It’s been a while I haven’t shared one of my “paper” readings. The most interesting book I’ve read these last months is Driving Results Through Social Networks: How Top Organizations Leverage Networks for Performance and Growth.

Businesses are now getting very interested in social networks, making the same mistakes they often did with communities : having a stactic and sometimes erroneous vision. Which leads to predictable results : “we don’t understand”, “where’s the ROI”, “what would make people use this software”….

It’s now time for businesses to understand that :

• Social Networks were not born with the softwares and services that wear the same same and that are only catalysts. It’s the way people have been actually working for a long time. Your company is full of social networks even if no employee has a computer.

• Social networks are not tangles of people who link together and share (or not) information. It’s a way of working in order to get things done. We talk too much of Facebook although business networks are different, have their own rules and purposes.

• Social Networks are not static things that are deployed and set up, they are changing, living things, which internal activity is not predictable.

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