Understanding the Difference Between Forums, Blogs and Social Networks

While doing some research on Social Networking and other collaboration tool strategies for improved organizational performance, I came across a great post from Forrester Research's Jeremiah Owyang's blog.  Notice how he uses the analogy of the conference (which many of us have attended as part of business) to describe three collaboration tools:

Forums are like social mixers, where everyone is at equal level, milling about and discussing with others. These many to many communication tools allow anyone to start a topic and anyone to respond to one. Members are often at equal level, and content is usually segmented by topic. (rather than by people).

Blogs are like a keynote speech where the speaker (blogger) is in control of the discussion, but allows questions and comments from the audience.
Blogs are journals often authored by one individual, and sometimes teams. In the context of business communication, these are often used to talk with the marketplace and to join the conversation that existing external bloggers may be having.

Social Networks are like topic tables at a conference luncheon. Ever been to a conference where different lunch tables had big white signs inviting people to sit and join others of like interest? It’s like that. Social networks allow members to organize around a person’s relationships or interests, rather that just focused on topic. People that know each other (or want to meet each other) will connect by a variety of common interests. These are great tools to get people of like interest to connect to each other and share information.

Adding to Jeremiah’s thoughts on the definition of Social Networks, we’re seeing a lot of interest in the public and private sectors for using Microsoft’s SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) collaboration platform as a tool for social networking via the “My Site” and blog functions.  For example, by using the “My Site” functionality in SharePoint, users have a ready made starting point for viewing and contributing to an organization's intranet through the portal site. It provides a place to save and share work, a way to find and connect with other people in the organization and see their work, and a way to customize how other people in the organization see each other’s work.