busy brainstorming with his colleague on whether to go with the cloud model for the company's latest project.
Employers may not be too happy about their employees tracking Shah Rukh Khan's tangles with the Sena on Twitter or Facebook, but on the flip side, they are also looking at the positives of social networking media. Companies such as EMC and IBM are not only allowing access to social networking sites, but are doing some frontal work in leveraging the power of social media.
These companies are using employees' urge to keep in touch with people to their advantage by also creating their own networking tools, which they believe are useful to businesses. Some entrepreneurs even include their LinkedIn, Twitter and Skype ids on business cards.
Says Mr Karthik Padmanabhan, Country Manager, Lotus Software - IBM India/South Asia: & Social networking is a great way to keep in touch with people and businesses must take advantage of this. After all, business is also about people and working with people; and social collaboration adds the fun element.
IBM has launched LotusConnections, a social collaboration tool that has all the features of social networking sites such as blogs, user profiles, wikis, file sharing, photos and forum capabilities, which help community members collaborate on projects.
Infrastructure storage company EMC, too, has over 200 active internal groups on its social media site EMC One wherein employees are collaborating with one another online to make presentations and exchange ideas.
"A lot of knowledge sharing happens through social media, whether it's Facebook or EMC One and we believe it can be converted into business benefits," says Mr R. Vidyasagar, Senior Director, HR, EMC India.
While at EMC it is mainly about internal knowledge sharing, IBM has also made it a business proposition and sold LotusConnections to around 2,000 companies including Colgate, Tata Sky, TCS and Airtel.
Companies are now approaching social media as L&D version 2 (learning and development), says Ms Yeshasvini Ramaswamy, Managing Director, e2e People Practices, an HR services firm. She, however, points out that this openness to the new media may not pick up as fast in Indian companies as it has in global majors. "Indian firms are still not open to honest employee views and perception which can be rampant on networking sites," she explains.
Surveys have revealed that only one in five companies allows the use of social media for work-related purposes. A study by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry in India shows that the productivity of employees has dropped mainly due to social media. The survey claims a corporate employee on an average spends an hour on social networking sites.


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