And here is a related presentation by Awareness:

Marketing to the Social Web

View more presentations from Mike Lewis.

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):

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).

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

• Innovation Loves a Crisis. Jonathan Schwartz wrote a publics memo about the financial markets crisis as a catalyst of innovation and new opportunities.
• Awareness Report Shows Significant Rise in Enterprise Social Media - Will It Continue? Bill Ives of FASTforward thinks it will.
• A List of Social Media Marketing Examples. A list gathered by Peter Kim comprised of 239 companies utilizing social media for marketing purposes. Admirable effort.
• IBM Rolls Out Bluehouse Social Office Suite. IBM is  publicly opening its Lotus Connections (in my opinion -  the most mature enterprise social computing environment available today) demo site.
• All Their Base are Belong to Us. Prof. Andrew McAfee is looking for E2.0 research questions suggestions.
• Crowdsourcing? Try expert sourcing. “Corporate America has hopped on the crowd sourcing bandwagon, but they may want to start considering another option: Expert sourcing.”
• An interview with Matt Rhodes of Freshnetworks. FreshNetworks is a social media agency from the UK and Matt is talking about the shift in the way companies engage with customers and prospects he witnesses.
• Shel Israel’s interview with IBM’s George Faulkner. Faulkner, editor in chief of IBM media library is talking with Shel Israel about IBM’s behind-the-firewall social media initiatives and experience.
• The Many Challenges of the Social Media. Jeremiah Owyang about the challenges social media professionals face and need to overcome.
• SocialText - the next generation. The E2.0 veteran (I’m following Ross Mayfield since 2004) is still innovating .

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.

(From Sam Lawrence blog post)