It wasn’t long ago that people took a hard look at the social networking world and saw that such activities didn’t quite jive with the typical workplace environment. Some employers solidified that notion by barring visits to such sites via their networks.

Well, here we are in the final days of October 2008, and two individuals at the UK-based think tank Demos, Peter Bradwell and Richard Reeves, have published a 92-page assessment of the potential upsides of social networking within organizations and between organizations and clients.

The text (which, wonderfully enough, has been issued as a PDF [link] under a non-commercial Creative Commons licensing) is titled “Network Citizens: Power and Responsibility at Work,” and it essentially takes what is arguably a sensible view on the present networking situation. They see workplace bans on Facebook and YouTube as “almost impossible to enforce,” and they draw a sort of sociological analogy to such efforts that would entail limits for gossip among colleagues. A nonsensical move, more or less.

Bradwell and Reeves even think that placing restrictions on Web-based networking within Facebook, et al., can be counterproductive, given the fact that modern technologies have allowed the world to transcend ordinary means of interaction and to attain what is ultimately a more collaborative reality for business development.

Yes, it is true that the issues of lowered barriers and intensive PC-based socializing reveal things that can be prone to exploitation in quite negative ways. As the authors of “Network Citizens” state, the networks have a definitive “dark side.” Yet the benefits for the pursuit of a relatively happy medium (my own phrasing) have really become too outstanding to negate.

Such benefits have only grown with developments made in the market specific to business relationship management - which goes as much for workers’ presence on LinkedIn as YouTube, depending of course on one’s area of industry. All things considered, corporations currently exercising no-social-networking policies would do well to browse the ideas delivered via this research.