A Demos report (funded by Orange) published today 29 October argues that social networking sites could help companies beat the recession (report pdf).

I liked this extract from the report: “Consultancy firm McKinsey has studied the importance of social or employee networks for businesses. They found in their research that ‘the formal structures of companies… don’t explain how most of their real day-to-day work gets done’.

“They go on to argue that to capture that value, these network relationships need to be formalised in ways that do not interrupt the looseness from which their value emerges.” (Bryan, Matson and Weiss, ‘Harnessing the power of informal employee networks’)

Reminds me of a post I wrote back in July on ‘How to survive a recession social network style’ quoting the example of BMW’s comms strategy from the early 1990s recession.