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Rachel Finley
574 TNRB
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
(801) 422-3598
prspecialist@byu.edu

The Business Power of Social Networking

Poll any business and it’s almost guaranteed that administrative assistant won’t be one of the top-ten, most popular office positions.

But according to Bonnie Anderson, BYU assistant professor of information systems, the social networking potential administrative assistants have at their fingertips makes them some of the most powerful players in any company.

While social networking theories are widely applicable, Anderson has focused her studies on social networking and technology, specifically, software adoption within companies.

“You figure out who the power players are in a company, the people who are best connected, and then you work with them so they adopt the new technology,” she says. It makes training the well-connected people in a business—the people everyone goes to for help—an important step in facilitating a business-wide adoption of new technology or software.

Technology is triggering a quick and sweeping growth of business-related social networking.

“The Internet has revolutionized people-to-people communications, and therefore social networking is faster, better, and cheaper than in an offline world,” says John Richards, managing director of the Rollins Center for eBusiness.

And by making connections faster, people—like administrative assistants—can connect with more people and increase their geographical reach faster, he says.

LinkedIn, an internet-based social networking aid, is designed to increase the efficiency of making business connections. It uses a gated access approach to protect clients and establish relationships of trust between businesses, people looking for jobs, potential employers, and opens the door to new business opportunities. By March 2006, LinkedIn had five million users.

Social networking is quickly proving itself a useful business tool, Anderson says.

“Understanding the network is an important strategy in the workplace,” she says. “If you can figure out who has the power and have them as a mentor or friend, that will help you a lot more than someone who may have the title, but has little influence.”

In analyzing and researching social networks, there are many ways to determine power and influence. Anderson identifies four potential positions of power in the business world.

First, people who ‘go between’ have power. Such connections are also called a ‘bridge.’ Administrative assistants, though low on the payroll totem pole, are often the best connected and most powerful in that sense because of the high level of social exchange they have within a given company. In essence, they are gatekeepers of all executive interactions, and act as a bridge between the executives and everyone else in the company.

Second, employees who maintain an active, central role in businesses are in a position of power called centrality. Centrality is the level of nearness, direct or indirect, to all other individuals. Friendly custodial workers who associate with a large number of other employees may have a high level of centrality because the personal contact they maintain within the company.

Third, Anderson measures the number of people who seek out one specific person as that person’s in-degree; the higher the in-degree, or the more people coming to that person for help, the higher the position of power. In Anderson’s research, a company’s IT department had the highest in-degree ranking.

Fourth, Anderson identifies a person’s out-degree, or when a person goes to another for help. Open networks in companies, or networks in which employees from different departments can interact, promotes new ideas and opportunities while also reducing the number of redundant ties. When a person links two otherwise unconnected departments or people, they fill a structural hole in the network. In fact, seeking connections to multiple departments is a strategic step in social networking.

For more reading on the power of social networking in business, visit BusinessWeek Online, “The Office Chart That Really Counts,” or PC Magazine Online at go.pcmag.com/socialnetwork.