Social networking

Some interesting thoughts from Marie Wallace of IBM here. Indeed, “social” as a term carries a lot of baggage. Basically, for me, it’s about people collaborating in pursuit of a common purpose – in the case of business “social networking”, it’s the pursuit of better business outcomes for all stakeholders.

If that means the Hong Kong office talking about its ski-ing holiday with the Austrian office, that’s probably just fine – perhaps they didn’t know of each others’ existence before and business collaboration has to start somewhere.

I am rather impressed by the maturity of IBM’s approach to the “social business”, after talking to those involved.