Social Business.  It’s all the buzz now.  Everyone who’s anyone in business is proclaiming the virtues of the social business model for success.  Let’s cut through the hype.  There are some things that the concepts derived from social networking for personal use can be leveraged in the business world.

Activity Streams - knowing what your co-workers are working on and providing relevant feedback without spending the day crafting unwieldy emails.

Status Updates - sharing with your team what is happening in real time instead of during the weekly status report.

Following - letting the system tell you when things are happening with people or projects of interest.

The hitch with all of these though is when there is no way to take practical action on the thoughts generated in “socialized” interactions.  Any system, tool, or solution that fails to provide a method of managing the results of said conversations is no better than having a meeting without an agenda.  Lots of talking may go on, but afterwards no one is responsible for anything.

When considering social business tools always ask this, “What are we going to do when the talking stops?”