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The Facebook Elephant

Following claims that social networking sites, such as Facebook could turn out to be a costly ‘white elephant’ for businesses, Tim Hoang reports on how the Web 2.0 world has reacted.

It was reported on business and technology news site, Silicon.com that analyst house Gartner had fired a warning to businesses who ‘rushed to invest’ in ‘Facebook-led web 2.0 hype’.

Describing the technology as ‘a costly white elephant’, the article highlighted how businesses should carefully consider how they would protect personal intellectual property and people’s preferences for using existing non-professional external social networks before they developed their own.

Despite evidence that companies would find it easier to develop their own social networks with Facebook licensing out its developer platform, Gartner’s research apparently alleged that ‘the hype around social networking doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a mature enough technology to make it a critical business requirement’. The article continued: ‘There is also little evidence that social networking will be as beneficial for businesses as other web-based communications tech".

However, some bloggers have hit back at the report. Influential blogger, Euan Semple simply asked his readers to "Ignore Gartner". However, this was soon updated to ‘Ignore Silicon’ as it became apparent that the report, according to Edward Charvet of Internet strategy consultants, Trovus, did not summarise Gartner’s report in a "fair and balanced manner".

"The article from Silicon was making reference to a recent Gartner thought piece, making you think that Gartner’s position was simply that social computing is crap and has no value for a clutch of reasons," said Charvet on his company blog, Rewarding Dialogue.

"It’s not the hellfire and brimstone that the Silicon article will have you believe.  The points Gartner make seem to be to be that Social Computing, like any application set, may be hampered in delivering value if the "human" element is ignore," continued Charvet.

Ken Camp, from digital media experts, Stardust Global Ventures believes that businesses should actually be investing more rather than less, resources into understanding the value of social media and how it can benefit business operations.

"Gartner says that social media technology isn’t mature enough to make it a critical business requirement. I don’t agree. It’s a rapidly emerging tool that’s becoming more vital to success in business every day. The problem is that businesses aren’t investing resources to understand how to capture the value. The value proposition of social media isn’t understood by enterprise business. I don’t think Gartner understands it either," he said.