Michael Maoz

As the family IT director, I have a point of view on social networking that goes beyond the four walls of the corporation, but has implications for the enterprise. I have three very internet savvy daughters – digital natives as they are referred to in the press. What do they do on the internet and PDA? Mostly I see my daughters on FaceBook, searching Google, SMS exchanges, IM, and some buying. Not much Tweeting going on, not much buying of anything complicated (and I don’t mean radiology equipment complex, I mean shoes or jewelry or jeans). They buy some books, a lot of tickets, and reserve some tables.

All of this is a bit pedestrian, and a 12 year old and a 25 year old do a lot of the same things on the internet or with digital media, with a shift in percentages. Nothing to compete with time or energy spent on X-BOX or Wii or Guitar Hero. Now, let’s look at the household. If a laptop turns into a slow, crawling Zombie in the house, I get the call. When iTunes stops synching the iMac and latest iPod, or the Lenovo can’t print to the Pixma wirelessly via the Airport Extreme, or security needs to be set on the router and set in the system file, who are they going to call? One thing is certain: they are unlikely to solve the problem themselves.

The point? Digital natives may be versatile at some things, but digital immigrants often come from countries where they have acquired skills that the natives lack. For a lot of us who learned the older technologies, it is akin to when high schools taught carpentry, plumbing, and electrical wiring as a standard part of the curriculum. Most university grads know nothing of any of these things. The same seems to be shaping up for the so-called ‘natives.’ Which begs the question: big deal that they can blog and Poke and Tag and Comment and adorn walls – what is the value that these skills will add to your business? To idea creation? To developing a thread of thought? Will these social networking abilities drive value at a greater level than a previous generation of worker who conference called, or used Webex, or email, or the conference room in the corner?

Before we become enamored of our social networking as a productivity tool, we probably want to put in place some way of assessing the value. We may want to remember that many of the new people joining the workforce were not trained necessarily in the computer sciences. They may exhibit the veneer of computer literacy, but it may be just that. Otherwise, if we do not guage their computer savvy, we miss opportunities to share basic skills that they lack, despite the many ‘cool’ skills that they possess.

We are just at the beginning of social networking, which makes it exciting and interesting. Measuring the benefit is not even at the level of inexact science nor of art. Caveat Emptor.