Enterprise 2.0 reads – January 2010

Here are some great reads of January. You can also check @oscarberg , @bduperrin  and @aponcier for their weekly updates. Have a great February everyone!

Yammering away at the office

Social networks are being used to break down internal barriers in the corporate world …The argument for using a system that allows the world to see what a firm’s employees are up to is that it helps make faceless corporations seem more human in the eyes of their customers.

A study last year by IDC, a research firm, found that knowledge workers spend between six and ten hours a week hunting for information. By using social networks to find data faster, employees can free up a chunk of that time for other things…

The networks are also a great way to capture knowledge and identify experts on different subjects within an organization…. Social networks … combine content with commentary from people whose know-how might previously not have been recognized.

Is your Company Creating Zombies 2.0? 

Monitoring Enterprise 2.0 adoption should … focus on communities, networks, and flows of knowledge, These are the real bricks on which to measure change, with a lot of precautions nevertheless.

Communities are the bodies, while networks are the souls of the collaborative enterprise.  Without a real cultural change, ‘change toward Enterprise 2.0 adoption’ merely means creating Zombies 2.0.

Defining Enterprise 2.0  

I usually dodge questions about specific vendors and their offerings, and instead answer how I'd look at any particular deployment of collaboration software to see if it met my definition of Enterprise 2.0….… I check to see if the environment meets three criteria: Is it freeform? How frictionless is contribution? And is it emergent?

Freedom…people come together as equals within the environment created by technology, and do pretty much whatever they want.

Frictionless means that users perceive it to be easy to participate in the platform, and can do so with very little time or effort. 

Emergent …is the appearance over time within a system of higher-level patterns or structure arising from large numbers of unplanned and undirected low-level interactions.

Practical Advice for 2010 on 2.0 Adoption

Some tips:

•   Do your homework first… Don’t deploy ‘E2.0′ tech just because others are. Find out what the business need …and then make sure you target that
• find where the trust is already and build upon that.
•  If you build it, they won’t necessarily come.
• Don’t try to explain 2.0 to executives. They will either not get it or will panic. Try to “sneak” them into a 2.0 tool
• E2.0 is not a new system or program you add to your old. It becomes part of your old – it is not separate, it is integrated into it. Don’t try to make a ‘another thing,’ make it part of ‘the thing.’
• The ROI for 2.0 tools is going to be defined – at least in part – by correlating network engagement with employee engagement (e.g., Gallup Q12) and consumer engagement.

What is Social Media? [the 2010 edition]

So what’s social media? It’s the opportunity to create shared vision.

All these platforms are just the tools, but look what they enable. In the way that mass media has shaped our perceptions about culture, politics, and society, now social media also has that ability. But the message isn’t traveling from them to us, top down, from the aristocrats to the plebes. It’s moving from us to us.

If you’re using social media as part of a new vision for your organization (social business design, social CRM) or as an addition to your personal learning network (PLN) or to empower people or to build and spread ideas, you get it. 

Lamia Ben