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Thursday, April 06, 2006

Social media in the enterprise: Part II

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The second installment in this series comes from Michael Pusateri, vice president, Engineering at the Disney ABC Cable Networks Group in Burbank, California:

Is social media The Next Big Thing in our business?

Well, not to be a naysayer, but I don’t see it that simply adding blogs with a touch of wikis suddenly leads to big improvements in company performance.  IMHO, the ‘social software’ tools are inexpensive and versatile bits of code that allow existing information workflows to function better at a lower costs than traditional alternatives.  Most companies have a plan (though sometimes poor) for internal communications and weblog software makes it simple to implement the plan in an understandable and recognizable way. 

Most workers recognize the information architecture of a weblog, informational posts in a chronological order with a personal writing style, and can accept it as a valid mode of communication.  Making the leap to something like Atom & RSS syndication and aggregation is something most people are not familiar with and therefore is a much bigger leap to make.

Again, IMHO, the key to using ‘social media’ is in having something to say and a plan to say it.  The tools are secondary.  Too often the tools come first, “Look, we have a company weblog.” instead of “Look, we have something interesting to say.”

We’ve been able to take existing workflows and use weblogs and syndication to improve the process significantly, with the user seeing a fundamental change they need to adapt to.  Our use of wikis is moving forward slowly, but is a fundamental change in the way we work.  That kind of change takes time.

If anything is the next big thing, it’s open and shared code bases that allow organizations to tweak software rapidly to remain agile.

Pusateri’s take—that the tools are employed as the means of achieving goals as part of a strategy—is entirely consistent with my own philosophy (which you know if you’re a reader of this blog). To Mike’s point: Social computing is a cultural shift that will occur gradually within organizations that employ the tools in support of business objectives and employee needs. Thanks, Mike!

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