Using social networking when making connections to co-workers and clients helps to improve and enhance collaborations like never before. With social networking, you have simple interfaces to put all the great ideas together which will encourage participation and collaboration. One aspect of the social networking process is building and maintaining each user’s social profile.
Social profiles are just like profiles on Facebook or MySpace. Business social network profiles acts as the interface to the company so using it to familiarize co-workers within the organization to everyone else, saves a lot of time and reduces the “getting to know you” factor dramatically. Users can point out strengths, skills, expertise and gives each user the ability to create a personal brand to highlight unique contributions by using social networking. Also being able to bring out personal interests adds personality to the profile. You can still build an organizational profile even as the users are able to express interests, build a tag cloud and upload a picture or avatar to describe themselves.
Having the personal information such as interests and skills as well as past projects listed means team leaders and managers can group people into communities with common traits. This makes putting together specific teams for special projects a snap. You will be able to simplify the process of putting together a team within minutes, instead of the days it used to take, by setting filters with specific skills and traits.
One big part of the social profile is the interface others see and work with. To have leaders and users work together in a manner that is not only transparent, but benefits everyone, there are guidelines and standards that are enforceable and are behind the scenes. This transparency reduces the amount of friction that’s always a part of the participation and collaboration processes, being able to filter groups with commonalities like experience, skills and interests enables team leaders to build tight, motivated teams. This makes for smoother collaboration and also puts users together in well balanced teams and communities.
Corporate social networking sites that are used and maintained well with social metrics and analytics become a great tool for the organization. Not only does it allow smooth information flow and easier collaborations but it also allows the entire organization to be more effective and efficient. The return on the investment in terms of dollars and added benefits makes for a great bottom line.