Short clip: BT on social networking apps

>> Let me ask you about FaceBook for a moment. Many companies today are banning FaceBook, MySpace and other social networking services from their corporations, and your approach is to let them in. And how do you justify that?

>> Well, I want to ask the question the other way around and ask how the other companies justify what they're doing. But fundamentally, what does FaceBook look like to me within an institution? It allows me to form groups of interest, which is no different than arranging a meeting or creating a center of competence. It allows me to send messages to other people in an efficient way rather than blasting people with email based spam. It gives me the opportunity for people to subscribe to things they're interested in. It gives me a news feed for what people are doing in a sharable, consumable fashion. It allows me the opportunity even to publish the interests of different people in such a way I can look at what my colleagues are doing, what my subordinates are doing, in fact, if you look at what I'm doing with FaceBook and what I'm really achieving, what any of us who wants to use it in an enterprise environment achieves, is to say that you've taken what happened at the water cooler or the coffee shop and made it persistent, made it sharable, made it teachable, made it learnable. Okay? That's a huge win because we've spent years talking about the value of the water cooler conversations, of the coffee shops, of the more amorphous, softer discussions. Now we have the ability to actually understand what these relationships are, how information and decision making migrates horizontally and laterally through an organization, rather than through the published hierarchies, how people really work and what people do as part of that work. You know, it's time we broke the assembly line mindset. I think social networking tools gives us an opportunity to look at the relationship growths, to look at the people who form, you know, the Malcolm Gladwell mavens and connectors and salesman, to look at the flows that matter rather than the flows of the politics.

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====