When Tweeting trumps Friending

SocialText CEO Eugene Lee
argues that Twitter might be a better model than Facebook for next-gen
communications within companies, so-called Enterprise 2.0. Facebook’s
trouble? Reciprocal friending. The problem, he says, is that employees
on corporate social networks start collecting friendships of execs. “Because the Rolodex is public, it becomes a matter of VP trading
cards.”

A preferable model for corporate relationships, he says, is Twitter,
where people lend their attention, not necessarily their friendship. In
SocialText’s Twitter-like corporate offering, Signals, more people are likely to “follow” the CEO — assuming he or she has anything interesting to Tweet.

Lee, who stopped by our offices recently, also had thoughts
about enterprise search. Here’s the kind of question people ask each
other in companies. “You know that slide of the chart with the curve
that makes that double-dip?” And answers, Lee says, are almost
impossible to find on search engines.

Studies indicate, he says, that knowledge industry workers spend the
equivalent of one day per week searching for people or information.
Often, the key is to find “the person who knows the person who knows
the answer.”

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Of course Lee’s betting that companies will harness social tools to
find that information and make workers more productive. The only
problem, from my perspective: Sometimes questions are dumb, and it’s
less embarrassing for employees to pound away on Google and desktop
search…

(cross-posted on Blogspotting.net)