Social Networking For Business

No Line Between Home and Work
Gen Y will be "the most high-performing workforce in history, for those who know how to manage them properly," said business consultant and author Bruce Tulgan, founder of New Haven, Conn.-based consultancy RainmakerThinking Inc. Young workers may not be as willing as their elders to sit in a cubicle for 40 to 60 hours a week, but their familiarity with remote technology means they can be productive outside the office and beyond the 9-to-5 work day.

Solution providers can offer the technology that younger workers want to do their jobs on the terms that make them most productive, said Huddle co-founder Andy McLoughlin.

"Our story is, it's not just what Huddle can do for you right now, it's about planning for when the MySpace generation enters the workplace," McLoughlin said.

Breezy social networking platforms like Huddle still have a long way to go before replacing more stodgy internal business communications apps, admits McLoughlin. For now, Huddle's main appeal is as a hosted platform for external collaboration, whether through its own portal, the Facebook integration or both.

Professionalism Still Important
At Demo 08, Huddle's presentation was followed by Catalyst Web Services LLC, an Alexandria, Va.-based startup peddling a hosted, Microsoft Outlook-style suite of business communications tools designed for SMBs. The uber-hip, Gen Y-heavy spiel of the preceding act somewhat unnerved Catalyst CEO Bob Mathew, he admitted.

"Having a clean interface like that is pretty appealing. It made us say to ourselves, 'Hey, do we have the right business plan here?'" Mathew said.

The doubts didn't last long. Catalyst's software suite may be bread and butter, but SMBs who want to get up and running quickly and affordably are going to find its professional look and dependability to their liking, Mathew said.

"I do think the work environment is going to change and I think Web 2.0 is going to change things, but I don't think it translates directly to having to change all your IT tools to Web 2.0. It really becomes more a question of company policy, more than software," Mathew said.

Mathew's argument has a somewhat surprising defender in Tyler Dikman. Now in his early 20s, Dikman was just 17 when he made his first million building systems and reselling Dell products. Today, he remains CEO of CoolTronics, but has branched out to become a principal at FlickIM, a chat program designed specifically for the iPhone.

As a young VAR who is also heavily invested in a hip social networking startup, Dikman might be expected to evangelize for the acceleration of Web 2.0 in the workplace. But when we caught up with him in a telephone interview, he was anything but enthusiastic about work and play colliding.

"When I talk to my friends who are professionals, ... they want professional IT tools and they want separation between their collaboration on work and their social lives," Dikman said.

Meeting of the Mind Share
Dikman may not find Facebook—and by extension, Huddle—particularly appealing tools for a professional business environment. But that doesn't mean the success of social networking platforms in the consumer space can't be seized upon by the developers of strictly business tools.

"I think if anybody's going to be successful today, ... I'd say LinkedIn has highest chance of success," he said, adding that IBM's Lotus SameTime instant messaging and Connections social software were leading the pack in leveraging Web 2.0 for the enterprise.

McLoughlin counters that his company is targeting SMBs who have big IT needs but small IT budgets, and more specifically, young people staffing, managing and eventually owning such companies.

"We really see our key market as being the SMBs. With Huddle, they can do IT without having to have somebody tinker with a firewall or a box. And what we've learned with various user groups we survey, is that it is a tool being used for work," McLoughlin said.