Business Social Networking: Gearing Up for the New Age Workforce
The world economy depends on the success of both large and small businesses around the world and their profit or loss statements. Business enterprises are not stand-alone units but an interrelated network of organizations that are dependent on each other, from setting up production centers to manufacturing, advertising and marketing, a process carried on for generations. Business networking is considered a low cost but effective marketing technique. Wikipedia defines it as a socio-economic activity through which groups of like-minded business people recognize, create, or act upon business opportunities.
However, with technological innovations, this long-term method of building relationship and gathering contacts has gone online. A business social networking is thus a professional network service implemented with the help of information technology to support business relationships and opportunities at a global level. Today as most business enterprises aim to go global, they make use of technology enabled business social networks to promote themselves online and expand their circle of business contacts.
Further, with globalization, businesses have expanded worldwide with a number of offices, mobile workforce and partners spread across geographies. Under such circumstances, business social networking through the corporate networks or the World Wide Web makes it easier for online team collaboration and to achieve business objectives. Just like the facsimile and paper files have been replaced by email and file transfers through corporate network leading to a paperless office, Gartner predicts social networking service to replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications in nearly 20% business users by 2014.
The business social networking movement will help organizations :
- To identify business areas with obstacles and opportunities.
- Strategize cross-selling process to improve the sales.
- Accelerate the process of identifying people with knowledge and expertise as per job requirement.
- Evaluate the business network with the use of right metrics.
Moreover, the need for bridging the gap between disparate teams, has led to organizations opting for social networking software and tools t . Leading IT service providers have developed business social networking applications befitting today’s dynamic business environment. This social business software with its varied features facilitates employees’ a cross-platform access to documents and discussions and develop rich profiles with the help of group-based structure that allows for easy and seamless group collaboration. The search engine and smart tags of this software facilitates easy information retrieval irrespective of the time, location and device.
The business social networking software developed by the leaders of the industry not only helps employees to microblog and be update with their peer groups, team members and colleagues but also paves way for organizations to understand coalitions and activity centre within the organization, understand the team members, their strength and weaknesses and individual career aspirations. Such information will help organizations designate future leaders and key personnel.
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