Social networks - who’s watching the big picture?
Jinfo Blog

12th June 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Online communities will be the most important category of ‘non-traditional stakeholder’ for companies in five years’ time, according to a new report from the Economist Intelligence Unit. Despite this, many companies are leaving it to public relations or marketing departments instead of incorporating new stakeholders into their strategic thinking at board level. These new relationships will carry risks, warns the EIU report Dangerous Liaisons: How Businesses are Learning to Work with their New Stakeholders (http://digbig.com/5bbsmk – registration required). Among these will be the possibility of reputation damage and the need to relinquish control over some proprietary information. There’s certainly no shortage of help available when it comes to protecting corporate reputations. LexisNexis, for example, has just announced a new alliance with Augure, an enterprise reputation management solutions provider. LexisNexis will contribute its analytical capability, monitoring and measuring reputation in a range of media, while Augure will bring campaign and workflow tools to the table, allowing an immediate response to any online coverage (http://digbig.com/5bbsmm). However this new service is aimed squarely at public relations professionals – reinforcing the EIU’s finding about lack of strategic oversight. Support for another key EIU finding – that companies will have to relinquish control because, in the words of one respondent, ‘everything will get out there in the end’ – comes from a further report earlier this year from Deloitte. Companies spent vast sums protecting their intellectual property, it concluded, when it would be more cost-effective simply to let people have it (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e28089). So this is a big deal, and corporate information managers should have a role to play within it. But where’s their point of entry? A landmark was passed in the United Kingdom last month when figures from the competitive intelligence service Experian Hitwise revealed that, for the first time, social networks received more visits than search engines. Nevertheless research director Robin Goad reported that the majority of online marketing spend is still diverted towards search (http://digbig.com/5bbsms). Just over half of those visits, unsurprisingly, were to Facebook, and the predominant business social networking site, LinkedIn, didn’t figure at the top. Yet, despite its niche operation – it’s just passed the four million mark for UK members (http://digbig.com/5bbsmp) – LinkedIn dominates overwhelmingly elsewhere. According to the NetProspex Social Report (which lists the 50 most social corporations in America and the top 20 with employees on Twitter), nearly half of all social network membership in the largest United States companies is with LinkedIn, while Facebook scarcely gets a look in (download the data at http://digbig.com/5bbsmq or see Resourceshelf’s coverage at http://digbig.com/5bbsmr). Draw all these threads together and this is big picture stuff, transcending PR & marketing, intellectual property issues and peer-to-peer collaboration. Corporate information professionals seem the obvious candidates to manage it.

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