Mr Yong Ming Guang: Enterprises and organisations will have to grapple with the reality that their next customer and next employee are comfortable with social media.

Social networking is becoming more pervasive than ever before, particularly with the new generation of adults for whom access to, and usage of, applications like Facebook and Twitter have become second nature.

“The importance of social media is growing every day,” said Mr Yong Ming Guang, Chief Executive Officer, Socialwok. “Enterprises and organisations will have to grapple with the reality that their next customer and next employee are comfortable with social media. Hence, they will have no choice but adopt social media into their business processes like internal enterprise collaboration or marketing. By embedding social media into an organisation’s DNA, it enables a community approach to business processes ranging from online marketing, brand management, knowledge management, customer support to enterprise collaboration.”

However, Mr Yong noted that using consumer social networks and blogging services lack administrative, privacy, security and enterprise specific features that are required for business use.

To resolve this issue, and seeing the potential of such an application, Mr Yong and his team at Voiceroute, decided to build Socialwok.

“My colleagues and I are big fans of social networking sites and we use it to keep connected with all our friends around the world,” he said. “In addition, we use Google Apps as our messaging and collaboration platform.”

As such, it was an easy decision to leverage the popular Google Apps platform, which provides secure and scalable enterprise office and productivity applications on a cloud architecture, and seamlessly integrate Socialwok to provide a familiar social networking interface, but with a business context.

Socialwok is particularly suited for small and medium businesses that use Google Apps for their online office productivity.

“We wanted to be able to share information across Google Apps in a more detailed way, so we created Socialwok to bring enterprise feed-based sharing to the Google Apps platform,” said Mr Yong. “We integrate deeply with Google Apps using the Google Gdata API (application programming interface) and our whole service is deployed in the Google AppEngine cloud.”

While users can also make use of consumer-focused sites for business, Socialwok feels that it is important to separate the two. “Fundamentally, people want to collaborate on a private basis with their co-workers separate from Facebook,” said Mr Yong. “It’s the same principle as someone who has both personal and company mobile phone. They would like to keep their personal persona separate from their business profile.”

Socialwok is particularly suited for small and medium businesses that use Google Apps for their online office productivity. “Users can share ideas, files, web links, Google Docs and Google Calendar with everyone or select groups of co-workers,” noted Mr Yong. “They can also create feeds for departments and projects in the company.”

Some of Socialwok’s customers include Alien Eye, a Tokyo-based creative marketing agency and Pointstar, a Singapore-based Google Apps reseller; both use the service for distributed project management, with particular emphasis on mobile and remote collaboration. Socialwok currently supports mobile web access for iPhone Safari and Android web browsers. It has also won the award for best DemoPit Startup at last year’s TechCrunch50 conference, where its enterprise-friendly, FriendFeed-like layer for Google Apps was praised for its innovation.