The Future of Tech May 22, 2008, 5:00PM EST

Beyond Blogs

(page 2 of 4)

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Today, wikis are a common tool for young workers Patrick Fraser/Corbis Outline

Kerry Miller's blog, Passive Aggressive Notes, has become a sensation Mark Stanton

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. The social network is now partly owned by Microsoft Markham Johnson

But blogs, it turns out, are just one of the do-it-yourself tools to emerge on the Internet. Vast social networks such as Facebook and MySpace offer people new ways to meet and exchange information. Sites like LinkedIn help millions forge important work relationships and alliances. New applications pop up every week. While only a small slice of the population wants to blog, a far larger swath of humanity is eager to make friends and contacts, to exchange pictures and music, to share activities and ideas.

These social connectors are changing the dynamics of companies around the world. Millions of us are now hanging out on the Internet with customers, befriending rivals, clicking through pictures of our boss at a barbecue, or seeing what she read at the beach. It's as if the walls around our companies are vanishing and old org charts are lying on their sides.

This can be disturbing for top management, who are losing control, at least in the traditional sense. Workers can fritter away hours on YouTube. They can use social networks to pillory a colleague or leak secrets. That's the downside, and companies that don't adapt are sure to get lots of it.

But there's an upside to the loss of control. Ambitious workers use these tools to land new deals and to assemble global teams for collaborative projects. The potential for both better and worse is huge, and it's growing—and since 2005 the technologies involved extend far beyond blogs. So our first fix is to lose "blogs" from our headline. The revised title: "Social Media Will Change Your Business."

Even when researching a story like this, it's easy to fall into old patterns. Let's see, we thought as we started out: Which top executives are embracing social media? Sun Microsystems (JAVA) chief executive officer Jonathan I. Schwartz is a blogger. What's he up to? IBM (IBM) set up its own social network for employees, Beehive. It has 30,000 employees on it. We should definitely give them a call.

But hold on. If we're writing about new networks that extend beyond companies and break down their walls, and if these technologies are often beyond the control of executives, what are we doing calling the bosses? Like many others in business, we have developed top-down reflexes that are nearly Pavlovian. We have to deprogram ourselves.

So. How to get in touch with the grass roots? We try Twitter, the microblogging sensation. People use it to send tiny haiku-like messages (140 characters maximum) to everyone who chooses to receive their feeds. The two of us each has a few hundred people following our posts, either on the Twitter page, sites like Facebook, or (for a few fanatics) the cell phone. Who are these people? Well, they're just that, people. They're not organized by industry or rank. They're screen names, just like us (stevebaker and heatherlgreen). An estimated 1 million folks are on the Twitter service now. It's a small number, but it includes lots of influential voices, especially in tech. Some follow friends to learn what they had for breakfast or what they saw at the Vatican Museum. But they also may see what technologies their competitors are putting into alpha tests and get the buzz on new rounds of financing. Work and leisure, colleague and rival; they all blend on these networks.

THE 140-CHARACTER RESUME

We send out a few posts on Twitter (they're called "tweets") asking people how social media are changing their work. Scores of responses pour in. People learn what colleagues are up to, inside and outside the company. They see trends. They make contacts. They learn. Some even sell. A Dell (DELL) employee who goes by the Twitter name of Ggroovin tells us that Dell's service on Twitter has brought in half a million dollars of new orders in the past year. Some on Twitter sniff around for the next job. "The new résumé is 140 characters," tweets 23-year-old Amanda Mooney, who just landed a job in PR.

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