Dvir Reznik | The (old) Blog

As promised last week, you can read the full interview TheMarker held with my friend Arjan Radder, Social Software Sales Mgr., IBM Europe. Interviewed by Or Herschauna.

Arjan will be speaking at TheMarker Com.Vention Conference coming Sunday, March 29.

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Facebook Is Not for Enterprises

Arjan Radder, Social Software Sales Manager in IBM Europe, believes that a Social enterprise networks can have a crucial role in enhancing organizational efficiency.

By Or Herschauna

The first time Arjan Radder, who is responsible for social software sales in IBM Europe, heard that many IBM Israel employees have a Facebook profile he was surprised. “It’s very different for us in Holland,” said Radder who will attend and speak at the Internet convention: Com.Vention, organized by TheMarker on March 29.

A quick check indicates he is right. There aren’t any Dutch IBM employees in Facebook or, at least, not any employees who mentioned the name of the company for which they work. Radder quickly regains his composure. “It’s actually logical,” he says, “Facebook is very popular in Israel. In Holland, for example, most employees have a profile in LinkedIn network, a network with business links. People’s Facebook account in Holland is only for private use – family and friends.”

Radder’s role at IBM involves in leveraging the advantages of social networks in the enterprises.

“When web sites like LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook started to become popular we understand that we at the IBM, have actually been doing something similar for over a decade. For example, we have a network of employee profiles called Blue Pages, which is almost identical to LinkedIn. It is no simple matter to make communications in an organization of almost 500,000 employees efficient. We are spread out over the entire world and engage in fields with a large amount of knowledge. It was simply a matter of necessity for us,” he explains. “We also have 80,000 blogs at the company, ad 12,000 communities,” he adds.

As part of its use of the advantages of the open social networks IBM recently incorporated Lotus Connect and Beehive in its organizational social networks product. Beehive expands the standard user profile in IBM software and makes it similar to the Facebook profile. Beehive allows surfers to upload pictures and events to the profile, and to add comments to the profiles of other users. Radder finds it easy to explain the significance of social applications in an enterprise like IBM.

“Once, when I searched the Internet for something, I’d do it through the regular search engines and receive, at least, hundreds of results. Now I get two results – the first is the results from the general search engines, like Google, and the second is a result from the links that IBM employees uploaded to IBM’s shared tag web site, which is similar to the Delicious social tag site. In most cases the second result is more relevant to my purposes,” he explains.

Saving Search Time

Radder notes that in house research IBM carried out indicated an increase of 50% in employees satisfaction with the search results. “Moreover – not only do I only get relevant results I can also examine the ratings that the company employees gave to the link and, at the click of button, I can start a chat with someone who has already looked for the concept,” he continues. “Can you imagine how much search time is saved in an organization the size of IBM,” he asks.

Radder presents the advantages offered to the enterprises by social software. “Take, for example, the immediate message programs – this is one the easiest business examples. It is very easy to show the tremendous saving which organizations can obtain using such software, in terms of the cost of telephone calls and storage space for emails,” he explains. Nonetheless, he does not recommend the popular programs in this field, such as Microsoft’s Messenger or Yahoo, Skype or Google Talk. “There are regulatory requirements for information storage. For example, organizational solutions for social networks contain the users’ immediate messages for a period of around three years, as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (the law which requires public companies traded in the USA to report in-house company audits). We should thank our friends from Enron for this,” he adds jokingly.

“Until a few years ago organizations that wished to use social tools contacted the accepted Internet portals, simply because of the lack of alternatives. These tools, however, are simply not suitable for organizational needs,” he explains. The first and foremost reason for the lack suitability, according to Radder, relates to the inability to perform user identity verification in an appropriate manner in the open social networks, such as LinkedIn and Facebook. “Moreover,” he explains, “there is, of course, a major problem of security and compatibility with the regulations.”