Is it even possible for corporate IT to engage with social networks without selling out, and possibly even causing brand damage in the rush to ‘keep it real’?

Key attributes shared by all social networking sites are transparency and immediacy ­ and that is exactly what Mike Scott, UK head of innovation for Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), was looking for when he wanted a way of keeping customers informed about research at the Peterborough-based innovation lab he heads.

‘We could have started publishing yet another glossy corporate newsletter, but they usually go straight into the bin, they are expensive and the information flow is one-way,’ he says.

Instead Scott produced a new blog to not only update customers on what TCS is doing, but to also stimulate online debate on innovation. He hired technology journalists to contribute and encouraged TCS executives to comment, both on the blog and through audio podcasts.

In their book Wikinomics, authors Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams argue that increasing interaction with clients through interactive web technologies encourages a transparency that can have positive long-term business benefits.

‘Recently, smart companies have been rethinking openness and this is beginning to affect a number of important functions, including human resources, innovation, industry standards and communications,’ they say.

‘Companies were closed in their attitudes towards networking, sharing and encouraging self-organisation, in large part because conventional wisdom says that companies compete by holding their most coveted resources close to their chest.’

Tapscott and Williams go on to argue that organisations that make their
boundaries porous to external ideas and human capital ‘outperform companies that rely solely on their internal resources and capabilities’.

Such ideas echo the experience of Scott at TCS, who says that for a very low initial investment the firm has created an extremely collaborative environment.

‘Globally we have 19 innovation labs, and interaction between them has improved because of the blog, along with the better communication with those reading the information who might never have interacted with TCS if this was on glossy paper,’ he says.

It’s not just companies exploring the potential of social networking for reaching out to interested collaborators; politicians are also dipping a toe in the water. MP Michael Meacher ran his MM4PM campaign almost entirely on various social networking sites, before announcing he would stand aside to back John McDonnell.

Prior to the decision, Meacher’s campaign manager Dan Judelson said the Labour leadership election would be the first major party-oriented contest involving social network sites.

‘We can expect all three major political parties to draw lessons from them for the next general election campaign,’ he says.

‘The interesting thing about Facebook, Live Journal and MySpace is that they have the potential to put campaigns in places where a target audience already is ­ we are going to them, rather than designing an expensive-looking platform with any number of interactive plug-ins to make it look more interesting and hoping voters will turn up.

‘The test will be to see if political campaigns are accepted in social network sites.’

But beyond the use of blogs to reach out to interested consumers or voters, how else can companies use a collaborative web environment to their advantage?

Mahesh Ramachandran, a non-executive director of foreign exchange currency firm FXaWorld, says his firm decided to take advantage of the innovative networking possibilities offered through YouTube.

‘We decided to run an online competition that uses the system as a delivery platform,’ he says. ‘Basically, we asked the online community to upload their own videos to YouTube with the promise of a $10,000 cash prize for the video that best captured the spirit of our company.’

As a peer-to-peer company that directly connects a currency buyer to the seller using the internet, FXaWorld can already be viewed as an innovative organisation ­ but was Ramachandran afraid of people making spoof videos or in some way abusing the spirit of the competition?

‘Not at all,’ he says. ‘We have seen some excellent videos being produced, which we can now use for our own marketing purposes. If anyone wanted to go to the effort of making a negative spoof then it would in fact be quite complimentary ­ all online publicity is good publicity.’

But the networking and collaborative possibilities of the internet don’t have to be harnessed from the boardroom for the initiatives to be useful.

A Californian college student and former Starbucks employee, Andrew Gonis, created a MySpace group named Starbucks HQ 18 months ago ­ now he has 4,000 members.

The group was not created or endorsed by the company itself ­ Gonis wanted to create an unofficial environment where colleagues could connect with their international peers and share experience and ideas.

‘There is no way you can go wrong when you connect employees who share the same passion for your company,’ he says. ‘When you put such people together, their passions ignite and they feed off one another.’

Gonis believes that MySpace and other networking similar sites can humanise a brand or company.

‘Rather than having to look at a corporate dot com, the viewer is on equal ground with the company because MySpace is something they can identify with,’ he says.

Online collaboration is the next killer application. It is crucial technology leaders recognise that tapping into the creativity of your employees and customers through established web platforms is an essential key to future innovation. CB

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary is the author of a number of globalisation-themed technology books. He writes a blog on outsourcing for Computing. markkobayashihillary.computing.co.uk