World Crisis Online

Image via CrunchBase

It’s official:  2010 was the year of Facebook.  With more than half a billion members, the social network was even more frequented than Google.

To provide context, the Internet counts close to 2 billion users.  So, although Facebook is not the Internet, it represents about 25% of its footprint.  The social network’s success is indicative of the evolution of our “Internet culture” and enterprise executives should pay attention.

To date, the media has done a good job turning the “Facebook Story” into a great drama.  The “Social Network” movie, last week’s CNBC special “The Facebook Obsession”, and Barbara Walter’s interview of Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg have, in aggregate, portrayed social networking as an addiction or, at best, a distraction that most pre-puberian individuals have fallen victim to.

Have we fully digested the impact that Facebook could have to our employees’ lives though?  Should the ‘social model’ of modern internet applications like Facebook serve as a guide for the applications we design or buy for our own employees?

Most executives don’t seem to worry about it, mainly because they believe that social networking is for teenagers and that these applications are productivity drains anyway.  There is also the belief that employees can’t effectively use social networks to achieve “meaningful” outcomes. None of the above generalizations is true.

Take engagement as an example.  When Sysomos, a media monitoring and analytics firm, shared that roughly 75% of twitter messages weren’t re-tweeted (understand “forwarded”), the press concluded that social networking was un-engaging.  Articles flooded explaining that 75% of twitter traffic was likely irrelevant.  Unfortunately, few journalists took the time to compare twitter numbers to what we know as the “1% rule”: for every knowledge management system, you should expect 1% creation, 89% of passive attention and 10% of active interaction.

In this context, it seems that twitter raises the bar from 10% to 25% active attention.  If you don’t know how to feel about this data, test it against your own email usage: how many emails do you read that you don’t respond to or forward?  If the answer is more than 3 out of 10, maybe you should supplement your email communication with an internal twitter-like application as a great way to engage with employees.

Second myth: social network users are teenagers.  According to Digital Surgeons, 80% of Twitter users are older than 25 (60% for Facebook, close to 90% for LinkedIn).  As I highlighted in an earlier post, the average user is 37 years old.  Bottom line: the majority of your experienced employees use social networks today.  Don’t wait for “Generation Z” to hit your payroll in mass before you re-engineer your applications (by the way, what happens after “Generation Z”?).

Third myth: social applications are a waste of time.  Even though the press wants you to believe that even President Obama thinks so, this myth is not true either. Check out Andrew McAfee’s well documented work in Enterprise 2.0 or the many examples in Socialnomics by Erik Qualman. Social networking returns dividend to companies.  See this video to understand how President Obama used social networks to “win the election” (was that a “meaningful outcome” for his team?).

Once the myths are dispelled, social media provides a model for internal applications and executives would be wise to consider it.  Do you have counter examples to my argument?

Bruno Aziza is the co-author of Drive Business Performance: Enabling a Culture of Intelligent Execution and a fellow at the Advanced Performance Institute, an independent advisory group specializing in organizational performance. He has held management positions at Apple ( AAPL – news – people ), Business Objects/SAP, Symantec ( SYMC – news – people ) and Decathlon.  Follow him on Twitter @brunoaziza. E-mail him at bruno@brunoaziza.com.