Social networking for organizations: Who would you trust your data with?

I read an interesting blog by Irwin Lazar about the pitfalls he’d experienced by hosting his customer community on Facebook (“Using Facebook for Your Customer Community? Think Again!”). He’d been using Facebook as a key social portal to his customer base but his account had suddenly been suspended for reasons that weren’t very clear. In particular, he was lamenting the fact that such networks have the “ability to rescind or suspend accounts without any notification, explanation, or seemingly any recourse.”

In short, he’d experienced an issue not only with customer service when trying to retrieve his account, but also with the fundamental matter of ownership and control of data and the customer relationships that are key to his business.

It raises important points for the growing number of organizations looking to use social networking to communicate, collaborate and build their brands. Whilst many quite rightly take steps to exercise corporate governance by managing risks, nurturing customer relationships and protecting their brands, all this can break down if they entrust their data and marketing effort to social networking sites who can do pretty much what they want.

If you’re an organization of any kind – be it a company, educational establishment or even government-related body – it makes a lot of sense to run your own core social network and then feed information out to services like Facebook as you see fit. You can do this very effectively with open source platforms like Elgg.  Indeed at Elgg.com you’ll be able to have it hosted for you, whilst retaining full ownership and control of data as well as being able to use your own branding, all for less than the price of a daily cup of coffee.

I believe organizations will increasingly look for more robustness and control in their social environments, especially as enterprise-wide social networking becomes core to internal and external communication, collaboration and brand development.