ANTenna Blog -- Business & E-Business

I've been scouring the tech predictions lists for 2008 and, along with the obvious trends -- virtualization will be big, more IT managers will be praying that Vista meets an early and painful death -- was one that could be surprising to smaller businesses: social networking is going to start to make business sense.

PC Magazine predicts that business users are going to finally see that sites like Facebook and Linkedin can actually be collaboration tools. Oh, and these sites will start developing apps that will actually attract corporate users.

Wired and PC World also see more business apps on social networks. According to PC World: "Services akin to the Salesforce.com offering that lets salespeople share leads and information will become standard in that market segment."
Is it time for smaller businesses to check this out?

ReadWriteWeb makes an interesting case for social networking in a recent blog posting. Writer Marshall Kirkpatrick lists 10 responses to common objections of social media adoption and many of them are pretty convincing for the small or midsize business trying to get noticed.

One of the objections many of us have heard over and over: "So much of what's discussed online is meaningless. These forms of communication are shallow and make us dumber. We have real work to do!" The response could make a smaller business reconsider: "If learning how the market feels about your organization, engaging with your customers and driving traffic to your web work - all very realistic goals for social media engagement - aren't work, then I don't know what is. Even in the short term, strategic engagement with online social media will have a clear work pay-off."

Another objection is also fairly common: "That stuff's fine for sexy brands, but we sell [insert boring B2B brand] and are known for stability more than chasing the flavor-of-the-month. We're doing just fine with the tools we've got, thanks."

The reply? "ROI is very hard to measure, but try allocating a little energy over time to experiment and see what kind of results you get. From connections between people and projects, to search-friendly inbound links, to early access to important information - the benefits of engaging in new social media go on and on."

Is your smaller business going to take the leap into social networking this year? Why or why not?

Check out what else is in store for IT in 2008 here.