Corporate Talk

I’ve always maintained that social media has this uncanny way of stripping the veneer of most entities – be it people, products or organisations.

At one point of time, Mouthshut used to be my preferred destination for user reviews. All the ads, all the DMs, and all the brand ambassadors would be collectively shown the door, if the user reviews declared the product a failure. Although, niche portals have taken away quite a bit of my dependence, I am still a user and so, was pleasantly surprised to know about the new section called Employers. (via AlooTechie) Yep, Mouthshut now allows users to review organisations that they’ve worked in, something like what Jobsnetwork.in has been doing, though that’s more a discussion board. Criticat seems to be doing this very well, though.

But they’re not the only guys with this agenda. I also came across a site called Jobeehive, whose proposition is “Before making your next decision, see company reviews, salary and advice given directly by employee”.I wonder why a service like LinkedIn (hey, they got more funding recently) hasn’t gotten into this, though. It could be the social angle to the networking relationships that are the problem. The typical user would be connected with his ex-boss on the network, and would hesitate before giving a negative review of work conditions/ salaries/ experiences etc. Everyone loves un-burnt bridges, social media be damned!! 😉 Shine, the career portal from HT, also limited itself to salary tools, and hasn’t built a review feature. I guess there are somethings people don’t want to share, for everything else there’s social media. 🙂

However, I live on the hope that transparency – in employees, and employers, will eventually become a reality. I read about a new service called BeenVerified, which helps employers verify candidate backgrounds. (via CenterNetworks) Meanwhile, in the last couple of months, the enterprise tools based on popular social media tools like Twitter have also been seen in the market. I’d written about Yammer earlier, the winner at TC50, and its premise of ‘Twitter for business’, and about a similar service, Present.ly. Later, Yammer also introduced Yammermail, you can read about it here. I also read about Co-op recently, which adds time tracking and project management to the ‘what are you working on’ feature. Smibsnet, seems to be on the same premise.

But the most interesting service I came across has to be SocialText 3.0, which “applies next-generation Web 2.0 technologies to the critical challenges facing businesses”. It seems to be a mashup of several web 2.0 entities like wikis, microblogging, Facebook, Friendfeed..and Twitter (as SocialText Signals) So it allows people to describe themselves, subscribe to others’ activity streams, edit information streams, and all of these get updated on a dashboard, which would help users in organising and using data better. By using the collaborative properties of all these tools, SocialText does seem to have gained an edge over other enterprise services in this genre.

The tools are definitely being built. It remains to be seen though, whether/how much organisations are willing to use them. Such tools would also dispel concerns about social media being just a productivity reducing mechanism.

until next time, organisational chats