‘Most feared’ social site?
Jinfo Blog

2nd March 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Groningen in the Netherlands enjoyed its five minutes of fame recently when one of its residents became the 60 millionth member to join LinkedIn (http://digbig.com/5bbdbq). But as engaging with social networking becomes a number one business imperative for 2010, are we at last seeing a clear split in the purposes to which the world’s leading services are put? LinkedIn may be congratulating itself on its 60 millionth member, but Facebook can expect to be ten times that size by the end of this year. However, as the IT analyst Gartner explains, Facebook’s writ doesn’t run everywhere; it won’t be number one in any of the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China – nor in Japan (see Penny Crossland’s posting at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27558 for more on this). Gartner warns that marketers and customer service management will need to switch focus from the large number of social networks to the three or four that will dominate specific languages. Perhaps much more significantly, though, it also forecasts that by the end of 2010, more than 80% of market growth in social applications will centre round improving not internal collaboration – the corporate information manager’s stock in trade – but external customer relationships (http://digbig.com/5bbdbr). Gartner’s prediction is supported to some extent by new research from market analyst Datamonitor, which shows that 50% of United Kingdom consumers are using a variety of online tools to make their financial decisions, compared with 41% globally. Social Media in Financial Services 2010 warns that traditional banks will need to recognise the value of social media if they are to keep their grip on customers (press release at http://digbig.com/5bbdbs but – astonishingly – registration required to see it in full). None of this may be particularly revelatory to astute information managers, who have long been aware of the potential of social networking, both inside the organisation and beyond. But the growing evidence of the need to concentrate on just a few services for different purposes may be helpful – and it works with the negatives as well as the positives. According to a ‘social security’ survey from IT security firm Sophos, Facebook is not only the biggest social network but also the ‘most feared’, with 60% of respondents believing it poses the greatest security risk, compared with a paltry 4% for the strictly business-orientated LinkedIn (http://digbig.com/5bbdbt). But with 72% of firms worried that workers’ behaviour on social networks is putting their business at risk, even LinkedIn could present its own hazards. ‘Sites like LinkedIn provide hackers with what is effectively a corporate directory, listing your staff’s names and positions ... child’s play to reverse-engineer the email addresses of potential victims,’ Sophos warns. True; but it also means it’s a great tool for legitimate competitor analysis.

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