E2.0 and culture - Part 1: Should social media lead or feed culture change?

There’s a growing shift in the conversation around E2.0 away from the technologies and on to the culture change that will unlock the value of social/networking systems.

You would think that persuading the Board about the merits of a more open, transparent culture isn’t too uphill a task, especially when you consider the alternative and the negative impact on the bottom line. Ross Dawson writes in Trends in the Living Network of networked organisations, in which being more effective at ad-hoc communiation and collaboration underpins organisatinoal performance.

Susan Scrupski's post Corporate Antisocial Behaviour: the Enemy is Us refers to five reasons why projects fail, and notes: "The technologies we had prior to web 2.0 would enable employees to 'speak up.' Email, telephones, even notes passed under the door could have prevented huge cost overruns and errors, but technology – old or new – won’t fix these problems."

Whether it is inside or outside the enterprise, one message does not fit all anymore. So should internal communicators use the new web to lead a cultural revolution, or to feed an effort to make the company more open that rides on the coat-tails of another project?

It depends. Assuming you accept the need to change your culture, then a corporate rebranding effort would provide a great opportunity to kick-start what Susan calls 'social process re-engineering'. But rebrandings do not happen often.

For a more likely opportunity, any significant project that requires upfront change management and/or communication input - and to the converted, that would be all of them - could be used by internal communicators as a trojan mouse.

Andrew Keen writes, "We all now know [Web2.0's] technological strengths and weaknesses, its cultural accomplishments and failures, its economic appearance and reality." Lead or feed doesn't matter as long as efforts are made to change people's day-to-day views on the value of effective communication, and corporate communicators should by now have an idea of the what the new we means for them, their role and, crucially, their company culture.