Social Networks to Improve Your Company’s Bottom Line

Enterprise networking still receives a fair amount of skepticism in this day and age. Most companies fear that employees will waste time and that overall productivity will decrease. Despite major criticism, this latest article on eWeek discusses how Wachovia, the nation’s fourth largest bank, is launching an enterprise social networking site for its 110,000 workers.

The real value of enterprise networking shines the more it’s used. Wachovia envisions a knowledge management system where employees can not only build relationships across departments, but where they can easily collaborate, share ideas, and locate information. This will be done through blogs, an in-house encyclopedia and an intricate intranet made accessible through a Facebook-like service.

Burton Group analyst Mike Gotta, analyst at Burton Group mentions:

"Social networks improve the ability of people to do their work.”

Web 2.0 applications in the enterprise make it easy for employees to get together online and offline on projects. Workers can easily combine expertise from across departmental boundaries which were previously unattainable through a social enterprise. Traditional organizational charts and the nature of organizational hierarchies are changing with each growing day. Out with the old and in with the new.