The People You Should Know

If you are a user of a social platform such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+ then undoubtedly you are familiar with People You May Know, the tools that are designed to help you to expand your personal social network to reflect your existing offline, real world network of relationships.

As described in The Facebook Blog: People You May Know

People You May Know looks at, among other things, your current friend list and their friends, your education info and your work info. If you are already friends on Facebook with some people from your last job, for example, you may find some more of your former coworkers (assuming they are visible to you in search) among the "People You May Know' suggestions.

I was fortunate to have recently attended a presentation by John McCarthy of Forrester Research, Inc. based upon a research report that he co-authored, “Mobile Is The New Face of Engagement” released February 13, 2012.  In his talk John asserted that “The perfect storm of technology change centered around mobile will drive significant technology and organizational change”. His perfect storm included a set of technology innovations including cloud, [big data] analytics, mobile apps, smart devices and social [networking]. He went on to provide examples to back up his claim.
 

I found his argument to be convincing, which set me to thinking.

While discovering the people that I may know may be interesting, discovering the people that I should know could be extremely valuable, particularly if a recommendation were made at the right time and place.

I have been user of social media for several years now. At first I had accessed social media sites almost exclusively from a desktop in an office or home office. It was rare, if ever, that I would spend any significant amount of time accessing these sites from a laptop while on-the-go. However, since I acquired a smartphone, and more recently a tablet, my usage pattern has shifted dramatically in favor of mobile access.

Like many smartphone users my “relationship” with my mobile devices is much more personal than it ever was with my desktop and laptop computers. I’m sure that there are several reasons for this, but the one that I would like to focus on now is the usage context. When I am working at my desk my real world experience is disconnected physically and emotionally from the abstract cyber world that social media inhabits. I believe that this disconnect underlies the potential to accumulate “social friends” that are not really friends at all. When I am mobile, moving about in the real world, my smartphone and often my tablet are my companions. They help me to navigate, find and experience the things that I need, when and where I need them. They are very much connected to and a part of my reality.

When I am stationary and working at my desktop the best that any social media site can do is recommend the people that I may know. It lacks the critical information, time and place, which are required to determine the proximity of people to each other, so it cannot effectively help me to meet the people that I should know. But when I am mobile my device knows where I am and where I’m going. Increasingly, using social data resident in the cloud and synthesized via analytical tools, it knows what I am doing and the things that I am interested in, so a mobile app can make a relevant and timely recommendation.

In doing research for this post I came across the relatively new social discovery and geo-location app Highlight which “helps you know when friends and other interesting people are nearby”. I have not used the app long enough to draw any conclusions, but I expect that over time it, or others like it, will be able to help me to find the people that I should know.

I believe that enterprise collaboration will be greatly facilitated by the extension of social business tools to the mobile realm.

What do you think? How are you preparing for the opportunities and demands created by mobile and related technologies?