There's a technical communications email discussion list I'm part of. It has a bit of bickering about commas, sure, but also interesting things. Some of those things make me cranky. Recently, discussion turned to social networking, and I got quite, quite cross indeed.
Essentially, there are technical authors who don't see the point of Twitter / LinkedIn / Facebook / Bebo / whatever. Fair enough, that's not a problem. There's a problem with the tone of, and assumptions underpinning some of these objections, however.
Here's a (slightly straw-man) cross section: "Social networking tools are just toys for teenagers", "It's just time wasting", "My docs aren't on the internet, why should I care?", "You can't write a help system in 140 characters", "What possible relevance could Myspace have to my business?" (ok, you've got me there, especially if you're say, documenting avionics), or "Why do I have this friend request from a Russian hooker I've never even met?"
Many of these arguments seem to issue from an assumed position of authority, often with a dismissive sneer. I can hardly criticise that, I suppose, but I'd prefer a more rational underpinning. If nothing to do with your product is on the internet, and none of your users care about it, then these may indeed not be the droids you're looking for.
For the rest, there's a kind of causation/correlation problem.
Lots of social networking tools do indeed appeal to young people. Young people are also often early adopters, and quite likely to make up a goodly chunk of any online user base. Like all humans, some of them are noisy. The loud, prolific contributors to any social forum, aside from tending to be quite a small group in most cases (see again Anne Gentle's book) set a lot of the tone for that forum. It would, in short, be quite easy to get the impression that Facebook is just about poking people, Myspace about emotional navel-gazing and eyeliner, Twitter about Bay Area hipsters flapping their lips in 140 character exhortations to buy ever skinnier jeans. It would be easy, and raises an easy smile, to be just as childishly dismissive as I was there.
But there is no necessary equivalence between the platform and the idiot on the platform. However much the idiots annoy you, however nosily vacuous they may seem, there's a certain amount of messenger you oughtn't to shoot. An email discussion list is a social networking forum. When a comment annoys me, or I get some spam, or even when a tedious-sounding meeting request hits my inbox, I don't decry email. Email, like Twitter, Facebook, or even Livejournal is just the platform. Is it a toy for teenagers? Maybe, and it can certainly be a place where teenagers talk. But it's unlikely to be "just" that, and dismissing any new communications technology as a toy has a bad history of making you look silly in the long run.
So what use is social networking to a technical communicator? Well, I could tell you to go read Anne's book, or Gordon's blog, or any number of things; but in short, it's about talking to your users and your peers. Technical Authors can use things like Twitter, LinkedIn groups, or even an email discussion list to share knowledge and experience. We can use more or less any social resource to gather information about the needs of our users, or even help them directly. We can, as the buzzwords currently go, "join the conversation." And we should, because it'll still happen if we don't.
Plenty of organisations even provide some social resources. There are buckets of products documented on Floss Manuals, for example. Google SideWiki potentially offers social documentation for any product. Red Gate maintains Simple Talk, SQL Server Central, Oracle overflow, the Future of Monitoring, and our own forums - all to enable us to talk to users and users to talk to each other. What does enabling that enable? Apart from the raw social benefit of it being nice to talk to folk, people have knowledge to share, and needs we want to understand.
For actual, useful information on this kind of thing: