By ALEX MINDLIN
Published: November 30, 2008

Canadian Internet users are far more likely than Americans to use a social networking Web site, according to September figures released by the research firm comScore. That number is consistent with Canadians’ generally heavy use of sophisticated Internet features like online video. “We joke that it’s because of those long winter nights up there,” said Andrew Lipsman, a senior analyst at comScore.

But it also reflects the broader truth that the popularity of such Web sites, and which services are at the top, can vary sharply in neighboring countries.

“One site may catch on in a certain country, and another may catch on elsewhere,” said Mr. Lipsman. “Often it’s whichever one gained prominence in the early phase of the game.”

For example, Google’s Orkut service, which has a third of Facebook’s traffic in the United States, is the dominant social networking site in both India and Brazil. ALEX MINDLIN

*Includes countries with a total Internet population of at least 10 million unique visitors in September 2008.

**Excludes traffic from public computers, such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones/PDAs.

“For Internet users in Brazil, social networking continues to flourish as a hugely popular activity,” said Alex Banks, managing director of Latin America for comScore. “One likely reason for social networking’s success in Brazil is that its concept of online community closely aligns with the culture in Brazil, which is also centered on a strong sense of community and social activity.”

Numbers Via Comscore

LinkedIn has a launched a revamped version of its search engine that aims to streamline the business social network’s most oft-used features. Most of the new features revolve around people-search (not surprising given the network’s theme), and while there isn’t anything particularly exciting from the user’s perspective the changes make the engine significantly more convenient (and will hopefully help the recently unemployed get back on their feet that much faster).

Many of the changes are subtle: as you begin typing names, LinkedIn will offer an autocompleted list of possible matches, similar to Facebook’s search. The engine also streamlines advanced search by presenting options in a more accessible menu (some of the features were previously available, but buried so that most users never found them). The engine is also making use of LinkedIn’s vast repository of structured data, automatically detecting when a search term is related to a name or to a person’s company and position.

One of the search engine’s most powerful new additions is persistent search, which allows users to effectively set up alerts notifying them when there is an addition to a company’s executive roster, or when an appealing job candidate is up for grabs (the feature will likely be a boon for headhunters). Before now there have been a few ways to create similar notifications (like Yotify, which we covered in September), but this is the first time that LinkedIn has integrated this functionality.

Cheng Wu is the co-founder and chairman of Azuki Systems.

As mobile social networks gain popularity, many are wondering how to ride the wave of this phenomenon. Leveraging the 3.3 billion potential mobile screens and the viral capabilities of social media, new forms of collaboration and media sharing will emerge and drive new sources of revenue.

As a result, we’ll see mobile social networking expand to build community around Web, user-generated and existing premium content – allowing users to discover and enjoy relevant content, rate and comment on high interest points, and share these elements with friends and colleagues, leading to a more vibrant, dynamic environment across both mobile and the desktop.

The Bad News

Today’s mobile social networks are admittedly primitive – confined to two fairly unattractive choices. Users can:

1. Access a mobile portal in an existing desktop community, where the experience is flat and text-oriented, or

2. Explicitly join a new mobile community in isolation.

It’s clear that change is needed.

The Good News

The broad availability of rich media-capable handsets is a harbinger of change, and with the increasing availability of platforms to enable interactive mobile media services, we’re also seeing the world of mobile evolve into a highly engaging and interactive means of sharing personalized and relevant content.

This evolving breed of mobile phones, along with the accessibility of one’s favorite content on mobile in bite-sized chunks that provide simplified navigation, is redefining the way people interact around content services. Mobile users are actively involved in sharing this ‘snackable’ content with friends and peers, voicing their opinions in online blogs, and viewing rich media content on a small, yet highly capable, mobile screen.

Additionally, mobile social networks are starting to incorporate location-awareness and contextualization capabilities to fine-tune the mobile experience and allow for more fluid formation of communities of interest around local events, news, sports or as an interesting clip that is quickly disseminated among friends. The viral, real-time nature, as well as the inherent contextual awareness, will expand both viewership and monetization options for content publishers, mobile operators and social networking brands.

What’s Next?

Interactive, Snackable Content
In order for mobile social networking to reach its potential, it needs to enable and be driven by interactive mobile content. This interactivity (in the form of rating, ranking, commenting, etc.) is key to enhancing the ‘stickiness’ of personalized and targeted mobile content in a snackable form. In addition, with the inclusion of these features, relevancy to the individual user is also greatly enhanced, increasing the likelihood of participation.

Focus on Content, Not the Community
To be successful and wide-spread, mobile social networking should revolve around the sharing of interactive, snackable, relevant content – and hinge much less on the sharing solely within a particular community. This new model implies cross-community dissemination, whereby group members are fluid and determined based on relevancy of said content. For this reason, it is important to keep in mind that adopting a one-size-fits-all approach for addressing social networks will be a mistake, and mobile users should not be pushed into any one particular network – but rather extend collaboration across Facebook, MySpace and other sites.

Integrate the Data
Mobile social networking will prove to be more about integrating mobile social data with desktop data and less about mobile specific data mining. Community data should be independent of the device that is used to access it. It needs to be a cloud resource in the Internet, accessible from all access devices including desktop PC’s and mobile handsets. Content publishers need to be able to leverage the existing content that is available on the desktop, and then have the ability to optimize it for personalized interaction on a mobile device.

Context-Enabled Social Communities
Mobile social networking also will involve real-time functionality and contextual awareness, with location-based services driving communication among physical communities. In that manner, and as interactive local content is rapidly disseminated, enthusiasm is generated about local happenings and local vendors, increasing the likelihood of service monetization and the overall success of mobile retailing.

Monetize
It follows then that mobile social networking represents the opportunity to monetize based on layered viral social activities over original content. For example, a pre-roll advertisement optimized for mobile consumption stands to be distributed to thousands of mobile users through user-initiated sharing of content on social networking sites. This radically increases CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) and drives revenue beyond a publishers own direct marketing efforts. Instead of the Web model of driving “eyeballs” to the ads, users drive the ads to the eyeballs.

There have already been some initial successes in mobile social networking that are now laying the foundation for this massive new category of advertising. By creating a more personalized experience for mobile users through contextual and bite-sized content, users naturally interact and share more through mobile mash-ups of this snackable content, involving contacts from their social networks. This creates an opportunity for viral mobile advertising where embedded mobile ads are shared along with the contextual content.

With interactive, personalized and snackable mobile content, the mobilization of fixed-Web social networks is indeed poised for growth and success.

Cheng Wu is the co-founder and chairman of Azuki Systems, which provides the industry’s first comprehensive interactive mobile media services platform, and is responsible for the company’s vision and corporate strategy. Wu is a successful serial entrepreneur and well-acclaimed industry veteran, having founded and led numerous businesses including ArrowPoint (acquired by Cisco for $5.7 billion), Arris Networks (acquired by Cascade Communications for $217 million) and Acopia (acquired by F5 Networks for $210 million).

Image courtesy of iStockPhoto, lindsayking, tforgo

By DAVID CARR
Published: November 9, 2008

In February 2007, a friend called Marc Andreessen, a founder of Netscape and a board member of Facebook, and asked if he wanted to meet with a man with an idea that sounded preposterous on its face.

Always game for something new, Mr. Andreessen headed to the San Francisco airport late one night to hear the guy out. A junior member of a large and powerful organization with a thin, but impressive, résumé, he was about to take on far more powerful forces in a battle for leadership.

He wondered if social networking, with its tremendous communication capabilities and aggressive database development, might help him beat the overwhelming odds facing him.

“It was like a guy in a garage who was thinking of taking on the biggest names in the business,” Mr. Andreessen recalled. “What he was doing shouldn’t have been possible, but we see a lot of that out here and then something clicks. He was clearly supersmart and very entrepreneurial, a person who saw the world and the status quo as malleable.”

And as it turned out, President-elect Barack Obama was right.

Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new. Instead, by bolting together social networking applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then John McCain and the Republicans.

As a result, when he arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama will have not just a political base, but a database, millions of names of supporters who can be engaged almost instantly. And there’s every reason to believe that he will use the network not just to campaign, but to govern. His e-mail message to supporters on Tuesday night included the line, “We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next.” The incoming administration is already open for business on the Web at Change.gov, a digital gateway for the transition.

The Bush campaign arrived at the White House with a conviction that it would continue a conservative revolution with the help of Karl Rove’s voter lists, phone banks and direct mail. But those tools were crude and expensive compared with what the Obama camp is bringing to the Oval Office.

“I think it is very significant that he was the first post-boomer candidate for president,” Mr. Andreessen said. “Other politicians I have met with are always impressed by the Web and surprised by what it could do, but their interest sort of ended in how much money you could raise. He was the first politician I dealt with who understood that the technology was a given and that it could be used in new ways.”

The juxtaposition of a networked, open-source campaign and a historically imperial office will have profound implications and raise significant questions. Special-interest groups and lobbyists will now contend with an environment of transparency and a president who owes them nothing. The news media will now contend with an administration that can take its case directly to its base without even booking time on the networks.

More profoundly, while many people think that President-elect Obama is a gift to the Democratic Party, he could actually hasten its demise. Political parties supply brand, ground troops, money and relationships, all things that Mr. Obama already owns.

And his relationships are not the just traditional ties of Democrats – teachers’ unions, party faithful and Hollywood moneybags – but a network of supporters who used a distributed model of phone banking to organize and get out the vote, helped raise a record-breaking $600 million, and created all manner of media clips that were viewed millions of times. It was an online movement that begot offline behavior, including producing youth voter turnout that may have supplied the margin of victory.

“Thomas Jefferson used newspapers to win the presidency, F.D.R. used radio to change the way he governed, J.F.K. was the first president to understand television, and Howard Dean saw the value of the Web for raising money,” said Ranjit Mathoda, a lawyer and money manager who blogs at Mathoda.com. “But Senator Barack Obama understood that you could use the Web to lower the cost of building a political brand, create a sense of connection and engagement, and dispense with the command and control method of governing to allow people to self-organize to do the work.”

All of the Obama supporters who traded their personal information for a ticket to a rally or an e-mail alert about the vice presidential choice, or opted in on Facebook or MyBarackObama can now be mass e-mailed at a cost of close to zero. And instead of the constant polling that has been a motor of presidential governance, an Obama White House can use the Web to measure voter attitudes.

“When you think about it, a campaign is a start-up business,” Mr. Mathoda said. “Other than his speech in 2004 at the convention and his two books, Mr. Obama had very little in terms of brand to begin with, and he was up against Senator Clinton, who had all the traditional sources of power, and then Senator McCain. But he had the right people and the right idea to take them on. When you think about it, it was like he was going up against Google and Yahoo. And he won.”

There is tremendous power in opening citizen access to government – think of how much good will and support Mayor Michael Bloomberg garnered by coming up with 311, a one-stop phone number for New Yorkers who had a problem.

But now Senator Obama’s 20-month conversation with the electorate enters a new phase. There is sense of ownership, a kind of possessive entitlement, on the part of the people who worked to elect him. The shorthand for his organizing Web site, “MyBO,” says it all.

“People will continue to expect a conversation, a two-way relationship that is a give and take,” said Thomas Gensemer, managing partner of Blue State Digital, which helped conceive and put into effect Obama’s digital outreach. “People who were part of the campaign will opt in to political or governing tracks and those relationships will continue in some form.”

The founders of America wanted a government that reflected its citizens, but would be at remove from the baser impulses of the mob. The mob, flush with victory, is at hand, but instead of pitchforks and lanterns, they have broadband and YouTube. Like every other presidency, the Obama administration will have its battles with the media, but that may seem like patty-cake if it runs afoul of the self-publishing, self-organizing democracy it helped create – say, by delaying health care legislation or breaking a promise on taxes.

That’s the thing about pipes today: they run both ways.

“It’s clear there has been a dramatic shift,” said Andrew Rasiej, the founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference about the intersection of politics and technology. “Any politician who fails to recognize that we are in a post-party era with a new political ecology in which connecting like minds and forming a movement is so much easier will not be around long.

“Yes, we have met Big Brother, the one who is always watching. And Big Brother is us.”

a study by Anderson Analytics confirms what everyone already suspects: LinkedIn users are rich.

Nearly 60% of users have incomes of $93,000 or more. Executives with an average income of $104,000 make up 28% of the 2,000 random users polled for the study. Another 30% are self-identified “consultants” with an average income of $93,000.

People with lots of connections tend to make more money, according to the study – those with incomes between $200-$350k were seven times more likely to have at least 150 connections than lower income users.

The study segmented users into four categories: executives (28%), networkers/consultants (30%), late adopters (22%) (not sure what this is) and “exploring options (20%).

I mostly abandoned LinkedIn long ago, simply because i couldn’t deal with the volume of inbound requests for introductions and other LinkedIn business. It’s a salesperson’s heaven (another word for “consultant” and “saavy networker” is salesperson). Rich people tend to have more connections, says the survey, which makes sense. These poor executives are constantly being bombarded with connection requests.

So if you have something to sell, stop wasting time on Facebook and MySpace. Get yourself on LinkedIn and add a couple of hundred connections. Before you know it you’ll be pulling in $350k.

In a time of stock market crisis, bailouts and a weak dollar, LinkedIn still raises $22.7 million in funding. How? It’s a relevant site with a number of useful resources for professionals and businesses. Meanwhile, the launch of the site’s application platform last week puts the spotlight back on this phenomenally useful social network.

Many folks involved in social media are so ADD driven to the latest social network, they fail to fully explore and make use of the networks that they are already part of. Enter LinkedIn, a haven for professional networking with an executive representation of all of the Fortune 500 companies. LinkedIn has a lot to offer regardless of where you are in your career, especially with the economy the way it is.

What Exactly is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn has been around all the way back since 2003, and many people use it differently, so I asked the Twitterati, “What exactly is LinkedIn?”

As we can see from the replies above, some people consider LinkedIn to be a full-fledged social network, while others see it as a mere contact list or business network. The devil is in the details.

Should Businesses Care About LinkedIn?

Of course they should. LinkedIn has over 20 million members. LinkedIn can be used by businesses and departments of any shape and size, and requires little social media know-how. Search Engine Guide’s Jennifer Laycock recommends LinkedIn to small businesses that are looking to start using social media but just don’t have a lot of time to do so. Here’s an HR perspective from Jim Stroud of The Recruiter’s Lounge:

“LinkedIn is a tool recruiters cannot ignore. Recruiters who do not want to be bogged down with resumes turn to LinkedIn to find quality candidates and their peers. On the flip side, some recruiters use it to build up a massive list of contacts that they can use for email campaigns. This of course, is not the intention of LinkedIn, but its a fact of life. LinkedIn is becoming the next “Monster” with more and more recruiters turning to it.”

How Do You Get the Most Out of LinkedIn?

The old adage that “it isn’t what you know, it’s who you know” still holds value. LinkedIn takes this thought one step further, making it “who you will know soon to be of utmost importance.” Using LinkedIn, I’ve trained small businesses to spread their wings and get connected with companies that they might otherwise have thought were beyond reach, and to the persons they were looking for in those companies.

So, how do you meet people? Well, you can’t throw sheep or sick your zombies after them. There’s also no chat. And guess what? That’s totally fine. Many who use instant messaging aggregate different chat networks into a single app such as Digsby, Trillian, or Pidgin. So who needs another chat app?

Here are seven features LinkedIn does have that you should take advantage of:

Quick Lookup – Look up who you are having that next business meeting with. You’ll be able to break the ice right away.

Q&A – Post questions to others in your industry. The Yahoo Answers look and feel of this feature has definitely made LinkedIn more active and interesting. A public question can be responded to by anyone that works in really any discipline. Such was the case where Derek Edmond spotted a discussion occurring about the trustworthiness of SEO.

Recommendations – Have clients or co-workers post recommendations, which future employers and clients can view to gauge your skill and level of trustworthiness. Conversely, if you’re an employer, these imply trustworthiness for a potential freelancer or new hire.

Background checks – Look up potential new hires or freelancers. This should be right up there in an HR manager’s toolbelt.

See what your competition is up to – Keep track of what others in your industry are up to. Network updates gives you a feed of recent activity, so you can see who your connections have friended, groups they have joined, and the people they have recommended. You’ll even be able to see when people are switching jobs.

Introductions – Use people you already know to help make introductions. It’s a great way to get in the door with a company you need to contact.

Open Networking – Go out and become a LION! You are an open networker.

What’s Next?

LinkedIn has made a lot of recent updates and additions, including:

Group mania – LinkedIn has been making great strides in the groups area, having added search within groups, discussions within groups, groups you might like, and sharing groups. When you think about how much engagement and adoption groups have brought to Facebook, you’ll really begin to appreciate these changes.

Profile page – since most LinkedIn users spend a great deal of their time on profile pages, the subtle UI (user interface) changes done to the profile page are a great update.

iPhone app – LinkedIn has a pretty spiffy iPhone app that’s worth trying out.

While I really appreciate these additions, I think it would be great for LinkedIn to tell beginner users more about why to use the service. Similar to Twitter using the CommonCraft show’s Twitter in Plain English, LinkedIn could use its LinkedIn CommonCraft video to make beginner users see LinkedIn’s true value of building connections to help accomplish your business goals.

What are your thoughts?

How do you get the most out of LinkedIn? Tell us about success you’ve had on the service in the comments.

Brian Wallace is a social media consultant – get it touch with him on his blog, or follow him on Twitter and Plurk. And yes, he’s on LinkedIn too.

When Facebook raised $240 million from Microsoft in 2007, and another $235 million in debt and equity in 2008, everyone thought they had plenty of cash to get through their big growth phase. With that kind of cash, the company could hire as many people as it needed to and not worry about profitability or going public until at least 2009, as board member Jim Breyer said in 2007.

But a confluence of factors may be conspiring to throw those assumptions out the window and force Facebook back to the capital markets much earlier than they originally planned. We’ve heard from multiple sources that they are testing the capital markets right now, in fact, and may be considering a near term capital raise at terms that could be much more favorable to investors than the previous $15 billion round that Microsoft kicked off in October 2007.

Facebook Is Growing, But So Are Costs

There’s no doubt that Facebook is growing at a breathtaking pace. A year ago, according to Comscore, they had just 74 million unique monthly visitors and 35 billion page views. Today those numbers have grown by 118% and 74%, respectively, to 161 million unique visitors and 61 billion page views per month.

Facebook’s growth, thanks to all these user-created translated versions of the site, has probably exceeded even their own internal projections. And running this engine isn’t cheap.

The company is likely spending well over a $1 million per month on electricity alone, say experts we’ve spoken with. Bandwidth is likely another $500,000 or more per month on top of that. The company has earmarked $100 million to buy 50,000 servers this year and next. And sources say they’ve been buying one NetApp 3070 storage system per week just to keep up with all this user generated content. At up to $2 million each, that adds up quickly – we’ve heard estimates that they may have spent as much as $30 million this year alone with the company. And the icing on the cake – earmark another $15 million per year in office and datacenter rent payments.

And don’t forget those human assets. With 750 employees and growing, Facebook is spending at least another $10 million per month on payroll.

It costs a couple of hundred million dollars a year just to keep the lights on at Facebook. But the real problem is keeping up with growth, particularly storage needs. Add another $100 million or more per year for capital expenditures, and you’ve got a company that’s doing exactly the opposite of printing money.

So How ‘Bout Those Revenues?

eMarketer estimates $265 million in revenue for Facebook in 2008. That’s great, right? Well, not really. The company is still losing money – lots of it – at current revenues. And it’s not clear that revenue will grow as robustly as costs.

Most of Facebook’s growth is outside of the U.S. A year ago, according to Comscore, Facebook had 31 million U.S. visitors, about 42% of the total. Today, U.S. visitors have grown to just 41 million.

19 million live in Africa and the Middle East. 26 million are in Asia (16 million alone in India). Europe, with 48 million Facebook users, has a larger share than the U.S. Another 16 million are in Latin America.

Just one in four Facebook users come from the U.S. today.

As we wrote last summer, most of these international users can’t be monetized today. And to make things worse, bandwidth costs in those countries is generally much higher than the U.S. So the users cost more, and they don’t bring in any revenue.

That international growth might be ok if U.S. growth remained strong. But the U.S. market just seems to be tapped at this point, and gaining market share from MySpace is a battle. As we wrote in August, at current growth rates it will take Facebook 18 years to overtake MySpace in the U.S.

Uh Oh, The Economy

So costs are skyrocketing, and revenues can’t keep up. Ok, But Facebook still has plenty of money, right?

Wrong.

The economy isn’t looking so hot, and it may get worse. If revenues don’t grow substantially, the company’s runway of cash gets much shorter. 2008 revenues are likely $100 million less than the company anticipated a year ago. If the economic train really derails, Facebook could be in big trouble.

A big chunk, probably a majority, of the roughly $500 million the company has raised is already gone. Even more will be spent next year, particularly if international growth rates remain constant (and there is lots and lots of room to grow internationally). Facebook could be down to just a year’s worth of cash at this point, with no IPO horizon in sight.

And even if they have cash into 2010 (its nearly impossible to figure out exactly how much they’re burning), the economic downturn is likely to be much, much worse than they anticipated. If they don’t grab the money now, it may not be available later on.

Which Explains Why CFO Gideon Yu Is In Dubai

Sources have told us that Facebook CFO Gideon Yu was in Dubai this week, possibly meeting with Dubai International Capital, exploring fundraising options.

U.S. investors, including VCs and hedge funds, aren’t interested or aren’t able to invest at the valuation Facebook expects. That leaves Sovereign Wealth Funds as the only viable funding solution. And the window to get money from them may fast be closing, too.

Which explains why Facebook may be looking for money sooner rather than later. If they don’t raise a big chunk of money now from someone who’ll pay whatever it takes to own a piece of Facebook, there may be a heavily dilutive down-valuation round for Facebook in the next 12-18 months.

It wasn’t long ago that people took a hard look at the social networking world and saw that such activities didn’t quite jive with the typical workplace environment. Some employers solidified that notion by barring visits to such sites via their networks.

Well, here we are in the final days of October 2008, and two individuals at the UK-based think tank Demos, Peter Bradwell and Richard Reeves, have published a 92-page assessment of the potential upsides of social networking within organizations and between organizations and clients.

The text (which, wonderfully enough, has been issued as a PDF [link] under a non-commercial Creative Commons licensing) is titled “Network Citizens: Power and Responsibility at Work,” and it essentially takes what is arguably a sensible view on the present networking situation. They see workplace bans on Facebook and YouTube as “almost impossible to enforce,” and they draw a sort of sociological analogy to such efforts that would entail limits for gossip among colleagues. A nonsensical move, more or less.

Bradwell and Reeves even think that placing restrictions on Web-based networking within Facebook, et al., can be counterproductive, given the fact that modern technologies have allowed the world to transcend ordinary means of interaction and to attain what is ultimately a more collaborative reality for business development.

Yes, it is true that the issues of lowered barriers and intensive PC-based socializing reveal things that can be prone to exploitation in quite negative ways. As the authors of “Network Citizens” state, the networks have a definitive “dark side.” Yet the benefits for the pursuit of a relatively happy medium (my own phrasing) have really become too outstanding to negate.

Such benefits have only grown with developments made in the market specific to business relationship management – which goes as much for workers’ presence on LinkedIn as YouTube, depending of course on one’s area of industry. All things considered, corporations currently exercising no-social-networking policies would do well to browse the ideas delivered via this research.

nalysts Explore Social Networking Impact on Government at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2008, 3-7 November in Cannes, France

Egham, UK, October 23, 2008 —

By 2011, 70 per cent of social computing deployments in government that achieve business benefits will do so in unplanned or unexpected ways, according to Gartner, Inc. Government organisations around the world are showing great interest in social computing, yet deployment so far is relatively limited.

“The current global financial turmoil bolsters the case for government adoption of social networks as technology-budget cuts make tapping into societal resources, such as voluntary groups, philanthropists, associations and social network groups essential to complement weaker government action in some critical areas,” said Andrea Di Maio, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

According to Mr Di Maio, there are plenty of government-initiated networks and – like any such network – they succeed only when they have a clear and magnetic purpose such as Diplopedia, a wiki created by the US State Department that supports collaboration across intelligence and foreign affairs agencies.  “However, the most promising, and yet, most disruptive, communities are those created outside government. Examples in the UK include Netmums, a community of parents dealing with child-care issues, and PledgeBank, which allows users to set up pledges and then encourages other people to sign up to them,” he said.

Today, the primary role of social networks for governments is to facilitate the exchange of information and to establish novel collaboration patterns, often across organisational boundaries. “For example, a case manager in human services is responsible for identifying clients in need through outreach or referral, and conducting a comprehensive social and financial assessment. In the future, he or she will be part of a more complex socio-ecosystem, including a voluntary sector, online communities and individuals who play a fundamental role through all the different phases. Their role will shift from managing a case to ensuring that community resources are complemented where needed,” said Mr Di Maio.

Boundaries in government are blurring at every level and driving the uptake of social computing. Horizontal business processes such as financial management, HR and procurement are subject to increased sharing across agencies and even jurisdictions. This means that government organisations no longer own or control them. Instead they are becoming clients to other organisations leading to increased adoption of social media. In addition, government IT infrastructure is subject to consolidation efforts and will be progressively commoditised and challenged by cloud-computing solutions.

Gartner points out that the benefits of social computing — when accrued — will rarely occur in the context of government-driven initiatives. For example, governments’ desire to retain ownership and control of the network, through restrictive participation policies, will be detriment to magnetism.

Gartner recommends that governments engage selected employees in finding external social networks relevant to the agency and its domain of government. They should also ensure that the use of social computing inside and between government organisations is based on a clear and compelling purpose – which is likely to be something that they cannot ‘engineer’. “Instead, they should recognise that spontaneity is needed for success,” said Mr Di Maio.

Mr Di Maio added that social networks require little investment to start so, at a time when budgets are increasingly tight, such technology is welcome. Social networks have worked well to aggregate people and information to face natural disasters. People look both for peer support and for government when times are tough.

Gartner predicts the execution of many government processes in human services, tax and revenue, health care and education will involve individuals who are neither employees nor contractors. Examples include replacement of some human services functions such as online collection of charitable donations to be directed to people in need combined with online ‘time banks’ through which citizens provide time to help others.

“The future of government is a very different government and, in some cases, no government at all,” concluded Mr Di Maio.

Mr Di Maio will provide more detailed analysis on the impact that social networking is having on governments during the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2008, taking place on 3-7 November in Cannes, France. Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the IT industry’s largest and most strategic conference, providing business leaders with a look at the future of IT. More than 3,000 senior business and IT strategists will gather for the insights, tools and solutions they need to ensure their IT initiatives are key contributors to and drivers of their company’s success. Gartner’s annual Symposium/ITxpo events are key components of attendees’ annual planning efforts. They rely on Gartner Symposium/ITxpo to gain insight into how their organisations can use IT to address business challenges and improve operational efficiency. Additional information is available at www.gartner.com/eu/symposiumfall

Members of the media can register for the event by contacting Laurence Goasduff, Gartner PR on + 44 (0) 1784 267195 or at laurence.goasduff@gartner.com

Additional information on social computing and government is in the Gartner report “The Business Impact of Social Computing on Government”. The report is on Gartner’s website at
The Business Impact of Social Computing on Government