While both personal and business relationships can involve social networking, there are some striking differences between the environments. With few exceptions, our business networks tend to be made up of people with skills we admire or from whom we might benefit, whereas our personal networks tend to consist of people with similar interests and with whom we enjoy spending time.

Robert D. Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone, talks about the differences between social connectedness and relationships in the workplace. He says that most studies of personal networks find that co-workers account for less than 10% of our friends, and that when people were asked to list their closest friends, less than half of full-time workers named a single co-worker.

While I like and respect my co-workers I do have two discrete IM programs, one for work and one for friends, and they have very little overlap. And I suspect I’m not alone in that. But just because my co-workers aren’t my closest friends doesn’t mean I don’t seek their approval. As Suw Charman mentions, the maturation of communications technology is allowing emotion to become a useful factor in professional collaborative environments.

Many social networking tools share an interesting characteristic; in addition to helping manage our sphere of relationships, the more successful technologies create an atmosphere of personal satisfaction and affirmation. Witness the value of participation in the feedback and comments sections of most popular social networking sites and think about how excited you get when someone comments on your posting or blog.

My point is that most businesses aren’t asking us how they can use Web 2.0 to link people in order to make their employees feel more appreciated, they are asking how social networking tools can increase the productivity of their workforce. The rub is that, with the exception of Wikipedia and a few other projects, traditional personal social networking tools are less focused on productivity and more focused on affirmation and emotion - YouTube isn’t so much a collaborative environment as it is additive and participative – and some would say addictive.

But it turns out the glass is half full. As Matthew Moran observed, the most effective employees thrive, not within the boundaries of title and responsibility, but in the broader context of desire, passion, and achievement. He warns that organizations that cannot match their working environment with that broader context are doomed to lose the best and the brightest. And the most powerful social networking tools massage those stimuli he cites. Isn’t it serendipitous that the concepts of productivity and emotional involvement overlap?