But the potential could be much greater. Just as email changed how workers communicate in a company, social networks – which, Li argues, by their very nature encourage sharing – have the potential to make office communications more fluid and efficient by forming ad-hoc collaboration, avoiding duplication in projects, streamlining processes and increasing the flow of information among hierarchical levels.
As an example, when Stephen Elop became Nokia's (NOK) CEO, he used Socialcast to ask employees what needed to change. "The dialog not only helped him learn from the organization, but also signaled that a new type of relationship was dawning between the leadership and employees," the Altimeter report said.
And social networks don't have much of a learning curve, since many people are familiar with Facebook, Twitter and specialized sites like LinkedIn and Pinterest. But there hasn't yet been yet a platform that causes workers to take to it intuitively, the way so many people have to those consumer social networks. And that leaves a huge opportunity for a enterprise social networking company. What Facebook did for friendships and LinkedIn did for industry connections, enterprise social networks can do for a company's workforce. It's a big market waiting for someone to conquer it.
