Scrambling for social networking
Jinfo Blog

20th November 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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With the innovation around social networks in the marketplace, there's never been a more auspicious time to do it, says Nancy Davis Kho (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27061) – and there’s certainly evidence that plenty is going on. Within the space of a few days, Microsoft, Dow Jones and Salesforce have each announced new social networking applications. Microsoft is partnering with business social networking veteran LinkedIn to provide an early application for its new Outlook Social Connector; now available as part of the Microsoft Office 2010 beta, OSC adds a range of social features to Microsoft’s classic email, calendar and task management package (http://digbig.com/5baqtn). Enthusing over the new alliance, Elliot Shmukler of LinkedIn highlights three key benefits: keeping up with your LinkedIn connections from your email inbox; emailing your LinkedIn connections directly from Outlook; and using Outlook to continue building your personal network (http://digbig.com/5baqtp). Meanwhile Dow Jones is currently hosting an interactive online community for its Factiva customers called Dow Jones Idea Share. Perhaps a little more limited in scope than its name might suggest, it allows customers to correspond directly with other members of the Dow Jones Factiva community, as well as with DJ’s product development team who facilitate, rate and answer questions and ideas on the site (http://digbig.com/5baqtq). And customer relationship management software specialist Salesforce has announced the launch next year of a new social platform called Chatter. Designed as both a collaboration application and a platform for building social cloud computing applications, Salesforce’s claim is that it will allow customers, partners and developers to create custom applications for secure use within the enterprise (http://digbig.com/5baqtr). As Nancy suggests, there’s bound to be more and more of this as other specialist providers scramble to develop their own proprietary social networking applications. But ubiquitous social networking may just turn out to be a two-edged weapon. Pulling together the results of a handful of recent surveys, the global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas (http://digbig.com/5baqts) reports that use of social networking as a job search tool is ‘exploding’ – particularly as a result of its increased use among business professionals. Indeed, the most rapidly growing age group represented on Facebook is the 35-and-older population. But John Challenger urges caution. Citing as an example the recent marriage of LinkedIn and Twitter (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e26788), he points out that, as these sites become increasingly intertwined, it becomes easier and easier for potential employers to access the more personal aspects of job seekers' lives. A job seeker is twice as likely to be eliminated from consideration as hired based on his or her social networking site content, Challenger reports one survey as saying. Comments made for a private audience are available to employers at the click of a mouse – and they’re permanent.

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