Social Networking: Still not a friend of business

The majority of users of social networking websites are motivated mainly by personal needs and a desire for entertainment, rather than business and practical objectives, according to a survey by Gartner...

The IT research firm says that although the potential of such sites for business remains largely untapped, they will become increasingly important to the competiveness of large enterprises in the future.

“Social networking software holds enormous potential for improving the management of large enterprises,” says Nick Ingelbrecht, research director at Gartner.

“However, work in this area is still immature, and in the meantime, enterprises should be aware of what is happening in the world of consumer social networking and implement appropriate usage policies for employees’ use of services such as Facebook and MySpace on company time.”

Gartner says more than half of us don’t visit social networking sites regularly or at all. Of those who do, males tend to access mobile and online social networking services more frequently than females, and the most active users in terms of life stage and age are single people and teenagers.

Despite the hype surrounding social networking, internet users generally do not place a high level of importance on social network sites, compared with other mainstream internet applications, such as e-mail and search.

However, taken together with other broader forms of networking – including instant messaging, e-mail, sharing of photos and files, and chatrooms – there is a significant aggregate level of interest in the social aspects of communication as opposed to applications that are simply transactional, diverting or functional.

Gartner predicts that online social networking will come to be regarded as just the latest expression of a long-standing pattern of human behaviours that involves an increasing range of communications protocols and technologies.

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