I was asked recently during a call with a client about the prospects for enterprise mobile social networking. My first response was that I thought two other things had to happen before that could become a reality - successful mobile implementations of social networking, and successful uses of social networking in business settings.
Having had the opportunity to think about it some more, I think that initial reaction is still the right one. Only once those two things are well established can the combination of the two really occur in the form of mobile enterprise social networking. And those aren’t insignificant barriers.
Ironically, even though I think the opportunities are far greater in some ways for mobile social networking, enterprise social networking actually seems to be taking off more quickly, in part because there are companies with the right assets to take the job on. Oracle, IBM and others are taking the lead in creating enterprise-grade social networks with the appropriate structure and controls for the business setting. They have the software expertise and the credibility and knowhow in business to make it work, and they are already doing so, both for internal use and for use by customers.
On the mobile side, most of the players only have half the story to tell - the social networking companies have the SN knowhow and the customer base, but not the mobile knowledge or operator relationships to really make things happen. The mobile implementation of Facebook (both the mobile website and the BlackBerry application) is limited at best and doesn’t do a lot of the things you’d want it to in order to be really useful. Mobile operators, who have many of the other pieces needed to make things work, don’t have the credibility as social networking providers in their own right, and so need partnerships with SN specialists to make things work. In time, the two groups will come together in such a way that mobile social networking is enabled in a more mainstream way, but we still have a long way to go.
Only once both of these trends move a lot further down the road does it make much sense to expect mobile enterprise social networking to take off. But that doesn’t mean that the various stakeholders shouldn’t start thinking about how it might work now. Both the Oracles and IBMs and the mobile operators and social networking sites should be actively working out how they will take advantage of this future opportunity today. But that shouldn’t prevent them from staying focused on nearer-term opportunities in both mobile and business flavors of social networking individually.
