Facebook is used by 150 million people and has over 50 million unique visitors each month. It’s in the top ten most populated countries in the world ( if you want to see it in that light). Twitter was growing at over 700% in 2008 and over 10% of on-line users use it. LinkedIn is gaining a new user every second.

Statistics are not hard to come by but they do contradict each other. However, we can, at least say that an awful lot of people use social networking sites – and spend a lot of time doing it ( four hours a month on average on MySpace alone – and I suspect there’s a huge spread here depending on the age of the user.)

It’s fairly clear how individuals use social networking and what they get out of it: friends without strings; dates; downloads; gossip; self-promotion; positive reinforcement that they’re important (to use a quasi psychological term). My LinkedIn and Facebook networks have doubled in size since the recession hit. This is partly a function of job insecurity: people realise the truth of that old business axiom A.B.N ( Always Be Networking) as the future looks darker.

But what’s in it for organisations? Quite apart from Facebook, Twitter and the like, some suppliers offer within-company social networking systems so that activity can be controlled and focused more effectively. You get the benefits of a closer culture without the downsides of endless, non-work chat.

I’d actually put it another way: you get a controlled simulation of social networking which has none of the benefits that caused this huge usage growth in the first place.

The fact is, I think we need to know a lot more about why people use the channel and how it works before we fully embrace it within organisations.

Sample the web and you’ll find any number of recommended uses. I’ve used some of them and they do have advantages:

• creating discussion groups for technical products;
• finding customers, partners, collaborators via networks;
• doing initial research for international business expansion;
• marketing which doesn’t look like marketing ( a Holy Grail of our times )

I’m a member of blogs and discussion groups which have increased my understanding of a topic and put me in contact with valuable people. It has to be said there are others I wish I could unsubscribe from as they bombard me with irrelevant e-mails. So, what’s my beef?

• There’s no longer any single thing called ‘social networking’. Like all sectors it started undifferentiated and has segmented. Different sites serve different functions. The movement started outside business: sites like LinkedIn were created to fill a market niche. Get the different sites confused and you’ll send a lot of time and effort trying to discuss your products with Lady GaGa fans.

• Most of the advantages are for individuals – getting jobs, advancing portmanteau careers. Putting these resources in front of your staff may increase their job opportunities and increase your churn.

• Younger people are very sensitive to marketing. They know when a blog or site is being used as disguised corporate communication…and they don’t like it.

• If your organisation has a cultural problem, the solution is the hard graft of creating a good culture, not introducing a piece of software and hoping it will do the job. Culture is created by action, not words. This are important issues here:

- You create relationships face to face. Without physical presence you miss a lot of information.

- Human beings can create real relationships with around 150 people. Past that it’s an acquaintance. Why have a network of 2000? You end up with the illusion of relationships.

- Social networking sites can, perhaps, cut through organisational hierarchies. The can improve information flow. You can set up social clubs through them and they serve the same purpose as the informal smoking think tank outside the back door. But I’m dubious. Leaders should be ‘managing by walking about’ not contributing to a blog.

• Social networking is about attitudes, opinions, and emotions. It’s rarely about facts. Yet material from blogs ( as from the rest of the Internet) seems to worm its way into reports, books and the received opinion of the business community when its little more than someone letting of steam. This is horribly dangerous.

• Despite the huge number of statistics you can get off the web I’m not convinced we’re yet in a position to evaluate the effectiveness of these techniques. With old style direct response mailing you could evaluate money spent against money received. PR is notorious for being unaccountable. If I know that 4000 people have exchanged information over a blog, how does that translate to business benefits? And if much social networking seems free it isn’t: it takes valuable time.

I haven’t even mentioned the obvious horrors of unregulated social networking usage which you can see walking round any office. Do you want to pay staff to organise their Saturday night on the town? On the other hand a complete ban on what is now more essential to some people’s lives than the phone or the pub looks Scrooge-like. So there’s a balance to be struck.

Am I being Luddite? I don’t think so. Social networking won’t go away. It needs to be integrated into business practice. My concern is that, as usual, a new idea has been seized up on as a cutting edge differentiator and used with little thought about basic business principles. So, as ever, having jumped into the deep end, organisations need to take swimming lessons.