Social Networks Versus Email

By Stephanie Jordan
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As part of its preparations for Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit 2010 held earlier this month in Baltimore, Gartner analysts shared predictions on the use of social software and collaboration in the enterprise.

“A lot has happened in a year within the social software and collaboration space, observes Mark R. Gilbert, research vice president at Gartner and co-chair of the Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit. “The growing use of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook by business users has resulted in serious enterprise dialogue about procuring social software platforms for the business.”

One of the key predictions that Gartner makes is that the greater availability of social networking services both inside and outside the firewall, coupled with changing demographics and work styles, will lead 20 percent of users to make a social network the hub of their business communications by 2014. Analysts think that during the next several years, most companies will be building out internal social networks and/or allowing business use of personal social network accounts.

Organizations are already finding ways to integrate social networking into marketing efforts and communications, so it makes sense that social networking will become more relied upon for business activities over email.

“The rigid distinction between email and social networks will erode. Email will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering while social networks will develop richer email capabilities,” expects Matt Cain, research vice president at Gartner. “While email is already almost fully penetrated in the corporate space, we expect to see steep growth rates for sales of premises- and cloud-based social networking services.”

Other research seems to confirm Gartner’s prediction. Keith R. Crosley, director of market development for Proofpoint, Inc. is one who does not dispute the finding. “In some rather informal research we conducted last year, Proofpoint found that more than half of UK workers and more than 40 percent of U.S. workers use social media platforms more than email in their personal lives,” he says. “About 10 percent of UK and 7 percent of U.S. workers said they already use social media platforms more than email in their professional lives. So it’s not much of a stretch to see this trend continuing to encompass 20 percent of business users in the next 4 years.”

But with the coming reliance on social networks, will the security of the channel be ready? Crosley believes that it will. “Over the next four years, I think that the security risks associated with social media platforms will be both better understood and better addressed. It’s reasonable to assume that they will be mature enough from a security standpoint.”

In addition, Crosley notes that like email, many of the risks associated with social media have both a policy and technology dimension and will continue to be fairly complex. “I’m thinking of data loss risks, acceptable use and related policy issues.”

Gartner is in agreement. As part of the prediction, Gilbert expects that success in social software and collaboration will require a concerted and collaborative effort between IT and business units. Gartner recommends that organizations develop a long-term strategy for provisioning and consuming a rich set of collaboration and social software services, and develop policies governing the use of consumer services for business purposes.
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Eye on Messaging is written by Stephanie Jordan, editor in chief of Messaging News. If you have story ideas or news to share, email her: sjordan [at] messagingnews [dot] com

Published March 15, 2010