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Locating employees who have specific knowledge or experience within a large organisation is an oft-cited benefit of internal corporate social networking. It is argued that by allowing employees to build profiles describing their personal expertise and recording their interactions publicly – in a similar fashion to such ‘professional’ social networking sites as LinkedIn – businesses can at last address the perennial problem of cross-departmental knowledge transfer.

Gareiss argues that a combination of these features and such UC functionality as click-to-call or click-to-videoconference would have particular utility for staff in customer- or client-facing roles. In the context of a sales pitch, when time and expertise can make the difference between closing a deal or losing a potential customer, she says, this amounts to something resembling a business case for converging social networking and UC.

However, Gareiss warns that the combination of unified communications and social media could intensify the security and regulatory concerns already associated with each individually.

Combined concern

By breaking down the distinction between one-to-one customer service and marketing or PR, for example, UC-empowered social CRM will make current corporate messaging policies difficult to enforce. “The problem is that all other forms of [outbound communication] have to go through marketing or PR or similar channels, to ensure that it fits legal or privacy criteria – and all of that kind of goes out the window,” Gareiss explains. “Information might be getting out that should not be getting out.“

Nick Sears, vice president for EMEA at security software vendor Facetime, proposes a similar concern. “The UK Companies Act mandates that you must put your company’s registered name, address and number on any externally bound communications if you are a registered company,” he explains. “Many people do not think about that as they deploy UC.” This could have serious connotations for outgoing correspondence that goes through social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter – the latter being notably awkward, due to its rigid 140 character limit.

In the end, though, it may not be such businesslike concerns that determine the viability – or otherwise – of the combination of unified communications and social media.

The driving force behind end-user technology adoption, even on business premises, has long passed from the IT department to the consumer. The use of social media in the workplace – for business as well as personal reasons – is a particularly potent example of this, as it has often occurred in direct contravention of corporate IT policy.

Business adoption of UC 2.0 is therefore unlikely to prove widespread until a similar service has gained momentum on the public web. A number of services approaching this vision are already available – web-based VoIP provider Jajah’s ‘@call’ offering that allows users to make phone calls to their contacts on Twitter is but one example – but none has yet tipped into mainstream adoption.

That may be about to change, considering that mobile telephones are today being used both to conduct IP telephone calls through such services as Skype and to access social media sites.

Until that happens, however, the potential utility of a combination of social media and unified communications will probably remain like that of its constituent parts: largely untapped.

CASE STUDY

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