September
An article originally posted on www.iht.com
“It’s just like living in a village, where it’s actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already. (…) The current generation is never unconnected. They’re never losing touch with their friends. So we’re going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that’s very new. It’s just the 20th century.”
Read the full article at www.iht.com
In-depth article of The Herald Tribune about the new perception of privacy induced by social media such as Facebook noticed by Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has closely studied how college-age users are reacting to the world of awareness.
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September
An article originally posted on www.theappgap.com
“The truth of most modern work is that we analyse data and information and reach out to our networks in order to gain access to knowledge. We collaborate on ideas and then have a burst of work that reflects the sharing of ideas. And, of course, once we have produced something, we then tend to socialise it again within our networks in order to refine the ideas we’ve produced. This is knowledge work in action and people are at the centre of it.”
Read the first full article at www.theappgap.com
“Various theories from social psychology have been used to explain this ‘whats in it for me’ factor to better understand how to successfully introduce social computing tools into corporate environments. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is often the first theory put forward.”
Read the second full article at www.theappgap.com
Matthew Hodgson summarizes how enterprise social tools fit into daily collaboration and provides perspicuous illustrations to this purpose.
In an apposite post to Andrew Boyd’s article, he then addresses the issue of adoption and describes values theories such as Maslow’s pyramid in an attempt to answer the “what’s in it for me” factor. Enjoyable read.
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September
An article originally posted on www.personalinfocloud.com
“The difference between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 is like the difference building a tunnel through rock and tunnel under water”
Read the full article at www.personalinfocloud.com
In this post, Thomas Vander Wal puts the emphasis on the difference between web 2.0 and their enterprise equivalents through the appropriate metaphor of rock and under water tunnels. The first gives way to far more traffic and can suffer imperfections while still being used. The second however has a smaller user base and faults are seen as more deadly, partly due to a perceived “fear of the environment”.
As mentioned also by Thomas, many new collaborative tools being brought to the enterprise are not flexible enough as users often have to adapt their behaviour to the tool and not conversely. More importantly these tools don’t yet effectively integrate the capturing of conversations around shared information, which is often where the real creation of knowledge happens.
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August
An article originally posted on Social Computing Magazine
“Social Media’s power is not in the tools, but in the actions enabled by the tools.”
Read the full article at www.socialcomputingmagazine.com
I like to remind people that knowledge work is perishable unless you store it and do something with it later. If you don’t use it, you lose it. You can lose it by neglect. You can lose it by forgetfulness. You can lose it because it’s relevance expires.
But knowledge work can be properly stored. This is the role of social media in the workplace - in the corporation.
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August
An article originally posted on discussionleader.hbsp.com
“The understanding that platforms are markets is one of the most vital differences between revolutionaries and laggards across today’s strategyscape.”
Read the full article at discussionleader.hbsp.com
A market is a social structure developed to facilitate the “exchange of rights, services or product ownership” according to Wikipedia’s definition. Now think about this in terms of knowledge exchange and ownership.
Do you reckon the emergence of social KM software inside the enterprise will also follow this pattern by eventually resulting in such open platforms ? Would this be leading us to new forms of knowledge markets and new heights of knowledge communication/exchange ?
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August
An article originally posted on Chris Brogan
“First and foremost, you have to jump over the fence from where you’re thinking, and get into their mindset. From there, look back at social media, and create values you believe they can understand.”
Read the full article at www.chrisbrogan.com
Here are really concrete reasons why social media is really helping business. Chris Brogan demonstrates in 12 bullet points how positive it can be.
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July
An article originally posted on blog.hbs.edu
“…we realized that due to the distributed nature of the company and the growth through acquisition there was little sense of a Serena community. People often worked together for more than a decade, yet knew nothing about each other. And if you think about it, why would they? There was no easy way to learn more about your colleagues. So here we had all these home workers, or employees in satellite offices like Melbourne who we only knew by name. We wanted everyone to feel like they were a part of Serena, we wanted our employees to help us mold what Serena should stand for in a very public way. And we wanted to create a persona for Serena made up of the company’s collective personalities.
At the same time we had just moved into business mashups. And as we looked at ways to train our employees on the value of Web 2.0 and show them how the workforce of the future will interact with software it occurred to us that the best way to learn is first hand. Our CEO and CMO were already avid Facebook users, and had both been into social networking for years so we thought, “what do we have to lose?”
Read the full article at blog.hbs.edu
An insightful story on hwo Serena –a 27 year old company employing approx. 850 employees located in 18 countries, with more than 35% working from home– chose in a bold move to use Facebook as their company wiki, and how enriching the whole experience has been so far, for the company itself as much as for its employees…
Make sure you check out their YouTube video (link provided in the story) ! It is really funny !
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June
An article originally posted on IT@Intel Blog
“As the person responsible for driving social media within our enterprise (Intel), I have come to realize that the best darn enterprise social tools don’t magically turn your company into a social enterprise. There is a core foundation that must be present or else you cannot reach social enterprise utopia. There are realizations that must occur or else you will not succeed. (…) It all boils down to the fact that at the end of the day, social media isn’t about the tools….it’s about people.”
Read the full article at communities.intel.com
As Laurie Buczek illustrates in her post, the real power of a social tool lies almost solely in its users, not in its ability to tag or comment a piece of information. However it seems many solution providers are currently adding a so-called “social” layer to their dinosaur tools and usage habits. Sure an easy upgrade sounds appealing as it gives an impression of immediate ROI at a low effort cost, but this approach will never help tackle the two major barriers to enterprise innovation and productivity: information silos and collaboration culture.
First an enterprise social tool should aim at smashing these silos, not creating more. The first step is to be “mashable”, i.e. provide APIs for easing connectivity, integration and scalability. Better yet, it should act as the “social glue” by bringing existing tools together and progressively filling in the gaps with social knowledge gathered (explicitly or implicitly) from your employees.
Secondly the tool should be flexible enough to handle your current business processes. For example, do not underestimate the resistance of people to change nor the importance of existing tools such as e-mail; work with them rather than against them. This flexibility shall then allow your working culture to gradually evolve and will be followed by the natural emergence of more collaborative processes.
Finally, it must be intuitive and easy to use, or your employees just won’t take it on.
Being user-friendly and providing a flexible framework for letting users and processes progressively evolve towards collaboration is the key to any successful enterprise social tool and, most importantly, to its adoption.
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June
An article originally posted on Fred Cavazza
“Did you notice that the “Web 2.0” term was outdated? One can say that after months (years?) of overselling the “2.0”” stuff, it begins to fade. Now, modern marketers talks about “Social Media“. Because with always newer services, always more sophisticated concepts, copycat, mashups of mashups… it really begins to be confusing. This is why it was important to divide this big “ratatouille 2.0” into smaller meta-concepts to ease the understanding (Enterprise 2.0, Social Shopping, Social Medias…).”
Read the full article at www.fredcavazza.net
Interesting article of Frédéric Cavazza on Social Media, i.e. the new term for the ‘web 2.0′ buzzword. He clearly defines the richness of these tools and services… but are you ready to experiment their endless landscape?
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May
An article originally posted on Business Week
“IBM has been encouraging social networking among its employees with in-house versions of Web 2.0 hits such as Facebook and Twitter”
Read the full article at www.businessweek.com
Interesting Businessweek article dedicated to the Social Networking at IBM.
“These social tools, IBM hopes, will provide a substitute for personal connections that flew away with globalization—and help to build and strengthen far-flung teams.”
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