Humans need to belong to groups and find significant value in communities -- physical or otherwise."

— Gabriele Piccoli, Editor

I remember first hearing about Facebook while I was still on the faculty at Cornell. I used to require my students to pick a technology or technology trend and, using the analytical skills and tools learned in class, to write a position paper describing its potential and likely evolution. One team discussed Facebook, at the time still a college students-only application. Today, as are many of you reading this issue, I am on Facebook, as well as LinkedIn, Plaxo, Twitter, TripIt, and probably a number of other social networking communities (look me up after reading this issue and connect with me). Today my wife and my mother have also both joined Facebook. This is ironic as, just a couple of months back, they "could not believe anyone would have 366 friends ... how can you call them friends?!" Today they both spend quite a bit of time every evening maintaining contact with their "friends" and seeking out others -- from old high school buddies to former colleagues and individuals whose life intersected with theirs at some point or another. I, of course, don't miss any opportunity to point out to my wife the irony of her behavior, just to receive an explanation of how what she is doing is "different" than the behavior she was criticizing a couple of months prior.

This little family anecdote is indicative of a larger phenomenon: humans need to belong to groups and find significant value in communities — physical or otherwise. That we need to somehow belong is evident all around us; just pay attention on the street and you can easily pick out members of different "tribes" from the way they dress (such as the emerging pants-below-the-derriere tribe). But perhaps more important to the continued success of virtual communities, from back in the day of bulletin board systems and newsgroups, to the recent meteoric growth of social networking applications, is the fact that humans find value in groups. A great example of how we find value in groups is provided by the travel industry. Many of you have, I am sure, looked up a hotel on TripAdvisor prior to making a purchase decision to see what actual guests who have experienced the property say about it. For many hotels, however, there are so many reviews that they can only be an aggregate indicator characterized by significant variability. You don't know the people who filed the reviews. A college student who is used to staying in youth hostels has quite different standards than a traveling executive who spends more than 100 nights on the road for business in four-star properties. Their evaluation of the same upscale hotel may tell us more about them than the property or the service they experienced. But what if you could have a system where only your family, or coworkers, or any other "qualified" group provided you with its ratings of the hotel you are considering? This information would be much more qualified and, as a consequence, much more valuable.

The above simple example clearly shows the value that we as users draw from social networks and points out that the benefits provided by various communities are different and partly a function of who the other members are. But what about the organization? Is there any opportunity for organizations seeking to benefit from their customers' use of social networks? How can organizations take advantage of the explosive growth of social networking? Here the answer is not so simple. For this reason, we focus this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review on this important and timely topic: organizational uses and opportunities in social networking. Our academic contributor in this installment is Mary J. Culnan, while on the practice side we have David Coleman. Mary, whom you already know from her issue on privacy and corporate privacy governance (Vol. 6, No. 1, 2006), is the Slade Professor of Management and Information Technology at Bentley University (USA) and is one of the leading academic experts on online communities and social networks. David, the founder and managing director of Collaborative Strategies and a senior consultant with Cutter Consortium's Business Intelligence and Social Networking practices, has been involved with groupware and collaborative technologies since 1989 as a public speaker, industry analyst, and author.

Mary brings to bear in this issue her substantial knowledge of the history of online communities. I found this history interesting and valuable as it lays the foundation for interpreting today's trends. She then categorizes the various kinds of social networking applications based on their organizing principles and discusses the four elements of the social networking infrastructure (content, a critical mass of participants, governance, and IT). With this foundation firmly in place Mary analyzes the survey results with a focus on translating the opportunity of social networking into tangible organizational advantages. She concludes with a set of guidelines for successful social networking.

David also briefly frames the historical context in which today's social networking technology must be evaluated and understood, drawing a distinction between communities and networks. He then specifically discusses social networking within the enterprise, with attention to the type of individuals that are most likely to gravitate toward it. With the framework in place, David systematically analyzes and interprets the survey results. There are many interesting and tangible suggestions interspersed throughout David's piece in the form of guidelines from organizations trying to harness the power of social networks to personal anecdotes.

Communities are as central to our life as they have ever been -- perhaps even more so now that time and geographic constraints have largely subsided. There is no doubt that social networking and technology-mediated community building provide significant opportunity for business and not-for-profit alike. How your organization can benefit from these trends largely depends on the context in which you operate. In this issue of CBR, our contributors trace many of the key variables to consider when assessing the opportunity and designing appropriate initiatives in this emerging frontier of interaction with your many stakeholders.