Social Networking Platforms For Business?

Huddle, the company Shipley was introducing for its six-minute demo, aims to change that.

The London-based social networking company was at Demo to introduce the integration of its hosted work space tool with Facebook. On Huddle, users from disparate locales can build or join workspaces—called huddles—for personal or professional projects. Each huddle gets a project calendar, a filing cabinet for sharing documents and files, a whiteboard for brainstorming and other useful tools. With its Facebook-style interface and now full integration with the social site itself, Huddle is billed by co-founder Alistair Mitchell as the place "where work and play collide."

Huddle offers four tiers of membership. The first gives users three work spaces and 1 Gbyte of storage for free. The next three tiers—marketed at professionals, small businesses and enterprises—cost between $20 and $98 per month and offer up to 50 work spaces, 25 Gbytes of storage, unlimited users, 128-bit SSL encryption for security and a customizable dashboard. An open API is available for developers and Huddle's proto-channel efforts consist of small commissions for resellers.

It's a platform Mitchell insists takes the fun of online social networking and points it in the direction of actually getting some work done. And with big U.K. retailers such as Boots already on board, London-based Huddle has some reason to believe its plan to tart up business communications for the MySpace generation has some legs.

But should IT solution providers care? Absolutely, say the documentarians of Generation Y. Some 70 million or so young Americans born between 1980 and 1995 are entering the workforce with different priorities, social networking needs and relationships with technology than previous generations.

If you're not thinking about meeting these young workers' IT needs, say the Gen Y evangelists, you might be planning for retirement sooner than you'd like.

No Line Between Home and Work

Analyzing the work habits and motivations of "Echo Boomers" has become something of a cottage industry within the business press. From Business Week to Time, there seems to be a constant stream of stories about job-hopping Gen Y workers and how to convince them to stick around at a company for the long haul. Because "the line between work and home doesn't really exist" for 20-something workers, writes Time's Penelope Trunk, "[t]hey just want to spend their time in meaningful and useful ways, no matter where they are."

Prescriptions vary for dealing with what business consultant and author Bruce Tulgan calls "the most highmaintenance workforce in the history of the world." The business decision-makers whom solution providers must please are probably hearing conflicting advice for best managing their Gen Y workers. But in general terms, what most consultants say is that younger people want more flexibility in where and how they work, more collaboration on work projects they are assigned and access to the familiar technological tools they need to make those things happen.

The upshot: Gen Y "will also be the most high-performing workforce in history, for those who know how to manage them properly," said Tulgan, founder of New Haven, Conn.-based consultancy RainmakerThinking. Young workers may not be as willing as their elders to sit in a cubicle for 40 to 60 hours a week, but their own flexible lifestyles and familiarity with remote technology means they can be productive outside the office and beyond the 9-to-5 work day.Solution providers can't tell customers how to manage their employees' work schedules or project parameters. But they can offer the technology that younger workers want to do their jobs on the terms that make them most comfortable and 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 have a long ways to go before replacing more stodgy internal business communications apps from the likes of Microsoft and IBM, 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.

"Huddle is a complementary tool. It's groupware collaboration. It's getting good purchase in areas where companies have to collaborate outside the firewall. No matter how good a company's work space tools are internally, they'll break down outside the company," McLoughlin said.

Still, not everyone is ready to ditch tried-and-true technology just to woo a bunch of kids.

Professionalism Still Important

At Demo, Huddle's presentation was followed by Catalyst, 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.

"They gave us some pause to think about what we're doing. 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. There's room for both a Huddle and a Catalyst in the workplace, he said, and while appealing to Gen Y is important, doing so is more a matter of the right workplace policies than it is about technology.

"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.

"So you want your Gen Y folks to have fun at work. That's great, but it's got to be under certain parameters. If it's more of a thinking job, coming up with ideas, then maybe goofing around is okay. It depends on the context."

Mathew's argument has a somewhat surprising defender in Tyler Dikman. It wouldn't be exaggerating to call Dikman the Mark Zuckerberg of the channel. 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, the company he founded at 15 while attending high school in Tampa, Fla., 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 don't want to work where they play, or play where they work, or whatever. They want professional IT tools and they want separation between their collaboration on work and their social lives," Dikman said.

Nor does he buy the argument that recent college graduates, accustomed to collaborating on a Facebook or other free online platform, can't handle the transition to professional enterprise software interfaces. "That's just what you do when you get a job in the real world," 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, excluding any new ideas appearing, I'd say LinkedIn has highest chance of success. The reason for that is it gives you the ability to separate your personal information from your business information. It's a pure business-to-business tool," 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.

"It comes back to the MySpace generation. They're not happy with the idea that, 'We'll just e-mail this document back and forth.' They know there are better tools for collaboration out there. And for an older worker, when you show them what [Huddle] allows you to do, all of a sudden online collaboration goes from a dirty word he doesn't understand to something he can use in his business."