For your own sake, make sure you’re not a Norman Naysayer
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.
