Have you seen the new IBM commercial on Social Networking? The scene opens up with a twenty-something pounding away on his key board when an executive type person walks in asks what he is doing. He responds "Social Networking, I have 200 friends now". The executive says "Do you know anyone that is a Six-sigma, Black Belt, Financial expert with Java, and CRM expertise". The young man responds "None of my friends are like that". As the executive walks away, the voice delivers the pitch for doing something as the core business strategy of IBM. This commercial is from a series of commercials from IBM that basically relate the messages that people, employees and even businesses waste time and get little done. My favorite is the one where the boss enters the room where everyone is lying on the floor "Ideating".

Anyway, back to the original post. The commercial misses the point of social networking in spades. The point of building a network isn't to have a friend or associate that is a Black Belt Six Sigma Financial guru but to have a connection to someone that is. If linkedin is any measure of this idea then the young man doesn't just 200 plus friends but he has a network of 2,500,000 people are only 1 to 2 relationships away. You can bet that in that 2.5 million there is exactly what the executive is looking for. So instead of asking the young man to work his network for free, she is going to go off and hire some consulting firm at 10x the price.

Now what really makes this an odd commercial is the enormous investment IBM is making in Social Software. What a strange world we live in today.