An enlightening article by Lara Lee on Forbes describes the advantages of managing Community Relations by businesses (embracing communities, creating them or helping them thrive): Communities cost less, they grow loyalty, maintain authenticity, drive innovation and support natural reinvention.
And here is a related presentation by Awareness:
Steven Elop, president of Microsoft’s business division explains to Tim O’reilly about Microsoft vision for the future of Web2.0 within the enterprise – Sharepoint as a social software infrastructure for the development of enterprise social applications, SaaS and ad-supported programs. (via ZDNet’s Between the Lines)
Two years ago a presentation titled “Meet Charlie” became one of the most popular visual aids for promoting the concept of Enterprise2.0. “Charlie” is a typical Gen Y employee who brings his everyday web habits (i.e. reading blogs, collaborating through wikis, sharing bookmarks and connecting with friends and colleagues using social networks) into his work environment.
A lot has happened in the field of Enterprise2.0 since the original “Meet Charlie” presentation was published by Scott Gavin. Charlie has become an E2.0 icon and many takeoffs were based upon his collaborative work adventures.
I’m writing all this, because today I encountered with a very good “Meet Charlie” takeoff made by two IBMers, Sandra Kogan and Chris Reckling who wanted to present the abilities of the latest version of IBM’s E2.0 application, Lotus Connections (via Luis Suarez):
In an age of social computing, shouldn’t IT be referred to as WeT? 
Gil Yehuda, which I had the pleasure of discussing with him the state of Enterprise2.0 in Israel a few weeks ago, writes about a current threat to the Enterprise2.0 mindset – the growing unwillingness of knowledge workers to share their knowledge with others:
All this sounds great — but these days I’m detecting a threat to this mindset — one that is aided by the recent down-economy. I speak to many employees in workplaces, and to many people out of work, and I detect a regressive attitude about collaborative thinking. Employees have lost all loyalty to their workplace and are preparing themselves for a potential layoff.
What results is that employees are more likely to take information and store it in their private web spaces (e.g. Google docs) or in their personal email folders and thumb-drives — waiting for the pink slip. In this way, they’ll have the information they need for the next job. And therefore, they are less inclined to share it.
Gil’s post is highly recommended for those of you who are interested in the cultural aspects of Enterprise2.0.
A Jive software video promoting the company’s new E2.0 business suite. WOW.
The role of marketers has long been to hunt out clients and, with the aid of salespeople, capture this prey. However, particularly with the maturation of the Internet, the tide is turning. For instance, in the vacation market now, many people hunt out the holiday they want themselves. They use the Internet to find and then make choices, sometimes interrogating potential sellers online. In industries like this, the role of marketing is to make sure that a company’s products or services are easily found online, and that the company responds effectively to potential customers.
(Mistakes Marketer Make by David Corkindale, published in the recent MIT Sloan Business Insight edition).
I have recently conducted a small research about Cisco’s social media presence for an Israeli software vendor that launched a new product alongside Cisco. locating Cisco’s activities within the social web wasn’t a very hard task to accomplish, since Cisco is absolutely everywhere. The vast and diverse participation of Cisco in various communities, social networks, and collaboration sites is really admirable (here is a Cisco presentation portraying a social media product launch strategy ). Add to that the social features Cisco has implemented within its own web site for customer, prospect and partner engagement and you get one of the most committed corporate social media adopters.
Cisco also employs social media tools and methods internally (Enterprise2.0) to “enable the company to accelerate productivity, growth, and innovation”.
It became a well known fact that successful web2.0/enterprise2.0/corporate social media adoption must be accompanied by an internal cultural change and have a senior sponsorship. After reading John Chambers’ vision about collaboration and web2.0 as the new enterprise engines, I am certain that Cisco got the senior sponsorship issue covered…:)
Update: More from Om Malik
Been a long and quiet Saturday with plenty of time to catch up with my long waiting reading materials. Following are some recommended inks.
I’m a very big fan Sam Lawrence, Jive’s CMO. I like his vision regarding the future of marketing and I think that he does a great job utilizing social media methods and tools in order to promote Jive’s social media tools and services.
Sam has developed the character of the “enterprise octopus” to illustrate the concept of social media within the workplace, and the octopus has become both Sam’s and Jive’s trademark.
A couple of months ago Sam has published a blog post titled: “Norman Naysayer,” the Enterprise Octopus arch nemesis which I somehow managed to miss. The post portrays the image of the enterprise octopus nemesis, i.e. the corporate executive which will stand in the way of embracing social media tools and methods saying things like “Social is what you do outside of work”, “Show me the financial justification for this investment”, “Show me a business process this improves” or “What if people post bad stuff?”.
I have met some Norman Naysayers during my social media voyage so far, most of them have repent and even became social media advocates, understanding that being a constant naysayer makes them innovation opposers in an innovation-centric era.
Being rational and responsible when making business decisions is not a bad thing of course, but being a Norman Naysayer is just being frightened.
