Last month, Roger Farnsworth asked how social networking can be used in business and made the point that when you say “social network”, most people think of MySpace or YouTube. I see the same sort of response from some people when I mention blogs - they immediately think of diaries and stories about what you had for lunch.

But what people tend to forget is that every business has a social network already, a network of colleagues that’s often divorced from the official org chart. Sociability is key to the success of any business. Without a network of contacts, acquaintances and friends, it would be difficult indeed for most people to do their jobs: no man works in a vacuum.

That social network itself is formed of conversations, the very small talk that many companies (wrongly) abhor but which actually provides the glue that keeps people working smoothly together. In September 2004, David Weinberger wrote a defence of small talk and although he doesn’t talk explicitly about business, business is built on the same social relationships that need the grease of small talk to keep them moving.

What has changed over the years is not the existence of these social networks or the way that they function, but firstly the venue and, secondly, the scope.

Over time, the venue for our conversations has shifted from face-to-face, to phone, to email, to social tools. The impact that technology has on the type and efficacy of conversation (as opposed to simply moving data about) has been pretty much ignored, and the shift has been away from high emotional bandwidth communications - i.e. face-to-face communications where you have tone of voice, facial expression and body language to help you understand what your colleague means - to the lowest of all emotional bandwidth technologies, email.

Despite it being too easy to misinterpret an email, we are now used to it and have come to depend on it. Maybe we even prefer it to face-to-face communications precisely because it is mediated by a computer and therefore less emotionally demanding. Like a frog being slowly brought to the boil, we’ve slipped down the emotional bandwidth communications curve until we’ve hit rock bottom, with people being drowned by hundreds of emails from people with whom they have no emotional connection whatsoever.

Social software is an attempt to, within the limits of computer-mediated communications, re-inject some emotion and empathy into our day-to-day conversations. It provides people with some of the cues they need to form emotional bonds with others, such as photographs and background information, ability to converse in an open arena, archives of past conversations/posts, and feelings of ownership and control over profiles, reputations and words. These help people to connect more strongly with others, and frequently facilitate the best of all communications fora - meeting in person.

The scope of our social networks has also dramatically changed over the years. There was a time where you knew your immediate colleagues well, had a small network of other people outside of your team, and had little or no contact with people from more distant departments or offices. The expansion of our social networks has been facilitated in turn, again, by the phone, email and now social software.

Social tools support wider social networks than can be supported by email or phone. They allow us to keep track of people, acting as outboard memories for us, so that we can easily remind ourselves of who someone is, what they look like, what they do. They support many different levels of social interaction, from simply knowing someone exists, to facilitating real and valuable friendships.

But one of the side effects is that you get to see your social network laid bare in your contacts list. I have 141 friends on social chit-chat service Twitter, which is getting pretty close to the Dunbar number of 150. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggested that there is a limit to the number of people that we can maintain stable relationships with, a limit that is a direct function of the size of the neocortex. How we will deal with seemingly ever-expanding social networks that these tools support remains to be seen.

I think, though, that asking what role social networks play in business is the wrong question. We already have social networks - we’re just moving them into new tools. The value remains the same: sharing knowledge, meeting people, doing your job as well as you can, forming useful and meaningful relationship with your colleagues. Searching for a concrete ROI for social networks is a bit like searching for the ROI of employing people.

Instead, we need to be looking at the different tools available, asking how they work, how we can introduce them to people, how we can move people away from the brokenness of email and into arenas which allow them to do what they do more easily. We’re not introducing a new behaviour, we’re making it easier for people to engage in the same behaviour that they’ve always engaged in, the behaviour that drives business, particularly in the knowledge economy: Talking.