Category Archives: change

One down – many to go

By DavidSCohen | Published: March 6, 2008

Well it was a great morning – we had a full house for the kick-off meeting of TAG‘s newest society, Enterprise 2.0.  Our society chair and vision leader, Sherry Heyl, did a great job acting as emcee and blog-journalist.  Check out her blow-by-blow report written live during the event.  And our featured speaker, Puneet Gupta, CEO of Connectbeam, gave a great summary and product demonstration, which I think helped to open our audience’s eyes to the advantages of well-managed social bookmarking in a corporate context.

The point I keep coming back to when it comes to Enterprise 2.0 is the idea that the trend toward adoption of social computing tools is already widespread – the people in your corporation are already using these tools and operating on different paradigms of communication.  The younger the employee the more likely they are to be “infected” with a web 2.0/social media mindset.  These are the people being hired by companies big and small every day.  Whether you choose to put an Enterprise 2.0 strategy in place for your organization, there is already a strong contingent of users who know from direct experience that there are other choices for communication and collaboration than those that may be already blessed by your IT department.  Progressive companies will recognize this and do what is necessary to keep apace of this wave of innovation and cultural change.  They’ll do it because they know that the young upstarts – the ones with no baggage are already there – and they are moving nimbly forward, unfettered by old-school command and control driven approaches.  The people know the tools, and like ’em and knowing the taste of transparent collaboration it is hard to go back to restricted access and cumbersome methods.  Today policies of restriction and banned IP addresses may be met with grumbling compliance – tomorrow the response might be rebellion and defection.

The Connectbeam offering was a great focal point for our first session because the concept of bookmarking is so well understood by virtually anyone who has used a browser in the last decade or so.  Shared bookmarking doesn’t require learning new and complicated skills, but through relevance algorithms and intelligent use of meta-data the social bookmarker gains advantages over the older tool.   Data becomes more meaningful and portable.  Communities of shared interest grow organically from the clustering of bookmarks and knowledge centers are exposed throughout the organization.  Now who wouldn’t want that power working for their corporation?

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Social Media is Already Inside Your Organization…

By DavidSCohen | Published: January 14, 2008

….you just might not know it. Sherry Heyl writes an insightful post, Social Media Affects Every Department Within Your Organization, which points to the ever-broadening reach of social media and its power as a resource for all disciplines within the modern corporation. I think this is an important observation, but the post also implies an issue that I think should be stated overtly: the social media contagion has already infiltrated your organization. Chances are, even in the most buttoned-down and security conscious corporate culture, that social media is gaining a foothold. Why? Because the vector for this infection is people. People recognizing the power of communication on their own terms, people increasingly aligning themselves to transparency and authenticity in their choice of community. People like the Generation Ys/Millennials who have made distributed communication their natural mode of interaction. You can try to shutdown the blogs, vlogs and podcasts, you can ban the IP addresses of every wiki, but you can’t change the fact that every day the people you hire, the people who are already in your organization, are becoming acclimated to a new set of communication tools and are hitting the reset button on their cultural expectations for integrity, immediacy and empowerment. I think the call for smart companies is to embrace this new connected, community-oriented, and empowered corporate citizen and do what is necessary to learn from the best of their skills, to nurture environments that will attract and retain the top talents, the most effective distributed thinkers. The challenge will be to adjust the top-down management styles and to educate this new employee on the ethics of corporate communication in a world where information is permanent.

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mmmm Melty

By DavidSCohen | Published: October 1, 2007

Anyone who uses a grilled cheese sandwich as a metaphor is OK in my book.  Ed Van Herik does just that in his recent post entitled “Who Melted my Cheese?”  Ed gives us a nice reminder that social media web 2.0 is not really , about predictable algorithms, but about reinserting the the mutable (and powerful) human element.  No tool can substitute for having something interesting to say, nor can any program yet effectively substitute for the very human mission of building a community.  It is our idiosyncrasies and adaptability that are our best assets in this changing media landscape. We must put them to practice however, to sharpen our skills, yes, but also to nurture our own social web (social safety net?).  Much as I love a melty cheese sandwich, I like the metaphor of a garden:  you can’t expect to plant a single seed and grow a prize-winning bloom.  Nor can you control the weather.  What you can do is tend to your little patch of land, nurture it, plant seeds, feed it, weed it, and encourage a little cross-pollination.  Because it is a process not of automation, but of attention that will be resilient and adaptable as the seasons (and the fads) change.

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