Andrew McAfee, from the Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Management, believes we’ve reached a tipping point in terms of the acceptance of the tools and techniques of enterprise 2.0.
McAfee sees some positive signs and some danger areas - “We have the opportunity to snatch defeat out of the jaws of success”. The way that’ll happen;
Declare war on the enterprise
Allow walled gardens to flourish – an interesting analogy to Napoleonic land division in Paris where smaller and smaller lots were created all divided with hedgerows – let’s not go there…
Accentuate the negative – the risks aren’t quite as bad as people make out, don’t dwell on them
Try to replace email
Fall in love with features - “what’s the simplest possible thing that could work”
Overuse the word “social”
Andrew is the father of the Enterprise 2.0 term – while his shtick is getting perhaps a little tired – he’s still got a valuable voice to add to the discussion.
The survey was developed by Robert Half Technology, a leading provider of information technology (IT) professionals on a project and full-time basis, and conducted by an independent research firm. It was based on telephone interviews with more than 1,400 CIOs from companies across the United States with 100 or more employees.
CIOs were asked, “Which of the following most closely describes your company’s policy on visiting social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, while at work?” Their responses:
Prohibited completely 54%
Permitted for business purposes only 19%
Permitted for limited personal use 16%
Permitted for any type of personal use 10%
Don’t know/no answer 1%
I am not surprised by the attempt at blocking access. Businesses view us as parts of the corporate machinery, and our reason for existence is to work on behalf of the company. That’s why we get so little vacation time, sick leave, and maternity/paternity leave in comparison to other nations.
Here, only 19% will even allow use for business uses, only!
Of course, there is nothing to stop people from using their phones to remain connected on these services if the companies block them at the firewall. This is an escape hatch, but still a pain.
In a world where social networks are increasingly playing the role of early warming system and primary information resource, organizations that impose these sorts of draconian solutions will suffer, not benefit.
By way of @ITSinsider, @tweetmeme and @elsua… I just caught this interesting slideshow on Enterprise 2.0 initiatives at Adidas Group by Christian Kuhna. Funny that just a couple weeks ago I announced that Nike would present at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference on their internal collaboration strategy.
So it would seem that the leading Enterprise 2.0 markets are government and, uh… shoes.
Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco’s Call for Papers closed on Tuesday after receiving a mind blowing number of submissions - 446 to be exact. It’s great to see the community is as enthusiastic about the San Francisco show as we are, and really reinforces the need for Enterprise 2.0 on the West Coast.
Some highlights and prevalent topics include:
Tons of case studies and tales of adoption
Mobility
Cloud computing
Micro-blogging & emerging platforms in the enterprise
Driving the social media bus
Building an Enterprise 2.0 culture
Internal & external communities
A big thank you to all that took the time and effort to submit an abstract. Steve and the Advisory Board have got some reading to do.
The Enterprise 2.0 team is gearing up to build the the program for the first annual San Francisco conference coming this November and we’d like to hear your success stories, case studies and the valuable lessons you’ve learned working with E2 tools and technologies in your organization. Submit your proposal through the Call for Papers, open until July 31. We’re looking for sessions and workshop proposals in the following topics:
Cross posted from CloudAve - specialist cloud computing and SaaS blog
Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Chief Technology Officer & Founding Partner, Blue State Digital looked at the strategies and tactics that helped put Barack Obama in the White House. Blue State is a five year old company that helps leverage social media for primarily issue or event based clients – from elections to humanitarian disasters to fundraising events.
Some statistics;
Over 1 billion emails sent to over 13 million email addresses
Lessons we can learn from the online Obama campaign
Drive Action - be true to medium, think about the use case
Be Authentic - don’t do press release to email, send email from a person within the organisation, ensure a consistent voice
Create Ownership - turn users into advocates, crucial to turn people into active rather than passive participants, connect people with each other, solicit ideas from the community
Be Relevant
Create a Strong, Open brand - consistent, professional, polished
This is a piece about manufacturing productive dissent online, a subject about which, I am beginning to think, I know something. My first piece on this site, which I posted on September 28 last year, received 46 comments. A clear watershed divide emerged between those who hated my stance on “social media vs. knowledge management,” and those who loved it. It also got an unexpectedly large number of blog reactions, considering that I am at best a D-list blogger. Though I was slightly taken aback by the intensity of the reaction, (enough that I toned it down a bit, since I have far less energy for online debate than I did 10 years ago) that first piece set the tone for my blogging here. In the six months and some weeks since, I wrote 14 original, long op-ed type pieces here, which averaged around 9 comments apiece. That’s thrice the average on my own blog, where I tend to use a completely non-provocative voice. So I thought I’d do a quick overview and share my initial conclusions about the art of manufacturing productive dissent. These thoughts were triggered by the most extreme reaction I’ve gotten so far: some guy disagreed so much with the views I expressed when Stowe Boyd recently interviewed me, that he somehow dug up my phone number and left a slightly alarming message on my voicemail. He then spewed some venom at me on Twitter. Certainly, a time-to-take-stock event.
The truly unique characteristics of Twitter are its simplicity and lack of specific purpose or application. Twitter is merely a digital conversation; albeit one that’s constrained to short statements of 140 characters or less. Like any conversation, you choose to talk to one other person at a time or broadcast out to many. You can make your conversations private or public. You can choose to blather, or to comment on everything from walking your dog to world affairs. You can follow and share your thoughts with thousands of people or you can offer your attention to a select few. As with any live conversation, contribute something particularly witty, funny or unique and your comment could be repeated to millions of users by Twitter’s digital word of mouth, also known as a re-tweet. At its core, Twitter is just a platform for simple conversation and that’s what makes it unique.
For those brand managers seeking advice on how to build a fan base around your company’s Facebook page/ public profile, the folks over at Facebook just posted a perky video from Wildfire Interactive advising how to drive your number of fans up and create a movement within the network.
There’s also an intriguing case study from Adobe that’s worth reading. Bottom line - providing your fanbase with the opportunity to interact via promotions, giveaways or contests will lead to more community enthusiasm and perpetuate the viral nature of Facebook.
The Enterprise 2.0 Blog is affiliated with the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, an event focusing on social tools and technologies that help make companies more creative, agile and productive.
Nov 3rd, 2009 |
