Social networking for business

No line between home and work

Gen Y will be “the most high-performing workforce in history, for those who know how to manage them properly,” said business consultant and author Bruce Tulgan, founder of RainmakerThinking. Young workers may not be as willing as their elders to sit in a cubicle for 40 to 60 hours a week, but their familiarity with remote technology means they can be productive outside the office and beyond the 9-to-5 work day.

Solution providers can offer the technology that younger workers want to do their jobs on the terms that make them most productive, said Huddle co-founder Andy McLoughlin.

“Our story is, it’s not just what Huddle can do for you right now, it’s about planning for when the MySpace generation enters the workplace,” McLoughlin said.

Professionalism still important

At Demo 08, Huddle’s presentation was followed by Catalyst Web Services LLC, a startup peddling a hosted, Microsoft Outlook-style suite of business communications tools designed for SMBs. The über-hip, Gen Y-heavy spiel of the preceding act somewhat unnerved Catalyst CEO Bob Mathew, he admitted.

“Having a clean interface like that is pretty appealing. It made us say to ourselves, ‘Hey, do we have the right business plan here?’” Mathew said.

The doubts didn’t last long. Catalyst’s software suite may be bread and butter, but SMBs who want to get up and running quickly and affordably are going to find its professional look and dependability to their liking, Mathew said.

“I do think the work environment is going to change and I think Web 2.0 is going to change things, but I don’t think it translates directly to having to change all your IT tools to Web 2.0. It really becomes more a question of company policy, more than software,” Mathew said.

Mathew’s argument has a somewhat surprising defender in Tyler Dikman. Now in his early 20s, Dikman was just 17 when he made his first million building systems and reselling Dell products. Today, he remains CEO of CoolTronics, but has branched out to become a principal at FlickIM, a chat program designed specifically for the iPhone.

Meeting of the mind share

Dikman may not find Facebook – and by extension, Huddle – particularly appealing tools for a professional business environment. But that doesn’t mean the success of social networking platforms in the consumer space can’t be seized upon by the developers of strictly
business tools.

“I think if anybody’s going to be successful today ... I’d say LinkedIn has highest chance of success,” he said, adding that IBM’s Lotus SameTime instant messaging and Connections social software were leading the pack in leveraging Web 2.0 for the enterprise.

McLoughlin counters that his company is targeting SMBs who have big IT needs but small IT budgets, and more specifically, young people staffing, managing and eventually owning such companies.

“We really see our key market as being the SMBs,” added McLoughlin.

business for networking social software